These steps are ideal to help you to focus on the problems you are looking to solve and the goals you have. Combining these activities with some objective data will give you an edge to finding the right CRM for your organization. 

Research commissioned on CRM selection

Insightly recently partnered with Ascend2, a B2B research firm, to get insights into how people make this important decision and ways to help them make it a successful one. The report, Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams: An inside look at how sales, marketing & customer service teams are leveraging their CRM for a better customer experience, is now available for download and review.

The new data reveals how more than 500 sales, marketing and customer service professionals choose a CRM and how they are leveraging their CRM to ensure a best-in-class experience for their customers. 

The report indicates that a customer relationship management (CRM) system can provide businesses of all sizes and industries a host of benefits, and that these systems can be a catalyst for achieving the goals of individual departments and the organization as a whole. 

Finding: CRM is key for delivering exceptional customer experiences

Among the benefits of effectively using a CRM is delivering exceptional customer experiences.

That bodes well for those seeking a CRM since improving the customer experience is a top strategic priority in the year ahead for 55 percent of respondents, second only to growing revenue. 

Further research found that less than one in five respondents rated their organization’s customer experience as exceptional, which is important to note because companies that report the best customer experiences are 2.5 times more likely to report significant revenue growth than all others.

Changing your CRM is common

The study also found that over one-third of organizations will be shopping for a new CRM in the coming year and 45 percent of respondents listed improving customer experience as a top priority in driving the consideration of a new CRM. And for those who currently use a CRM platform and are looking for a change? For those in a manager or director role, the biggest complaints about current platforms being used are missing or inadequate features, cost and difficulty of customization. VPs and executives were more concerned about scalability and costs.

Alignment drives growth

Only one-in-five organizations surveyed report having aligned technology and customer data used by marketing, sales, and customer support/success teams. On the flipside, over one-third of companies with completely aligned technology and customer data across their marketing, sales, and customer success teams saw a significant increase in revenue last year. It’s clear that alignment among teams drives growth.

Benefits of an effective CRM

The top benefits of effectively utilizing a CRM according to those who are extremely satisfied with their solution, include better customer data (44 percent), more organized/streamlined processes (43 percent) and higher sales/faster growth (40 percent).

Across all teams, dashboard visualization of reporting and analytics is essential. Creating a unified view of the customer is imperative to providing an exceptional customer experience.

Over two-thirds (68%) of those surveyed report having customer data stored in multiple locations. Storing customer data across several different platforms limits access across teams and ultimately results in an uninformed and disjointed journey.

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data: 

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
•  Project status

By enabling this unified customer view, organizations are given a better understanding of the customer. This allows for improved personalization and a better overall customer experience, not to mention more efficient workflows and processes.

The problem with enterprise CRMs 

The data shows that ‘over-buying’ is a real issue in regards to enterprise solutions. It seems that flashy marketing campaigns and big name sponsorships may convince organizations to over-invest in an enterprise solution (e.g. Salesforce) that is really meant for the Fortune 500. Two-thirds of enterprise CRM users are from departments with 50 employees or less. This signals that these organizations have likely over-invested in a solution they likely underutilize. 

The resulting data shows that enterprise CRM users are significantly more likely to complain about initial and ongoing cost of their CRM (41% of Enterprise CRM users list this as a top complaint vs 24% of all others). Clearly, the chosen solution is not a fit.

Integrating with existing systems 

For 40% of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enable a unified view of the customer.

The most useful integrations according to those surveyed are QuickBooks, ADP, and WordPress, but this varies by who you ask. Sales puts Zoominfo among the top of this list while Customer Success and Ops professionals place a higher value on Workday.

For 40 percent of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enables a unified view of the customer. 

Project management and CRM is a logical progression

It seems like a natural progression that a prospect becomes a lead, a lead becomes an opportunity, and an opportunity becomes a customer. After that, most CRMs end and projects are moved to a PM tool for execution. A full 93% of those surveyed would adopt a project management tool that was native to their CRM tool to have this continuity rather than exporting data to yet another system. Note: Modern CRMs, like Insightly, have project management functionality built right in.

Failed implementations are costly – in many ways

With any new tool in your organization, the risk of failure is there. Successful adoption is the goal of course, but it doesn’t just happen. Having a plan and a team to guide the process is vital. Failed implementation of a CRM can cost organizations greatly. According to the survey, not overcoming these challenges results in employee frustration, wasted staff time, and missed opportunities for revenue according to 51%, 44%, and 43% of those surveyed respectively. 

In short, every implementation is important, but this is one you have to get right. Steal this proven process from the Insightly implementation experts. 

Methodology, get the full report & more

A custom online questionnaire for the “Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams” survey was fielded throughout the month of April, 2022 to a panel of 511 professionals representing sales, marketing, customer success, and related operations teams and who self-identified as management through higher-level job functions such as directors, VPs, and executive roles. These individuals represent business-to-business (B2B) organizations in the US with 50 – 500 employees across several industries.

Get your copy of the full report and/or watch a webinar presentation of the results from the head researcher. 

Ready to align your teams? Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo.

The post New research to help companies choose a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems simplify the process of managing your customer data and relationships so that you can focus on what you do best. In this post, we will look at how a CRM is vital to your small business and why Insightly is the best platform for supporting your growth.

Why your small business needs a CRM

Creating exceptional experiences for your customers is crucial for all businesses. However, it is even more vital for small businesses. Unlike mid-size and enterprise companies, a single customer can make the difference between staying afloat or losing it all. This means you must go above and beyond to ensure that every customer has such a good experience, that they never consider looking anywhere else.

So how do you go about delivering these winning experiences? It starts with how you manage and utilize the information surrounding your customers. You need to truly understand someone to best serve their needs. In the early stages of your company, it may be tempting to manage your customer information using spreadsheets, physical documents, or even worse – in someone’s head. However, this leads to unwanted inefficiencies as your team must spend more time searching for information. If your team is weighed down by inefficient systems and processes it will lead to wasted time that could be better spent helping your organization grow.

A CRM gives you a centralized place for storing your customer information. By using a single tool, it is easier to ensure that your information is always up to date and easily accessible to everyone on your team. This leads to greater productivity and higher quality service given to your customers.

How you can streamline your sales and marketing with a small business CRM

As a small business with a small team and a small number of customers, you may be wondering if your company really needs a dedicated platform for storing customer information and managing relationships. However, you don’t need to be a large-scale business to benefit from a CRM. Here are some of the ways you can use a CRM platform to help your small business.

Get a 360-degree view of customers

A CRM serves as a central source of truth for everything you need to know about your customers. When you have holistic views of each customer, it is easier to craft high-quality experiences. You can personalize every interaction based on the information you have at your fingertips while ensuring that the timing of your messaging is always aligned. It also leads to consistent engagements across sales, marketing, and customer support.

Get more done faster

Managing all your data from a centralized location allows your team to get more done in less time. Instead of wondering where to find the information they need, everyone can access the CRM to quickly pull any insights as required. When you boost your team’s productivity, you lower your business costs while improving processes. This ultimately leads to more sales and better experiences for your customers. 

Qualify your leads more effectively

New leads are a potential source of revenue for your small business. However, not every lead will be a good fit for your company, and some will be more worthy of your attention than others. Without a good lead management system, your sales team will struggle to achieve their optimal results. A CRM helps you filter and manage your leads so that your sales team only focuses in on those most relevant to your business and more likely to close.

Key functionality of a CRM for a small business

Every small business is different, with a unique set of needs. That said, there are some functional requirements needed in a CRM no matter your specific use cases. Below we will examine some of the essential features to look for in a CRM for small businesses.

Pipeline management and visibility

A CRM should be the backbone for all your sales processes. You want the ability to visualize your entire sales funnel to know exactly where every prospect is in their journey and how they got there. When you have a clear understanding of your sales pipeline, you are better able to track each opportunity and can tailor your communication to only include the most relevant messaging to each prospect.

Contact management

CRM software lets you track every customer detail and interaction. This includes basic information like contact details along with more specific information like the last time you messaged them. A strong platform also comes with the ability to create custom fields for specific details that are important to your business, and the ability to add notes to each contact profile to reflect each interaction. With this information, everyone on your team can pick up a conversation without having to ask repetitive questions.

