Over the past decade, I’ve worked with numerous clients across multiple industries and sectors. Although most clients use a CRM, I have encountered a few who do not. Drawing from first-hand experience, here are seven downsides of running a business without a CRM.

1. No source of truth

Spreadsheets, inboxes, documents, and your brain. These are just a few of the data silos that exist in your business.

Data silos have many negative consequences on your operational efficiency and are difficult to overcome—especially when you’re not using a CRM. After all, where do your people go when they need timely and accurate information? Their inboxes? Your shared network drive? Or, do they just call each other and ask for help? Without a single source of truth, your team spends more time looking for data than actually using it.

Data should propel your business forward—not create new obstacles to success. Without a central source of truth, the obstacles are plentiful.

2. You can’t see the “big picture”

Successful business leaders effectively use data to inform their decision-making. They also regularly set time aside to ensure data is timely, accurate, and, most importantly, useful. From pipeline value to customer retention to website engagement, data-driven metrics form the basis of modern management.

Of course, it’s hard to gain the necessary insights when data is spread all over the place. As a result, organizations that do not use CRM technology tend to rely purely on gut feelings as opposed to real-world performance metrics and forecasts.

In short, you can’t see the “big picture” when you don’t know where to look—or what to look for.

3. Relationships are harder to understand

Stop and think about your ten most important client relationships.

How did you acquire these customers? Were they the result of a successful advertising campaign, or did they all come from word-of-mouth referrals? Now multiply the same questions across your entire customer base. Sure, it may be possible that you have all the answers, but does the rest of your team?

CRMs are built to help you track, understand, and strengthen business relationships. Features like record linking and advanced reporting help you and your entire team know—with certainty—the original source and impact of each relationship.

Without a CRM, you’re forced to rely on anecdotes, which become less reliable as you scale your business.

4. Less control over your data

Let’s assume that you track all of your customer data in a shared spreadsheet. Although better than nothing, spreadsheets have several shortcomings that limit the control of your data, including your ability to:

Restrict access to data

You may be able to protect certain tabs of a spreadsheet, but within the tab itself there is less control. This becomes problematic when you need to restrict customer data from specific users. Case in point, your sales rep in the northwest district does not need to see the leads from the southeast district. Unfortunately, making this work in a spreadsheet is difficult—if not impossible.

Ensure data integrity

What happens when a user accidentally deletes a row in your spreadsheet? Days or weeks may pass before anyone even notices. Once the issue is identified, how will you know who made the oversight or how many other accidental changes were made? It’s impossible to ensure data integrity with spreadsheets.

Maintain data compliance

We live in a world increasingly concerned about data privacy and security. Ensuring total compliance with regulatory and industry-specific guidelines is complex enough even when you have the right tech stack. Spreadsheets and homegrown databases are not built for data compliance. It’s just that simple.

5. Productivity issues

Your team can’t be productive unless they have a clear understanding of what they’re supposed to do. When delegations are spread across multiple inboxes, chat threads, and team collaboration platforms, staff become overwhelmed and feel unable to focus and make progress.

Centralizing all of your work into a CRM that’s built for project management alleviates this confusion, resulting in elevated productivity and motivated team members. And, since your CRM houses all of your customer relationship data, tasks and projects can be easily linked to relevant records, providing an additional layer of transparency and accountability.

6. Confusion about what’s actually going on

Speaking of transparency, do you know what staff are working on each day? Are they focused on the priorities that deliver the greatest impact?

Without the right technology, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Integrating all of your project management data into a CRM provides much-needed clarity for your leadership team. Data-driven productivity reports provide instant visibility into who is getting the most work done. Notes, tasks, and linked emails deliver detailed insights into the life of each project. Kanban-style project boards offer an intuitive and visually appealing format for collecting ideas, sequencing work, and accomplishing more goals.

7. Bad data

The only thing worse than no data is bad data.

Bad data comes in many shapes and sizes and from many sources. That’s why fixing and preventing bad data is not easy—even with a well-structured CRM. Without a CRM, you lack a consistent format for collecting and organizing data, which makes your job even more challenging.

