In reality, it’s not that simple. People who are hungry could go to the grocery store, or they could order take-out. People looking for a new book could go to your bookstore, or they could go to a library. Companies looking to improve processes could buy software, or hire a specialist.

Your company, product, customer, and price point all contribute to your value proposition. Your value prop details the exact usefulness that your product provides. It is also your differentiator.

Value proposition definition

Value proposition is a promise of value stated by a company that summarizes how the benefit of the company’s product or service will be delivered, experienced, and acquired. (Corporate Finance Institute)

A value proposition is what you do, and how you do it.

Why is a value proposition important?

A value proposition is crucial for your company’s success. Here’s why.

A value proposition centers your company

Value propositions define exactly what your company should be doing. Oftentimes growing companies can be tempted to pivot or adjust their vision. A value proposition serves as an investment to keep the company focused on the task at hand.

A value proposition explains your company to your customers

At the end of the day, a customer doesn’t care about your marketing spend. They don’t care about how many social media posts you publish, or how many blog posts are on your site. They care about what your product does, and if it serves their needs and meets their expectations. The value proposition is the bridge to your customer having brand awareness.

A unique value proposition sets you apart from your competitors

Your product, value and price point are different from those of your competition. But does your audience know that? Your value proposition allows you to outline what makes your offering unique, and how it disrupts the market.

How to create a value proposition statement

Value proposition statements are best done when developing your business plan. Yet, many CMOs may want to go through value proposition exercises later on, as they refine and improve marketing programs. You can adjust your value prop as your company grows and changes. Use these steps for new and revised value proposition statements.

Identify the features of your product

Start simple: list the products that you offer and their useful features. If you are a software as a service (SaaS) company you may have many features that allow users to do many different tasks. If you are a restaurant, your products may offer breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can include outstanding customer service or special events as your offerings.

Features can be large or small, many or few, original or unoriginal. By listing each feature, you get an idea of exactly what you are offering to your customers.

Identify the benefit of each feature

Features and benefits are often lumped together, but they are distinct. Each feature should provide a benefit. For example, Uber’s app for requesting a carshare is a feature. The driver picking you up and taking you where you need to go is a benefit.

Map each of your features to their customer benefit. By doing this exercise, you’ll start to see which features provide the biggest benefits.

Define your target customer

You’ve likely completed many exercises aimed at understanding your target customers. By clarifying their identity, you’ll better understand their journey to your product.

Dive deep into your customers wants & needs

Sure, your customer might want to buy a new software solution because they need a new software solution. But—what do they really need? Say, you sell financial management software. If your target customer is a finance manager, they might need your solution. Yet, what they really need is to free up some time during their end-of-month close. This will give them the time they need to still have 1-on-1s with team members. They might be searching for a financial solution, but what they are really looking for is time.

Clarify your price point

It takes time and research, but you must understand if your product has a price below, at, or above market rate. This allows you to understand if your product is a value product, a typical product, or a premium product. Your unique value proposition allows customers to understand if they are getting their money’s worth.

Put it all together

Steve Blank (Lean Startup) suggests the following simple phrasing for your value proposition. “We help X do Y by doing Z.”

Mapped to the above framework, this may look more like:

“We help our [TARGET CUSTOMERS] do [CUSTOMER NEEDS] by doing [OUR FEATURES AND BENEFITS].”

If you offer a low-cost or premium product, include your pricing in your value proposition statement well.

Examples of effective value propositions

These seven digital technology companies each offer a unique product, but also face stiff competition. Each of these value props outlines their target customer, their needs, and how they meet them—setting them apart from their competitors.

Calm

Calm is a mobile app based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Calm helps people who have trouble relaxing sleep, rest, and meditate by providing an app that offers these experiences.

Curology

Curology is a custom skin care solution based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Curology helps people in need of skin care by providing custom skin care products. They also include their competitive pricing and delivery mechanism.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a language-learning app based in Pittsburg.

Value proposition example

Duolingo teaches second-language enthusiasts how to speak a new language by providing an app that gamifies language education.

Impossible Foods

Impossible is a meat-alternative company based in Redwood City, CA.

Value proposition example

Impossible Foods provides an option for health-and-environmentally-conscious consumers to eat sustainably, by offering a meat product alternative.

Slack

Slack is collaboration software based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Slack provides busy professionals a way to avoid using email, by offering a more comprehensive and easy-to-use collaboration and communication tool.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer support SaaS based in San Francisco.

Value proposition example

Zendesk provides customer service professionals a way to manage their operations with a comprehensive software solution.

Conclusion

Setting your value proposition is an exercise that helps everyone. It aligns your internal focuses and it better communicates your company to customers.

The post What is a value proposition? Definition + examples appeared first on Insightly.

Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn’t get a ride on a cold winter evening in Paris, so they came up with a ride-sharing app and called it Uber. Jessica Alba didn’t feel safe using childcare products from popular brands, so she launched The Honest Company to make baby and beauty products without synthetic ingredients. These are stories of entrepreneurs building products they wanted to use. They became their own customers and found enough demand to turn ideas into business opportunities. It’s a familiar theme in many inventions and company origin stories.

There is another familiar theme. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, more than 30,000 new products are introduced to market every year, but only 5% of them succeed.

So what sets apart successful entrepreneurs from all those whose stories we don’t know or remember? Part of the answer is their sustained focus on the customer. Here are a few basic steps in building products you want to use and becoming a customer-centric company.

1. Know your audience

This may seem pretty obvious, but so often entrepreneurs get distracted by shiny objects and start building products or features that don’t add value for customers. Once you have established there is a demand for your product, stay focused on your customers’ needs. Consider what your customers can afford and are willing to pay for. This is true whether you are building a productivity app or a toothbrush.

In the software industry, for example, there is a big difference between building products for large enterprises versus mid-market companies or small businesses. Large companies can afford expensive platforms that come with lots of bells and whistles, while smaller companies can’t. Yet, every business owner, no matter the size of his/her company, wants technology that can help them to save time, become more productive, and increase revenue. They just don’t want to pay a steep price for implementation and the time and effort it takes to set up complex systems. The trick here is to scrutinize every new idea to make sure it creates more value for customers and at a price they are willing to pay.

2. Collect customer feedback

Talk to your customers on a regular basis. Find your own way to reach out and connect. Send brief surveys, ask for individual feedback, when possible, and/or organize groups of 10-15 customers to test a few specific ideas.

For example, if you are developing an app or software, you may get a wide range of requests and ideas. So, it’ll be up to you and your team to come up with product features or solutions that are generic enough to solve most of what your customers want, while leaving some room for future adjustments. Deciding on which features or products to prioritize is one of the most difficult tasks in product development.

Sometimes, after the initial feedback, you still may not have a clear idea of what you are going to build. Use these first conversations to gain more clarity on what you want to do and prepare for more informed conversations with the next group of customers.

As you review customer requests, you might change your mind or rearrange the order in which you will deliver different features. Set clear priorities and timelines, so that both your team and your customers know what to expect.

When you listen to your customers and follow up on their feedback, you’re not just gaining valuable information and improving your product, you’re also strengthening your customer relationships.

3. Make it easy to use & buy

This is as true for consumer products as it is in the B2B space. Time is our most valuable asset. And with so much continuous information and distractions, our attention span is getting shorter and harder to keep. The only way your customers are going to buy from you is if you make it easy to find and use your products.

Here again, you must know your customers at a granular level. Learn where your target customers get their information and how they consume content. If you sell clothing or decorate homes, Instagram might be a perfect tool to find new customers and keep them engaged.

In the software industry, a product’s ease-of-use is one of the top factors in user adoption. If customers don’t quickly adopt and use the software on a regular basis or as-intended, they’ll never be able to realize its full value. Forget about upsell or cross-sell. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t get too comfortable with your product or marketing success. Consumer behavior, including buying habits and preferences, is constantly changing. The expectations for personalized interactions, stellar customer service, and convenience are only growing. If you don’t make it easy for customers to buy and use your products, someone else will and your customers will flock to them pretty quickly.

4. Scale with your customers

This is probably more relevant for B2B than consumer products. Whether you offer consulting services or build software, you may start by building products for small companies. But, as your customers’ businesses grow, you’ll need to scale operations and products to meet their new needs. They may ask for more customizable tools that are easy to adopt and use. Some features that were “nice-to-have” will become “must-haves.” For example, when a business goes from 10 employees to 2,000, the “search bar” to look up an employee in the list (instead of endlessly scrolling) becomes pretty useful.

Growing businesses want tools that scale and adapt to their needs, so they don’t have to get a replacement, retrain staff, and reshape their tech stack every year. If you want to keep your customers and grow your own business, stay focused on your customers throughout their journey. Make your products scalable and scale your operations to serve bigger customers.

Just as Uber went on to add UberX and UberEats and The Honest Company launched a whole slew of baby and beauty products, successful companies adapt and scale with changing customer demands and preferences.

Read more from Anthony:

• Marketing’s role in building a customer-centric company
• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020

The post How to build products you want to use & people want to buy appeared first on Insightly.

As entrepreneurs, we focus on building and growing a business and often get excited at the possibilities that lie ahead. Many of us have big dreams about where our company will go and how we’ll get there, but it can also feel like using a map with no starting point.

