A CRM solution is an essential part of your company’s digital transformation. You can eliminate redundant interactions, departmental silos, and customer frustrations. You can maintain all your customer data on one central platform. And you can create new assets like dashboards, visualizations, and apps with incredible speed.

For example, your sales team leads can view individual interaction maps and know exactly where prospects are in your funnel. You can track each prospect’s unique paths through your marketing and sales pipeline.

Most importantly, you can use a CRM to develop and maintain long-lasting customer relationships.

Define your CRM needs

Before committing to a CRM solution, identify the business needs it should address. Determine the aspects of your current sales and marketing system you want to maintain. Next, ask yourself which goals you’d like to accomplish. And finally, answer these critical questions: 

• How do you currently track marketing prospects and sales leads? 
• How do you manage ongoing customer/client relationships?
• Do you use the same CRM software for all front-end operations? 
• What redundancies exist between your current systems? 
• What will it take to switch CRM platforms?
• Which new technologies do you want to leverage? Consider customized dashboards and visualizations, app development and deployment, and AI data analysis, forecasting, and machine learning.

Once you’ve answered these questions, here’s what you need to do next to get started. 

1. Assemble a cross-functional team

Because your CRM software will affect a wide array of stakeholders, you need a cross-functional needs assessment team. This group should represent senior leadership, middle managers, and the front-end staff who will use your new CRM every day. Invite specialists like IT people and CRM admins – as well as generalists and creative thinkers.

Choose a leader for this group who has an excellent understanding of all your customer-facing operations. This person will take responsibility for the project, ensure team member accountability, and deliver a data-backed decision. Consider operations or data managers, sales leaders, or IT leads for this position. Most of all, this person should balance details with general perspectives and have excellent communication skills.

2. Collect feedback from future users

Your new CRM software will integrate all your front-facing operations into one system, so touch base with everyone who will use it. Have leaders ask their teams what functionalities they value in your current system, what customer experiences they wish you could offer, and what workflows and interactions they wish you could track?

Create a comprehensive needs list like this:

• Secure customer data management
• Lead management
• Project management
• Workflow automations, integrations, and customizations
• Sales automations like product and price catalogs, quote books, territory management, etc.
• Marketing automations like campaign management, email marketing, lead scoring, etc.
• Data analytics and reporting
• Mobile CRM access
• Data management during the transition to this new CRM
• User training and ongoing support
• Implementation requirements and total cost of ownership

3. Analyze and synthesize feedback

Meet with a small group of stakeholders and parse your feedback data.  Look for similarities between  ideas, issues, and feature requests that may signal important trends. Group these into categories such as important features, cost and licensing, scalability, integrations, and support.

4. Prioritize your CRM needs and wants

Choose a CRM solution that meets the needs of your customer-facing teams. As you review your analysis, differentiate between each department’s “must-haves” and “wants.” Look beyond the needs of any single group to be sure your new CRM is easy to scale up as your business requirements grow and change.

Assess CRM vendors

To properly assess all the CRM solution vendors available, consider some key questions, including: 

• Which one offers the right mix of features for your organization of all the CRM companies out there?
• Which CRM tool allows access to real-time customer relationship data?
• Which contact management suite tears down the invisible barriers between your marketing, sales, and support teams? 
• Does your CRM software map interactions in real-time so your team members can speak with confidence and relevance? For instance, your sales manager may want to follow up with current customers to track relationships.
• And most importantly, how will your new system protect your customer’s personal information?

5. Identify solutions that fit your needs

Every department will need different features from your CRM. For example, your: 

• Marketing teams may want CRM features like custom dashboards and detailed lead management visualizations. 
• Sales managers may want to know how far prospects have progressed through your sales pipeline. 
• Content creators may require clearer perspectives on the email and workflow builder, and its content creation interface.

By determining all the features your company needs, you can compare CRMs and make the best decision for your company. 

6. Keep an eye out for CRM costs

Big names don’t mean big savings and every feature you require. Some legacy CRMs may include features that don’t meet your business needs. Alternatively, these older CRM solutions may not have the new technologies necessary to increase your market share.

CRM providers typically offer tiered pricing per user that facilitates scaling. However, look out for hidden fees and ensure the features you want are in the tier you choose.

7. Hop on trials and demos

After comparing the benefits of the CRMs on your list, pick two or three to examine in depth. The most efficient way is to schedule live demos and sign up for free trials.

Have your tech team test out integrations, customizations, and add-ons. Ask your marketing team which CRMs provide the conversion statistics they need to get the most from your ad budget. Have sales teams test out custom ticket automations and role-based permissions.

8. Remember these essential CRM characteristics

As you’re testing potential CRM solutions, consider the following essential factors that may matter most for everyday use:

• Implementation—Choose someone who understands team workflows and tech logistics to create a new CRM implementation plan. Although you probably want a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments, you also need a CRM system that integrates with your existing software and data.
• Adoption rate—While a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments is a wise choice, you also need a CRM system people will actually use. According to this 2019 report, experts differ on the causes of low adoption rates, such as bad experiences, poor onboarding, and negative preconceptions. However, the data shows that users engage more with systems that are easy to use, and include mobile apps.
• Customization and workflows—Even though a particular CRM software package may look like the right one on the surface, be sure to dig deeper, so have your teams test the limits of dashboard customizations, email design tools, and analytics.Make sure your new CRM can handle everything your teams throw at it during their daily workflows. Do a few test runs with salespeople playing the part of customers. That way, you’ll know you’re making the right choice.
• Support—A CRM system is only useful to your organization if users can quickly and easily get the help they need. From salespeople to tech people, everyone eventually needs help. Be sure the CRM you choose provides comprehensive customer service and support.
• Integration: A unified platform—You can save big bucks with a single, unified CRM solution that eliminates redundancies and helps you create efficiencies. However, integrating all your client-facing operations into one system can be difficult. So have your tech teams work closely with team leads to ensure your CRM can deliver on its all-in-one promises long before deployment day.
• Scaling and growth—Your CRM is the central hub of your customer-facing operations. Adopting new CRM software can put a massive strain on your teams. Be sure the platform you choose will easily scale to your growth. That way, you’ll avoid massive headaches by not having to change CRMs every time you expand.
• Smooth transitioning—Your new CRM software should seamlessly integrate with a wide array of third-party applications. Make sure your CRM works well with the tools you use now and the tools you’ll rely on as you scale up.Of course, your CRM will also need to integrate with your existing system. It’s crucial to preserve your current customer relationship data as you transition to a single, unified CRM.
• Compliance—Your organization needs to show it meets all current digital privacy requirements for the countries in which you’ll be operating. Be sure the CRM software you choose has powerful and up-to-date customer information protections. Nothing matters more than building and maintaining customer trust, so your CRM should be able to support those goals.
• Ease of use —Although your team needs to feel comfortable using your new CRM platform, consider how it looks to your customers. Find out if their experience is pleasant? Does your CRM software feel intuitive? Have team members play the role of the customer. They’ll learn a lot about each CRM’s UX by opening emails, clicking through funnels, and filling out forms.