Harkening back to our spreadsheet example, let’s consider your organization’s process for tracking lost deals. When a deal is lost, sales reps simply key in a freeform explanation of what happened. Over the course of dozens or hundreds of deals, however, making sense of countless paragraphs of unstructured text becomes untenable. As a result, sales managers stop reading the summaries and, eventually, sales reps stop providing feedback altogether.

By contrast, a CRM can be configured to display an intuitive picklist when deals are marked as lost. With the click of a mouse, sales reps simply select the reason and get back to work. No more long-winded paragraphs. No more typos and missing details. Just the facts. This approach standardizes the data entry process, reduces the potential for bad data, and enhances your ability to run meaningful reports and course-correct.

Time for a CRM?

Implementing a CRM may seem like a relatively low priority given all of the other moving parts in your business. But, maintaining the status quo can have lasting negative effects on your organization and hold back growth.

Take time to assess your business needs, then seek out platforms that can easily adapt to your unique needs and help you reach business goals.

Get started with a free needs assessment and a product demo from Insightly.

Request a demo

The post 7 downsides of running a business without a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

With data playing such a pivotal role in today’s business landscape, how can your company increase data accessibility without spending a fortune on data scientists and complex algorithms? Look no further than your CRM.

In this article, we’ll share 11 easy-to-configure CRM reports to guide your decision-making.

1. Total booked revenue

Key metric: Booked revenue for your company during a predefined period of time, most likely year-to-date or quarter-to-date.

Why it’s important: You can’t grow your business without a detailed understanding of reality. Booked revenue provides a high-level indicator of the company’s overall success trajectory. Tracking revenue from closed deals is certainly not a new concept, but it’s absolutely vital for a variety of business processes, such as forecasting, preparing budgets, ordering materials, and making staffing decisions.

2. Revenue performance by team member

Key metric: Booked revenue by sales representative over a given period of time.

Why it’s important: Collectively, your sales team is one of your company’s greatest assets. As with any team, however, not everyone is an equal contributor. Analyzing booked revenue at the individual level makes it easier to identify superstars, rising performers, and, yes, even those who underperform.

User-level data also offers transparency into who is actually using your CRM. Is it possible that “underperformers” are just forgetting to update their deals, thereby leading to underreported revenue? Perhaps they need a little extra encouragement (or training) to fully adopt your CRM.

3. Pipeline by team member

Key metric: Value and number of open opportunities, broken down by team member.

Why it’s important: Next to booked revenue, sales pipeline is arguably your most important sales team KPI. Obviously, pipeline translates into sales. In theory, the more pipeline each sales rep brings in, the more business they’ll eventually close.

User-level pipeline data is also helpful for identifying discrepancies in your funnel. For example, if your lowest producing sales rep consistently has the largest pipeline, there may be a problem. Is his close rate really that bad? Or, is he just pumping your CRM full of low-quality opportunities to inflate his pipeline numbers? Either way, something needs to change.

4. Total pipeline value

Key metric: Value of all open opportunities across all sales reps and pipelines.

Why it’s important: Pipeline is the lifeblood of your organization. All things being equal, a dip in pipeline value will negatively impact future revenues. Total pipeline value is therefore instrumental for detecting and correcting issues before they get out of control.

Filtering expected revenue for specific pipelines can also be useful, especially if your company offers solutions with vastly different sales lifecycles. Is your total pipeline being dragged down by a product-specific quality control issue? Has an unexpected downturn in one sector of the economy impacted your sales forecast?

Start with the big picture and drill down into data that answers the tough questions.

5. Pipeline by opportunity state

Key metric: Value and number of open opportunities, broken down by opportunity state.

Why it’s important: Missing last month’s numbers is a major bummer. That being said, no sales forecast is 100% accurate. Don’t just chalk it up to bad forecasting. Rather, diagnose the situation by diving into the opportunity state data.

Did someone drop the ball last month? How many big deals are still on the verge of closing? What steps should be taken to get more opportunities across the finish line? Opportunity state reports provide your team with rapid answers to complex questions like these.

6. Win rates

Key metric: Number of won opportunities divided by the total number of opportunities.

