With the availability and affordability of tools like unified CRM solutions, the measurement of many metrics is automated. Plus, these tools provide dashboards that compile the metrics you need to see in one easy-to-access location.

Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t have a formal metrics and reporting structure established within their organizations. Moreover, those who do report on various metrics, do so in a siloed way and miss opportunities to extract valuable insights and act on them in a timely manner.

Marketing might be reporting on email open rates, but what does that mean for the rest of the business? How does that impact revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and company growth? If all marketing does is pat themselves on the back for increasing email open rates, they end up with what are referred to as “vanity metrics.”

Vanity metrics don’t provide much actionable insight. However, certain metrics provide significant insight into business health and drive the smartest growth decisions. We’ll call them “golden metrics.”

• Productivity metrics
• Sales metrics
• Marketing metrics
• Marketing SEO metrics
• Customer metrics

Golden productivity metrics

Internal teams’ productivity levels are key to business growth—that’s common sense. But it’s easy to mistake the activity for productivity. Let’s quickly touch on that before diving into productivity metrics as it’s an important distinction.

Activity vs. productivity: an important distinction

Excessive meetings provide a great case study through which to distinguish activity from productivity.

Let’s say an employee often schedules meetings to discuss X, Y, or Z. However, during those meetings, little is accomplished, no one is engaged, and the information shared could have easily been conveyed through an email.

On the surface, that person may be seen as a proactive and productive colleague who brings people together to drive initiatives forward. But, more often than not, all they are doing is activelywasting time.

With that important distinction out of the way, let’s look at some key productivity metrics you can start measuring today.

Employee experience: The overlooked key to business success

Employee experience (EX) is one of the important variables that dictate employee productivity and a business success. If your employees aren’t happy, inspired, engaged, and motivated (all parts of the overall EX), the quality of their work product will decline. Plus, employees in these states of mind deliver a poor customer experience, further damaging your bottom line.

The challenge of measuring employee experience

It’s challenging to measure EX because there are too many variables involved. Most companies use surveys. But surveys don’t paint an accurate picture of EX for a variety of reasons, key among them are:

1. Many employees are hesitant to answer survey questions honestly for fear of retribution and this skews results. (You may tell them it’s anonymous, but many employees won’t believe you.)
2. Most companies design their own surveys. However, they are rarely designed by psychometric specialists with the expertise to develop an unbiased survey that produces reliable results. For a survey to be effective, it’s best to outsource it to the experts.

Fortunately, you can maintain insight into the quality of the employee experience without using surveys. You do so by analyzing additional metrics that are directly or indirectly connected to EX. These additional metrics, in addition to being an aggregate representation of EX quality, are themselves great ways to measure productivity.

Employee turnover rate

Turnover is natural and happens in every company. But if your turnover rate is significantly higher than industry benchmarks, it’s a strong indication that productivity is down, and your employee experience needs improving. The average national employee turnover rate in the US (as of 2019) was 22%. (1)

What’s the main driver of employee turnover? The graphic below says it all—82% of respondents to a recent survey cited better job opportunities as the leading cause.(2)

Employee engagement

You can measure employee engagement by looking at their usage rates of the technology you provide to make their jobs easier. Participation in employee engagement programs such as employee volunteer initiatives is another way to measure engagement. And you can use surveys, of course. Just be aware of the points mentioned above about using a psychometric expert to design and administer the survey.

Why is employee engagement so important? Consider that disengaged employees in the United States cost businesses between $450–550 billion annually. (3)

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Golden sales metrics

Fortunately for businesses, it’s much easier to measure sales performance than productivity. Below we lay out the golden metrics for sales, many of which can be measured by the powerful reporting productivity tools of a unified CRM.

Sales revenue

Sales revenue is a simple metric to measure and can provide much insight into the health of your business. This metric can tell you how sticky your product or service is, how competitive you are in your market, whether your marketing initiatives are producing results, and a lot more.

Plus, it’s easy to calculate. There are two types of sales revenue: gross revenue and net revenue. While both are easy to calculate, they provide quite different types of insight.

Gross sales revenue

Gross revenue is simply the amount of money your company brings in through sales. If you sell 100 widgets at $10 each, your gross revenue would 100 times 10, which equates to $1,000. That would be your gross revenue.