Workflow automation

Large, small, or a new startup, every business has repetitive tasks. These are often low-value actions but are required for the company to function. When your business is small, these tasks take up a larger portion of your available resources. With a CRM, you can program many of these tasks so that they no longer require manual input.

Integrations

A CRM solution is just one tool your business will rely on. Over the course of operations, you’ll also need tools for accounting, project management, and internal communication. The more effort you need to put into switching between different platforms to perform important tasks, the less time you’ll have for caring for customers and growing your business. This is why you need a CRM that has integration capability.  The best CRM software for small businesses will integrate seamlessly with the other tools used to run your business, making your important customer information available to any other process and system in the company.

Why Insightly is the best small business CRM software

Insightly is a highly customizable solution that offers a wide range of sales, marketing, and management features to help your small business operate more efficiently while creating world-class customer experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take a look at a few of the distinguishing qualities that make Insightly the best CRM for small businesses:

Quick implementation

A CRM won’t do your business much good if it is difficult to use or if it takes a long time to set up. In fact, nearly 70% of CRM implementations stall due to lack of adoption. Insightly is built with user-friendliness top of mind, ensuring your employees won’t have to waste valuable time simply learning their way around. Plus, the platform is quick to set up, so you can enjoy immediate benefits from adopting a CRM. This ease of use doesn’t limit functionality as you still get all the key features needed to manage your business. 

Workflow and automation

Insightly comes packed with built-in automation features to streamline every aspect of your small business. You can use these capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks like updating records, sending followups, and routing leads to the best sales rep. By automating away your mundane tasks, your team can spend more time serving customers and engaging in other high-value activities. 

Robust integrations

If a CRM is to serve a single source of truth for your business, you need the ability to bring together all your other tools into the platform. With Insightly, you get powerful pre-made connections for hundreds of the most common business platforms. This includes communication tools such as Slack as well as social media platforms and email marketing tools like Gmail. By integrating Insightly with all your external platforms, you can set up workflow automation to eliminate redundant tasks and the need to switch back and forth between solutions. Via AppConnect, Insightly has more than 500 pre-built integrations available to you.

Customized reporting

Your business may be small, but you can still benefit from the enterprise-grade data visualization capabilities included in Insightly CRM. The platform allows you to create custom dashboards to visualize data and insights for any process happening in your CRM. For example, you can see how many opportunities you have in your pipeline and their projected value, given their current stage. Or, you can view roundups of important projects to know where you stand. By leveraging these insights, you can understand every part of your business to make decisions that drive the best outcomes.

Streamline your business with a user-friendly CRM system

Now you now know some of the immense benefits of implementing a CRM system for your small business. Don’t think you can put off adopting the software until your business is larger and more established. It will only get harder to implement the software when your team and customer base are larger.

Flexible, with affordable pricing, Insightly CRM was made with small businesses in mind, making it well suited to help your company at each stage of its growth. Plus, you can get started for free for up to two users.

Try out a free trial of Insightly CRM or get a personalized demo to see firsthand how the platform can support your small business.

The post Best Small Business CRM: Empower Your Small Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

In this post, we’ll cover some of the key reasons you need a CRM system for your eCommerce business and why Insightly is the best CRM for eCommerce.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM
• How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?
• What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce
• Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software
• How to win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM

ECommerce is growing, but it is also more competitive than ever before. Customers have countless online stores and marketplaces they can choose from when making a purchase, and it is easier for competitors to enter the market.

If you want to stand out in this hyper-competitive market, you need to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. This means creating holistic views of each of your customers to understand the needs of new buyers to show them the products they are looking for, and analyzing the behavior of past buyers to know how to best keep their interest.

This can be challenging as eCommerce stores inherently lack the ability to interact with customers in person as you would with a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Even more so when data is scattered across multiple tools. eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento have customer profiles, but the information is limited, normally only consisting of name and contact information. 

A CRM brings together fragmented data on customer actions from all touch points to give you a centralized repository for storing data and connecting sales and marketing teams. This data allows you to gain insights into your customers’ shopping behavior and purchasing habits. You can see everything from when a customer lasted visited your site to what products are their favorite. 

When this information is consolidated into a single platform, it is far easier for you to target customers with messaging that is relevant to them. By engaging in personalized marketing, you can drive more sales while creating a better overall experience for your buyers.

How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?

Adopting a CRM for your eCommerce store can have a big impact on your bottom line. Data accessibility shortens the sales cycle and fosters loyal, long-term customers and strong features improve your business operations. Here are a few of the ways you can use an eCommerce CRM to benefit your business.

Gain detailed insights for marketing

As an eCommerce business, you need powerful analytics and data to market your products effectively. With a CRM, data is gathered from all your marketing channels to provide detailed insights and reports into your eCommerce business.

You can see what pages are the most visited, how many people add products to their catalog, how many abandon their carts, and more. All of this data helps you understand the shopping patterns and preferences of your customers.  With this information, you can quickly identify your strengths and points of weakness in your shopping experience. For example, you might notice new customers prefer a specific type of product then choose to feature this product more prominently in your marketing.

Segment customers by interest

Segmentation is critical to ensuring that each customer receives an experience relevant to them. With an eCommerce CRM, you have the ability to create highly targeted segments for all of your contacts. You can then create personalized marketing message tailored to each of your customers.

These segments can be created using a variety of criteria. For example, you can create unique groups based on total spent, past products purchased, pages visited, and more.

Boost business efficiency with automation 

Without a system for streamlining all the tasks needed to run your business, even the most organized and efficient organizations can only operate at a fraction of their capacity. When your team gets less done, it ultimately leads to a poor experience for your customers and less revenue for the company.

A good eCommerce CRM lets you automate processes and redundant tasks. This gives your team more time to focus on engaging customers and creating the quality experiences needed to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce

With a better understanding of how to use a CRM to improve your eCommerce business, let’s examine the key functionalities to look for in a CRM solution:

Data security and compliance

Securing your data is vital to the longevity of your company. One data breach can tarnish your brand’s reputation past the point of recovery. Because a CRM serves as a centralized repository for all your customer data, it needs to be completely protected from all security threats.

A good CRM meets all the industry-standard security compliances. There are security features like two factor authentications and all data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Customization

No two eCommerce businesses are the same. This means that there is no standard CRM layout or set of features that will work for every company. Because of this, a good CRM for eCommerce needs to be highly customizable.

You want to be able to customize the interface and functionalities as needed. This means customizing sales funnels, building custom reports, and creating custom fields and templates to use for your records.

Integrations

When evaluating CRM software for your eCommerce store, it is also important to find a platform that can integrate with the other tools your business uses. To start, the CRM will obviously need to work with your eCommerce platform in order to gather data such as orders and sales histories. Other useful integrations include accounting software and any lead generation tools.

Like automation, strong integrations help you save considerable time. It frees you from having to hop back and forth between different platforms to review data or complete tasks.

Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software

Insightly CRM is designed to help small and medium eCommerce businesses provide the great experiences needed to make a difference in a competitive market. It lets you bring all aspects of managing your customer relationships into an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform. Here are some of the distinguishing features that make Insightly the best CRM for eCommerce:

Holistic and unified data

Today’s buyers interact with your business through a variety of touch points. Someone may first discover your business through social media, view your store on their mobile device and complete their purchase through their laptop. You need the ability to track this entire journey to really understand your customers.

Insightly connects data from all these interactions to give you a unified view of all your leads and customers. With the data, everyone on your team is on the same page and has access to the information needed to create successful campaigns. They can then have more meaningful interactions to boost conversions while working better without the need to switch between tools. Customer support can know someone’s purchase history in real-time to quickly find a solution to their problem.

Audience segmentation

Age, location, browsing behavior, and other characteristics reveal a lot about how to best target a customer. Insightly gives you the ability to segment your audience according to their interests and stage in the customer journey. It ensures that you always send the right message at the right moment for each individual.

Advanced automation

Small and mid-sized eCommerce stores need tools to get more done with fewer resources. Insightly makes it easy to create workflows to break down your manual process into smaller, repeatable steps that the CRM can perform automatically. You can automatically update records to reflect each customer interaction and save time by automating many of your administrative processes.

With Insightly, you are also able to automate your email marketing efforts so that your team can focus on devising winning campaigns. For example, you can set up an automated email message for previous customers that have not engaged with your business for a few months. Or you can create an abandoned cart series targeting anyone that leaves your site with items in their cart.