9. Choose the best CRM system

Ultimately, you need to discover what feels right for your workflow and your teams. Take your time, test potential new CRMs, and check in with your colleagues. Together, you’ll find a set of tools that supports all your organization’s front-facing teams.

Marketing, sales, and support teams love a unified CRM

Insightly provides the versatility you need to quickly and easily scale your operations.

With Insightly, integration and dashboard customization are a snap. Our users appreciate our massive suite of relevant and powerful tools. Insightly’s adoption rates are incredibly fast because people enjoy using our tools.

Rely on Insightly for everything from broad-scope analytics to single-customer views. Our CRM software gives you unparalleled perspectives on your most precious asset: customer relationships.

Make us the nerve center of your entire customer service infrastructure. Click here for a free trial of Insightly.

The post 9 steps to choose the best CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Customers want—and expect—a great product or service, amazing support, and a price that beats the competition. And, in an age of “cancel any time” and “no long-term commitments,” customers know that they have the upper hand. When companies fail to deliver, customers cancel and take their business elsewhere.

So, what should companies do to reduce cancellations and encourage long-term relationships? Let’s take a closer look at customer churn, how to calculate it, and what to do about it.

What is customer churn?

In business, the term “churn” typically refers to the act of customers cancelling, unsubscribing, or otherwise leaving. Adding up the number of customers that were lost during a specific period provides a company with its total churn metric. Churn is often tracked on an annual, quarterly, and/or monthly basis. Companies that have unusually high amounts of churn may choose to report on a weekly or daily basis, especially as they implement systems and programs aimed at reducing it.

How do you calculate customer churn rate?

Reducing customer churn is a top priority for businesses of all types—particularly those that offer monthly or annual subscription models, such as software as a service companies, no-contract wireless providers, consulting businesses on monthly retainers, and streaming media platforms. Unfortunately, improving churn is not as simple as it may seem. Customer journeys are complex and diverse. Seasonal buying patterns create artificial peaks and valleys for signups and cancellations. Just knowing what to focus on first can be a point of contention for many companies.

That’s why you need to normalize your churn data into a metric that accounts for the fluctuations in your business. That’s where customer churn rate comes in handy. Customer churn rate is usually calculated like this:

For a simple example, let’s assume that your company calculates churn rate on a monthly basis. On March 1, you had 1,000 total customers. By the end of March, your company lost 200 customers. This means that your monthly churn rate was 20%. Given a 20% churn rate, you could theoretically expect all of your customers to churn within a five month window. Or, stated slightly differently, your average retention period for a typical customer is five months.

5 tips for lowering churn

Maintaining a high churn rate is a recipe for disaster. There’s only so much demand generation that your sales and marketing teams can deliver. Here are five tips to consider as you develop a strategy for reducing churn.

1. Know your customers (better)

Keeping pace with customer orders and support requests can seem like an insurmountable job that leaves no time for strategic planning. However, it’s only by zooming out and seeing the big picture that your organization can identify issues that lead to cancellations. Invest more time in understanding your customers’ goals, objectives, and needs. Customer journey mapping is an excellent place to start.

2. Surround yourself with great people, systems, & processes

Does your company have the expertise and capacity to build a first-class customer success program? Perhaps you already have a qualified CS leader onboard, but he or she is in the wrong seat. Or, perhaps you need to go and recruit someone who has the right mix of experience and know-how. Start by surrounding yourself with people who are invested in the customer experience. Then, empower them to recommend and implement systems, processes, and technology that align with both your company’s and customers’ goals.

3. Focus on delivering great service & being customer-centric

An essential component of customer success is, of course, providing stellar customer service. Achieving and maintaining a one-hour response time on support tickets does not go far enough. Customers expect an amazing experience at every step of the journey—from interacting with chatbots to accessing thorough information on your support site to receiving helpful responses from your live agents.

Revisit your customer journey map and identify unnecessary points of friction. What adjustments can (and should) be made to provide a customer-centric experience? Strive to be more empathetic as a company and develop training programs that show staff how to walk in the customer’s shoes. Implement processes and metrics that hold front-line staff—particularly support agents—accountable for providing great service.

4. Collect actionable data to understand why customers leave

Customer data is more readily available now than ever before. Each customer interaction with your website, emails, and support team is another datapoint that can help you improve customer satisfaction and, hopefully, reduce churn.

If customer data management is not a strength for your company, here are a few data sources that are worth cultivating:

• Customer interviews: When a customer cancels, ask if he or she would be willing to have a 15-minute conversation. Expect a low participation rate, but also expect tremendously useful information from those who do.
• Built-in prompts: If you have a customer-facing user interface (UI), build in prompts to ask each customer why he or she is cancelling or downgrading. Sync this data directly to the contact or organization record in your CRM.
• Automated surveys: Use marketing automation technology to measure customer satisfaction throughout the entire customer journey.

These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Collaborate with team members from support, marketing, sales, and operations and continuously look for ways to securely collect more data and improve churn.

5. Use your data to identify trends & correct course

Simply collecting large amounts of customer data is a fruitless endeavor unless you have a reliable way to track and manage it. Using an easy-to-integrate and customizable CRM, such as Insightly, makes life easier on staff when trying to make sense of customer churn data. Custom objects and fields provide flexibility for organizing data in a way that aligns with your unique business model and customer journey.

In addition, look for ways to harness data that already exists in your CRM. For example, your sales team probably tracks their lost deals and cancellations. Use your CRM’s built-in dashboards and reports to visualize this data, identify churn-related trends, anticipate problems that lead to churn, and develop new strategies for lowering it.

Build business relationships that last

At the end of the day, reducing churn is all about building business relationships that last. Companies that truly understand their customers, implement customer-centric systems and processes, and strategically use data are better positioned to build long-term, churn-resistant relationships.

The post What is customer churn rate? 5 tips to lower it appeared first on Insightly.

So, what steps can you take to make customer service a priority and, as a result, improve customer satisfaction? Here are five customer service tips.

1. Start with a clear understanding of the present

Improving any initiative is difficult without performing an honest evaluation of the status quo. Customer service is no exception. Start by forming a cross-functional team whose mission is to objectively audit customer service on a company-wide basis. Diving into existing metrics, such as your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, may be a wise place to start—but it’s not the only indicator of service. Online review sites, social media comments, and surveys can provide additional context into customers’ perception of the service that they receive.

CRM reports, such as won and lost opportunities by reason, can be tremendously insightful, especially if you have a critical mass of data to analyze. Seek to understand why potential customers are opting for competing solutions instead of yours. Does a competitor offer premium support plans that you’re not currently equipped to provide? Or, are you competing against a company who is well known for providing excellent support at no extra charge? Either way, analyzing deal data can surface insights to identify gaps in your customer service strategy.