When I founded Insightly, our primary goal was to deliver the premier customer relationship management platform for businesses. As our customer base evolved, so did their needs and, as a result, so did our features and functionality. We scaled as our customers did the same.

Based on my experience, here are three guiding principles to help you scale with your customers while maintaining your company’s identity.

Gain deeper insights into your customers and where they want to grow.

One of the things we talk about most often is the importance of truly knowing your customers. It’s important to look at a whole host of data about your customers, including key demographics, buying behaviors, how they interact with your brand and more. Armed with this info, you can develop a close connection with customers, personalize their experience with your company and send the message that you’re invested in their success.

From there, you’ll be able to ascertain their goals, big and small, for the future and how you can continue to support them along the way. For example, you might need to introduce tools and services to support your customers’ expansion into new market segments and/or geographies. Depending on your product and services, this could mean anything from introducing multilingual support to providing international market insights to adding currency and time zone conversion features to your app.

Or, maybe your customers are adding online stores and need various system integrations and marketing tools to support e-commerce. There are a couple of things to consider here: First, are there enough customers who need these features and services to justify the new production cost? Second, do these new products/features or services align with your company goals (i.e., would they attract and secure your target customers going forward)? So, if you are looking to gain bigger, international companies or online businesses, then investing in features and infrastructure that would support international customers or e-commerce makes a lot of sense. This leads us to the next point.

Think about the features you need as a company.

In order to serve your customers’ growing needs, you must grow in a way that also serves your business’s needs. It’s two sides of the same coin, and one cannot exist without the other. What are the top priorities you need to invest in to make it easier and faster to serve your customers?

When thinking these through, it’s helpful to categorize them into shorter-term investments and long-term investments. What are things you can likely implement and accomplish in six months to a year, and what are things that will take a few years to complete? In order to serve your customers well, you need to put your best foot forward, and doing that requires that you think about what investments will serve your company best. In short, you must fill your own cup so that you’re able to fill those of others.

Don’t lose sight of who you are to satisfy a bigger fish.

It can be tempting to get ahead of yourself and sprint toward attracting the business of a “game-changing” customer. While part of scaling is taking into account the needs and goals of your customer, it’s crucial to not lose sight of the foundation of your company in search of more business. It’s not your job to be everything for everyone; in fact, that’s a great way to stretch a business too thin, too quickly. Instead, your job is to be the best at the work you do. Like many things, it’s about finding the balance.

Scaling a business can be a daunting task for any entrepreneur, but with the right mindset and the right tools, it can be markedly less so. By serving your customers, serving yourself and focusing on your goals, you’ll have a recipe for success.

The post How to scale up as your customers grow appeared first on Insightly.

There are myriad of articles on artificial intelligence (AI) and its application in business. As AI continues to grow and permeate every aspect of business, it’s important to cut through the noise and focus on where AI fits in your organization and how to best implement it. Here are a few ideas to help you determine your own approach to AI.

A brief overview of AI application in B2B

Broadly speaking, AI is a branch of computer science concerned with replicating human intelligence in machines. Depending on whether you run a B2C or B2B company, you may find some types of AI more relevant to your business than others. In B2B, AI is all about data and analysis to make better-informed decisions. For example, if you have enough sales and customer data, you can use predictive analytics to figure out your ideal customer profile and/or potential customer base and adjust your marketing strategy and campaigns accordingly.

In more technical terms, AI applications in B2B can be broken into three types of machine learning: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement.

In the case of supervised learning, you or someone with business intelligence skills feeds the data to the learning algorithm (a statistics algorithm) and sets a goal (what you want to get to or what you’re looking for). The machine then tries to match that goal.

In unsupervised learning, the algorithm looks at the data and searches for patterns. As the name suggests, there are no instructions given prior to the analysis. For example, it can look at your customer data and decide that you have a cluster of customers in the manufacturing industry that looks really promising.

Finally, in reinforcement learning, which is more advanced, the algorithm looks at the data and comes up with a set of conclusions. You don’t provide a predefined dataset or any guidance, it’s more of a trial-and-error method. You look at the results and tell it whether the conclusions are correct or not and it continues to reinforce the right steps to get to an end point.

How can AI benefit your business?

For businesses that collect a lot of customer data at every point, being able to use AI to derive meaning from data can really help to get ahead of competition. You can spot trends really early, identify areas where you’re losing revenue or where you could potentially gain revenue. You can then make data-driven decisions and quickly adapt to changes. Compare this to waiting until the end of the month, when someone is going to pile all the sales numbers by hand, produce a report using one of your analytics tools or a dashboard to show you what you already knew was happening. With AI’s real-time analysis you can run a truly agile business and stay ahead.