Net sales revenue

Net revenue considers expenses as well as incoming cash flow. To calculate net revenue, simply take gross revenue and subtract all the expenses in producing and selling that product or service.

For example, let’s say to produce one widget, you pay $1 for parts, $2 for an employee to produce it, and $2 to rent the space and pay the utilities needed to keep your shop open. Your expenses per widget are $1 + $2+ $2, which equals $5. When you subtract that $5 from the $10 in gross revenue you made from selling it, your net revenue would be $5.

What does each tell you?

If gross revenue is increasing, you can ascertain that sales are up. However, if, at the same time, net revenue is dropping, it means the costs of producing and selling your widgets are increasing. And that means less profit for your business. These are important distinctions that inform different types of forward-looking business growth decisions.

Customer acquisition cost

This is another helpful sales metric that sheds helpful light on the effectiveness of your sales team and the overall health of your business.

This golden metric is calculated per month, quarter, and/or year. To calculate customer acquisition cost, start by calculating the amount of money spent on acquiring new customers: marketing spend, sales technology subscriptions, sales team travel costs, etc. in a given time frame.

Next, divide that amount by the number of new customers acquired during that same time and you have your total customer acquisition cost. This metric is best used in tandem with customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV), when used with customer acquisition cost, is one of the most important metrics to measure. In short, it is the total monetary value your average customer brings to your business.

It’s a bit more complicated to calculate. You start by calculating the average value of a single sale for a given time frame—typically one year. For subscription-based businesses, this isn’t limited to average annual subscription cost per customer—you must consider upsell transactions as well.

Once you calculate the average cost per sale, you then multiply it by the average number of purchase transactions you process per year (again, don’t forget to include upsell purchases). Finally, take that number and multiply it by the average customer lifespan (the amount of time the average customer remains a customer before leaving). That’s your CLV. It’s a particularly important business intelligence metric that all businesses should measure. If this is new to you, read this comprehensive piece on customer lifetime value.

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Golden marketing metrics

Let’s turn our attention to marketing metrics and reporting. Metrics are especially important for marketers. Proving the impact of marketing via metrics and reporting is one of the only ways marketers can justify their worth within an organization.

Marketers measure all sorts of metrics—open rates, click-through rates, new leads generated, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), etc. However, many of them don’t shed any light on overall business health and some don’t even help marketers themselves.

Why measuring MQLs isn’t golden

New leads generated and leads qualified don’t mean much because there’s no telling what will happen to them after they are generated and qualified. Many marketers revel in their ability to generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The problem with that metric? The marketers using it to measure their own performance are the same people who define what it means to become “qualified.” It’s a subjective metric that many marketers spend way too much time focusing on and celebrating.

Sales measures lead-to-customer conversion rates (how many leads they convert into customers). It’s a helpful metric for sales teams but it doesn’t tie back to marketing because sales teams find many leads on their own.

MQL-to-customer conversion rate: Where the gold lies

The golden marketing metric in this mix is MQL-to-customer conversion rate, which measures the percentage of MQLs that sales convert into customers. Why is this important? It tells marketers how precise their criteria for qualifying a lead is. You can send MQLs to sales all day, but if only two out of 50 of them convert into customers, you’re not qualifying them properly and should sit down with sales and discuss your lead qualification criteria and revisit your lead disposition process.

What matters is that marketing is sending sales the right leads—those that are sales-ready. Quality wins over quantity here. The MQL-to-customer conversion rate will tell you whether you’re sending the right leads at the right time, or if your process needs to be refined. If your ratio is low, you are qualifying leads too soon. If it’s high, congrats, you should be promoted.

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SEO metrics

Among the most important elements of a successful business in the digital era is a healthy website. It’s crucial that your site can easily be found and is engaging enough for visitors to stay for a bit and return later. To drive traffic to your website, you need to constantly tend to search engine optimization (SEO) tactics—both on-page and technical SEO tactics.

Marketing is typically charged with SEO and website design. In the 80s, the physical brochure was your brand’s public face, and it was incredibly important to make yours shine and stand out from the rest.