2. Align training with the ideal customer experience

For years, thought leaders in the customer service world have stressed the importance of empathy, active listening, clear and on-brand communication, and in-depth product (or service) knowledge. These skills, in most cases, must be learned and reinforced through training. Simply picking up the phone and fielding inbound calls from unhappy customers is not a winning strategy.

Top-performing companies align their training programs with a vision of the ideal customer experience. Emphasizing the importance of delivering great service—at every stage of the buyer journey—is key to realizing this goal.

Ask yourself these questions as you evaluate your training programs.

• What is your company’s definition of an ideal customer experience?
• Is customer service a focal point of your existing training programs?
• Do all team members receive customer service training, or just the support team?
• Could a series of service-focused workshops make an immediate impact?

Bonus tip: Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Consider implementing a “customer service hero” award that spotlights one team member who goes above and beyond to provide amazing customer experiences. Point out how the “hero” took steps that align with desired behaviors that are emphasized in your training materials.

3. Eliminate points of friction in customer service

One bad interaction is all it takes for the customer to form a negative opinion of your company. The customer does not know—or care—when a support rep is at the end of a ten-hour shift and less patient than usual. The customer simply wants a positive experience, but human weakness sometimes stands in the way.

Customer-facing teams, in particular, must continuously find ways to eliminate points of friction from the customer experience. If lengthy shifts, for example, lead to negative interactions, leadership may need to reimagine the team’s structure, management, or processes. When a team cannot serve each customer’s unique needs—even at the end of a long shift—then change is necessary.

4. Respond quickly & effectively

No customer wants to be stuck on hold for twenty minutes only to find out that no solution is possible. That’s why time to resolution is arguably one of the most important service-related metrics that influence customer satisfaction. Customers want fast service, but they also want effective service that helps them achieve success.

Providing fast and effective service must extend beyond the walls of your customer support department. Prospective customers, for example, expect price quotes that are accurate, detailed, clear, and promptly delivered. Channel partners need timely and accurate sales collateral that help them create awareness for your brand. Your customers’ accounts payable teams expect invoices to be sent to the right inbox, on the right day, and for the right amount.

Here are a few strategies for accelerating your company’s time to resolution.

Document & share internal knowledge with customers

Certain customers may prefer self-help resources as opposed to interacting with human beings. How can you use customer-facing web portals and other online resources to enable immediate access to helpful information?

Ideas: Customer knowledge bases, online price quote generators, FAQ pages, email templates with helpful links.

Provide inter-team & cross-team support

Some questions are too complex for one person to solve in a timely manner. Look for ways to streamline and enhance your escalation process.

Example: A software company routinely receives product enhancement ideas from its customers. Support team collects the ideas in a shared document and occasionally shares a summarized report with the product team. By the time the product team reviews the report, there is usually not enough context to understand the original idea. A better approach may involve immediate escalation to an on-call product team member, which would help the company understand new feature requests and simultaneously make the customer feel valued.

Invest in automation

Some things work better when automated. Take customer onboarding for example. Should every step in the process (emails, training sessions, etc.) require a manual action by your staff? Probably not. Check out Insightly’s workflow automation guide for ideas on how to use automation for sales, marketing, customer onboarding, and project delivery.

5. Value lifelong customer relationships

Companies that provide great service also tend to value lifelong customer relationships, which makes perfect sense. Providing great service makes customers more likely to stick with your company. Focusing on keeping customers for life, by its nature, forces your organization to continuously ask—and answer—important questions, such as:

• How can we provide even better service for customers?
• What gaps in service prevent some from becoming lifelong customers?
• Which service-related challenges have the biggest impact on churn?
• What positive interactions have led to long-standing customer relationships?

Spend time developing your customer journey map to begin the conversation.

It’s time to move beyond buzzwords & take action

Simply saying that you’re “customer-centric” has minimal benefit for your organization and customers. It’s time to take action. Start with a data-driven understanding of your customer service strategy. Align your training and programs around the customer experience, eliminate friction, find new ways to improve time to resolution, and value lifelong customer relationships.

The post 5 ways to deliver the best customer service appeared first on Insightly.

As a business leader, you see both sides of the issue. You want data integrity, but you also want to empower users with the right mix of tools and information. What’s the best approach?

Here are four steps for striking a balance.

1. Develop a cross-functional CRM team

Some organizations wrongly assume that their CRM should be entirely owned and managed by sales (with occasional assistance from IT). Revenue-generating teams may be some of the heaviest users of CRM technology; but, they’re not the only stakeholders. A properly implemented CRM should serve as the source of truth for your customer data, which includes everything from basic contact information to web interactions and attitudinal insights. Storing all of your customer data in your CRM forms a solid foundation for understanding the customer journey—which benefits everyone, not just sales.

Data-driven customer journeys don’t just magically appear in your CRM. Rather, they require a company-wide commitment to efficient data collection, organization, and reporting. That’s why you need to establish a cross-functional team that is responsible for strategic CRM decision-making.

At a minimum, the team should include your CRM administrator along with representatives from sales, marketing, IT, operations, business development, and executive leadership. The team should meet regularly, discuss corporate strategy in the context of your CRM, and serve as a clearing house for any major changes or enhancements.

2. Make it easy for CRM users to share feedback

Your front-line staff probably comprise the largest group of CRM users. Sales reps use it daily to log calls, send emails, track deals, and monitor pipeline growth. Operations teams manage projects, invoices, proposals, and work orders. Marketers build segmented lists, design and send promotional emails, and monitor lead acceptance rates. Altogether, your users may have thousands of CRM interactions in a single day. Naturally, they’re full of CRM enhancement ideas.

Get ahead of the situation and develop a formalized mechanism for soliciting and collecting user feedback. If your organization uses a team collaboration platform—such as Slack or Microsoft Teams—consider setting up a dedicated channel for users to share ideas in real time. In addition, distribute a quarterly survey that encourages all users to share their joys and pains of working with your CRM.

Taking a structured approach will make users feel confident that their thoughts are being heard, which can lessen the perceived need for “urgent changes” to your CRM. More feedback leads to more data. More data empowers your cross-functional team to identify trends, weigh one idea against another, and make informed decisions—instead of dealing with every customization request as a free-standing emergency.

3. Know the full scope of what your CRM can do

Messy CRM customizations are often unnecessary—especially when you know what you’re doing. Just because your sales team is asking for a way to track “hot deals” does not mean that a custom field is the best approach for alleviating their pain point. In this example, an Insightly user might consider using tags—rather than custom fields—which can be easily applied to leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities, and other records without altering the record itself.

Or, perhaps a more robust solution is required, in which case prospect lead scoring with Insightly Marketing could be worth a look.

Either solution addresses the core request while using built-in CRM capabilities (instead of relying on record-level customizations).