Quick implementation and ease of use

CRM software should make running your business easier. With Insightly, you get a platform that is easy to implement and quick to learn. You don’t have to spend unnecessary time onboarding your team. 

Insightly CRM has an intuitive user interface and the features are easy to use so that all team members can utilize full functionalities of the CRM. With Insightly AppConnect, you can quickly set up an integration with eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magneto. Plus, there are hundreds of other pre-built connections to help you integrate the other apps and tools that your business needs.

Win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

The right CRM software helps your eCommerce business provide great buyer experiences that retain loyal customers. With Insightly, you have an all-in-one tool to know every detail of your customers while improving processes to run your business more efficiently.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your eCommerce store standout.

The post Best Ecommerce CRM: Improve Your Customer Experience with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

Why your healthcare business needs a CRM

Healthcare, like many industries, is built on daily interactions with customers (in this case, patients). Providers must build strong relationships with patients if they seek to stay in business. As the number of available providers continues to increase, it is easier than ever for customers to shop around and find a new healthcare provider. The key to creating meaningful relationships that retain patients for the long term is to truly understand their needs.

Healthcare organizations looking to manage their customer relationships using a disparate set of tools or multiple spreadsheets cannot gather the insights needed to create great experiences. Instead, it takes a comprehensive solution for storing and accessing all your customer data. With a healthcare CRM, you can keep track of all your patient details from one platform. You get a complete view of each individual, and there is no need for your team to hop between platforms to manage patient information.

Additionally, in the healthcare industry, it is vital that you protect all patient data and meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. When engaging with patients through digital channels, you also need to collect and store data in a way that is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards. The right CRM software is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant, allowing it to serve as a central repository for storing and managing your sensitive data.

How you can use a healthcare CRM to improve customer relationships

Let’s examine some specific ways a CRM system can help your healthcare practice.

Better understand your patients’ needs

Providing great customer service requires you to deeply understand your patients’ needs. Healthcare CRM software collects data from every interaction across a variety of touch points and ensures this information is always available and up to date. Housing all this data in a single platform gives you a clear picture of each patient’s journey. You can use this information to know your patients’ greatest needs to provide better service.

More accurate record-keeping

Keeping complete and accurate records is challenging when your practice serves many patients. A study from Surescripts found that over 50% of medical patients have had experiences where their medical history is incomplete or missing when visiting a healthcare provider. This includes not having insurance information on file, not knowing existing medical conditions, and missing personal information among others.

Understandably, poor record-keeping can have a detrimental impact on your customer experiences. It also bogs down your business as you then need to spend your time fixing any issues. CRM systems fix this issue by giving you a centralized repository where you can store customer information. When you use a single tool, everyone knows where to add the information, so it is never misplaced or updated in the wrong system.

Reduce the time it takes to serve patients

Because a healthcare CRM system puts your patients’ details into a single system, it takes far less time for everyone to access vital information like patient medical histories and digital intake forms. With less time spent digging for information, your team can focus on getting to know your patients and establishing strong relationships with them.

Key healthcare CRM functionality

As you can see, there are many ways to utilize a CRM to enhance your healthcare business. Because healthcare is such a unique industry, a CRM system must be made with certain qualities if it is to prove effective. Here are some of the key features to look for in a CRM for healthcare companies:

Data management compliance

Protecting your patients’ private data is of utmost importance. Any CRM platform you consider using for your healthcare company must adhere to the latest security standards. Many companies choose to keep sensitive customer information inside their electronic medical records (EMR) system while using the CRM for non-medical data like contact information. However, if you want your CRM to serve as an all-in-one solution, it must be HIPAA compliant.

Workflow automation

Automation features help to save you both time and resources. For your patients, it provides a more consistent and reliable service as the removal of manual processes leads to a reduction in errors. Look for a CRM that lets you use automation to set up tracking and personalized interactions for each customer. For example, you can tag and segment your patients based on medical conditions and then set up an automated communication sequence that matches their particular needs.

Reports and analytics

A CRM should give you detailed insights into every aspect of your healthcare business. You want the ability to create customized dashboards and reports full of rich data and statistics. With this information, you can make real-time, data-driven decisions to create better outcomes for your business. For example, you can know which department drives the most revenue to make it a focal point of your resources. Or you may notice that patients are less responsive to a certain type of communication and decide to adjust your outreach strategy.

Why Insightly is the best healthcare CRM software

There is no shortage of healthcare CRM software options on the market. Insightly stands out among various platforms as a feature-rich, easy-to-use tool designed to serve as an all-in-one solution for managing the relationships in your healthcare business. Let’s look at some of the key qualities that make Insightly the best healthcare CRM.

Unified patient profiles

Insightly unifies every record from your patients’ medical history into comprehensive profiles housed in one central hub. Scheduled appointments, patient notes, and interaction histories are all there for your teams to quickly access so that they can serve patients quicker. These faster, more attentive interactions result in improved patient management and care and, ultimately, a better reputation and more sales for your practice. 

Data compliance

Insightly offers GDPR and HIPAA compliant transfer and storage of patient records. Your CRM account is protected through a variety of security features, including data encryption and multi-factor authentication. With this industry-standard security, you can use the platform as a central database that can be integrated across all your touch points.

Patient management and segmentation

The best way to connect with patients is to offer personalized care and attention. Insightly comes with powerful segmentation features for you to differentiate your patient engagement based on their unique medical histories and other personal factors. You can use this to deliver personalized messaging before, during, and after visits to boost patient satisfaction and retain more customers.

Integrations

A CRM is a powerful tool, but it is not the only solution you’ll use to manage your business. If you want it to serve as an all-in-one platform, it is important for a CRM to work effectively with your others tools. Insightly excels in this regard as it is built to seamlessly integrate with hundreds of the most popular solutions. With AppConnect, you can easily build automated workflows to reduce the need to hop between tools and ensure everything is in sync between platforms.

Grow your healthcare practice with Insightly

A CRM system can prove an invaluable tool for healthcare professionals looking to create better patient experiences. With a platform like Insightly, you can improve your internal business processes while differentiating yourself from the competition by building stronger relationships.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your healthcare business.

The post Best Healthcare CRM: Enhance Patient Experiences with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

It’s building a strategy around the tools your company invests in that takes time and effort. Beyond “what are we buying?” you must challenge yourself with “why are we buying this?” and then build a plan to achieve the why. This is called your strategy.

What is a CRM strategy?

A customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is the specific, documented way in which your employees work together within your chosen CRM platform to serve customers and potential customers and elevate the overall customer experience.

Why do you need a CRM strategy?

Sure, you can jump into a platform and pushing data through it, but without a strategy, you’ll be missing out on the true value of your purchase. Here are a few benefits of putting together your CRM strategy:

ROI from your CRM – A CRM is a big investment, so you’ll want to make sure you’re getting a return. Having a strategy in place up front helps you look for the right data points to show the investment is paying off. 

Better sales pipeline – Your pipeline will be under the scrutiny of leadership, so you have to get it right. Part of having your CRM strategy will be defining key terms. Having common definitions that are supported by your CRM will make it easier to forecast your revenue. For instance, does everyone know what constitutes an opportunity? If one rep opens up an opp after a first call and another waits until there is a timeline and a quote, your forecasting will forever be flawed. 

Data you can trust – Some companies subscribe to the “if it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen” philosophy. If you make this part of your strategy, you’ll be sure that the data you are reporting is accurate and up to date. Nothing is more troubling than running all sorts of reports only to find that one rep is behind on data entry. Your CRM strategy includes policies that ensure everyone is in the CRM regularly and that data entry is everyone’s process all the time. 

How to build a CRM strategy

Your CRM strategy will be unique to your business and your goals. You can review guides and research options, but ultimately it will be up to your team to build. Here are some ways you can move along that journey:

Define your CRM goals

If this is your first CRM, perhaps your goal is simply to have all of your data in one place and create a single source of truth. If you’ve had more experience with CRMs, you can look to increasing sales rep productivity, or relieve them of manual processes to make them more efficient by using automated workflows. With even more experience,  you can look beyond internal metrics and seek to increase customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT or the like) or decrease churn rates. 

Map your customers journey

As part of your CRM strategy, you’ll want to step into the shoes of your customer and see what the process is and what improvements can be made. That’s called customer journey mapping. It’s the process of creating a visual step-by-step view of your customers’ interactions with your brand. It seems simple, but it can awaken team members at all levels of flaws and pain points in the system and areas for improvement. With these insights, businesses can optimize their resources to deliver an improved customer experience via the CRM.

