A unified CRM is what’s required to thrive in a competitive landscape. The tools and data integration that it provides enable all of the company’s teams to seamlessly achieve synergy. They enable you to gain more insights and deliver a better experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the ways Insightly’s unified CRM software can have a transformative impact on your business.

What is the CRM process?

The CRM process can be best described as a business strategy that enables companies to better identify and interact with current and potential customers. 

The idea here is to improve personalization for every customer interaction for enhanced customer experience and loyalty through data analysis and segmentation tools.

The same approach is also leveraged for prospects to convert them into paying customers. The five core steps of the CRM process signify a collaborative effort between the key departments in a company.

The 5 steps of the CRM cycle

1. Increase brand awareness

Typically the marketing team’s domain, the first step in the customer relationship management process involves introducing prospects to the business. It requires in-depth research on the audience’s demographics and interests.

Audience personas are created based on this market research to launch marketing campaigns that will theoretically have a greater chance of resonating with the audience.

2. Acquire more leads

The lead acquisition step is generally handled by the sales or marketing teams, or in some companies, both. This is essentially an effort to get prospects to engage with the business. 

For example, the marketing team might offer downloadable content as a lead magnet to website visitors if they provide an email address. The sales team could then pull that data from the CRM to proactively target prospects to convert them into customers.

3. Convert leads into paying customers

Reps nurture leads to get them to convert to paying customers in this part of the sales process. They usually rely on lead-scoring data in the CRM to identify prospects that may have the highest probability of a sale and follow-up diligently with the lead.

Converting prospects into new customers is more of an art than a science. Sales reps must be skilled at building trust to inspire confidence in the leads to convert them into paying customers.

4. Retain customers with customer support and customer success

The job doesn’t end when the lead converts into a customer. Providing them with exceptional customer service is key to ensuring that they remain loyal customers.

The most widely used metric in customer service is CSAT or customer satisfaction. This data is used to track trends and identify and fix any issues impacting customer service.

5. Extract more value per customer with upsells/cross-sells

Upselling and cross-selling are great opportunities to proactively meet the needs of your customers by utilizing the data in the CRM. Companies should be mindful of the fact that customers’ needs may change over time. 

This can be achieved by leveraging purchase data to provide personalized recommendations on the products and services that would provide further benefit to the customers.

Why the CRM process is flawed

Not all companies are created equal. The customer journey will always be different for every company. What works for one may not necessarily work for the other. This crucial fact tends to be overlooked by the CRM process. 

What ends up happening is that the data gets compartmentalized in different tools. It turns into a mess as data discrepancies inevitably occur when all teams are not entering data into the same system.

This causes friction between various teams, including sales and marketing, since they effectively work in silos with complex ad hoc data sync processes.

Employees thus end up not trusting the data as it doesn’t provide them with a holistic view to make empowered decisions. They come to question the integrity of the data because it doesn’t appear to be cohesive and comprehensive.

They also find it difficult to achieve synergy with colleagues on other teams. Alignment across teams is crucial to close more customers and to improve retention.

A real-life CRM process example

A legacy CRM is effectively used as a suite of apps by a company. All of the sales, marketing, and service data is collected and managed in separate silos. 

Thus, in reality, these so-called “integrated” CRMs are actually “assembled” CRM software where features and functionality were added over time in response to customers’ needs. 

These solutions don’t fit the customer journey, particularly for companies that offer multiple products and services. The many teams that work on them use different tools that all do the same thing but don’t allow for seamless data integration. It’s impossible to have confidence in the data when it’s scattered everywhere. 

There’s no continuity between the various tools in the CRM system, which prevents them from having an up-to-date and comprehensive view of the customer journey.

This will prevent, for example, the hardware and software sales teams in a company from leveraging the upsell/cross-sell opportunities that may exist with their customers simply because their data is all over the place. 

Trying to fully integrate the scattered data is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, often making efforts to achieve that futile.

A better, adaptive approach to the CRM process

1. Start with the customer journey

The customer journey is a vital part of any CRM integration. Most solutions go about it the wrong way by forcing the customer journey to adapt to the CRM process. 