Go beyond the original request and terminology nuances. Revisit your CRM vendor’s documentation often. Understand what you’re trying to solve for. Tap into your CRM knowledge (and your creativity) to deliver the most value with the simplest solution.

4. Take an agile approach to CRM feature rollouts

The world’s top software development teams are experts at collecting a wide spectrum of user feedback, sequencing ideas, and working on features that deliver immediate impact. And, that’s exactly how your CRM cross-functional team should operate, too. Here’s how.

Collect raw ideas in a centralized location

Once you turn on the spigot of ideas as outlined in section two, you need a place to collect and organize them. A shared spreadsheet could work, although centralizing ideas as projects or tasks in your CRM might be a more scalable solution.

Merge & filter ideas

Some ideas will be duplicates. Some will be related or subideas within a larger idea. Some won’t be aligned with your company’s CRM philosophy. Appoint one person from your cross-functional team to regularly combine and archive requests on your kanban board.

Sequence ideas for implementation

There are only so many hours in the day. Members of your cross-functional team have plenty of other responsibilities on their plates, so sequencing top ideas is dependent upon understanding true capacity.

Engage the team in a discussion to understand capacity so that cards can be prioritized for implementation. Sequence CRM customizations or enhancements that offer the most value to the largest amount of users, without compromising data integrity or accessibility.

Find the right balance for your CRM

At the end of the day, your CRM should help your teams become more efficient, productive, and confident. CRM customizations, when implemented strategically and methodically, support these ideals without abandoning time-tested best practices.

Learn more about how to customize CRM for your business while preserving data integrity.

Get a free Insightly demo to learn more about CRM setup best practices.

Request a demo

The post Balancing CRM best practices with the need for customizations appeared first on Insightly.

• Part 1: What is customer success?
• Part 2: Customer success program prep: a six-point checklist

Quick recap

What is customer success?

In our first installment, we discussed customer success as a concept, why it’s an important functional area to focus on today, how CS teams operate, and the need to streamline your CS efforts with a unified CRM.

Preparing to launch your customer success program

In the second piece, we discussed customer success planning. We provided a six-point checklist to help you put all the pieces in place to launch and run your own program. We covered building the perfect customer success team, measurable KPIs, using a unified CRM to support your efforts and general customer success strategy.

Now let’s dive into launching your efforts and customer success program management. Below are three tips to get started.

Launching your program in three steps

With your team in place, your strategy defined, and a solid understanding of what customer success is, you’re ready to launch your inaugural CS program. Here are three vital steps to take when introducing your program to your customers and the market.

1. Create buzz & awareness

Treat the launch of your CS program like a new service or product launch. Develop a go-to-market campaign to spread the word. Use multiple channels to raise awareness.

Leverage your CRM’s marketing automation capabilities to run a program awareness email campaign for existing customers. Run a separate campaign to introduce prospects to your new offering. Maximize exposure via social media marketing. Use every appropriate marketing channel to spread the word.

2. Generate internal excitement

To launch and drive an outstanding customer success program, it’s important that your entire business adopts a customer-centric mindset. Hold all-hands meetings to walk all teams through your new program and how they will be involved.

Be sure to communicate to employees the importance of their involvement. Give them the opportunity to ask questions so everyone is aligned around your customer success objectives. Finally, let your Director of Customer Success or a Customer Success Manager (CSM) drive this effort.

PRO TIP: Once your program is up and running, give employees feedback channels to suggest improvements or provide general feedback. This will help them feel more involved in your program’s success.

3. Start reaching out to existing customers

Start speaking to existing customers to get the ball rolling. Explain the program to them, how they will benefit from it, and discuss steps to start incorporating them into your program.

Managing your CS program in seven steps

Once you’ve launched, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work managing your CS program. Here are seven customer success best practices to help you get started.

1. Activate your customer success playbooks

In part two of this series, we covered customer success playbooks—process documents that summarize the activities that should take place at each stage of the customer journey. Now is the time to put them into action.

Customer success playbooks involve various customer touchpoints that should be automated by your CRM solution. A few examples of automated actions include reminders, notifications, automated communications, etc. These are key to fomenting stronger customer relationships as you go.

2. Focus on onboarding

When you win a new customer, your CS team should start planning their personalized onboarding program. One of your customer support managers will own this process.

Ideally, you should have a series of meetings with your new customer to fully understand their use case, needs, challenges, pain points, etc. This allows them to tailor onboarding to meet each customer’s unique needs and increases the probability of their success using your product.

3. Deliver robust training

Training is essential to customer success. If customers don’t understand how to fully maximize the use of your product, they won’t use it. Nor will they realize the value it delivers.

Training should also be tailored to each customer’s unique needs. Training new customers is critically important. But you should also offer free product training to new users joining existing customer accounts.

PRO TIP: Make a point to record training sessions and make them available to each customer. The customer can then return and reference these training recordings when they need to refresh their knowledge around a particular topic.

4. Always be available

You can’t just onboard and train customers and leave them to fend for themselves. Ongoing support and guidance are key to customer success.

Dedicated customer support managers

Each customer should have a dedicated CSM who is always available to offer guidance when needed. Offering reliable guidance and teaching customers to drive their own success is key, so be sure each customer has its own CSM to turn to when guidance is needed.

Multiple support channels

Give customers various ways to reach customer support when they have a technical issue with your product. You can offer live phone support, as well as email support, chatbots, and even receive support queries via social media.

5. Give customers a voice & listen

It’s smart to open channels for customer feedback and product enhancement ideas. When you implement product changes based on customer feedback be sure to let customers know so they feel their voices are being heard.

A few effective ways you can provide your customers with a voice include:

• Sending routine surveys to gain key insight into your program’s performance
• Putting in place a cadence for regular, one-on-one check-ins between your customers and their CSMs
• Creating a customer advisory board
• Automating surveys after closing each customer support case
• Developing a closed customer community and forum to give customers a way to interact with one another and propose feature enhancement “ideas.”

PRO TIP: Whensoliciting feature enhancement requests from customers, refer to them “feature ideas” rather than “requests.” This will lower the expectation that every request will become a new feature.

6. Upselling & cross-selling

Your CS team’s role is not to upsell or cross-sell products or enhancements. However, by teaching customers the ins and outs of the system, your CSMs will explain additional product features that customers might not have.

When learning what might be possible if they added a specific add-on module or upgraded their plan to access more features, your CS team inadvertently engages in cross- and upselling. This is OK, just make sure it’s not at the center of their strategy.

Customer success reps are there to help the customer achieve success, not to push a sales pitch. This can have negative impacts on their performance because it’s crucial that customers see CSMs as their advocates, not salesmen in disguise.

7. Contract renewal management

Customer retention and churn rates are key metrics for customer success teams. When a customer’s renewal date nears, your CRM’s workflow automation features should send your CSMs an alert.