Analyze your sales process

It’s always a good time to take a look at your sales process, but when building your CRM strategy, it’s crucial. How are leads routed? What’s the time to first touch? Do you have a self-serve model, or are salespeople required for all deals? How many calls does it take to close? Are reps discounting? What’s the length of the sales cycle and is it getting longer or shorter? Where are deals getting ‘stuck?’ Keep in mind that your sales process should mirror the buyer’s journey. 

Knowing all of this will help you better position your CRM for success. You’ll set up better pipelines, employ custom fields, and create the right reports to get visibility into the business. 

Identify customer touch-points

As part of your journey map, you can identify each customer touch-point. A touch-point is each interaction your business has with your customers. You’ll want to map the touch-points and individually consider each one. Is there a way we can improve this touch-point? Perhaps it’s a form with seven fields. Can we cut that to five? It’s also important to check each touch-point on different devices. It may be a perfectly good touch-point on a desktop, but mobile users may struggle with it.

It’s tempting to complete this exercise and then forget about it, but the best experiences are reviewed regularly for updates and improvements. You should set a schedule for reviewing your touch-points – preferably quarterly.

Assess the data you need to collect

In order to determine  the success of your CRM strategy,  you’ll need data points. This is a good time to determine which data points to collect and measure. 

Caution: there are infinite ways to view, slice and dice data. What means the most to your company? What will the leadership team need to know to make decisions? These are the types of data points on which you should focus when deifining your KPIs in step 7.

To get your ideas flowing, review this list and see what makes sense to track for your organization:

Pre-sale metrics 

• Lead count by source
• Opportunity count by pipeline
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
• Average projected deal revenue 

Post-sale metrics 

• Win percentage
• Revenue per sale
• New revenue per day, week, month, etc. 
• Order volume per sales representative
• Estimated profitability per won deal 

Delivery metrics

• Opportunity-to-project conversion ratio
• Project aging (average number of days or weeks)
• Percentage of past-due projects to total
• Actual cost vs. budget Productivity metrics
• Task completion count
• Tasks completed per team member
• Task duration
• Top-producing team members 

You can roll these metrics up into dashboards for your leadership team and/or for in-house monitors around your company offices.

List the tools your teams are using

Each department in your organization has the applications that are essential to how they operate within your business. Plus, there are some communications tools that are used throughout (looking at you, Slack and Gmail.) You’ll want a comprehensive list of those as you create your CRM strategy. Your CRM is the heart of your business, so it must interact with all of the applications in use. CRM integration creates an accurate, comprehensive picture of your customers and prospects. It improves how you communicate with customers, delivering more value from every interaction. Some CRMs require coding to get integrations to work. This can be costly and time consuming to both set up and maintain, likely by an expert resource or an outside firm. Modern CRMs have no-code, drag and drop functionality for integrations that make building and maintaining them much easier. 

Define your KPIs

Your team should set lofty, yet attainable key performance indicators (KPIs). As noted in section 5, there are many types of data your CRM can report. You’ll choose to roll up those data points into KPIs to share a few vital data points among stakeholders. What specific data points will you look at to determine CRM performance and thus the performance of the business? How will you report on the KPIs and how frequently? These are the questions to answer as part of your CRM strategy.

6 CRM goals examples

Coming up with your goals can be difficult, so below are some examples to help get you started. Your business is unique, however, so you should consider this a starting point and turn these ideas into your own. Consider the metrics that matter most to your business, and determine how the effective use of a CRM can impact them. 

For each goal, be sure to have a metric that you can measure. Below is a list of improvements with a sample goal under each one.

This is not an exhaustive list. You can look at any of the benefits of using a CRM and assign a quantifiable value to it. For example, how can you quantify the benefits of a 360-degree customer view? More accurate customer data? Reduced sales cycle? These can all be part of your goals and strategy.

1. Improve user experience – Achieving 83% customer satisfaction by 12/31.
2. Create personalized campaigns – Improving email click through rates by 8% in Q3.
3. Increase customer loyalty – Increase open rates on customer emails by 4%.
4. Improve your sales process – Use automated workflows to decrease time spent on repeatable tasks by 20%.
5. Track and report sales performance – Improve first response time to leads by 5 minutes.
6. Save your sales reps a lot of time – Automate 5 workflows this quarter.
7.  Bonus goal: Align your teams – Reduce expenses by eliminating apps from your tech stack by 30%.

How can a CRM do that last one? Well, Insightly CRM is part of a powerful platform that puts your CRM tool in the same suite of products as your marketing automation app and your customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform. You have one platform for three teams, saving time on logins and data sharing, while empowering your teams to get the full picture of each customer. 

Choose Insightly CRM to achieve your strategy

Your CRM strategy will ensure that you get the most out of this critical tool and elevate the customer experience. The steps above will ensure that you are on the path to ROI from your CRM investment.

If you are selecting your CRM, put Insightly on your list and set up a free demo and discover how you can grow your business today.

The post How to Build your CRM Strategy (+6 Example CRM Goals) appeared first on Insightly.

If your current CRM isn’t working as well as it should, making a move isn’t easy.

Despite the compelling reasons to switch, organizations continually find themselves settling for what’s familiar. The simple truth is that switching CRMs can feel risky and costly at first glance – which means staying put feels like a safer choice than taking this leap into uncertainty. But flip that script and think about what you’re missing out on by staying.

Why switching CRM can be a good thing

If you’re looking into a new CRM, chances are you are experiencing some or all of the following issues:

Frustrated end users – It’s hard to gain value from your CRM when end users aren’t happy. Spend time to understand the concerns of your end users. Whether you stay with the status quo or try something new, end users must feel comfortable with your CRM. If they don’t, you’re fighting an uphill battle that you can’t win.

Constant data roadblocks – Getting data flowing into your CRM seemed like a monumental achievement. Keeping it up to date has proved to be even more complex. Integrations aren’t cheap to build, What’s worse is that they always seem to break at exactly the wrong moment. 

Unavailable or restricted features – It’s not a new story. Your plan level doesn’t include that particular feature. And, since the vendor doesn’t publish its pricing, you’ll get to sit through several more pitch presentations, only to learn that you can’t afford the features you need most. 

Disillusioned administrators – You demand a lot from your CRM administrators. With so many custom integration projects, data synchronization issues, and other fires to put out, delays are commonplace. Requests for updates/dashboards/reports are always backed up. All of this puts unnecessary strain on your administrators.

Stagnant product development – When was the last time your CRM vendor released an innovative feature? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a CRM partner that actually cares about your success? One that understands your business and designs (and thoroughly tests) solutions, aimed at making your company more profitable?

Negative (or questionable) ROI – Measuring ROI from your CRM (whether negative or positive) can be a multi-faceted endeavor. Developing a cost-benefit analysis can seem daunting, which is why many in your situation take the path of less resistance and stick with the status quo. Do some digging to see if your CRM has a negative value proposition. Your finance team can help. CRMs are priced per user and it can vary; pricing can be anywhere from $12 to $300/month. You’ll need to consider the size of your business. If it’s one of your biggest bills, chances are you may be overpaying. 

Preparation and planning are key

Whether you’ve already decided to leave your CRM or are just exploring options, one thing is clear—the status quo is not working. Having invested time, money, and effort, your leadership might be wary of change, dreading the entire data migration to a new CRM and worried that it won’t be as scalable or powerful as your current CRM. These are all valid concerns, and you’ll need help to navigate the decision-making and buying process with knowledge and confidence. You’ll need to approach this like any project – getting a plan together, selecting a new CRM, running an implementation program, and staying on track. 

16 steps to switching your CRM

Unlike most software investments that are department-specific, a CRM touches nearly every aspect of your business, so there is a higher level of complexity and accountability to consider. Every company and situation is different, but the steps below are universally applicable to organizations in this situation. 

Before Switching

This is the phase where you lay the groundwork for a successful transition. 

1. Assess your current situation

Put together a plan for soliciting feedback from across the organization. You’ll probably get a mix of detailed and brief responses. For a more data-driven approach, design a brief survey that addresses the common pain points, such as disorganized information, poor client and supplier management, inefficient collaboration with team members, and difficulty managing projects. As you collect feedback and begin to analyze the data, you might notice a few common threads. Consider using the following categories to group ideas, issues, and feature requests:

• Important features
• Cost and licensing
• Scalability
• Integrations
• Support. 