Why it’s important: Sales reps are competitive people who like to make their bonuses. Win rate data help reps stay one step ahead of their pipeline. If, on average, 50% of your opportunities convert into paying customers, sales reps need to have at least twice as many deals lined up to hit their numbers.

7. Won & lost opportunities by reason

Key metric: All closed opportunities (won and lost), broken down by state reason.

Why it’s important: As we discussed in the buyer journey series, understanding buyer motivation is a key step for pivoting toward a customer journey mentality. Tracking specific reasons why customers choose (or fail to choose) your company provides data-driven insights into buyer behavior. Stakeholders across product development, marketing, sales, customer success, and other departments can then use this information to design innovative solutions that resonate with potential buyers.

8. Lead volume by source

Key metric: Number of leads created during a specific period of time (probably monthly, quarterly, or year-to-date) from different sources.

Why it’s important: Marketers (digital marketers in particular) spend most of the day figuring out how to increase lead flow. Social media, pay-per-click ads, and content marketing are common tactics used by marketers to generate leads. The reality is that some sources generate more leads than others, which is why marketers need source-specific lead reports in your CRM.

9. Lead quality by source

Key metric: Number of leads converted into opportunities, broken down by source and lead rating.

Why it’s important: Generating hundreds or thousands of low-quality leads is counterproductive and fosters misalignment between marketing and sales. Feeding marketers with lead quality reports from your CRM enables them to refine the marketing mix and deliver higher quality leads.

10. Contact volume

Key metric: Number of contacts created during a specific period of time.

Why it’s important: Don’t forget that the letter “R” in CRM stands for “relationship.” Each business relationship involves two or more people, which is why contact volume can be an early indicator of pipeline and revenue.

11. Sales territory maps

Key metrics: Number of leads, number of customers, sales revenue, product sales volume, etc. in any given geographic region — state, region, or country.

Why it’s important: With sales territory mapping you can monitor sales performance across different geographic regions to identify areas with the most (or least) activity, determine potential opportunities, and allocate resources accordingly.

Accelerate your business with CRM data

In conclusion, CRM reports and dashboards can be an excellent source of business intelligence for your company. Take time to explore the prebuilt and custom reporting options that your CRM has to offer.

Learn how Insightly customers like IT Consultis gain insights from dashboard reports and use the knowledge to better manage their sales and grow revenues.

Ready to explore Insightly CRM dashboards and build your own reports? Request a demo below and get started.

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The post Top 11 CRM reports in 2019 appeared first on Insightly.

Managing data: Why customer data is increasingly important (Part 1)

Managing data: How to accelerate revenue growth with data (Part 3)

As covered in the first post of the effective data use series, companies across all industries are increasingly motivated to leverage customer data.

Despite data’s importance, effectively using it can be complicated—especially for midsize companies that lack the resources of larger enterprises.

Today we’ll explore three common roadblocks to effective data use and how technology is leveling the playing field for midsize companies. We’ll also look at Insightly customers who have managed to overcome these common roadblocks.

1. Growth rate that outpaces existing IT infrastructure

“Our 5-year plan calls for 3X growth in our customer count and top-line performance.”

On paper, this type of statement sure sounds great. After all, who doesn’t want to experience rapid growth? While rapid growth can be a very good thing, growing too fast can have unintended consequences — especially on a company’s IT infrastructure.

Here are two high-growth companies, Insightly customers, that achieved the best of both worlds by adopting a CRM that could keep pace with expansion.

4over, LLC overcomes data roadblocks by centralizing all of its customer relationship data into a searchable ecosystem.

With a local presence in more than 100 geographic markets, 4over is respected as one of North America’s premier wholesale print companies. The company sells a number of different printed products through a network of third party resellers, marketing firms, and graphic designers.

With an ever-increasing amount of relationship, project, and pipeline data flowing into the company, 4over’s existing infrastructure could no longer support its growth trajectory.

“We’ve grown into a medium-sized organization and needed a more efficient way to track customer information beyond simple spreadsheets,” says Rita Ward, Overseer of Outbound Telesales at 4over. “We needed a reliable way to track who was working on what in real-time to avoid missed deadlines and miscommunication.”