This is their queue to activate their customer success renewal playbook. At this point, they will schedule meetings with the customer to see how things are going and how they can improve their service to their customers.

If they can reassure each customer that the problems that they encountered in the past year are being addressed or have already been resolved, they increase the probability of customer contract renewal.

Performance Measurement

Routine reporting and metrics analysis are key to increasing program success. During the preparation stage, you will have defined the customer success metrics you want to track. You’ll have also collected baseline data around those metrics, so you’ll know how far you’ve progressed over time.

We recommend monthly reporting and analysis meetings within your CS team. This lets the team identify areas for improvement.

We also recommend holding a quarterly meeting with other team leaders to share results and open the floor for suggestions about how to improve cross-functional collaboration as it relates to your CS program.

Here are commonly-used CS metrics to track:

• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer health score
• Net promoter score
• Customer lifetime value
• Product adoption and usage rates
• Product upsell and cross-sell rates
• Contract renewal rates
• Customer satisfaction levels
• Customer support ticket volume per user
• Expansion revenue

Ready to start your own CS program?

Kickstart your program with more knowledge and preparation, and you’ll increase customer success, as well as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue growth.

Read more like this:

• Part One: What is customer success?
• Part Two: Preparing to launch your program
• Lead generation vs. customer retention
• Rethinking customer retention

The post Customer success: How to launch & manage your CS program appeared first on Insightly.

We cover important steps, like building the right team to drive your efforts, defining customers’ needs, and mapping your process and touchpoints to align with those needs. We then discuss the technology that drives customer success today.

We wrap up by walking you through creating predefined, repeatable practices to streamline each stage of your mapped process and the metrics used to measure your performance.

Preparation is the most important phase of kicking off a CS program. Let’s dig in.

1. Hire top talent to drive your efforts

The success and effectiveness of your CS efforts hinge on the team that drives it. They will be at the center of every CS process, so it’s important to invest in top talent.

However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best candidates available. Research indicates that employee turnover of those born between 1980 and 1996 is costing the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually.(1) So, how do you prevent employee turnover?

Retaining top talent through employee engagement

The key to maintaining high levels of employee satisfaction and retaining top talent lies in engaging employees. Consider the following statistics from Gallup:

• Well engaged teams see a 41% drop in absenteeism and a 17% rise in productivity
• Those highly engaged teams experience 59% less employee turnover
• Highly-engaged business units generate 21% greater profitability for their organizations (2)

2. Understand & relate to customers’ needs

It’s easy to start a CS program with a strategy defined by your perception of what your customers need. However, this is a common mistake that can have serious impacts on your program’s outcomes. To truly drive lasting success, you need to understand what success means to your customers.

Market research helps. But the best way to gain this insight is by going directly to the source and asking customers and what they need to be successful. Customer surveys help you do this, particularly if you offer incentives for participation.

PRO TIP: Be sure to carefully select your survey participants. Customers without a vested interest in your objective will complete a survey to receive the incentive without thinking critically about the answers they provide.

3. Map the customer journey

With fresh, reliable insight into customers’ needs, you can more accurately map the customer journey. When creating your customer journey map, be sure to include the touchpoints and deliverables customers require at each stage. This will act as a roadmap to ensure you deliver a consistent customer experience.

PRO TIP: This is a vital step in preparing to launch your CS program. It will align teams around a central, documented process and define your CS playbooks (more on playbooks below).

4. Implement technology to drive your success

Much of the administration of your CS program should be streamlined with automation technology.

The role of CRMs

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms play a major role in driving customer success. They capture the data needed to drive CS programs, track defined KPIs, and provide invaluable insight into customers’ needs, challenges, goals, etc.

Having a CRM solution in place is key to sustaining an effective customer success program. CRMs drive trusting customer relationships, which are at the core of customer success. They also facilitate better customer data management, which is vital to achieving CS objectives.

Customer success management platforms

Customer success management (CSM) software started to gain traction in the 2010s and is a rapidly growing industry today. Companies like Gainsight, ChurnZero, and Custify are moving the industry forward.

Many businesses implement CSM solutions, but these systems need the data captured by a CRM to deliver value. So, businesses invest in both systems then integrate them.

Instead of paying two vendors, many organizations simplify things by using one of the few CRMs that offer customer success programs. This lowers costs, reduces the size of your tech stack, and increases data accuracy as all data is stored in one central database.

PRO TIP: Automation technology is key to driving CS programs. However, always remember that certain processes require a human touch and are devalued when automated. Personal, telephone outreach to customers is a great example of the need for that human touch.

5. Create customer success playbooks

CS playbooks are process documents that outline the internal and external actions that should occur at each stage of the customer journey. They define how your desired customer experience looks and the key performance benchmarks you expect to hit at each stage.

CS playbook basics

Playbooks need to align with overall business objectives to drive the results and business growth you seek. Moreover, each playbook outlines various paths your team can take at each respective stage based on individual customer context. In other words, a single playbook can outline 10 different scenarios to ensure you’re prepared for the unexpected.

For example, product adoption playbooks are incredibly important, but there’s no cookie-cutter approach. A CS team might need an adoption playbook version for customers who aren’t using their product, another for customers with low usage rates, and a third for those with high usage rates.

Customer success playbook examples

Common playbook examples include:

• Pre-sales playbooks
• Customer onboarding and training playbooks
• Product adoption playbooks
• Executive change management playbooks (e.g. actions to take if your customer hires a new CEO)
• Playbooks for routine customer check-ins
• Playbooks that define how you’ll address at-risk customers
• Contract renewal playbooks
• Customer churn playbooks

Ultimately, the playbooks that you need depend on your internal operating processes. There’s no repeatable template that applies across the board.

6. Define KPIs & CS metrics

Before kicking off your initiative, you need to define the metrics you’ll track to measure performance. There is currently no metric specifically designed for customer success teams, but some of the best minds in the space are pooling expertise to define a CS-specific metric.

Until that happens, CS teams use a constellation of metrics designed for other teams to triangulate their CS performance. Commonly used metrics used in combination include:

• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer health score
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Customer lifetime value
• Product adoption and usage rates
• Product upsell and cross-sell rates
• Contract renewal rates
• Customer satisfaction levels
• Customer support ticket volume per user
• Expansion revenue

As you can see, this can become overly convoluted and confusing. That’s why the CS community is working on defining its own metric rather than piecing together a somewhat accurate measurement of their performance with metrics not intended to measure CS.

In part three of this three-part series on customer success, we’ll cover those steps and provide guidance around how to kickstart a CS program.

Stay tuned for part three. If you missed part one, bring yourself up to speed by reading our recent post, What is customer success?

Read more like this:

• What is customer success?
• 5 trends impacting customer engagement
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• Rethinking customer retention

Sources:

1. “Millennials: The Job-Hopping Generation,” Gallup, Updated 2019

2. “The Right Culture: Not Just About Employee Satisfaction,” Gallup, Updated 2020

The post Customer success program prep: a six-point checklist appeared first on Insightly.