AI can also make a big difference in your customer relationships management and team productivity. Whether it’s helping to identify the hottest leads, building effective nurture campaigns, or personalizing customer experience–AI can help marketers and salespeople to prioritize campaigns and focus their time and resources on high ROI activities.

There’s some concern about AI replacing jobs. This is mainly in the robotics branch of AI and it concerns manual work, like packing and putting things in boxes. But for knowledge workers such as marketers, sales and customer service reps, there’s a big opportunity for AI to help, not hinder their performance.

How to introduce AI in your business

Make sure you are clear on where in the business you want to use AI and what you hope it will solve for you. Keep in mind that you need to have enough data to make your AI investment worth it. Once you’ve done that, train your employees on how it’ll work. It’s not a black box!

When introducing any new technology, it’s always good to begin with a really small project and work from there. Start with a hypothesis and a goal and at the end analyze how well you did and if you had reached the right conclusions. But the first project is really about the journey more than the end goal.

Finally, there are two sides to managing AI expectations. Some people on your team may think it’s really awesome and is going to solve a lot of problems. Others may get really scared, thinking it’s going to replace their jobs. Try to address the expectations and concerns on both extremes. AI is not going to solve everything and, in a B2B company, it most likely won’t replace jobs. You have to tamp down both the enthusiasm and worries surrounding AI to ensure buy-in before you make it part of your business.

What technology do you need to implement AI for the first time?

Start by using available cloud computing resources, which are great for small to mid-sized companies. Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS cloud platforms recently introduced affordable tools that can help you get up and running pretty quickly. You don’t need to know a lot of underlying methodologies. Whereas, if you decide to set up AI technology on premise, you’ll need some hefty horsepower and someone with a lot more knowledge of the underlying analytical algorithms and statistics to run through big datasets and get the highest ROI from AI.

Increasingly, it’s not a question of if, but when you should implement AI in your business. The sooner you figure out your AI approach, the sooner you’ll start reaping its benefits.

Read more like this:

• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020
• How to manage customer input in product development

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In the business-to-business world, where the goal is to empower customers to better run their businesses and succeed, customer relationships resemble partnerships where all sides are invested in finding the best solution. Incorporating customer input in product development is one way to strengthen these partnerships. Timely customer feedback can also prevent costly mistakes and help design better solutions that more people will pay for.

This seems straightforward. But in the real world, customers are a diverse group with wide-ranging needs. Some of them are more vocal than others. Some ask for features that don’t align with your product road map. Having a strategy or guidelines will help you stay focused.

Based on my 14 years of experience in leading product teams and growing my company, here are five tips on managing customer feedback. I use examples from software development (my area of expertise), but the tips are applicable across industries.

1. Remember you’re the expert

Customers can tell you the exact product features they want and point you in the right direction. But at the end of the day, you’re in charge of designing solutions. In software development, a seemingly simple customer-facing feature might require building complex underlying technology. Customers might not know or care about all the decisions and steps involved in fulfilling a single customer request. It’s your responsibility to figure it all out. Is the requested feature the best solution for that specific problem? Is there a more effective solution? Are there any prerequisites?

All that behind-the-scenes work reminds me of a computer game called Civilization, which uses a technology tree to illustrate what all it takes to “build an empire to stand the test of time.” You can’t invent nanotechnology without first researching and developing composites and lasers. Product development is sometimes a lot like that: you have to research and develop some of the prerequisite technologies before you can fulfill customer requests.

2. Analyze & organize customer feedback

As you talk to different customers, you accumulate a lot of information. Synthesize it to come up with features, requirements or a solution that’s generic or adaptable enough to solve most of what your customers want while being broadly applicable to future customer needs. That’s part of the art of product design that is often the most difficult to perfect.

Sometimes when my team and I talk to the first 10-15 customers, we don’t have a clear idea of what we’re going to eventually design. After these initial conversations, we analyze the feedback, and by the time we talk to our next group of customers, we have a better understanding of what we want to do.

While analyzing customer requests, you might change your mind or rearrange the order in which you will deliver different features (remember the technology tree analogy). To make sure both your team and your customers are clear on expectations, set clear priorities.

3. Decide on priorities

When speaking to customers, we often find that customers perceive product development as a fast process where you can turn requests into features within weeks. In reality, depending on the company, it can take months or even years to build new products and features.

Decide on priorities to avoid making unrealistic promises, getting sidetracked or missing goals.

There’s an adage in software design that you can control any two out of three priorities: time to market, product quality and cost. So if you choose to prioritize both the time to market and product quality, the cost is going to go way up because you’ll need to employ more resources to meet your tight deadline and high quality bar. If you choose to optimize lowering product cost and keep a high bar on quality, your time to market will be stretched out.