2. Prepare for CRM switching costs

Monthly subscription fees – If you’re already using a cloud-based CRM, there’s a good chance that you already budget for this. On the other hand, if you’re using self-hosted software, it’s important to note that most CRMs these days are priced on a monthly or annual subscription model.

Infrastructure & device upgrades – Do you have enough bandwidth, or is your WiFi connection somewhat spotty? Is it time to upgrade your sales reps’ outdated smartphones and tablets? The best CRMs offer a variety of desktop and mobile interfaces, so you’ll want to give your team the best connectivity and mobility possible. 

Data accessibility costs – Some CRMs make it difficult to export your data. Others offer export functionality, only to output a file that requires significant modification and formatting. Check to see if your current vendor permits (or charges extra for) on-demand data exporting. 

Data import & de-dupe costs –  Some CRMs provide in-depth data migration guides and concierge onboarding services. Other software vendors provide minimal documentation or community-only support. Quality of support will definitely impact your team’s ability to make a smooth transition.

Early cancellation penalties – Does your current vendor agreement demand an early cancellation penalty? If you prepaid for a full year, can you request a partial refund? 

Training & onboarding expenses – Who should have access to what? Should you train everyone at once? Or, does it make sense to do a series of several role-based sessions? How much in-house documentation will need to be updated as a result of the switch? There are costs associated with training that you should anticipate.

Downtime risks – How confident are you that your team could guarantee minimal downtime? Do you need to bring on additional resources to ensure a seamless changeover? Each day spent between CRMs could translate into untold lost opportunities.

3. Get internal buy-in

It’s not possible to overstate the importance of getting buy-in from as many people as possible. Without buy-in the CRM switch will fail. 

Decide on who is going to be involved in the switchover process. Consider forming a cross-functional team that includes senior leaders along with mid-level and frontline users, so you have both big picture and daily user perspectives across different business lines. Make sure to include current/future CRM administrators and an IT person in your CRM needs assessment task force. It’s also helpful to have at least a couple of outside-the-box thinkers on the team. 

While you need a cross-functional team to collect feedback and execute the plan, you also need someone who will rally the troops, hold everyone accountable, and ensure successful delivery, i.e. someone who will own the project. This might be someone from your PM team, your lead IT resource, a sales leader, or a data and operations manager. When selecting a project owner, look for someone who is detail-oriented but also understands the bigger picture and is a good communicator.

The person or team who recommended the current CRM (or the current software being used as a de facto CRM) may be the toughest nut to crack. Ensure these people feel included in the discussion and that the research and effort they put into the initial decision is validated and harnessed for this new project. Perhaps some of the same issues still exist, or the issues have merely shifted. 

4. Define your needs

It’s likely that people have special requirements and needs that they couldn’t fulfill with their previous CRM. Based on steps 1 and 2 above, your team should have a clear list of these needs. It’s important to know what the new CRM will bring and it will help with internal buy-in.

This guide contains a CRM needs assessment checklist that can assist.

Having acquired an in-depth understanding of your needs, you’re in an excellent position to begin comparing vendors. Vendor selection typically starts by identifying those solutions that fit within your cohort group. If you’re a growth-oriented company with 50 or so employees, you wouldn’t want to waste your time on systems that only support a handful of users. Likewise, you probably shouldn’t consider systems designed (and priced for) Fortune 500 companies or systems that are actually ERPs (enterprise resource planning systems). 

So, how can you quickly identify CRMs that truly fit your business? Word-of-mouth referrals and online research are a good start, but SaaS (Software as a Service) vendor trust maps can be even more beneficial (see TrustRadius, G2 and similar vendors.) As you narrow your vendor list, drill down and seek comparative reports that aggregate candid feedback from actual users. What are users saying about your “must-have” features? Which vendor seems to check the most boxes?

Set up demos with the most qualified vendors, consider the budget and then have your selection team rank their choices. The top vendor will likely rise to the top for the whole group.

5. Set your success metrics

Increasing sales is an admirable goal, but is it specific enough? Probably not. Just because you have a new CRM, there’s no guarantee that it will magically impact revenue – especially if goals remain vague or unknown. Do some team brainstorming with the expressed intention of defining (or refining) top-level CRM goals. For example, is a 20% increase in cross-sell revenue feasible this year? Could your implementation team cut project-related expenses by 5% over the same time frame? Challenge your departments to consider lofty, yet attainable KPIs. A KPI should be more than just a buzzword. Establishing best practice KPIs will help your company monitor progress toward the achievement of its goals. But remember, defining a bunch of KPIs offers minimal value without transparent reporting. Your CRM should be able to help with that. Check to see if your CRM offers a library of pre-built reports and dashboards. Get to know your CRM’s reporting interface. You might be surprised by the many ways you can slice and dice the data. 

Bring these success metrics to each demo and have your sales rep talk you through how exactly this solution fits your needs.

Then, sign your contract.

6. Tell your Sales Reps to clean their data

Think of this transition as a ‘spring cleaning’ of sorts. You’ll do a global data examination in Step 8 below, but before that can occur, you’ll want to ask your reps to clean up their individual records. You may ask a sales leader to set time with each rep to do this process with them. Encourage them to get rid of dead opps, be realistic about timelines, and clear out duplicates. It will make the first few weeks of the new CRM much more efficient. 

7. Communicate on the migration date

When choosing a migration date, consider end of month/quarter/year timeframes that may make for an easier transition, but don’t draw out the process any longer than it has to go. Consider a brief period when systems may run in parallel. Also, plan a final cut off date when your old CRM will no longer be accessible. (Don’t panic about this. You can store the data in a file in perpetuity.)

Data migration

8. Clean and prepare your data

After your reps have made a pass at data clean-up for their own records (step 6 above), it’s time to act globally. A new CRM is your opportunity to start fresh and leave the junk behind. Bad data creeps in over time. Common examples of bad data include duplicate records, unused custom fields, overlapping tags, confusing dropdown menus, and various hacks/workarounds. Before switching CRMs, challenge your team to identify only those records, fields, and objects that are truly needed. You can always save the “extras” in a CSV file, in case someone needs that data later. You can easily clean your data in your new CRM, but it’s best to start with a clean slate. Taking a somewhat minimalist and deliberate approach could offer additional clarity, reduce confusion, and expedite CRM success. 

9. Export your existing CRM data

When it comes to migrating data, you’ll start with an export of your old CRM data. Your new CRM should offer a migration tool that transfers all data for all fields from all standard objects, such as calendars, tasks and events, emails and notes, leads, accounts, users and roles, contacts and opportunities. 

10. Import your data in the new CRM

Most modern CRMs will have a migration tool that imports exported CRM data into your new instance. You should not have to import the data manually or do any mapping. The migration tool does all the hard work for you so you can have a smooth transition. Great measures must be taken to preserve all existing data relationships you have in your old CRM and migrate your data over with high fidelity. If the set up is done properly, this step should be a breeze. Log in to your new instance and start to look around!

11. Set-up your integrations

Your data is in…great. You know that integrations are just as important as data. They ensure everything keeps working together without disrupting people’s current habits and tools. In your plan, you identified your integrations, so now it’s time to link your new CRM with other apps in your business. Depending on the CRM you choose, this can be a long, technical process, or it can be a ‘drag and drop’ no-code or low-code experience. However you accomplish it, you must test these integrations as part of your migration process. Common integrations to HR apps (e.g. BambooHR), communication tools (e.g. Slack), and sales tools (e.g. Docusign) will need to be up and running immediately.

12. Verify everything and test

You cannot send people on the new CRM if you are not 100% sure everything works as intended and everything promised is there. Your project team’s individual areas of expertise should come in handy here. Each team member should be responsible for testing the CRM and integrations for their team. Then, each team member should walk through the test with another team member as a back up. This adds a layer of accountability.

13. Make the switch

If all of the above steps are followed, the actual cutover should be fairly smooth. People will start work one day and be in the new system. You may run the two systems in parallel for a while, just to ensure that the data is all migrated. 

