Insightly customer since 2015, Chicago-based NowPow uses the power of technology to change the game in health and social care by providing people with timely access to high-quality community services. More specifically, NowPow serves as an online community resource directory and a tool that care professionals use to identify patients’ health and overall wellness needs and match them with appropriate resources, make referrals, close the loop on those referrals, and sync all that information with patients’ primary care at the hospital.

Recently, Insightly CMO Tony Kavanagh spoke with Emma Roberts, the Director of Sales at NowPow, on the Insightly Gamechangers Podcast. They talked about how the idea of NowPow came about, how the platform works, and where the company is headed. They also discussed how the NowPow team uses Insightly CRM, including Microsoft Office 365 integration, to power their internal operations and manage customer relationships. Below is a summary of their conversation.

To listen to the full episode, check Insightly Gamechangers Podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.

What is NowPow’s origin story?

The concept of NowPow emerged from the need to provide patients with support across different social determinants of health — or things tied to their overall wellness — food, child care, employment transportation, behavioral health, etc. For health providers, that meant being able to systematically identify and address their patients’ basic needs, either in-house or by building a network of partners.

Dr. Stacy Lindau, the founder of NowPow, set out to address this need. She came up with the idea of e-prescribing community resources right at the point of care after conducting research funded by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, at the University of Chicago.

What makes NowPow a gamechanger?

While the concept of connecting traditional health care with community resources, or weaving social determinants of health into standard care, has been around for decades, NowPow is among the first organizations to leverage technology and make that connection easily accessible and effective.

For many hospitals, sharing the information with patients and caregivers has been a major pain point — the process is cumbersome, time-consuming, and lacks a follow-through. With NowPow, health care providers can connect with patient advocates and care managers in a timely manner and coordinate their referrals securely on a multi-sided platform. They can also use NowPow to track the impact of these referrals on patients’ health and well-being over time.

How do care professionals use NowPow?

Broadly speaking, care professionals have to complete four steps to make referrals via NowPow. As the first step, they identify a patient’s need, which can be anything from a higher-paying job to better childcare. They also collect key information, such as a patient’s health conditions, address, schedule, etc., via screening or through electronic health record (EHR).

The second step is matching patients with specific programs and services that best fit their needs and are available to them at convenient times and locations. After the matches have been identified, care providers make recommendations and share that information with patients or caregivers. Note that with NowPow, care providers can track all that information in a patient’s EHR.

And, finally, care providers close the loop on referrals, i.e. confirm that the referral was a success.

Why did they choose Insightly?

With so many moving pieces and a growing customer base, it was crucial for NowPow to find an internal system for managing sales and customer relationships from the get-go. They also needed to future-proof their business and be ready to scale.

Five months after the launch, NowPow was a team of five people, including Emma, the Director of Sales, looking for a way to track interactions with their customers (hospitals) from the very first engagement to launching NowPow platform, and through months or years down the road. The team needed to be able to view and understand the entire scope of customer relationships. They were also looking for an affordable solution that they could customize and implement quickly.

In their search for a solution, the NowPow team considered a number of CRMs, including Salesforce, Base, PipelineDeals, and Insightly. After comparing these CRMs across different functionalities at price points that matched NowPow’s needs and budget, the team chose Insightly.

They were able to upload all the information, set up the process, and start using Insightly on the day they signed up.

How does NowPow use Insightly?

Initially, NowPow had identified a couple of key needs: the ability to manage sales opportunities and a way to keep track of all past conversations (so they could easily assign salespeople for follow-ups or brand new outreach). At that time, their contact base consisted of 500 people, in Chicago and New York. But as NowPow grew, the team expanded their use of Insightly to manage ongoing customer support. Here are more details on how NowPow uses Insightly.

Sales and lead management

NowPow has embedded Insightly into their sales team’s day-to-day workflow. As soon as the team gets a lead (from the website), they immediately record it in Insightly with all the key information, including source, contact, and title, and assign a sales associate for the follow-up. After the first conversation, they move the contact to the next stage in the pipeline and use calendar notifications to ensure regular check-ins.

More recently, NowPow has begun to use Insightly’s Leads functionality to conduct mass outreach within their target markets.

“Everyone on the sales team uses Insightly every day. It’s the same for [NowPow platform] implementation and customer success, in terms of every team member using it… But I would say that for the sales team – we definitely spend the most time in Insightly,” says Emma.

Productivity and collaboration

NowPow’s customer success team uses Insightly’s Tasks feature to schedule and manage customer onboarding, training, and ongoing support/check-ins. The entire team has full visibility to scheduled tasks and events.

“In sales, we are really focused on the organizations, context, opportunities, and leads, but our customer success team uses all of Insightly’s project management functionality,” says Emma.

Business intelligence

NowPow also uses Insightly to gain in-depth understanding of their opportunities and existing customer relationships: What’s in a pipeline? Where are the gaps? How long is an opportunity in the proposal stage? What’s an average year one contract value? The team uses these and other insights to decide how to manage contacts.

“It [Insightly] really is the anchor of our processes and essential to what we do,” says Emma.

How does Insightly’s integration with Office 365 work for NowPow?

NowPow uses Insightly and MS Office 365 integration for all of their email customer communication and outreach.

“It’s great that we’re able to do the mass outreach right through Insightly, but then it is automatically in our Sent box in Microsoft Outlook,” says Emma. “Outlook is where we spend the most of our time, and so when someone responds, it’s just all in Outlook, and that’s been really convenient for us.”

As a matter of fact, Insightly and MS Office 365 integration is the first item covered in NowPow’s training of new sales associates.

What’s ahead for NowPow?

Taking a bit of inspiration from Insightly, NowPow plans to revamp their own analytics environment to make it possible for users to pull their own reports on the platform. At the moment, they have a Community Resource Finder, but plan to build out their patient-facing functionality to allow self-referrals and self-scheduling for patients.

As NowPow evolves and grows its customer base, they intend to leverage Insightly’s custom capabilities and integrations with other key tools and systems, such as Office 365, to manage internal processes and double down on their outbound lead outreach and management.

Listen to the full conversation on iTunes or SoundCloud.

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