4. Set clear & honest expectations

After you have synthesized all the information and determined your priorities, you can set clear expectations with your customers. How long will it take to deliver? Will the end result be exactly what your customers asked for? Will you ship it at all?

As we listen to our customers, we often get a wish list of exactly what they want, and they expect quick follow-through. Keeping our customers up-to-date on where we are in the design process and where we think we might end up helps us to manage expectations.

Once you’ve set clear expectations, commit to check-ins. Get back to a customer during the initial product development or beta period, or ask them for additional feedback on what you’ve envisioned.

At my company, we keep quite a close level of communication with early customers, usually checking in every three to six months. Find a cadence that works for you.

5. Know your customers

Get to know your customers—not only what they want, but also what they can afford and what they’re willing to pay for.

In the software industry, for example, there is a big difference between building products for large enterprises versus mid-market companies. Large companies can afford to pay for expensive and flexible platforms, while mid-market companies don’t have that kind of cash to throw around. Yet, mid-market customers still want almost all the capabilities and flexibility of enterprise software, without having to pay for implementation costs and the length of time it takes to set up these large complex systems. That’s why at my company, we use a mid-market lens and modern technologies to design user experiences based on what we know about our customers’ needs.

Incorporating customer feedback in product development is a powerful way to reaffirm your commitment to customers. The degree to which that feedback is effective depends on you. Use the above tips to frame your own approach.

Read more articles on Forbes.

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The story of Insightly Marketing begins with Insightly’s original vision of empowering businesses of all sizes and industries to manage sales, marketing, delivery, and service on a single unified platform. The strongest driving force behind that vision has always been data integrity — a prerequisite for business success in today’s economy and the new digital age. By unifying sales, marketing, and delivery on a single data platform, we are eliminating the need and cost of constantly cleaning and syncing data between systems and teams. We are also erasing outdated boundaries between sales and marketing, allowing businesses to run coordinated campaigns, create consistent brand experiences at every customer touchpoint, and accurately measure and report on results. Learn more about the advantages of a unified platform.

Of course, in order to realize any vision, you need a set of beliefs that help you to stay focused, overcome obstacles, and remind you of why you started the journey in the first place. Here are a few principles that guided our journey of building Insightly Marketing app:

1. Level the playing field for businesses of all sizes and stages of development by opening access to enterprise-grade CRM technology that allows them to compete in the subscription economy where a company’s ability to collect, analyze, and act on customer data in a timely manner is crucial to business success.
2. Simplify complex systems and processes to support and empower high-impact work and sound decision-making. Too many teams are distracted and held back, too many opportunities are missed as a result of using outdated, cumbersome, and/or deficient CRM technology.
3. Design and build technology that humanizes data and allows businesses to focus on the relationship aspect of acquiring and retaining customers. Data is a foundational building block of customer relationships, but it can be overwhelming and useless without a proper structure and ability to take action. We help businesses to easily connect numerous data points to create a high definition picture of every customer and craft personalized messages and brand moments that strengthen their customer relationships and build trust.

Creation journey

The journey of building Insightly Marketing has been a journey of collaboration between product, engineering, and marketing teams, with our customers as a source of continuous inspiration and real-time feedback. From the ideation throughout the build and user testing, our product and marketing teams worked closely on every feature, sharing insights and challenging us to build the simplest and easiest to use solutions for marketers of all skill and experience levels.

As our own first customer, we got to test firsthand the transition from Marketo to Insightly Marketing and put it through its paces across four key marketing automation functions: prospect segmentation, email campaign creation, customer journey mapping, and analytics. We are excited to share a few details and lessons learned from our journey. We hope you’ll find the information and insights useful as you revisit your current marketing automation technology and/or consider implementing Insightly Marketing.

1. Challenging the status quo

Marketing automation is an aspect of customer relationship management (CRM) that’s concerned with prospect definitions, segmentation, and marketing campaign execution and tracking throughout the entire customer journey. With marketing automation, teams are able to perform key marketing functions in a more efficient and accurate manner at scale and measure performance. There are a number of ways to evaluate and compare different marketing automation technologies, but at the end it comes down to your marketing goals, priorities, and available resources.

Being strategic about your marketing tech investments will not only help you reap higher ROI, but will also help you to pursue new opportunities as your business scales.