By centralizing all of its customer information into a searchable, cloud-based CRM system, 4over has elevated its record keeping across the entire organization. Telesales, for example, tracks conversations with prospective customers, enabling the team to increase the effectiveness of outreach campaigns. Business development reps use the CRM to capture key correspondence and emails from any web-enabled device, streamlining customer engagement efforts and accelerating growth.

Continue reading about 4over’s success story.

Annexus Health overcomes data roadblocks by focusing on currency and recency of pipeline intelligence.

Research from the National Cancer Institute estimates that more than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, leaving many families in desperate need of affordable cancer care. The assistPoint platform, from Annexus Health, is a web-based software application that simplifies the process of matching patients to financial and nursing support programs.

With 250+ cancer centers already using assistPoint and thousands more in the pipeline, Annexus Health reached a pivotal point in its data management journey.

“We’re working with hundreds of cancer center organizations, each of which has multiple points of contact along with countless other data points,” says Kerry Bradley, Co-Founder of Annexus Health. “As the organization advances in its use of assistPoint, the number of linked contacts and interactions with each organization increases.”

Adopting a CRM that provides out-of-the-box integrations to other vital business systems has allowed Annexus Health to manage a rapidly expanding contact list without encountering stale data. “Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, and Power BI are some of the integrations we rely on,” says Bradley.

An integration to the company’s support ticketing software feeds real-time customer service data into the CRM without manual effort. “This keeps everyone in the loop, and it helps us avoid data silos in our business,” says Bradley.

Learn how Annexus Health is leveraging data to serve more cancer centers.

2. Disintegrated systems

Companies don’t typically intend to create data silos. In most cases, they form organically over long periods of time. In today’s marketplace of countless SaaS tools, there’s an app for just about every need. Each newly deployed tool brings incremental efficiency, but, without attention to system design, it can also lead to massive datasets that few users know about.

Let’s explore how two midsize companies solved the disintegration trap.

The Red Pen overcomes data roadblocks by tracking the student journey in a centralized source of truth.

Since 2011, more than 2,400 students from across the globe have trusted The Red Pen’s mentoring services. The company’s impressive track record makes it the go-to educational consulting firm for students hoping to study abroad.

With a world of students to serve, The Red Pen needed a better way to collect, organize, and track student relationship information.

“We had a lot of data, but we didn’t have an efficient way to organize it,” says Namita Mehta, Partner at The Red Pen.

Moving to a centralized customer database to track each student interaction eliminates confusion and delivers much-needed transparency to the team. Integrated inboxes combined with web-to-lead forms accelerate the organization’s ability to collect more student engagement data with less effort.

As students advance through the pipeline, won opportunities are converted into projects within the organization’s CRM, preserving a historical record of each relationship and eliminating the need for overlapping business systems. “Notes and emails stay intact throughout the entire customer journey,” says Mehta.

Continue reading about how The Red Pen harnesses data to engage more students.

Skidmore Group overcomes data roadblocks by gaining user adoption.

With a corporate history dating back to 1946, the Skidmore Group has evolved into a diversified holding firm that has built more than twenty successful brands.

Kitchen Art Design, one of the companies in Skidmore Group’s portfolio, needed a way to overcome scattered customer, project, and pipeline data.

“Customer information was spread across folders, handwritten notes, and inboxes. This made it difficult to understand customers and communicate with them,” says Rody van Vianen, Manager of Business Improvement at Skidmore Group.

To ensure a long-term solution to the problem, the team needed a CRM that was intuitive for a wide spectrum of users. “Our main consideration was ease of use,” says van Vianen.

Selecting an easy-to-use CRM has led to a strong adoption rate, better data, and fewer silos. Design consultants were the first group to adopt the CRM for enhanced sales pipeline management. Back office staff and production teams also use the system to track important details, such as customer payment and on-time delivery.

Implementing an intuitive CRM has delivered so much efficiency for Kitchen Art Design that the Skidmore Group now uses it to track investment opportunities, deals, and other information at the parent company level.