Just After Switching CRMs

14. Onboarding and training

Every CRM is different. Although there may be some similarities between systems, your end users are bound to encounter countless differences. These differences inevitably create questions – and, if not answered, can cause confusion. Be proactive and put together a rock-solid training and onboarding plan. If you’ve picked a good vendor, you may be delighted by their robust support documentation and user community, which definitely helps.

You’ll want to subscribe to a “just in time” training philosophy where users are trained as close to the cutover date as possible. Experts say they need to get hands-on with the system just after the training to increase the rate of adoption. Plan multiple sessions and record them for those who can’t attend.

If there are specific areas or terminology where the new CRM and the old differ, it may be a good idea to have a ‘cheat sheet’ of sorts to highlight those trouble spots. 

Effective training will be a big factor in the success of your CRM implementation. Don’t skimp in this area. Those who attend training sessions are more likely to report positive experiences with the new system.

15. Pay attention to user feedback

How will you collect feedback in the first days of the implementation? This will be the most crucial time. What do they like about your CRM? Are users creating unnecessary workarounds? Collecting this type of qualitative data will supplement the quantitative data found in your CRM reports. Although there’s no one-size-fits all formula for quantifying return on investment, you can reflect on your goals and KPIs to see how you are measuring up. Circle back to your CRM goals (which you set during the needs assessment stage of the switchover) to track progress. Get specific. Consider open door office hours (in-person or virtual) to be available during the first crucial days.

16. Iterate and improve your CRM migration

No CRM is perfect. Your new CRM will evolve over time as the needs of your business and your people change. Keep your feedback loops open and make use of people’s feedback and recommendations to improve their experience. Remember that their use of the CRM will ultimately help them be more efficient in their work. Your CRM implementation team should continue to meet regularly for the first few months post-implementation to assess needs and follow-up on requests. Meeting frequency can slowly reduce over time, but quarterly check-ins should remain in place for a year at a minimum.

Measure your CRM migration success

Now the migration is done, it’s time to track and measure the KPIs and goals set before the migration. Your plan comes in handy here because you have pre-determined your success metrics. Meet as a team and look at how your implementation measured up. This will give you a quantifiable answer. In terms of qualitative answers, that may be more difficult. In reality, there is no off-the-shelf formula to determine if switching CRMs is a good idea. Rather, you must do the work, ask questions, gather data points, and synthesize the data through a lens of your organization and its needs. 

Your finance team should be able to provide a report of costs associated with the change and any forecasted expenses/savings.

Join the thousands of companies that successfully switched to Insightly

Switching CRMs is a big project – but one that’s well worth the effort. With today’s limitless options for CRM technology, “settling” on your current platform just isn’t a viable path forward. 

With the right team, migration doesn’t have to be difficult. Insightly has migrated thousands of companies from other CRMs (including Salesforce) and can help you too. The Insightly Professional Services Team is ready to assist you and wants to be part of your success. 

Ready to switch CRMs? Get in touch for a free needs assessment and personalized product demo to see if Insightly CRM is the right match for you.

The post Switching CRMs: the No BS, No Headache Guide appeared first on Insightly.

As technology converges and start-ups grow, businesses and consumers have more choices than ever. Smart executives know that the customer experience is what is going to win in today’s crowded marketplace. 

But you’ve got this, right? You’ve mapped the customer journey and you’ve analyzed the customer experience (CX). Customer support is the pride and joy of your company. Your execs think that customers are thrilled with your service. 

But are they?

According to a recent survey commissioned by Insightly and conducted by Zogby Analytics, there is a disconnect between what consumers say and what companies believe. 

Only 6% of consumers say a company’s customer support always exceeds expectations but 35% of business decision makers believe that their company always exceeds customers’ expectations.

Ouch.

There’s a CX disconnect  

Maybe your CX team isn’t killing it? Check out these stats:

About a third of Americans (31%) would rather wait in line at the DMV than try to resolve an issue with a company or service. They would also learn a TikTok dance with their kid (18%), get a tooth pulled (14%), or stay with their in-laws for a month (10%).

Why would anyone choose these awful alternatives to simply placing a call with customer service? According to the study, they say they fear being ignored (30%), having to repeat oneself to multiple departments (30%) and length of time to get the issue identified (27%).

How does your customer support process work? Would your customers ever feel ignored during the process, get stuck in ‘a phone tree of frustration,’ or spend an unreasonable amount of time on the phone? 

When was the last time you tested it? Listened to calls? Sent in a social media message to see the response?

It’s always a good time to examine your processes and look for incremental improvements. 

Appreciating your customer support team

Don’t ever underestimate what it takes to answer support calls. You need a deep understanding of your product and your customers, plus a whole lot of empathy. These team members start each day knowing that every time they pick up a call, they may be dealing with an irate person. 

Business decision makers on the same Insightly survey don’t seem to have the personality to perform the functions that their support teams do. 

For example, 44 percent of business decision makers surveyed said they’d rather enter data in a spreadsheet than deal with a call from an angry customer, while three in 10 said they would do almost anything other than take an angry call, like sit on an 8-hour Zoom call (13%) or sit next to a crying baby on a cross-country flight (15%).

How do we show this team how awesome they truly are? First off, put National Customer Service Week on your calendar. It’s typically the first week in October. Use this as an opportunity to recognize your team’s hard work. But don’t wait for a special occasion; check in on the team and ensure they have the leadership, tools, and bandwidth to make every engagement a successful one. 

CX shows up on the bottom line

There is good news here, too. Unlike the external threats to your business like emerging competitors, market forces, economic downturns and the like, customer experience is something you fully control.

Data from the same study reveals just how powerful this can be.

When customers are unhappy, businesses worry that they will complain to customer service (23%), complain on social media (56%) or, even worse, choose a different provider (21%).

However, when happy, American consumers are most likely to tell all their friends (27%), tell the company (25%), write a comment on review sites (23%) and post about it on social media (15%).

These actions should sound familiar since they are all characteristics of brand advocates. According to Entrepreneur.com, brand advocates are super fans and brand loyalists who engage with the brand because they truly love it and will take action if asked.

If you reframe calls and outreach to customer service as an opportunity to create brand advocates, you start a cycle that fills the top of your funnel with new leads. 

Feed the top of the funnel with successful CX

After seeing these statistics, what are some action steps that leaders like you can take today? 

• Examine closed tickets. Don’t just read them. Look at the time stamps. Look at the length of the calls. Listen to the calls if possible. How can each interaction be studied and improved the next time?
• Reframe your mindset on support. Every time the phone rings or an email is submitted is an opportunity to create a positive experience and produce a brand advocate. Think about the things that people said they would rather do than talk to you (e.g. learning a TikTok dance), and then elevate their experience by delighting them.
• Some people will never be happy. Ensure you have ‘no blame culture’ from the top. Frame those negative customer interactions as learning experiences for the team without blaming team members, product, sales, etc.
• Encourage leadership to personally call random customers regularly and check-in to see how they are doing. They could potentially intercept a problem before it snowballs, but they will also gain an understanding of what’s going on daily on the front lines.

Manage relationships with Insightly Service

Your customer service team needs a powerful tool to meet the needs of your customer base. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your tool for customer service was part of the same suite of products as your CRM and marketing automation platform? So the sales, marketing and customer service teams are aligned on a single, powerful platform?

Built on Insightly’s platform, Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business applications that companies are already using. With Insightly Service, critical data is shared across departments and in real-time, so that all customer-facing teams are aligned and empowered to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.  

Insightly Service can be bundled with the entire Insightly suite of customer relationship management applications and is also available for purchase as a standalone customer service and support product. 

Get a demo of Insightly Service today.

The post CX survey shows companies overestimate customer support satisfaction appeared first on Insightly.

You know that each minute focused on manual tasks and basic business management is a waste of your expertise since it is time not spent on your clients. In the end, the work you perform, the results you deliver, and the experience you create determine whether clients come back for more.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are an answer to many of the challenges facing consulting firms. In this post, you’ll see how you can use a CRM to improve your sales processes and why Insightly is the best CRM for consultants.

• Why you need a CRM for your consulting business
• How can you benefit from a consulting CRM?
• What to look for in a CRM for consulting firms
• Why Insightly is the best consulting CRM
• Grow your consulting business with Insightly

Why you need a CRM for your consulting business

A consultant’s business starts with acquiring new clients. You need to convert the opportunities that come from your sales and marketing efforts into paying customers if you are to drive any revenue. Organizing your lead routing, automating your workflows, and sending, tracking and saving emails are critical to closing deals. Getting a dashboard view of your business makes it easy to see the health of your business at a glance. If you are using spreadsheets, you’re missing out on the convenience of automation and the insights from accurate reporting. The right CRM can provide all of this and more. 