Think about it, what works for a customer who wants to buy hardware might not work for someone who’s buying software. The same CRM strategy can’t be used for both.

It should be the other way around. The CRM process needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the customer journey. This increases the potential of converting leads and enhancing retention regardless of what stage of the sales pipeline they’re in.

2. Integrate with your existing tools

A single customer view that centralizes all customer data is a powerful tool to achieve synergy. Its integration with all of the existing tools that a business uses is also of vital importance. 

Insightly AppConnect is a tool that allows for integration automation. Companies can use it to link and integrate Insightly’s unified CRM system with the other apps they use in their organization. 

This allows for powerful new workflow automation between applications. AppConnect also features over 500 pre-built connections to popular business apps.

Even non-technical users can build seamless integrations by using its simple drag and drop interface without writing a single line of code.

3. Take a unified approach

Companies can both extract the most from their CRM implementation and improve customer service by adopting a unified approach that no longer relies on redundant tools and the compartmentalization of data in silos. 

They can achieve synergy and data integration by unifying the marketing, sales, support, and project management on a single platform. All of the teams work together with a holistic view of the customers’ needs and expectations.

​​One of the biggest benefits of a unified solution for teams is that they can complete many tasks in one single system. They no longer have to switch between multiple applications to use various tools just to access data, a task that unnecessarily slows them down. 

Insightly puts this unified approach at the heart of its CRM solution. Teams’ productivity increases through automation. With business intelligence built in, Insightly can also be used to create data visualizations and real-time data dashboards for unmatched visibility.

Insightly unifies your CRM process

Insightly empowers organizations and even small businesses to align sales, marketing, and support teams so that they have complete visibility over customer relationships. They can use that insight and knowledge to improve customer service. 

Automatic lead routing ensures that leads are routed to the right person in real-time. With workflow automation, companies can create complex, multi-step business processes to better serve their customers. It can even execute custom business logic to sync with external systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

AppConnect ensures that the ecosystem of tools that a company uses every day isn’t disrupted; rather it’s integrated seamlessly with the CRM. AppConnect comes with more than 500 pre-built connections to the most popular business software apps. This makes establishing seamless integrations between the CRM and apps very straightforward.

Interested in learning more about how a real single customer view can enable you to improve customer retention and to better connect with them? Try Insightly for free to feel the unified CRM difference for yourself.

The post The CRM process is flawed. Here is why. appeared first on Insightly.

That being said, trying to do too much without the right mix of people and technology can cause deals to go to waste.

To help sales reps elevate productivity in today’s “socially distanced” selling environment, many companies are taking a fresh look at workflow automation. When used properly, workflow automation helps reps get more done with less effort, and close more deals.

Here are six best practices for using workflow automation to streamline your sales pipeline.

1. Avoid automation (for now) & shore up your pipeline

Workflow automation is defined as the use of technology to reduce or eliminate the manual aspects of a business process. It is not a magical solution to fix all of your sales problems. In fact, when used in tandem with a poorly constructed sales pipeline, workflow automation may make a bad situation even worse.

To illustrate my point, let’s assume that a company’s sales pipeline for its ideal customer profile (ICP) consists of four stages:

• Needs analysis
• Value proposition
• Price quote
• Closed won (or lost)

The company’s sales reps reliably move opportunities from stage to stage, but deals consistently get stuck in price quotes. Seeking to accelerate deal velocity, the sales manager designs a complex workflow that involves numerous tasks and emails so that reps perform their necessary follow-up activities. Despite even the best intentions, this approach will likely fail because it does not address the root issue. Reps don’t need more emails crowding their inboxes. Maybe they just have a hard time differentiating between deals that are being quoted and those that are already quoted and require follow-up. In this case, simply adding another stage to the pipeline (i.e., “quote follow-up”) might be more effective and help reps structure their work with fewer distractions.

Key question: Does the sales pipeline in your CRM accurately represent your sales process? If not, it’s time to make a few changes.

2. Collect a list of your sales pipeline bottlenecks

Let’s assume that your sales pipeline is aligned with your CRM. Now the automation can begin, right? Maybe not. Here’s why.