Websites are today’s brand brochures and it’s equally if not more important that it shines. Why? There are exponentially more websites today (more competition) than there were brochures in the 80s.

How do you ensure your site’s visibility and high engagement? A few golden metrics will give you a constant sense of how well your site is doing, as well as inform you when something needs to be fixed. Let’s break them down.

Total organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to site visitors that find you via search results. Organic traffic doesn’t include visitors that arrived on your site by clicking an ad result—that’s pay-per-click traffic and is a separate tactic and metric altogether.

It’s easy to measure organic traffic. If you have a website, you can connect it to Google Analytics for free and easily grab loads of real-time data about site health, visitor trends, and more. Logically, you want to see a steady uptrend in traffic per week and month over time. Ideally, you want your traffic chart to resemble Berkshire Hathaway’s stock share price chart.

How to interpret organic traffic

You’ll see traffic dips here and there, but you should expect to see more and more visitors to your site as you grow. If your traffic plateaus, it could be caused by any number of things, including backend technical SEO issues that Google and other search engines see as negative factors and penalize your site’s ranking for.

The other usual culprit that causes traffic to stop growing is a drop in the quality of your content. Google’s algorithm keeps getting smarter and can increasingly differentiate high-quality content from fluff and clickbaits. But content quality is better measured by the next metric on our list: average session duration.

Average session duration

This metric can also be pulled from Google Analytics. It tells you the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. If this metric is hovering around one minute, it’s an indication that your site is not engaging visitors and needs some work. If session duration is, on average, three minutes or above, you’re looking good. When you reach five minutes, it’s time to bring out the champagne.

Bounce rate

We’re still in Google Analytics with this one. A “bounce” refers to a visitor who lands on a page, takes no action such as scrolling, clicking anything, etc., then leaves. In other words, they did nothing on your site. They came, took a peek, didn’t like what they saw, and left.

Alternatively, it wasn’t that they didn’t like what they saw but rather they realized they were in the wrong place. That results from your site’s rankings not aligning with search intent, a topic that’s broad enough to deserve its own article.

Quality backlinks

Backlinks are links on other sites that reference information on your site, then link to and send their visitors to your site to learn more. Google sees this as a powerful sign that your site is authoritative and thus ranks it higher.

Backlinks are an important metric to track but beware of one tempering yet self-destructive temptation. Don’t purchase backlinks. You must generate them organically by publishing amazing content that people want to consume. If you buy backlinks, anyone who clicks on them is likely to bounce and/or skew your other website metrics in a negative direction. Also, make sure that your backlinks are from high-ranking, relevant, and quality sites, otherwise they’ll affect your SEO negatively.

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Golden customer-focused metrics

We round out our guide to golden business intelligence metrics with some important customer-focused key performance indicators (KPIs). We’re now in the age of the consumer and customer expectations are higher than ever before. Catering to customers’ needs has never been more important. The metrics below are vital to maintaining a healthy business and insight into your future growth trajectory.

Customer churn and retention

These are two separate metrics but tie into one another. They provide the same type of insight but from opposite ends of a spectrum.

Customer churn

Calculated as a percentage, customer churn rate is the proportion of customers that you lose in a given month or year. It’s a great metric for keeping an eye on how quickly your business is growing and reflects the performance of every team in your business. It’s particularly helpful for subscription-based businesses.

It tells you if you’re losing more customers than you acquire and vice versa. Churn rate is easy to calculate. Simply take the number of customers you lost during a given time frame and divide that by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that timeframe. Then represent that number as a percentage.

For example, if you started the year with 100 customers but lost 15 that year, you would divide 15 by 100, which equals 0.15. As a percentage, that’s 15%. So, your customer churn rate would be 15%.

Customer retention

Customer retention is also most helpful for subscription-based businesses. Customer churn shows you one side of the coin while retention shows you the other. Customer retention tells you the percentage of customers who stick with you and renew their subscription to your product or service.

To calculate retention, you need three numbers: the number of customers you started the year with (A), the number you acquired during the year (B), and the number of customers you had at the end of the year (C). The formula looks like this: ((C – B) / A)) x 100.

For example, let’s say you started the year with 100 customers, acquired 20 new ones, and ended the year with 110 (because you lost 10 during the year). You could subtract 20 from 110 and have 90. Then you’d divide 90 by 100 (the number of customers you started the year with) which gives you 0.9.