With that in mind, we reviewed our Marketo instance and evaluated the platform in light of our business and marketing goals. We narrowed down our expectations from a marketing automation platform to this list:

• Generate more leads with the same budget
• Help sales build more and better pipeline
• Empower marketers to easily build campaigns, without outside help
• Gain visibility into the entire customer journey
• Manage the lead funnel more effectively
• Integrate sales and marketing to share a single source of truth on customer data
• Calculate ROI and prove the value of marketing efforts and spend

Marketo is a complex and sophisticated platform, but despite our best efforts, which included hiring a dedicated Marketo specialist and setting up regular data syncs with Insightly CRM, we constantly grappled with lead and customer data integration between sales and marketing. It took hours every week to complete data admin work, which included manual export and import, duplicate suppression, data cleanup, syncing fields, etc. We even hired an external agency whose sole job was to manage our email campaigns in Marketo. We sent them content, design assets, and campaign details and hoped it would all turn out as planned. The lack of full visibility and control over our campaigns hindered our ability to quickly set up and run multiple campaigns, test ideas, and make any last-minute necessary changes in real time. And, yet, working with an agency that specializes in Marketo was still easier than grappling with the system’s cumbersome setup on our own.

We found that Marketo’s interface made it hard to get employees to fully adopt the system and make the most out of it. For example, it took numerous clicks to view key information, such as creative assets and content, nurture configuration, and program performance reports.

With Marketo, we experienced firsthand the shortcomings of a marketing automation system that came with a lot of bells and whistles, yet failed to meet our most basic needs on a daily basis. In the meantime, the costs of using the platform kept rising without providing more value.

When Insightly engineers began to build Insightly Marketing, we were more than ready for the change and took key learning from that experience into designing a simpler, more intuitive, and scalable marketing automation solution for ourselves and other businesses. (You can say it was easier to build a whole new marketing automation app than to continue using Marketo.)

2. Creating our vision of marketing automation

As we thought about our marketing and business needs, we wanted to make sure that our marketing automation system would:

• Easily sync with the CRM in real-time, removing the need for manual data integration. Instead of spending hours to set up a single campaign, we’d have an automatic flow of information into that CRM that just worked.
• Serve as a single source of truth on customer data, including activities that led to sales conversion, and allow marketing and sales teams to create triggered, always-on campaigns to nurture our prospects into leads and nurture our customers into repeat customers and brand advocates.
• Help us track all our efforts by individual campaigns, so we’d able to optimize each one and increase conversion rates at different stages of customer journeys.
• Allow us to easily build dynamic lists that would automatically segment prospects and customers, so that we could reach them with timely and relevant messaging.
• Allow us to easily create drag-and-drop email campaigns with beautiful templates.
• Have a simple clean look and feel, allowing users to easily access necessary information, collaborate on projects, and reinforce best practices for marketing campaign management.

3. Turning our vision into reality

As we set out to turn our grand vision of an ideal marketing automation system into reality, we had to prioritize. We started exactly where we always do — customers and customer data, a foundational building block for any business. We wanted our marketing automation app to first and foremost accomplish two things:

1. Integrate with a CRM to create a high definition picture of every customer with full visibility throughout the entire customer journey, and

2. Allow businesses to use the data to create customer segments and quickly and easily carry out targeted marketing campaigns. Knowledge meets action, at scale.

From a technical perspective, we already had the foundational data architecture in place. We just had to build the marketing automation app on top of the platform that hosts our CRM, connecting sales and marketing at last. With a unified platform we’d be ensuring continuity at every level — from data structures to system integrations to user interface. We’d be able to link different types of customer data (profile and actions) in a clear and meaningful way to better understand our prospects and customers and reach them with targeted sales and marketing campaigns. We’d also be able to augment existing customer data with additional data from around the business and link relevant records in just a few clicks to gain visibility into every customer touchpoint.

With our framework and concept defined, we mapped the first set of functions for the initial release:

• Prospect segmentation and list creation
• A very easy to use email designer with great templates
• A visual customer journey builder
• Amazing analytics dashboards
• Advanced custom reporting

We also reviewed the top email campaign use cases:

• Batch and blast (announcements, newsletters, one-off communications, etc.)
• Simple nurture (follow-up after content download, blog subscription, event registration, or other top of funnel conversions)
• Conditional nurture (reengagement campaigns, custom follow-up triggered by certain actions/conditions)

4. Becoming our own first customer

As magical as it was to watch random (to an unaware eye) sketches from dry erase boards turn into clickable prototypes and, ultimately, into product features, we stayed critical throughout the entire process, testing and tweaking in real time. Here are a few key steps we took as we were building and later implementing Insightly Marketing.

Definitions

We debated naming conventions and meanings. What is a prospect? What is a lead? From our previous experiences we knew that these seemingly obvious definitions are often misunderstood or mean different things to sales vs marketing teams, and as a consequence create confusion and misalignment. So, we approached these definitions with great care and consideration, to make sure all data got accurately mapped between a CRM and Insightly Marketing and all records got properly organized and linked. Learn more here.