Although creating workflows in your CRM should be relatively easy, doing so consumes scarce resources. With sales teams leaner than ever, you don’t have unlimited time available for configuring an unlimited number of automations. You must be selective and only build automated workflows that will deliver tangible value to your business.

Slow down and make a list of the current bottlenecks in your pipeline. If you can’t think of any, look for these warning signs:

• Processes that require significant amounts of data entry
• Things that consistently get “stuck’ in the pipeline
• Processes that require manual coordination with third-party systems
• Data silos

Key takeaway: Create a shared document or kanban board to collect your sales pipeline bottlenecks. Share the list with everyone involved in the sales pipeline and crowdsource ideas.

3. Know what your CRM can do

You don’t need to hire an expensive CRM consultant to understand how your CRM’s automation works. Spend time reading your CRM vendor’s automation documentation (for example, check out Insightly’s automation guide). Ask yourself these questions as you dive in:

• Which CRM records (i.e., leads, contacts, etc.) can be used to trigger an automated workflow?
• Does my CRM allow me to use multiple criteria (i.e., bid amount, deal status, etc.) when building automated rules?
• Can actions be scheduled to occur on a future date rather than occurring immediately?
• What are the different types of actions (i.e., send an email, update a record, etc.) that are available?

Reminder: Don’t forget to check if workflow automation is included in your current CRM plan level. If it’s not included, perform a basic ROI analysis to determine if the cost of upgrading is worth it.

4. Sequence your biggest pain points

Now it’s time to sequence your bottlenecks to decide what you should automate first. Remember, you want to identify the one thing that will have the biggest impact on your sales pipeline but is also easy to implement (given your CRM’s capabilities as previously discussed). There are numerous ways to do this, but I suggest keeping it simple:

Impact

Large = 1 point

Medium = 2 points

Small = 3 points

Size

Small = 1 point

Medium = 2 points

Large = 3 points

If you’re using Insightly, you might use tags to assign an impact and size rating to each item. Then use your project kanban board to drag and drop cards into a logical order. Use a golf-like scoring methodology to give preference to cards with low scores (i.e., large impact, small size).

Bonus tip: If there’s a tie between two or more cards, ask for feedback from other stakeholders in the sales pipeline. After all, you want buy-in on the automation that you’re building.

5. Automate one sales workflow at a time

Notice that the headline says one workflow—and not several.

Don’t be tempted to automate too many things at once, especially if this is your first attempt at automation. There are enough decisions to make in building a single workflow. Distributing your focus will only lessen your ability to think strategically and clearly.

For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that you’ve identified inbound lead automation as the highest impact, lowest effort initiative. Your SEO and paid promotion is paying off and generating more inbound inquiries; however, you lack a scalable system to deal with the influx. You’re looking to automate the following steps to engage more inbound leads and reduce manual effort:

• Immediately send a welcome email to the lead
• Assign a task to an SDR for follow-up
• Send a second email a few days later

If you’re an Insightly user, check out this helpful guide, How to configure an automated workflow. Before you start making any adjustments in your CRM, however, it’s wise to diagram your ideal workflow. Use descriptive words to explain exactly what you want to happen. Here’s a simple illustration:

Use your diagram as a guide for implementing workflow triggers and actions that help you achieve your goal. Refer back to it often—especially if you feel like you’re getting lost in the weeds when evaluating workflow criteria.

Suggestion: Test your workflow in a limited scope before rolling it out across your entire sales team. During testing, you might assign automated tasks to yourself instead of to your SDRs. This approach allows you to make any final adjustments and ensure everything is working as intended.

6. Use data to measure success & plan your next move

Workflow automation should have a measurable impact on your sales key performance indicators (KPIs). In an example with inbound lead automation, you can expect to see a noticeable improvement in one or more of the following areas:

• Email response rate from inbound leads
• SDR appointments with inbound leads
• MQL-to-SQL ratio for inbound leads

Use data from your CRM to track desired and actual outcomes. If, after a few months, you notice very little change (or a change for the worse), perhaps it’s time to make a few adjustments. Ask users for their input, too. What seems to be working? What makes their lives easier? What, if anything, has created new challenges? Look for opportunities to improve and continuously refine the workflows that you build.