Viewed as a percentage, 0.9 is 90%, which would be your customer retention rate. Now, is 90% a good retention rate? That depends on your business model. However, in most cases, it’s a high retention rate that means your business is stable with reliable recurring revenue. If this metric is new to you, learn more about customer retention and strategies to keep your rate high.

Customer effort score

Customer effort score (CES) is a simple metric that measures customer satisfaction and customer experience at the same time. There are various customer satisfaction metrics out there. Many businesses rely on net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of satisfaction metrics. However, using NPS as an end goal is misleading both for employees and businesses. NPS should be used as a beginning point, a way to learn and track customer satisfaction for ongoing improvements and building better customer relations.

Now, back to CES. CES measures the amount of effort a customer had to put into a specific interaction with a company. Many businesses use CES to assess the effectiveness of their customer support function, but you can use it to measure any interaction your business has with a customer.

In many ways, higher levels of customer satisfaction depend on reducing the effort a customer must put forth when interacting with a business. If their issue can be solved in a few minutes without putting much of the burden on their shoulders, they will come away satisfied. That indicates a satisfied customer who just received a positive customer experience. Checkmate.

CES tends to be more reliable than other satisfaction metrics. CES is calculated by asking customers to rate the amount of effort they had to put into an interaction, on a 5-point scale, with 1 being “very low effort,” and 5 being “very high effort.”

Collect a number of scores and calculate the average. A score of 2 or lower means that a company is making life easy on its customers, and they are happy. A score of 4 or 5 means that the company should rethink how they support their customers with a mind towards taking some of the burden off their shoulders.

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Connecting the dots

We just covered some of the most valuable metrics businesses today—metrics that provide real, actionable insight. That insight is necessary to make data-driven decisions today.

It’s important that your leadership team gets behind business intelligence and reporting efforts. After all, we have the data at our fingertips. Why would we not use it to inform the decisions we make that will dictate the future survival or failure of our businesses?

Good luck, and may the data be with you.

If you’d like to learn how Insightly CRM can help you to align teams around key metrics, reduce data silos, and create a data-driven culture and decision-making, then request a free demo.

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Sources:

1-2. North American employee turnover: trends and effects, Mercer, 2020

3. DNA of Engagement: How Organizations Can Foster Employee Ownership of Engagement, The Engagement Institute, 2017

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In today’s world, where everything you need is just a click away, customers value relationships over transactions. If you don’t treat customers as they expect, it is easier than ever before for them to leave you for one of your competitors. And in a precarious economic climate such as this one, the last thing anyone needs is to lose customers to something completely preventable. To treat your customers the way they’d like to be treated, you need to know them inside and out, and the only way to achieve this is to use data to create a high-def picture of them.

Your CRM solution must allow you to gather and use customer data at every point of their journey, so you can deliver consistent brand experiences to every one of your customers, from the first touch throughout the entire customer journey. To do this successfully, you need all of your customer data in one place. With a unified CRM, all your marketing, sales, delivery, and support applications sit on the same data platform, leaving less chance for customers’ data getting lost or corrupted, pixelating the hi-def picture of the customer and inhibiting your ability to build lasting relationships.

There are countless reasons why you need a unified CRM to build lasting customer relationships and compete in the digital age, but here are the top five.

1. Sales & marketing alignment

With a unified CRM, sales and marketing can collaborate in a closer, tighter way. From lead disposition to customer interactions, they are working in unison to drive leads through the funnel. They no longer work in silos with their own separate software systems or have to figure out ad hoc data syncing processes.

Alignment across teams is critical to closing more opportunities and growing a business. Automated workflows and real-time analytics—along with other system features and capabilities, including lead disposition—bridge the gap between the two teams. These features also lend accountability to each respective team, forcing them to collaborate in new and innovative ways.

As a bonus, storing all data in one central database, which is easily accessible by all, helps drive CRM adoption among salespeople and creates transparency throughout the entire organization.

2. Data accessibility & reliability

When data collected by every team is entered into the same system, you eliminate data discrepancies that occur when different contact or other data is entered into two separate systems. Everyone works within the same data structure, exponentially increasing data integrity. When new data is entered into the system it is updated in real time for all to see.