That being said, a process is purely theoretical without a proven implementation workflow. Workflows bring order and scalability by breaking processes into bite-size, repeatable chunks of value.

Unfortunately, many workflows are inefficient—or downright broken. That’s where workflow automation comes in handy.

Let’s take a look at the basics of workflow automation.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation uses technology to reduce (or eliminate) the manual aspects of a business process. When used properly, workflow automation elevates the productivity of an organization by freeing up staff to focus on high impact activities—rather than keying in data and performing monotonous tasks. In short, workflow automation should not eliminate human intervention; rather, it helps people to be more efficient and effective at what they do.

A variety of workflow management tools now exist. Some CRMs, such as Insightly, offer built-in workflow automation features that simplify email delivery, record updates, and record creation. Third-party automation platforms, such as Zapier, connect multiple apps together, thereby enabling automated workflows across countless business systems.

Workflow automation examples

Although workflow automation could benefit almost any department, the most common use cases are in sales, marketing, and operations. Let’s explore a few examples.

Sales

In sales, every minute spent on data entry and inefficient workflows adds up to lost deals and less pipeline. Smart sales teams use workflow automation to their advantage through streamlined:

Lead nurturing

Manually following up with each new lead becomes less feasible as a pipeline grows to contain thousands of records. Workflow automation supplements a sales team’s efforts by enabling automated email outreach. New leads receive a friendly welcome email within moments of requesting information. Additional emails can be triggered as prospects advance through the buyer journey. This approach provides leads with the helpful information they’re looking for—without creating new bottlenecks for sales staff.

Lead routing

Traditionally, sales organizations have relied on a manager to serve as “air traffic controller” for new lead records. Under this model, the manager reviews each lead and manually applies geographic or account-based rules to ensure proper assignment. Workflow automation eliminates this intervention by instantly analyzing data in the lead record, applying business rules, and making lead assignments.

Customer onboarding

Closing new business is exciting, but each new deal creates a significant amount of work. Handing off the project to the delivery team, setting up the new account billing, and providing training materials are just a few examples. Workflow automation can help account executives stay focused on closing additional deals without losing sight of customer onboarding. Automated tasks and emails keep internal stakeholders in the loop while providing a seamless experience for the customer.

Marketing

As marketers, we often juggle multiple tasks and projects at the same time. There are many responsibilities to organize and track, and although some marketing projects are unique, many follow a common series of events. Here are two that come to mind:

Inbound lead management

Digital marketers spend the majority of their time trying to increase inbound lead volume. However, generating a bunch of leads provides limited value without the right engagement plan. Potential customers want to feel valued, and they also want solutions to their problems. Workflow automation helps marketers provide a meaningful experience at scale by simplifying the collection, use, and organization of data. Web to lead forms automatically create new records, while workflow rules update data fields to ensure proper categorization. Workflow rules can also trigger drip campaign emails that keep prospects highly engaged.

Campaign management

Leads don’t just appear out of thin air. Experienced marketers realize that lead generation requires a multitude of creative campaigns. From email to social media to pay-per-click advertisements, each campaign has a unique set of requirements that contribute to its success. Workflow automation can create a structure for marketing campaigns, which reduces the need to reinvent the wheel. For example, a social media campaign may require involvement from several people within an organization. An ad strategist must create the right audience, a graphic designer must develop the perfect design elements, and a copywriter must craft compelling headlines that get clicks. An automated workflow could assign tasks to each user (in sequential order) at exactly the right moment. As a result, everyone knows exactly what to do—without unnecessary meetings.

Delivery

Operations teams can also benefit from business process automation. Here are a few ways to put workflow automation to use in the delivery of goods and services:

Project kickoff

The moment a deal closes, an automated workflow could convert the opportunity to a project. In addition, downstream tasks and emails could remind key stakeholders to take action.

Customer communication

The initial 90-day period is critical for establishing healthy customer relationships. After all, signing on with a new vendor is stressful and can involve large investments of time and capital. Providing premium support and communication during the first three months—and throughout the entire customer journey—is therefore vital. Customer success teams can leverage automated workflows to trigger helpful emails that improve the onboarding experience. Emails that contain how-to guides, on-demand training webinars, and one-on-one onboarding sessions can be especially impactful.

Project invoicing

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. Timely and accurate invoicing, therefore, is paramount to ensure long-term success. Accounting teams could use workflow automation to ensure new customers are added to invoicing and order management systems. Likewise, automated 30-day reminders could go out to ensure each customer is invoiced in a timely fashion.

Benefits of workflow automation

As shown above, workflow automation has a number of tangible benefits for almost any business, including:

Less manual & repetitive work

Reduction of manual effort is the most obvious benefit of workflow automation. Automated workflows create new tasks for staff. They can update fields and create new records. They can even send out emails. All of this work must be done by someone (or something). Why not let a robot do it? Workflow automation doesn’t just save time, it also helps to reduce errors and streamline work.

Better data

Automation reduces the prevalence and impact of bad data. Fewer oversights and typos improves data integrity, which, in the long run, leads to better decision-making and richer insights for continuous improvement.

Less stress, more productivity

Forgetting to take action can be a major stressor for anyone. No one enjoys letting the team down (or taking the blame for an oversight). Automating the creation and completion of administrative tasks reduces stress by eliminating mind-numbing work, minimizing oversights, and freeing up staff to focus on the work that they enjoy, improve customer experience, and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Process scalability

As alluded to at the beginning of this article, scalable workflows lead to scalable processes. Technology creates scalability by overcoming bottlenecks that are a result of inefficient workflows and contributors.

6 signs that you need workflow automation

So, when should you implement workflow automation at your company? There’s no perfect answer, but here are a few signs that it’s time to begin exploring workflow automation:

1. You find yourself doing the same task over and over again.
2. Staff consistently forget to perform an important action.
3. Delegating work requires more time and effort than completing the task yourself.
4. Staff spend considerable time just trying to figure out what to do next and/or fixing errors.
5. Your handoff from sales to operations is time-consuming and complicated.
6. You need to accelerate pipeline engagement without increasing headcount.

Do any of these situations sound familiar? Perhaps it’s time to take the next step. If you’re an Insightly user, check out all of the free training materials in the Help Center. Review the training videos and documentation so you can maximize workflow automation’s impact at your company.

If your current CRM provider does not offer workflow automation or you are not getting value from it, request a free demo and your workflow automation needs assessment with Insightly.

Request a demo

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It’s a fair question that many midsize companies ask when switching CRMs. At face value, an annual CRM support plan seems like an unnecessary expense that could be better allocated toward revenue-producing activities, such as this year’s online ads budget. On the other hand, failing to achieve liftoff with your CRM represents a significant risk to the company’s future success, which could far outweigh the de minimis cost of a success plan.