Insightly tip: Insightly dashboards can help you visualize your data so you know what to tweak and what to automate next.

CRM automation helps you scale your sales pipeline

Automated CRM workflows play a pivotal role in helping you create a more scalable sales process. Shore up your existing CRM pipeline, understand your vendor’s capabilities, and use data at every step of the process to build workflow automations that make an impact.

Continue reading about CRM workflow automation to see what it can do for your business.

If you want to learn about Insightly CRM’s advanced workflow automation capabilities, request a free demo and see how you can better equip your sales team.

Request a demo

The post 6 workflow automation best practices to streamline sales pipeline appeared first on Insightly.

The basic formula for calculating ROI is not overly complicated. Simply divide your net profit by the total investment, multiply by 100, and you have your number:

ROI = net profit / total investment * 100

But estimating ROI for a business system—such as a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) —is not as straightforward as a one-time advertising campaign. In this post we will explore best practices for estimating the return on your CRM investment (e.g. the ROI of CRM).

Let’s start with perspective

Going from no CRM to a paid monthly (or annual) subscription is a new expense and takes a bit of adjustment.

After all, up to this point, your business has been successful without a CRM. Will the new expense of a CRM solution be worth the upfront and ongoing investment? How long before you recoup your investment? Wouldn’t the money be better spent on paid promotion, freelance labor, or something with more immediate impact on performance?

To answer questions like these, you must have the right perspective. Go back and revisit your original motivation for considering a CRM. Most likely, you wanted technology that would help you grow faster and smarter. A CRM, when properly implemented, aligns perfectly with these goals by providing the tools you need to:

• Increase sales revenue/revenue growth
• Decrease operational costs
• Maximize internal collaboration and productivity

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

Revenue growth

A CRM cannot make cold calls for you. It cannot source and hire new sales talent. It can’t close deals like your salespeople can. So, how can a CRM contribute to top line growth?

In short, a CRM maximizes the impact of your salesforce and your sales processes and systems by:

Freeing up sales reps to sell more

Sales reps don’t want to waste time fumbling with spreadsheets or subpar CRM systems and arguing over lead assignments. They want to sell. Lead management, workflow automation, and assignment rules make sales reps more productive and less distracted. Focused sales reps find more time for prospecting, customer acquisition, and upselling, which results in a healthier pipeline.

Providing transparency into what’s working (and what’s not)

Your sales team tries their best. No one doubts that. Aside from their personal anecdotes, however, how can you definitively know which actions and team members are contributing to your success? Without a CRM, it’s difficult to track and measure performance.

CRMs are built to increase the transparency and accountability of your sales operations. Pipeline visibility dashboards, lost deal monitoring, and sales rep performance reports deliver actionable, data-driven insights for measuring success or failure.

Aligning sales and marketing

In today’s virtual world, sales and marketing teams frequently operate in isolation from each other. Marketing focuses on content creation and delivering MQLs, while sales builds pipeline. This sounds great in theory, but, in reality, it rarely works due to goal misalignment.

CRM technology bridges the divide between sales and marketing. Marketers gain insights into conversion rates to understand which leads convert into paying customers and therefore contribute most to the bottom line. With the right CRM, sales reps enjoy greater visibility into the status of important marketing initiatives and lead flow in real time. All of this creates a virtuous sales cycle that, hopefully, leads to streamlined and enhanced communication and collaboration between two vital departments.

Increasing the value of your data

When properly organized, customer data can be one of your most valuable business assets for revenue-generating teams. However, data that is unstructured and spread across countless inboxes, spreadsheets, and disintegrated business systems cannot be fully leveraged. A CRM creates structure and makes it easier to identify and prevent bad data. This alone can justify the cost of investment in improved customer retention.

Cost management

Implementing a CRM can also create numerous cost saving opportunities.

Here are a few basic possibilities:

System overlap reduction

CRM vendors are constantly developing new features and apps that meet the evolving needs of their customers. From integrated marketing automation to project management to contact enrichment, CRMs support a variety of use cases that allow businesses to simplify their tech stacks and reduce overlapping software costs and training costs. Be sure to be continually looking for upgrades to your system as your business needs evolve.