A CRM that has everything sitting on one platform eliminates the need for additional integrations between systems and reduces the chance for customer data corruption. It also ensures that everyone who engages with customers has access to a complete customer profile and history of interactions, whether they work in marketing, sales, delivery, or support. And that’s great for your customers.

3. Stronger, more personal customer relationships

Unified CRMs store data about each customer and prospect—including demographic data, search and buying behavior, interactions with your brand, purchase history, challenges, and more. Quick and easy access to that data allows customer-facing teams to quickly gather insight into who the customer is, which products they own, and their product or service satisfaction levels. This gives customer support teams the ability to speak to customers on a more personal level. Your teams can form close customer relationships and personalize interactions to make customers feel more comfortable and build trust. Doing this sends the message that you’re invested in them and their personal success. That, in turn, fosters loyalty, generates brand advocates, reduces customer churn, and increases recurring revenue.

4. Better insights and analytics

Unified CRMs constantly collect data around a broad range of measurable metrics—from marketing campaign engagement to customer satisfaction and retention. You decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to use the reports. Tracking and analyzing metrics helps businesses identify which strategies and tactics are producing desired results and which are not. This allows you to focus attention on the tactics that are working and remove those that flop.

Moreover, some unified CRMs provide custom reporting that delivers insight into the metrics you need to see most. Normally, these can be automated and sent to you via email or displayed on a custom dashboard that you configure to meet your needs. Stay informed, test assumptions, and easily share results with other stakeholders to make data-driven decisions.

5. And perhaps most important… higher customer satisfaction

Experts suggested years ago that 2020 would be the year that customer experience would overtake price and product as the key differentiator in consumers’ purchasing decisions. We still believe this to be true. And to create and deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need a unified CRM. As a quick recap here, with a unified CRM you empower your teams with accurate data, deep understanding of your customers’ needs, efficiency, and ability to deliver personalized interactions throughout the entire customer journey. A great customer experience increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention, and it supercharges business growth.

In conclusion, unified CRM is the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way to gain visibility into every aspect of your customer relationships, make well-informed decisions, and create customer experiences that align with your brand vision. You’re not buying a CRM for the sake of a CRM—you have business goals to reach and a CRM is your means to an end. Choose your means well.

Read more like this:

• 4 key steps for sales and marketing integration
• From personalized to humanized marketing
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020
• What are different types of customer data?

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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.

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Over the past decade, I’ve worked with numerous clients across multiple industries and sectors. Although most clients use a CRM, I have encountered a few who do not. Drawing from first-hand experience, here are seven downsides of running a business without a CRM.

1. No source of truth

Spreadsheets, inboxes, documents, and your brain. These are just a few of the data silos that exist in your business.

Data silos have many negative consequences on your operational efficiency and are difficult to overcome—especially when you’re not using a CRM. After all, where do your people go when they need timely and accurate information? Their inboxes? Your shared network drive? Or, do they just call each other and ask for help? Without a single source of truth, your team spends more time looking for data than actually using it.

Data should propel your business forward—not create new obstacles to success. Without a central source of truth, the obstacles are plentiful.

2. You can’t see the “big picture”

Successful business leaders effectively use data to inform their decision-making. They also regularly set time aside to ensure data is timely, accurate, and, most importantly, useful. From pipeline value to customer retention to website engagement, data-driven metrics form the basis of modern management.

Of course, it’s hard to gain the necessary insights when data is spread all over the place. As a result, organizations that do not use CRM technology tend to rely purely on gut feelings as opposed to real-world performance metrics and forecasts.

In short, you can’t see the “big picture” when you don’t know where to look—or what to look for.

3. Relationships are harder to understand

Stop and think about your ten most important client relationships.

How did you acquire these customers? Were they the result of a successful advertising campaign, or did they all come from word-of-mouth referrals? Now multiply the same questions across your entire customer base. Sure, it may be possible that you have all the answers, but does the rest of your team?

CRMs are built to help you track, understand, and strengthen business relationships. Features like record linking and advanced reporting help you and your entire team know—with certainty—the original source and impact of each relationship.