Learn more about Skidmore Group’s approach to data management.

3. Cumbersome legacy CRMs

A quick web search returns dozens of CRM products. Comparing the many features, benefits, and pricing levels can be overwhelming, leading some companies to base their decisions purely on brand recognition. While name recognition is one factor to consider, it’s not everything. More important is the CRM’s ability to adapt to your specific business model.

Here’s how DynEd and O2X improved their business processes by switching CRMs.

DynEd overcomes data roadblocks by implementing manageable CRM processes.

An impressive 25 million students have learned English by using software from DynEd International, Inc. The company’s approach incorporates a unique blend of AI-powered technology, tutors, and internationally recognized testing standards.

With millions of records to keep organized from customers, educational institutions, and business partners, the company’s legacy CRM had become unmanageable.

“Customer information would regularly be incomplete, which impacted the sales process,” says Edda Cortez, Lead Americas Sales Administrator at DynEd. A major cause of friction was the CRM’s clunky and complicated conversion workflow, which caused many team members to abandon the system altogether.

Migrating to an intuitive, easily customizable CRM has allowed DynEd to scale its sales processes. For starters, the team built highly customized, multi-stage pipelines to align with its exact sales management workflow. Reports and dashboards provide additional clarity to the deal tracking process.

“Once opportunities advance to a certain stage in the pipeline, there’s a stronger likelihood that the deal will close,” says Cortez. “This allows us to build more reliable forecasts and make smarter business decisions.”

Read more about how DynEd scaled its sales processes.

O2X overcomes data roadblocks with workflow automation

O2X is at the forefront of human performance education. With a client list that includes the US Navy, FBI, State Department, and many police and fire departments, O2X is known for elevating the performance of tactical athletes.

Seeking to elevate the efficiency of its own business processes, the O2X team needed to overcome its legacy CRM’s shortcomings.

“The system’s limited functionality did not meet our needs, which explained why so few of us actually used it,” says John Hall, Operations Manager at O2X.

The team switched to Insightly CRM, which made an immediate impact on productivity. Inbox integration, in particular, saved the team countless hours of manual data entry.

“The Insightly Sidebar allows users to quickly save contacts and correspondence without leaving their inboxes,” says Hall.

Workflow automation delivers additional efficiency, eliminating time-intensive administrative tasks. “Workflow rules, activity sets, tasks, email notifications, and project pipelines keep everything on track,” says Hall.

See how O2X uses workflow automation for other processes.

Next up, accelerating growth with data

The next, and final, article in this series will spotlight innovative ways that medium-size companies harness data to accelerate revenue growth, boost profits, and solidify customer loyalty.

As always, be sure to check out Insightly’s collection of customer stories.

Request a demo

The post Managing data: Top 3 roadblocks to effective data use (Part 2) appeared first on Insightly.

Lately, in my research, I’ve experienced a growing number of experts who throw around the term “business intelligence” – or “BI” for short. Taken at face value, “business intelligence” sure sounds nebulous enough. In reality, BI is changing how companies make informed decisions.

In this post, we’ll dive into the topic of BI and explore how you can put it to good use.

What Exactly is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence has been defined a thousand times over (and by many people, who are smarter than me). That being said, allow me to break it down in a way that makes sense for busy entrepreneurs (such as myself). Business intelligence typically refers to a general category of software tools that are especially useful for visualizing important metrics. In other words, an effective BI application will take your historical and real-time data and present it in a way that’s both engaging and informative.

Business intelligence tools come in all shapes and sizes. Some are entirely dedicated to data modeling. Others, such as Insightly, incorporate aspects of BI into a much broader feature suite. Either way, as illustrated in the following screenshot, BI software gives the business owner fingertip access to a number of vital KPIs.

Sales KPI tracking is certainly a common use case for BI technology, but it is by no means the only use case. Companies use business intelligence software for almost everything imaginable, from tracking churn to customer satisfaction and on-the-job safety.

How Can Businesses Benefit from BI?

Like anything else, business intelligence is what you make of it. If your company makes an investment in a business intelligence system but then promptly forgets about it, you’ve obviously wasted your time. On the other hand, if you start with the intention of streamlining your goal tracking and decision making, BI can be an excellent resource for your organization.