Process enhancement

Automated workflows present limitless possibilities for reducing (or reallocating) monthly expenses. For example, does it really make sense to have a freelancer spend 20 hours per month on record management if your CRM can handle most of the work? Wouldn’t that freelancer deliver more value if reassigned to higher impact activities? When you choose a flexible, customizable CRM, you can set up workflow automation at a level that makes sense for your team and business – regardless of if you have a small business, mid-sized operation or and enterprise.

Process elimination

A CRM may even be able to eliminate costly inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your business. Integrated web-to-lead forms, for example, collect website inquiries and create matching lead records on your behalf. In addition, Insightly users rely on the Insightly mailbox feature to rapidly save contacts, organizations, and related data from their inboxes—with zero manual data entry.

Collaboration & productivity

Beyond revenue growth and cost reduction, consider the intangible benefits of a CRM. Even a marginal improvement in the following areas can have a lasting, positive impact on your ROI calculation:

Enhanced information sharing

Reliable, actionable information is what your people need to perform their jobs. Guaranteeing reliable, actionable data is difficult, however, when your organization is plagued by silos.

A CRM overcomes data silos by centralizing all of your most important customer, project, and business intelligence into a single, collaborative ecosystem. Team members can instantly search, filter, and view data from any web-enabled device—rather than digging through countless documents, spreadsheets, and network folders.

Integrated task management

Projects aren’t the only thing that require accountability tracking. Sometimes you just need proof that a sales rep actually followed up on a major deal as promised. CRMs that offer built-in and flexible task management capabilities provide more control to ensure everyone—including sales—stays on track. Accountability leads to productivity, and productivity leads to success.

Intuitive record-linking

To build new relationships that align with your corporate vision, you should carefully examine the existing relationships that have led to your current success. That’s hard to do on a whiteboard or in a spreadsheet—especially if you have hundreds or thousands of client relationships.

A CRM provides a flexible way to track and view all of your business relationships. Linking records together is especially useful to serve existing customers.

Your total investment

Any discussion about ROI must also consider the “investment” side of the equation. When properly implemented, a CRM should far outweigh the upfront and ongoing costs. Here’s a list of costs to consider:

• Subscription costs: monthly or annual fees paid to the vendor
• Consultant fees: data migration, system customization, etc.
• Training and onboarding: in-house opportunity costs to train and onboard users
• CRM administration: staffing required to manage data, users, CRM integration and customizations
• Other costs: additional user licenses, data integrations, and record overage charges

Obviously, these categories can vary based on your feature requirements, in-house technical capabilities, and vendor pricing. That’s why it’s important to do your homework and select a vendor that offers the features and support you need at a reasonable price.

At the end of the day, calculating return on investment for your CRM is a multi-faceted endeavor. When measuring CRM ROI, consider all of the ways that your CRM impacts revenue, expense management, and productivity. In doing so, you will likely find that the benefits outweigh the cost.

To learn how Insightly helps companies to get the highest ROI on CRM, request a free demo.

Request a demo

The post How to calculate and forecast your CRM ROI in 2022 appeared first on Insightly.

With this in mind, we recently reached out to Insightly manufacturing customers to learn about their experience and changes observed as a result of implementing Insightly CRM. We asked questions that covered common operational and business areas in manufacturing: from planning and forecasting through production, inventory management, sales, distribution, and customer service.

In this post we share key takeaways from 115 manufacturers who completed our anonymous email survey. We hope these insights will help decision-makers and CRM administrators in manufacturing companies to evaluate their own CRM needs and select the right solution.

We asked questions in the following categories:

• User adoption
• Productivity
• Customer insights
• Return on investment (ROI) and revenue growth

User adoption

User adoption, or a process of adopting and using a new CRM by its intended users, is one of the top concerns of any company that’s introducing a CRM to the team for the first time or is switching to a new one. After all, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated and powerful a CRM is if your team finds it hard to adopt and incorporate in their daily work.