Without a CRM, you’re forced to rely on anecdotes, which become less reliable as you scale your business.

4. Less control over your data

Let’s assume that you track all of your customer data in a shared spreadsheet. Although better than nothing, spreadsheets have several shortcomings that limit the control of your data, including your ability to:

Restrict access to data

You may be able to protect certain tabs of a spreadsheet, but within the tab itself there is less control. This becomes problematic when you need to restrict customer data from specific users. Case in point, your sales rep in the northwest district does not need to see the leads from the southeast district. Unfortunately, making this work in a spreadsheet is difficult—if not impossible.

Ensure data integrity

What happens when a user accidentally deletes a row in your spreadsheet? Days or weeks may pass before anyone even notices. Once the issue is identified, how will you know who made the oversight or how many other accidental changes were made? It’s impossible to ensure data integrity with spreadsheets.

Maintain data compliance

We live in a world increasingly concerned about data privacy and security. Ensuring total compliance with regulatory and industry-specific guidelines is complex enough even when you have the right tech stack. Spreadsheets and homegrown databases are not built for data compliance. It’s just that simple.

5. Productivity issues

Your team can’t be productive unless they have a clear understanding of what they’re supposed to do. When delegations are spread across multiple inboxes, chat threads, and team collaboration platforms, staff become overwhelmed and feel unable to focus and make progress.

Centralizing all of your work into a CRM that’s built for project management alleviates this confusion, resulting in elevated productivity and motivated team members. And, since your CRM houses all of your customer relationship data, tasks and projects can be easily linked to relevant records, providing an additional layer of transparency and accountability.

6. Confusion about what’s actually going on

Speaking of transparency, do you know what staff are working on each day? Are they focused on the priorities that deliver the greatest impact?

Without the right technology, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Integrating all of your project management data into a CRM provides much-needed clarity for your leadership team. Data-driven productivity reports provide instant visibility into who is getting the most work done. Notes, tasks, and linked emails deliver detailed insights into the life of each project. Kanban-style project boards offer an intuitive and visually appealing format for collecting ideas, sequencing work, and accomplishing more goals.

7. Bad data

The only thing worse than no data is bad data.

Bad data comes in many shapes and sizes and from many sources. That’s why fixing and preventing bad data is not easy—even with a well-structured CRM. Without a CRM, you lack a consistent format for collecting and organizing data, which makes your job even more challenging.

Harkening back to our spreadsheet example, let’s consider your organization’s process for tracking lost deals. When a deal is lost, sales reps simply key in a freeform explanation of what happened. Over the course of dozens or hundreds of deals, however, making sense of countless paragraphs of unstructured text becomes untenable. As a result, sales managers stop reading the summaries and, eventually, sales reps stop providing feedback altogether.

By contrast, a CRM can be configured to display an intuitive picklist when deals are marked as lost. With the click of a mouse, sales reps simply select the reason and get back to work. No more long-winded paragraphs. No more typos and missing details. Just the facts. This approach standardizes the data entry process, reduces the potential for bad data, and enhances your ability to run meaningful reports and course-correct.

Time for a CRM?

Implementing a CRM may seem like a relatively low priority given all of the other moving parts in your business. But, maintaining the status quo can have lasting negative effects on your organization and hold back growth.

Take time to assess your business needs, then seek out platforms that can easily adapt to your unique needs and help you reach business goals.

Get started with a free needs assessment and a product demo from Insightly.

Request a demo

The post 7 downsides of running a business without a CRM 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

The post Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business appeared first on Insightly.

Managing data: Why customer data is increasingly important (Part 1)

Managing data: Top 3 roadblocks to effective data use (Part 2)

Today’s article, the last in the series, will spotlight several midsize companies, Insightly customers, that effectively leverage data to accelerate revenue growth, achieve scalable business processes, and increase customer satisfaction.

Maximizing revenue growth

Adding more sales reps or spending more on advertising offers no guarantee for growth. In fact, without a well-researched plan, such actions can have a substantially negative impact on profitability.

Smart companies use data to identify initiatives and processes that contribute to top-line performance without detracting from the bottom line. Here’s how Tribuna Digital and Mowery Construction are doing exactly that.