Simply winning new customers sounds great but to retain clients, you need to deliver results. You want clients to associate your firm with successful outcomes.

To achieve this, your team must have a comprehensive understanding of your clients’ needs and how to serve them best. 

If you only had one client, this would not be a challenge. But, being a consultant means juggling multiple clients at once. And, the more complex your service offering, the more you need to stay in touch over the course of your engagement. Every action, from interacting with a client to researching potential solutions, ultimately affects the client relationship.

You need to ensure a positive flow of communication with clients to provide the experience they expect. A scattered approach to communication makes it difficult to give clients the attention they seek. The end result is a strained relationship and the strong potential of losing the client to another firm. Unfortunately, many businesses suffer this fate because they rely on standard business tools to manage client relationships.

Many others are run down by manual tasks. This slows everything down and also leads to poor attention paid to clients. To fix this, you need to automate as many processes as possible. Doing so lets you focus on meaningful work while fostering your business growth. As in the client acquisition stage, the right CRM can assist in client management as well.

How can you benefit from a consulting CRM?

Now you know that a CRM can assist your consulting business with both client acquisition and client service. With a better understanding of how a CRM is essential to your consulting firm, let’s examine how you can specifically use the software to improve every aspect of your business:

Visualize sales activities

Your sales process is an essential part of your consulting firm. Processes are unique for every firm, but each relies on a sales process with clearly defined steps. A CRM system helps you visualize the different stages in your sales process. You can then track each client’s journey through your pipeline.

This information allows you to personalize your communications to match each stage of the funnel.  For example, an email introducing your services might be best for top-of-the-funnel prospects, while those further along the sales pipeline are better suited for a phone call. With the help of a CRM, you can ensure the right person connects with prospects in the most appropriate manner.

Faster onboarding

Mundane tasks like drafting proposals and onboarding clients may not seem burdensome in isolation but with numerous client engagements occurring simultaneously, these tasks can quickly become time-consuming.

With a CRM, you don’t need to spend time continually completing these manual tasks. Once you’re ready to send a proposal, you can leverage automation tools to send them out quickly, reducing the time it takes to get it signed by your new client. Processes like intro calls, discovery sessions, and strategic information gathering are rinse-and-repeat with each engagement. Creating workflows for these tasks saves time and ensures that nothing slips through the cracks. 

Better organization

Each client interaction is an opportunity to pick up valuable information. With a consulting CRM, you can take notes and add them to that client’s profile. Project notes, budget updates, and contact details are all stored in a centralized place, allowing everyone on your team to quickly access the information they need.

Cross-sell and upsell existing clients

Existing clients are ideal for upselling and cross-selling additional services. A CRM helps you tap into this opportunity by making all relevant information easily accessible to all team members.

As you work to understand their needs, you will likely discover new pain points that you can help them with. When handled properly,  you can increase revenue significantly by securing additional business to go along with their initial engagement. Selling more into your existing customer base is a significantly less expensive way to grow revenue vs. net new business.

What to look for in a CRM for consulting firms

With a better understanding of how to boost efficiency and automate your business processes, you can begin evaluating CRM options. Let’s examine the crucial functionality to look for when seeking out the best CRM for consulting businesses.

Workflows and automation

A good CRM lets you create complex workflows to automate many of your day-to-day activities. For instance, when you get a new lead, you can automatically notify your sales team and assign the lead to the appropriate sales rep. Or, you can create email templates for common communications so your team won’t have to write out emails for each interaction.

Reporting and analytics

Keeping track of all your business activities, new leads, and results doesn’t have to be time-consuming. CRM software has vital reporting and forecasting capabilities built-in to the platform. This lets you create in-depth reports and customize high-level dashboards to get quick access to valuable data. 

Project management

Consultants need strong project and task management to stay on top of client relationships. The last thing you want is to miss a scheduled meeting or let important tasks fall through the cracks.

A CRM with project management functions gives you the ability to organize and manage all your tasks from a single system. You can book appointments and events and quickly assign tasks to your team members. The best CRMs for consultants offer low-code or no-code integrations with platforms such as Calendly and Google Calendar to bring cohesion across your business.

Why Insightly is the best consulting CRM

An all-in-one CRM like Insightly eliminates the need to rely on a disparate set of tools for communicating with clients and managing your consulting business. The efficiency it provides enables management to make better decisions and equips staff with all the resources they need to foster positive relationships.

Here are some of the key features that make Insightly the best CRM for consultants:

Holistic customer insights

Insightly puts the data you need to foster strong client relationships right at your fingerprints. By using just the Insightly CRM platform, you get a single database for all your accounts. This allows you to build a complete 360-degree view of each of your clients. Your teams then have quick access to all relevant information to proactively attend to client needs before issues arise.

When you bring new leads into your CRM, this single view makes it easy to find the best potential clients. You can segment prospects with tags to identify those that match your desired characteristics and prioritize your time to direct your efforts to the prospects. 

For even greater insight, add Insightly Marketing to harness the power of marketing automation in your consulting business. Attract and engage your ideal customers and grow your business faster with this powerful and easy-to-use marketing engine built on the same platform as Insightly CRM.

Next, add Insightly Service to provide mission-critical customer data to all of your teams, in real-time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.

Finally, add Insightly AppConnect to build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization.

Streamlined communication

Insightly centralizes communication. You can engage clients through emails, calls, and texts while managing the communications from your CRM. There are integrations for dozens of telephony providers to log calls and view details in the same place. 

Customizable reports and dashboards

Insightly gives you powerful tools to make data-driven decisions. You can create stunning data visualizations to track your progress and uncover new insights. The drag and drop functionality is simple, allowing anyone on your team to swiftly build the reports they need. These reports are readily available in your CRM to share with important stakeholders.

Ease of Use

Your consulting team shouldn’t struggle with your CRM. It should be simple to navigate and all important information should be easy to find. With Insightly, your opportunities, contacts, projects, and emails, are all accessible in one place. Free from having to click again and again, sales and marketing teams become hyper-efficient, and optimized productivity becomes the norm for your consulting firm.

Grow your consulting business with Insightly

Your clients expect an incredible experience. If you make the effort to understand and serve their individual needs, you will create long-lasting client relationships.

Insightly gives your team the tools to streamline every part of your consulting business so that you can efficiently acquire new clients and then give those clients the attention they deserve. Check out Insightly CRM, Insightly Marketing, Insightly Service and AppConnect today on a demo or free trial to see how aligning your team on a single platform can help your consulting firm grow.

The post Best CRM for Consulting Businesses: Close More Deals appeared first on Insightly.

Top brands like Apple, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Costco (just to name a few) hyper-focus on customer experience. 

Shouldn’t you?

How do you get this competitive advantage?

It’s time to change your perspective. Put customer satisfaction first. Examine your products/services from the customer’s viewpoint. Take a few steps on your own customer journey.

Don’t just learn to address customer needs. Learn what it feels like to have those needs met by your company. Show you truly “get it” and exceed customer expectations. Satisfied customers mean more referrals, a better brand reputation, and repeat sales.

5-steps for a customer-focused strategy

1. Collect and unify your customer feedback

Most companies have plenty of customer information. However, problems can arise if your customer data is siloed across multiple teams and systems. Before you can create a customer-focused organization, you need to get your entire frontline staff on the same page (e.g. the same CRM).

For smooth customer journeys, choose a unified CRM that eliminates departmental data silos. For example, would your sales team benefit from the customer data and feedback stored on your marketing team’s email campaign platform? Would integrating all your customer information help these salespeople personalize their efforts and manage common objections?

Most of all, you need to spend time with your customer feedback. such as the ratio of positive to negative terms in reviews and comments. Be sure to read customer feedback in context. Purchases are emotional decisions. Learn how it feels to go on your company’s customer journey, and share these perspectives with your teams.

2. Study and streamline your touch points

Spend time to scrutinize customer feedback at each step of the customer journey. Use a single-customer-view approach and watch how customers develop individual relationships with your brand. Identify your most popular and productive routes to brand trust. Invest in those proven paths to decrease conversion costs and increase sales.