Not surprisingly, when asked why they chose Insightly CRM, 57% of our survey respondents cited “adoption and ease of use” as one of the most important factors in their decision-making.

But adoption is only the first step in ensuring ROI in any new technology —consistent, frequent, and as-intended usage is what determines its long-term benefits. To that end, we learned that 77% of manufacturers use Insightly CRM on a daily basis.

Productivity

Automating repeatable processes to minimize human error and save time across different workflows and departments is critical to ensuring productivity.

In our survey, 42% of respondents reported improvement in “implementing repeatable business processes” (workflow automation) and 39% reported overall improvement in employee productivity as a result of using Insightly CRM.

Users also reported slashing weekly hours spent on administrative and routine tasks.

Customer insights

The soundness of your business decisions depends on the accuracy, relevance, and timeliness of your customer data analytics. Access to a single source of truth with a 360-degree view of your customer allows you to align your teams and engage with customers at the right time with the right message, build superior products and customer experience, and make solid business decisions.

In our survey, 69% of respondents reported having a more accurate source of information on their customers, sales, and projects as a result of implementing Insightly CRM and 47% reported improvements in understanding and reporting sales performance.

ROI and revenue growth

Of those survey respondents who were able to observe results, 70% saw positive ROI within the first year of using Insightly CRM.

As far as revenue, survey respondents reported 18% annual revenue growth as a result of using Insightly CRM.

The degree to which manufacturers are able to streamline their operations and improve productivity has a direct impact on the quality of their customer and business relationships, ability to scale and, ultimately, grow business.

For more insights and data charts from our survey, please download the FREE ebook below.

Download the ebook

The post Manufacturers improve operations & grow annual revenues 18% appeared first on Insightly.

All your CRM data front and center

Built from the ground-up on Insightly’s Customer Relationship Platform, the newly released reporting and dashboard rich analytics feature allows businesses to view critical information directly within the CRM. By building data visualization tools right into its CRM, Insightly provides a powerful out-of-the-box solution for uncovering valuable business data. Customers now have the option to place a dashboard on their home screen so key information is always front and center.

Track performance and find hidden opportunities for growth

With a single view of your CRM data, you can track team performance and quickly make decisions to make a positive impact. Insightly’s dashboard engine includes a calculation tool to crunch numbers and show metrics like “Win Rates” and “Average Sale Price” to measure performance. Plus, with better structured data in Insightly’s dashboards you’ll uncover more opportunities for growth.

Build your own dashboards without IT help

With a simple, intuitive drag and drop interface you can create dashboards in minutes. Easily build individual cards with specific categories and values to add to any dashboard and display them in a variety of visualizations like bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts and more. Personalize the dashboard layout to your preference – resize cards and drag and drop them anywhere on screen – all without needing to be a technical whiz.

Key features include:

• Expanded Chart Types: Insightly provides +40 chart types for sales reps, business leaders and other collaborators to visualize everything from leaderboards and pipeline summaries to project updates and productivity goals
• Custom Field Support: In addition to a wide variety of standard business data, Insightly also supports critical custom fields in dashboard to view segmented data such as lead source, top industries, premier accounts and other criteria.
• Project Insights: Teams can now visualize not only sales information and individual projects organized by status, owner or client. By flagging at-risk projects early, companies can allocate resources to ensure successful on-time completion

Dashboards for any role: Executives, Sales, Marketing

Whether you’re a CEO, sales leader, marketing manager or another role, Insightly’s dashboards provide insight into the overall health and trends you need to make smarter, more informed decisions. Using data drawn from Insightly’s underlying Customer Relationship Intelligence Platform, CRM users can surface rich, customizable dashboards to display dozens of different reports filtered by role, industry, customer profile and other attributes.

Easily share key information

Your business has questions. Insightly CRM has answers. Dashboards are an effective way of organizing report information in one place for insights into key metrics at a glance. Insightly’s sleek dashboards allow companies build KPIs to view insights about their business, track important projects and share information seamlessly within their company.

Availability

The new customer data visualization features are available March 1st across all Insightly CRM plans.

The post Data visualization redefined with dynamic dashboards appeared first on Insightly.