Tribuna Digital uses pipeline data to monetize more than 100 sports apps.

Each month, 22 million users access cutting-edge sports content via Tribuna Digital’s mobile and desktop apps. As a result, advertisers from across the globe are lining up to explore placement opportunities with the European-based sports media company.

“We’ve experienced significant growth over the past few years,” says Varya Trifonova, Account Manager at Tribuna Digital.

To keep pace with ever-increasing demand from advertisers and prevent monetization opportunities from slipping through the cracks, Tribuna Digital tracks all of its pipeline data in a cloud-based CRM system.

“Sales managers have instant access to the entire company’s pending deals, related documentation, and client interactions,” says Trifonova.

Centralizing contacts, opportunities, emails, notes, proposals, and other related pipeline data into one system reduces confusion and creates a collaborative ecosystem for Tribuna Digital’s 200+ team members.

Tribuna Digital also converts won opportunities into projects, preserving a 360-degree view of each relationship in its CRM.

“Projects help us coordinate the many post-sale activities, such as launching the client’s campaign,” says Trifonova. Keeping everything in one system eliminates data silos, reduces unnecessary data transfers, and keeps everyone focused on what matters most.

Continue reading about Tribuna Digital’s monetization strategy.

Mowery Construction closely monitors sales KPIs to stay on track with projections and revenue growth.

Mowery Construction is a Pennsylvania-based construction management firm that serves a broad spectrum of industries, including healthcare, warehousing and distribution, education, and senior living. Since its founding in 1925, the company has successfully completed more than $2 billion in projects.

Prior to implementing a CRM, the company’s sales data was spread across multiple disconnected systems, such as inboxes, spreadsheets, and other databases. Migrating several decades of project data into a centralized sales management platform has allowed Mowery Construction to focus on projects that contribute to growth.

“We’re using this data to glean powerful business insights and identify projects and markets that fit our expertise,” says William Sutton, Vice President of Business Development at Mowery Construction.

Real-time pipeline dashboards provide vital business intelligence for sales and strategy meetings, making it easier to monitor key KPIs and anticipate roadblocks to growth. “If a metric dips below a certain level, we instantly know where to focus more of our attention,” says Sutton.

Read more about how Mowery Construction uses data to accelerate revenue growth.

Scaling business processes

To compete with larger enterprises, midsize companies must continuously reevaluate and refine their internal practices. Each moment wasted on a low-value administrative task benefits the competition.

Let’s take a look at how two midsize companies use data and technology to scale business processes.

FitSmallBusiness.com uses production data to craft award-winning content that resonates with readers and industry partners.

1.5 million small business owners visit FitSmallBusiness.com each month for best practices on marketing, finance, accounting, productivity, and much more.

Unlike many content producers who rely on spreadsheets to track the editorial process, FitSmallBusiness.com manages its entire 15-stage writing and review process in a project-friendly CRM.

“Project pipeline stages help us create accountability and control for articles advancing through the production cycle,” says David Waring, Co-CEO at FitSmallBusiness.com. Custom fields and project categories make it easier to track industry-specific data points, such as topic or article complexity. “Being able to report on custom field data has allowed us to increase productivity and reduce roadblocks,” says Waring.

Managing the editorial process with a CRM simplifies downstream promotion of content with other publishers, monetization partners, and related stakeholders. By linking projects to contacts and other data, FitSmallBusiness.com has built a scalable workflow that maximizes the impact of its content.

Learn how FitSmallBusiness.com harnesses data to scale and refine its content production.

TravelSolutions by Campbell uses workflow automation to reduce manual data entry and improve data integrity.

TravelSolutions by Campbell, the corporate division of Campbell Travel, provides clients with reliable travel management services supported by proprietary technology.

A longtime user of CRM technology, the TravelSolutions by Campbell team realized that its former CRM platform no longer aligned with its data management needs. “Sales reps had to fill out an internal form when handing off a closed-won deal,” says Robert Lawrence, VP of Sales at TravelSolutions by Campbell. Manual data entry caused bottlenecks in the sales process, resulting in delays for customers and data reliability issues.