So, is a CRM success plan actually worth the cost?

Let’s see if it’s right for your business.

1. Structured approach to onboarding and training elevates user adoption

As a marketing consultant, I’ve assisted with several CRM transitions during my career. I say “assisted” and not “led” because I’m not a CRM expert, per se. To effectively implement a CRM at a midsize company, one must possess a unique blend of skills and knowledge, ranging from sales pipelines to database management and third-party integrations. (That’s why I typically choose to support the process, rather than lead it.)

Some companies try to leverage in-house technical resources, such as an IT manager, to oversee implementation and training. Although this approach can work, there’s a chance that the IT manager lacks the practical sales knowledge to customize the platform to the company’s unique customer journey. Such misalignment causes a never-ending loop of confusion between sales and IT, which delays onboarding and stifles user adoption.

Hiring a CRM consultant is another common solution. However, this strategy has its own set of drawbacks. Granted, a good CRM consultant may be more conversant when it comes to sales pipelines, and he or she should certainly know the software. That being said, a skilled CRM consultant’s time is not cheap, and every consultant’s onboarding methodology is bound to be slightly different. What’s worse, if the consultant fails to deliver on his or her promises, the client has few options other than starting over with a new consultant.

How a CRM success plan helps: Signing up for a vendor-provided CRM success plan can lessen or eliminate many of the aforementioned risks. Remember, the CRM vendor has a vested interest to ensure you’re up and running quickly and with a high level of user adoption. (Otherwise, they won’t be getting your signature for next year’s renewal.) An experienced and dedicated success manager will listen to your business objectives and apply his or her CRM expertise to align the technology to your exact needs. Better yet, you’ll be guided through an onboarding and training workflow that’s already been tested on countless other midsize companies.

In short, a vendor-provided CRM success plan standardizes your onboarding experience, reduces the workload for in-house staff, and minimizes your dependency on high-priced consultants.

2. Personalized guidance creates stability in the face of change

To grow and compete in today’s competitive market, midsize companies must constantly adapt and evolve. Change is good, but each new change has a downstream impact on business systems—and a CRM is no exception. Just because a pipeline was accurately configured yesterday does not mean that it is useful today. Cluttering a CRM with unnecessary data fields and relying on outdated processes slows down business development, thereby increasing the chances that users will abandon the system altogether.

Despite the necessity for change, companies often hesitate to make adjustments to their CRMs. Fear of “breaking something” usually outweighs the unquantifiable gains to be had by maintaining an agile CRM instance. As a result, user adoption erodes over time, leading to a CRM that becomes even less relevant with each passing day.

How a CRM success plan helps: A CRM success plan can provide staff with the confidence they need to overcome the fear of “breaking something.” As your business grows, your customer success manager walks alongside you to co-develop strategies for adapting the software without business interruption. And, as your CRM vendor rolls out new features, your success manager will be there to brainstorm innovative use cases that maximize the system’s impact for your situation.

Simply put, a vendor-provided CRM success plan provides you with a sense of stability in a constant world of rapid business and technological change.

3. Accountability to ensure consistent usage

When done correctly, switching CRMs can be an exciting opportunity for a company to accelerate growth and increase efficiency.

Of course, this can only be possible when users buy into the system and leverage it as their central source of truth. Sadly, some companies invest significant resources into the upfront onboarding process, only to resort to bad habits a few months after the switch. Without proper accountability checks in place, users inevitably gravitate toward familiar data silos, such as isolated inboxes and spreadsheets, which, ultimately, leads to a high-caliber CRM full of low-caliber data.

How a CRM success plan helps: With a vendor-provided CRM success plan, you’ll gain an added layer of accountability to keep users engaged with the system. Collaborate with your customer success manager to configure data-driven reports and dashboards that monitor usage. After establishing a baseline, it may be wise to set up email alerts to notify you (and your CSM) when usage falls below a desired level or exceeds a predefined goal. From there, brainstorm new opportunities for maximizing system utilization.

Lean on your customer success manager’s experiences with other clients to implement best practices at your company.

Choosing the right plan for your needs

One final thought about CRM success plans: Not every vendor forces you into a one-size-fits-all package. Case in point, check out the three support tiers offered by Insightly. Be sure to ask your vendor if they offer multiple support options, then select the plan that best fits your needs. You could always adjust in the future.

Interested in learning more about Insightly’s products and success plans? Request a demo and get in touch with the Insightly team.

Request a demo

The post 3 ways a CRM success plan can help you maximize ROI appeared first on Insightly.

Consultants (like me!) and business owners of all types are doing their best to close out last year‘s books, get feedback from their accountants, and file accurate returns. In my experience, preparing for April 15th (or, as this year’s calendar falls, April 17th) requires a quantifiable amount of work and brainpower. Also, it usually involves writing several painful checks.

Although we can’t change the reality of tax day, we can at least dream. So, in the spirit of dreaming, here are seven things that you’d probably rather be doing this time of year.

1. Billing Time to Clients

In the consulting profession, the name of the game is maximizing billable hours and minimizing non-billable stuff.

Working on your taxes is particularly frustrating for two big reasons. First, every hour spent on your taxes is one that can’t be billed to someone else. There’s a clear opportunity cost associated with this situation. If you spend eight total hours on your taxes and your rate is $50 per hour, you’ve essentially “spent” $400 (and that doesn’t include what you’ll pay your CPA).

To make matters worse, it’s not like working on your taxes is a very gratifying experience. Gathering 1099s, pulling last year’s P&L statement, reviewing expense categories, and preparing summary sheets for your CPA isn’t exactly complicated work. It just consumes a lot of time – time that might be better spent (in a perfect world) on something more valuable to your business.

2. Prospecting & Networking

It’s hard to maximize your billing potential without a full book of business. As I’m sure you’d agree, one of the best ways to build a solid book of business is through networking.

In today’s fast-paced consulting world, there are a limitless number of ways to generate new opportunities for your business. Here are just a few ideas that could yield meaningful results with relatively minimal effort:

• Asking for referrals from existing clients
• Offering new services to existing clients
• Networking through consulting marketplaces, such as Upwork.com
• Engaging in LinkedIn groups
• Attending local networking events
• Traveling to conferences and workshops

If any of the previous ideas caught your attention, consider creating a task to circle back soon. Would an April 18th start date make sense? I’m thinking so.

3. Continuing Education

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

I’m sure you’ve heard it said many times. But, is it really true? For successful consultants, I’d say a more accurate statement goes as follows:

“It’s what you know, who you know, and what you do about it.”

Knowing a bunch of smart or well-connected people is no doubt important. Your clients appreciate the introductions you’re able to make. But, where does that leave you? You’re not in the business of simply playing matchmaker. Without the right mix of knowledge and skills, clients will find it difficult to keep you around for very long – despite the great connections you bring to the table.