When compiling a comprehensive list of touch points, organize them in phases. Many touch points occur before the prospect is identified. You probably generate traffic with SEO blogs, social media ads, and search engine ads. Your company may also run print and outdoor ad campaigns. And don’t forget other touch points like events, gift cards, and customer referrals. 

During the sales process, customers consume reviews of your product/service in various forums. Point-of-sale blurbs/brochures can also count as touch points. Of course, your sales process, whether in person or online, must be frictionless and frustration-free.

After the sale, your touch points probably include satisfaction surveys, email lists, reviews, and comments. Of course, many people will continue to touch base with your brand via your social media communities. And remember, billing and shipping touch points matter to customers, as well.

Develop a business model that nurtures customer loyalty after the sale. Asking for feedback builds engagement and allows you to compute important metrics like stickiness, CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Reduce churn and increase customer retention by showing you care about customer success, even after you’ve scored a sale.

3. Analyze and visualize your customer journey

Study your touchpoint data to anticipate customer needs and eliminate frustrations.

In this popular case study, a Norwegian research team analyzed customer journey touch points. They identified four common problems:

• Timing Errors – Your customer journey needs to make logical sense. This could look like a sales page link that happens too early in an email campaign, making people think you’re going to the hard sell rather than a micro-yes (e.g. download an eBook, check out a blog post). Worse yet, it could be a gaff like asking customers to log into a product before providing a code or registering their credentials.
• Ad Hoc Touch Points – Sometimes, unexpected and unplanned customer interactions happen. For example, when timing errors occur, customers (we hope!) will contact your support team. This can be an opportunity to build trust or further weaken customer relationships. Ad hoc touch points also include customer interactions with your accounting and logistics teams while untangling paperwork snafus.
• Failed Touch Points – Broken links, of course, diminish brand trust and increase bounce rates. Failed integrations between your ad platform, your website, and your point-of-sale software do the same. However, humans make mistakes, too. Late follow-ups, redundant/spammy sales calls, and other gaffs also lead to walk-aways.
• Missing Touch Points – A missing touch point could be as simple as a missing link or an incomplete email series. However, customers may be even more offended by missed meetings and ignored deadlines. These mistakes might be rare, but they can destroy brand trust. Demonstrate professionalism and due diligence to “walk the walk” of your customer-focused strategy across your entire organization.

Unify your data onto a platform with a comprehensive analysis suite. Visualizations matter, especially when sharing customer interaction and behavior insights with stakeholders. Use custom dashboards, graphs, and charts to tell customer stories and extract more value from your data. For example, you could track customer-focused KPIs like satisfaction scores to set team targets.

With the right CRM, it’s easier than ever to watch your customer relationships grow and mature.

4. Foster a customer-focused culture

Provide and track high-quality customer experiences across your entire organization.

To get started, define your vision of customer focus and share it with all stakeholders. It can help to follow Gulati and Oldroid’s four stages of the customer focus journey:

1. Create a centralized customer data repository, such as a unified CRM. Standardize this touchpoint information and organize it by customer, not by product/service, sale, account, location, etc.
2. Select a leader to own this project. This person will oversee the handoff of information from analysts to managers to marketers, to salespeople, etc. (A unified CRM makes this task simpler and easier than ever.)
3. Experiment with interventions. Use your unified data system to analyze and predict behaviors. Test possible improvements to your customer journey with customers (and against a control group).
4. Coordinate your efforts. With a good user experience system in place, let your teams care for your customers. For example, when a logistics team lead might notice a late shipment, she could identify the salesperson with the best relationship with this customer. Who else could best smooth over this mistake on your company’s behalf?

5. Resolve issues quickly

Customer focus means quick issue resolution. 

The logistic team leader from the previous example could use a unified CRM to update delivery schedules. She could reach out to your billing department for a revised quote. Her sales colleague could access this real-time customer relationship data and send out relevant customer service messages.

Of course, a solid software platform will help you catch your mistakes. Employ automated messaging and issue escalation features to alert stakeholders when teams take too long to resolve cases.

Align your teams with Insightly 

Insightly’s unified CRM gives you the tools you need to adopt a customer-focused approach.

It unites Marketing, Sales and Service teams into one tool. Then, you can easily integrate your other apps in your business with Insightly via AppConnect. You can quickly streamline your processes without writing a single line of code.  

Let Insightly’s unified approach give you the insights you need to improve customer focus and build stronger relationships.

 Get your free Insightly trial today.

The post 5 Ways To Improve Customer Focus appeared first on Insightly.

TrustRadius announced today that Insightly received a 2022 Most Loved Award. 

How are the awards determined?

TrustRadius analyzed every review collected in 2021 word by word across 25,820 products and 800 categories. The most beloved products were determined by comparing mentions of “love” in all its (grammatical) forms to the total number of reviews received for each product. 

Just 101 products emerged from this process as the winners of TrustRadius’ 2022 Most Loved Award. These products earned the highest ratio of “love” per review across the entire TrustRadius platform.

“Buyers have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) software,” said Megan Headley, VP of Research at TrustRadius. “The right CRM can help businesses ensure they are able to provide a seamless customer experience. Insightly earned a Most Loved award based directly on feedback from their customers. It’s one of the most loved software products of 2022.”

We’re blushing, but it got us wondering, what main qualities make a CRM worthy of love? 

• Unification – Perhaps CRM love means you are using a unified platform where marketing, sales, customer service, and project management all come together with a shared database.
• Connections – Being able to integrate with all of the tools you already use, like Quickbooks, WordPress, Slack, and more without writing lines and lines of code could be the definition of CRM love.
• Service – Nothing feels more lonely than not having the support you need. Maybe a loveable CRM is one that provides extensive onboarding, ongoing email and phone support, and quarterly check-ins to make sure you’re getting the most from your CRM by using all of the newest and best features.

So, we hit the proverbial streets to hear directly from Insightly users on what makes them love Insightly. This is what they told us:

Love closing deals faster

“Adopting Insightly has helped us close deals faster because the entire team collaborates on providing mission-critical detail in the CRM. From my perspective as a sales leader, the support I get from the team to capture this information and close opportunities is absolutely critical to our success.” – Ian Pund, Senior Vice President, Sales, Noble Biomaterials

Love driving 10x pipeline

“Insightly Marketing journeys are an intuitive solution that has helped our client drive a 10x increase in pipeline over just a few months by identifying prospects with a high propensity to convert. – Amy Anderson, Co-Founder, Wild Coffee Marketing

Love easy customizations

“With Insightly, we can implement changes in minutes, not months. And as sys admin, I’m able to handle almost any customization–we don’t need to hire expensive dev resources to update code.” – Charlana Tanner, Business Systems Administrator, Sigma Equipment

Love doubling output

“We use projects to manage complex client reporting on campaign performance and audience insights. Insightly’s flexibility and functionality has empowered our teams to double the number of projects we deliver weekly.” – Maud Levasseur, Director, Platform Operations, AdSquare

Love dashboard views

We’re a very data-driven organization.  Adopting dashboards has saved multiple days per month in manual Excel work for me and my dept heads, reduced the possibility of errors, and empowered us to be much more forward-looking in our approach.” – Jonathan Bernwieser, CEO and Co-Founder, Agrando    

Love doubling lead volume

“In less than a year, we’ve expanded our program from 2-3 campaigns a month to 12 unique campaigns, and we’re continuing to grow. Using advanced segmentation has doubled our lead pipeline and deal conversion through more effective targeting.” – Jordan Horn, Email Campaign Marketing Manager, Barrier Companies

Love customizations without a developer

“Insightly empowers our team to easily customize fields, processes and automations on the fly. You don’t need to be a developer to do this–it just works so seamlessly. Insightly helps us deliver a bespoke experience for all of our customers.” – Chris Benham, Director, The Village Goldsmith

Love hitting growth targets

“Insightly Professional Services delivered a business-critical integration that not only gives us real-time access to revenue projections, but is also empowering us with the insights we need to hit our growth targets.” – Andrew Piron, COO, Proud Source Spring Water

Time to swipe right on Insightly

So, if you’ve got the CRM blues, it’s time to swipe right on Insightly. Whether you’re looking for your first CRM love, or you’re moving away from a partner who’s not treating you right, Insightly has the features and the pricing that will make your heart sing and your phones ring. Start a free trial today. 

The post Feeling the love for your CRM? appeared first on Insightly.