Take, for example, your sales process. I’m guessing that you’re already tracking the following data points:

• Total booked sales revenue
• Sales revenue, broken down by each sales rep
• Current value of your deal pipeline
• Stages where deals are stuck
• Top reasons deals are lost

If you’re using a CRM, this data is readily available to you. The big question is not what to track – rather, it’s how to track it (and present it in a meaningful way).

By harnessing the power of BI, small business owners can bring new life to data that would otherwise be less insightful. Instead of waiting on a virtual assistant to manually refresh a spreadsheet, team leaders and department managers can gain instant access to the information they need. Furthermore, they can drill down with the click of a mouse, yielding more answers and less confusion.

So, Why Aren’t More Businesses Using BI?

If BI software is so powerful, why aren’t more small and mid-size business owners utilizing it? Good question.

As a consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients across a wide spectrum of industries and markets. From my perspective, the following issues seem to be the most common impediments:

Affinity for Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are essentially free to create. They’re also easy to share with collaborators. With spreadsheets being so familiar, why venture into unknown territory and mess with a business intelligence package? It’s a question that business owners no doubt wrestle with.

Data Silos: Data silos present a very real issue for organizations of all sizes. With sales records in one database, newsletter stats in another, and customer support tickets tracked elsewhere, simply creating a 360-degree view of each customer’s journey can be enough of a struggle. Tying all of these disparate data silos into a separate BI platform is, therefore, unrealistic for most companies.

Lack of Technical Resources: Even if a company has a relatively clean data structure, few businesses have the technical know-how to deploy a business intelligence app. API documentation, security protocols, and data warehouses can be daunting to even the most experienced of IT managers.

Budgetary Constraints: BI tools usually come with some type of subscription or download fee (although some are free). There’s also the cost of hosting, maintaining, and supporting a BI application. When weighed against more pressing priorities, it’s easy to understand why business intelligence drops to the bottom of to-do lists.

More Pressing Matters: Speaking of more pressing priorities, just keeping the lights on and customers happy consumes 99% of most business owners’ brainpower. Deploying a BI tool, though desirable, seems more of a luxury than a necessity.

Solving the BI Puzzle for Businesses

For the reasons we’ve discussed, third-party BI tools are simply not feasible for a sizable percentage of the small and mid-size business world.

And, perhaps that’s why a solution like Insightly is particularly intriguing. Unlike a third-party tool, that may require extensive setup and technical expertise, Insightly’s solution is native to the user interface. Free and paid users alike enjoy out-of-the-box data dashboard, consisting of cards that can be dragged and dropped.

In addition to lead and opportunity data dashboard, Insightly users even enjoy project dashboards.

By leveraging a CRM that offers built-in business intelligence capabilities, including a data dashboard, smaller companies might be able to bypass the headaches commonly associated with BI.

Better Intelligence, Smarter Decisions

At the end of the day, your company is in the business of efficiently and effectively serving its constituents. A business intelligence system can help you achieve this goal, but only if the tool delivers more value than the resources it consumes. Smart business owners should seek out BI solutions that provide powerful insights without creating new internal problems.

The post Why businesses need business intelligence appeared first on Insightly.

Who will be this year’s Cinderella story? Which #2 seed will be upset by a #15? And, perhaps most importantly, whose bracket will reign supreme?

At your office, this time of year is marked by both excitement and fierce competitiveness. Unlike some offices that run pools involving money or prizes, everyone at your company is motivated by one thing alone: bragging rights.

And, when it comes to bragging, no one is outdone by your old rival, Mitch. Mitch, a self-proclaimed “bracket genius,” does things a little differently than you. (OK, he does things a lot differently than you.) Constantly running his mouth is a good example. Creating near-perfect brackets appears to be another. Personally, you’re a little tired of Mitch’s antics. For once, just once, you’d like to beat Mitch at his own game and claim bragging rights for a year.

As you create your plan for beating Mitch, it might be healthy to do a retrospective on last year’s miserable showing. And, as you harken back to last year’s results, you might be surprised by the many business lessons hidden deep within your bracket.