Data clean-up & migration

Before migrating to Insightly Marketing, we reviewed all our data in Marketo. We reviewed campaigns, programs, and performance reports, created catalogues of all landing pages and forms, and cleaned lists before exporting. As computer scientists and data analysts like to remind us — “garbage in, garbage out.” We got rid of garbage. Find more information on connecting Insightly CRM and Marketing data here.

Campaigns

As our own first customer, we got a chance to use the app to build and run real-life campaigns, including a monthly newsletter, a couple of webinar campaigns, and a conditional nurture campaign to revive inactive leads.

We then determined the types of email templates we’d need to create different campaigns. Here are a few template examples:

• Monthly newsletter
• Announcement
• Nurture email
• Event/webinar

After we sent out our very first email from our beta of Insightly Marketing, we learned that the “unsubscribe” function didn’t perform exactly as intended. Our engineers had to quickly fix the issue, so we could run our next email campaign. We then added a quick guide and tips on creating an “unsubscribe” link in an email template.

Anyone who has ever managed email campaigns knows how many things can go wrong. We’re acutely aware of this at Insightly, and as our engineers continue to innovate and simplify the complex world of marketing automation, we use real-time feedback and testing to keep up the quality of our solutions and give our customers peace of mind as they manage their own marketing campaigns and outreach.

To learn more on building email campaigns, check out this section in our Help Center.

User management

One of our favorite moments while implementing Insightly Marketing was when for the first time ever everyone on our marketing team could easily access and use a marketing system. Our designers could now create and test email templates right in the app, instead of having to build mockups or submit specs to a third party, and our writers could easily add and edit the content on their own. This eliminated a lot of back-and-forth (online and offline) and duplicate efforts, and also provided individual team members with visibility into marketing campaigns from start to finish.

While a rapid team-wide adoption was exciting, it also reminded us of the need to properly set up and manage users and user permissions. To that end, we identified “administrators” with advanced permissions and regular users with limited/simple permissions and designed simple processes and folder structures.

Folder management

Considering how many content assets we create, store, and use, Insightly Marketing’s Folders feature became an invaluable tool for keeping our content organized and easily searchable and accessible. We developed a simple and consistent naming convention for all our files and folders and organized them in a way that made sense to the team.

Measuring performance

In order to ensure that Insightly Marketing wasn’t just easy to use, but also helped us to significantly improve campaign performance, we established key performance indicators (KPIs) — open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, registration rates — and benchmarks for each KPI. This required massive reporting data exports from Marketo and analysis of recent historical KPIs by email category.

First, the data had to be formatted, cleaned, and categorized by top level category, such as Webinar, Announcement, etc. We then categorized it by sub-category: Invite 1, Follow-Up, Confirmation. Next, we collated the data and established averages for each specific sub-category. Based on that analysis we determined our baseline goals for email open rates, click through rates, sign-ups, and so on, which we’d use to evaluate every email campaign performance.

Once we configured some campaigns in Insightly Marketing and reached and exceeded our baseline goals, we started to trust our tool to send more emails.

We’re now regularly reviewing KPIs for each email or customer journey send, comparing the results to the original benchmarks. This measurement became valuable product feedback for the development team and continues to inform the build-out of the future reporting and dashboards.

Our journey of building Insightly Marketing doesn’t end here. Our engineering team delivers new product features and improvements every two weeks. Stay tuned for more updates on Insightly Marketing.

***

At the end of the day, marketing automation should solve for three key needs: planning, execution, and reporting of marketing campaigns. In today’s economy — with an abundance of information and options and multi-path consumer behavior — it takes strategic thinking, an ability to analyze a lot of data, and creativity to acquire and engage today’s customers.

With this in mind, a unified CRM for sales and marketing is the most effective way to ensure customer data integrity, foster team alignment, and achieve high ROI on marketing spend. We believe that investing in a unified CRM platform for sales, marketing, and delivery is the single fastest and most effective way to cut overhead costs and make the most out of every marketing dollar spent. We also believe that it takes a shared vision among stakeholders, true collaboration, and a solid strategy to effectively implement marketing automation.

We invite you to browse documentation, guides, and best practices on how to properly set up and start using Insightly Marketing. For more information, please check the Help Center, where we regularly add new content on all our products and best practices.

Are you ready to start your own journey with Insightly Marketing? Learn more in Marketing Automation Made Simple, and when you’re ready, let’s talk!

Request a demo

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Often in the typical life journey of a startup, it all starts with a prototype and a burst of early adopters, who are your only customer base. This initial success is enough to light up the founders to do whatever it takes to showcase and validate the product-market fit, a crucial ingredient for venture funding and future growth. It is also a phase when things are engineered for survival. The feature definitions are flexible and malleable, the use cases are primarily driven by the willing customers for the next big deal or growth spurt (assuming they are strategically aligned, of course).