Smart consultants find time to keep learning, thereby making themselves more useful. Unfortunately, some consultants put continuing education on the bottom of their to-do lists. Balancing the many client expectations and seasonal demands (such as taxes!) is challenging.

Continuing education can wait until next month, right? On the other hand, December will be here faster than you think!

4. Creating New Passive Income Streams

In reality, consultants are in the information business. Clients need information, and you’re more than happy to give it to them (for an hourly fee, of course).

Here’s the big problem with the consulting model: There’s way more clients in the world than you have hours. Even if you doubled your number of billable hours, hired a team to support you, and raised your rates, you would only be scratching the surface of what’s possible. For these reasons, some consultants package their knowledge into passive income streams. Here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:

Paid Webinars: Webinars can be an excellent way to share your knowledge with hundreds of clients at once. What if you could get 100 clients to simultaneously pay for the same hour of your time? That would have a pretty big impact on your bottom line, wouldn’t it?

Online Training Courses: Some topics are evergreen in nature, which can make for perfect online training courses. In your field of expertise, what are the most common challenges your clients face? Would the creation of an online course help solve their problems while enhancing your profitability and personal brand?

Books: With self-publishing on the rise, it’s easier than ever to become an author. Authorship can help establish you as a thought leader, but it can also serve as an incremental revenue stream.

5. Spring Cleaning of Your Records

Like the dust that has collected under your couch all winter, your CRM could probably use a good old-fashioned spring cleaning. If you weren’t frantically looking for that missing 1099, you might have time to take care of the following:

Adding New Contacts – Not everyone you’ve met in the last year has made it into your CRM. For example, your thought leadership efforts have really started to pay off in several LinkedIn groups. Likewise, you have a stack of business cards from last month’s trade show. It sure would be nice to get them added to your contact database.

Merging Duplicates – You try your best to keep clean records, but some things slip through the cracks. Making time to deduplicate your contacts, tasks, projects, and other records can make you feel more productive and less strung out.

Closing Old Opportunities – Some clients are just too nice to tell you “no.” This can lead to a CRM full of opportunities that will never materialize. Being realistic and closing low-probability opportunities (despite never getting a firm “no”) can help you reduce clutter and refocus attention to higher probability deals.

6. Analyzing Your Financials (Rather than Just “Doing” Them)

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of tax season. Did my accountant remember to include my SEP IRA contributions when calculating adjusted gross income? Is the new laptop that I purchased last year being amortized or expensed fully? Questions like these are important to ask when ensuring accuracy, but frankly they’re not all that useful from a strategic standpoint.

If “doing” your taxes wasn’t such a major undertaking, there might be more time to ask value-focused questions like these:

• What percentage of income originated from consulting versus passive income streams?
• Which of my services are most profitable?
• Which of my clients are most profitable?
• Is my business exposed to unnecessary risk by serving too few / too many clients?
• Could I actually be losing money by refusing to outsource certain tasks?
• Should I be saving more for retirement?

Sadly, for many consultants (myself included), such strategic questions are frequently overshadowed by the nuts and bolts of meeting the mid-April deadline. By the time May rolls around, these questions are long forgotten – until maybe next tax season.

7. Just About Anything Else!

When you finally get around to cracking open that 75-page packet from your CPA, you know you’re in for at least an hour of tedious review. When you take on projects, you do them well. It’s just who you are. Signing off on your taxes is certainly no exception.

As the packet continues to stare you down, it’s easy to get intimidated or find other matters that take precedence:

“It’s been a while since I backed up my computer.”

“My office plants look a little stressed. I should probably give them a quick drink.”

“I’ve been meaning to descale my coffee machine.”

Before you know it, it’s the end of the workday. Your taxes will just need to wait until tomorrow. Let’s hope tomorrow isn’t too late!

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Custom Objects

The days of one-size-fits-all apps are long gone. Every business is different in how it enables its people, manages its processes, and behaves in increasingly competitive markets. Insightly’s new Custom Objects functionality allows businesses of any size and in any industry to add custom data fields and model every touchpoint of the customer journey. A real estate business can now customize their CRM with property type, seller, buyer, and broker info, and listings; a manufacturing business can keep track of equipment, shipping, logistics, and work order; and so on.

With Custom Objects you can finally build 360-degree view of the customer — all your customer data in one place — and, ultimately, build lifelong customer relationships. As far as the setup and adoption, Custom Objects look and perform like any other object and can be fully and flawlessly integrated with standard/existing fields and workflows.

Feature details:

• Create custom views with up to 200 individual fields and millions of records
• Get support for all 14 distinct custom field types
• Search any field in under 25 ms and update data in under 45 ms
• Customize page layouts with dynamic layout rules
• Use Workflow Automation, including webhooks and lambda functions
• Create custom business intelligence dashboards and cards on top of Custom Objects
• Import from CSV or Excel and update data in Custom Objects
• Deploy new Custom Objects across web, iOS, and Android with just one click

Availability: Professional & Enterprise Plans

Custom Apps

This new feature is all about user adoption and efficiencies, which are critical to a successful CRM implementation and the future-proofing of businesses. The Custom Apps capabilities allow Insightly users to tailor their daily CRM interactions to the very specific needs and individual preferences, at every customer touchpoint.

Salespeople can now create their own view of the application that will provide them with everything they need — standard objects and Custom Objects — to perform their daily functions; service and support professionals can create their specific view; project delivery teams, both internal and external, can create theirs, and so on.

The more in-tune the application experience is to the individual users’ needs, the more likely they are to use it, the more productive they will be, and ultimately, the happier their customers will be.

Feature details:

• Build and deploy new business applications
• Create unique application branding, iconography, and theme
• Use Drag and Drop user interface builder
• Deploy to the Web, Android, and Apple phones and tablets with just one click
• Add any combination of Custom Objects and standard objects
• Add a customized dashboard to each app home page
• Easily switch between CRM and custom apps with App Switcher
• Keep everything safe and secure with fine-grained permissions and security model

Availability: Enterprise Plan

Insightly Voice

Insightly Voice allows users to make and receive phone calls from within their browser software with click-to-call functionality, and makes placing and receiving calls dramatically more efficient with auto-call logging, so no data entry is required.

Feature details:

• Record and store calls automatically
• View call history and follow-up action notes, analytics on call agent productivity
• Set up custom wait greetings, hold messages, and voicemail greetings for each agent
• Listen in for coaching or monitoring

Availability: Professional and Enterprise Plans, United States and Canada at launch, more regions to follow.

User Interface Improvements

With 20+ product refinements, Insightly users can now customize their workspaces with custom logo rendering, last-used column width maintenance, and additional date and time formatting options, to name a few.

Availability: All plans

For more details, watch the webinar.

As always, we’ve got deep documentation in the Insightly Help Center to help you get started.

Request a demo from a representative from our Sales team if you would like to learn more about the new product updates.

The post New features and key platform updates appeared first on Insightly.