Here are are just a few.

Takeaway #1: Intelligence Trumps Gut Feelings

Last year was a busy year for you. Your wife had a baby, you moved into a new home, and your oldest son started Kindergarten. With so many changes, you didn’t have much time to watch college basketball. As a result, when it came time to filling out your bracket, you found yourself scrambling. Sure, you went through the motions and read a few sports columns from “the experts,” but ultimately you were operating on a gut feeling.

Clearly, your “gut feeling” didn’t work out so well.

Mitch, conversely, had spent hours watching countless basketball games and taking meticulous notes. He had an in-depth understanding of each team’s players, defensive strategies, offensive plays, and coaching philosophies. In short, no amount of last-minute cramming stood a chance of competing with the amount of knowledge amassed by Mitch.

Although watching endless hours of basketball won’t be in your near future, last year’s experience did teach you something important about information management. That is, the guy (or gal) with the best data has the unfair advantage.

Pausing to apply this lesson to your sales career, your thoughts immediately go to your CRM records. For years, you’ve been using your CRM for contact tracking, customer tracking, email tracking, leads, and opportunities. But, could you be missing out on features that might help you accelerate sales? Could prebuilt reports and dashboards make the data already in your CRM more useful?

Takeaway #2: Work Smart, Don’t Just Work

Within moments of submitting last year’s bracket, you began second-guessing yourself. “Did I pick enough upsets?” “What if I don’t get any games right?” “Am I destined for embarrassment?” The questions never stopped coming.

Feeling uncertain about your primary bracket, you decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon filling out extra brackets. To cover all your bases, you first created an “all upset” bracket, in which every lower-ranked team defeated a higher-ranked team. Your next bracket was the exact opposite, giving the nod to every favored team. A dozen or so brackets later, and you finally felt somewhat confident about your chances. “Surely one of these will beat Mitch,” you thought to yourself, just as the clock struck 4:29 pm.

Alas, even with all the extra brackets, you didn’t break the top ten mark.

What can we learn from this?

Simply doing work (i.e. filling out brackets) for work’s sake is a complete waste of time. Now, I suppose you could argue that your efforts weren’t totally in vain, as you did aim to increase your chances of winning. On the other hand, as has been said many times: a goal without a plan is just a dream.

As you look for ways to apply this lesson to your work life, seek out those tasks that present minimal value or have no clear motivation. Do you really need to be doing them? Could they be automated by a robot or delegated to a different team member? Or, should they instead by realigned into a more strategic project?

The desire to achieve value should dictate the work that gets done, not the other way around.

Takeaway #3: Technology Can Reduce Procrastination

Another contributing factor to last year’s embarrassing defeat was procrastination. March is always the third month of the year – it never changes. Despite that fact, you waited until the night before tipoff to begin your bracket. Had you started a week or two earlier, you might have been able to do more research. Or, perhaps you could have invited Mitch for coffee in hopes that he would reveal some inside tips. (Mitch really gets chatty when he’s had two cups of dark blend.)

Sadly, you kept pushing things off until it was too late.

The good news is that you learned another hard lesson: technology can help overcome your tendency to procrastinate.

Take, for example, something that’s more important than your bracket but also happens once a year: submitting your annual sales plan, including sales forecasting. Like clockwork, on December 1st, your sales manager expects to have it on his desk by 9 am sharp. And, also like clockwork, you put it off until November 30th. When 9 am rolls around, you’re completely exhausted, grumpy, and not interested in anything other than sleep.

Instead of waiting until the last minute, why not leverage technology to hold yourself accountable? Set yourself a repeating task and specify a start date of mid-November and a due date of November 30th (or before). Now, you’ll give yourself plenty of time to get things done while combatting your affinity for procrastination.

Mitch Can Be Beat

In reality, you might never beat Mitch at picking basketball teams. Here’s the good news: you can beat him in the sales game. Keep on learning, continuously refine your processes, and never stop looking for lessons in everything – even in your brackets!

The post Business takeaways from last year’s bracket appeared first on Insightly.