Insightly is no different. We went through some similar phases of growth. We built features with a fervor. We understood and fulfilled the needs of the small and medium businesses. However, once we were outside the initial survival phase, we were very prudent about how we built our application.

Though it was difficult, we took a needed pause to evaluate our strategy for architecture and growth. Based on where we wanted to be, we made many product decisions coupled with some key architectural decisions that changed the overall DNA and trajectory of our offerings. From our founder, who wrote most of the initial code, to the early team that built many of its subsequent offerings, Insightly has always been grounded on a solid engineering foundation. This foundation is the lifeline of our company and has been a catalyst that has helped us grow exponentially.

Here are some of the engineering and architectural initiatives that not only helped us deliver compelling functionalities to our customers, but also formed the rock-solid foundation of Insightly’s SaaS offering.

Metadata driven architecture (MDA)

From early days, when we were working on our long-term product strategy and roadmap, it became very clear that we needed an architecture that could serve us for the long term and yet be flexible enough to accommodate the heterogeneous needs of our growing customer base. Being a horizontal CRM product that caters to a multitude of verticals, MDA provided the needed flexibility. By abstracting the functionality from the application architecture, we were not only able to personalize the experience tailored to each of our users, but it was also easily maintainable and less prone to errors and regressions. Converging the metadata and their instance data in real time and dynamically rendering the user Interface at runtime, helped us hit the mark with our customers.

Custom objects & custom fields

Custom Objects and Custom Fields have an equal footing as the pre-defined standard objects, that comes out of the box from Insightly. From CRUD operations to reporting, from extensibility using custom fields to API access for these Objects, they thrive and live like first class citizens within the Insightly ecosystem. The MDA architecture underneath helps us provide a consistent user experience across all the objects within Insightly.

Microservices

Decoupling many of our heavy lifting modules into smaller asynchronous jobs not only helped us reach our high availability goals, but also helped us to scale exponentially and handle many more requests. It also provided the required elasticity to scale individual pieces of our software based on the statistics and monitoring we had in place. We were able to surgically fix issues that helped us in our overall performance, stability, and at the end of the day, improve on the one metric that counts the most, usability of our product and customer experience!

Platform

At Insightly, a platform strategy was always at the core of our architecture and roadmap. In addition to providing our customers with a myriad of powerful CRM features, we also wanted to extend our value creation by building meaningful extensions and integrations. Insightly provides a rich set of Restful APIs that can be used by external ecosystems to create more value to our end customers. We also allow folks to extend the capabilities by providing a seamless integration with an external serverless compute framework from within our application ecosystem.

Security

Security is at the core of any organization that manages its customer data, and Insightly is no exception. Security is at the heart of everything we do and work on at Insightly. From a company wide initiative to be SOC2 Type II compliant, to many other initiatives like GDPR, Australian Privacy Act, and Privacy Shield, we always adhere to current industry standards and security practices. We constantly audit our applications for vulnerabilities and keep plugging away any vulnerabilities we find. From a A+ rating on our SSL server tests, to adopting best coding practices, from internal security checks to external audits, from to Pen testings to OWASP initiatives, security is embedded at all levels of our technology spectrum.

SSL Server Test Results

Simplicity

Keep it simple! It has been a mantra our engineers have always relied upon, and it has helped us grow as an engineering organization. While we have tackled some hard engineering problems related to architecture and scale, we have always brainstormed ourselves out of complex solutions, and relied upon sound, simple and elegant solutions that deliver the end results for us and our customers.

Mobile

In the current era, mobile apps are not just “nice to have”, but are an essential part of any offering. At Insightly, we built our mobile app from the ground up using some of the latest technologies. Rather than trying to mimic the exact web user behavior, we focused on ensuring the mobile use cases were at the forefront of our design and architecture. From beautiful and polished UI to handling push notifications, from stability to performance, we wanted the user experience to be nothing but amazing!

Build versus rent

Sometimes you do not have to build everything from the ground up. It is prudent to integrate with some best of breed to provide meaningful and seamless experience to your customers. For example, we integrate with some of the best cloud companies that are the leaders in sending millions of email or managing your queues at scale, or helping you monitor the health of your applications and servers.

Engineered by engineers

Finally, the Insightly Web Application is not a standard monolithic legacy application. It’s a 21st century, enterprise grade, cloud based SaaS application built not only with the latest technologies, trends and practices, but also by some of the brightest and smartest engineers that take personal pride in how they have engineered and architected the solution. They collaboratively and consistently balance innovation and customer needs every day. In the end, it’s the engineers and the culture of our entire organization that is the true rock solid foundation of all our offerings.

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