By switching to a CRM that offers out-of-the-box workflow automation capabilities, sales reps and team members have more time for value-added activities. “Now, when a deal is marked as won, everything happens automatically without forms or extra steps.” With workflow automation, tasks, emails, and data field updates are automatically triggered with a single click, saving everyone time and reducing oversight.

Keep reading to learn how TravelSolutions by Campbell automates its pipeline data collection.

Increasing client satisfaction

In today’s world of online reviews and social proof, companies of all sizes are taking a serious look at the customer journey. Simply having customers is no longer good enough. To survive and thrive, organizations must figure out how to convert customers into lifelong advocates. In-depth data analysis is an excellent starting point for understanding the customer and increasing satisfaction.

Here’s what Kent ISD and Engage Training are doing to convert clients into advocates.

Kent ISD collects interaction data for a deeper understanding of client needs.

Serving more than 117,000 students, 8,000 educators, and 300 schools in Michigan, Kent ISD is one of the state’s largest intermediate school districts. Successfully coordinating hundreds of projects across a 1,000+ square mile region requires tight coordination among the organization’s consultants.

To keep everyone on the same page, consultants rely heavily on Insightly CRM to collect vital relationship data, such as discussion notes, emails, documents, contact information, project histories, opportunities, and much more. “Each consultant uses the system to track his or her client interactions, delivering a 360-degree view of the organization’s services and opportunities,” says Rick Mushing, STEM Consultant at Kent Intermediate School District.

Having a central source of truth also allows consultants to stay one step ahead, leading to enhanced client satisfaction. “Insightly keeps us informed of client needs and helps us identify innovative solutions to meet those needs.”

Learn how Kent ISD uses client interaction data to provide innovative services.

Engage Training analyzes course inquiry data to continuously optimize its offering.

Engage Training, a commercial training institution, offers skills-based training solutions for individuals and corporate clients throughout Wales.

With training programs for animal care, business, childcare, construction, hospitality, and many other specialities, Engage Training takes great effort to align its courses with the needs of its constituents. Data stored within the organization’s CRM plays a vital role in ensuring ongoing alignment.

“Each month, we run reports for the number of inquiries and bookings, conversion rate, and overall pipeline value,” says Helen Davies, Head of Part-Time Delivery at Engage Training. “By analyzing inquiry and booking data, we can identify course preference trends.”

As customer preferences evolve, Engage Training relies on quantitative evidence to inform course decision making. “Some courses become less popular over time, and Insightly helps us decide what to keep or pull.” Maintaining a data-driven approach allows the organization to iterate faster and deliver stellar service to its constituents.

Read about how Engage Training analyzes course trend data to increase client satisfaction.

A better CRM to improve data management, accelerate revenue growth

There is one common thread that runs through all of the aforementioned customer stories — having a reliable and easy-to-use CRM system, which is paramount to the effective use of business data.

Does your current CRM align with your organization’s need for better business intelligence? If not, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate your options. Ideally, your CRM should provide the right blend of usability, reporting, integrations, and, of course, data security and compliance. Then, you can make well-informed, data-driven business decisions.

For additional reading, check out this free eBook that contains helpful tips to consider when switching CRMs.

Ready to check out Insightly CRM? Request a demo and get a real sense of Insightly’s features and capabilities.

Request a demo

The post Managing data Part 3: How to accelerate revenue growth with data appeared first on Insightly.

Managing data: Why customer data is increasingly important (Part 1)

Managing data: How to accelerate revenue growth with data (Part 3)

As covered in the first post of the effective data use series, companies across all industries are increasingly motivated to leverage customer data.

Despite data’s importance, effectively using it can be complicated—especially for midsize companies that lack the resources of larger enterprises.

Today we’ll explore three common roadblocks to effective data use and how technology is leveling the playing field for midsize companies. We’ll also look at Insightly customers who have managed to overcome these common roadblocks.

1. Growth rate that outpaces existing IT infrastructure

“Our 5-year plan calls for 3X growth in our customer count and top-line performance.”

On paper, this type of statement sure sounds great. After all, who doesn’t want to experience rapid growth? While rapid growth can be a very good thing, growing too fast can have unintended consequences — especially on a company’s IT infrastructure.

Here are two high-growth companies, Insightly customers, that achieved the best of both worlds by adopting a CRM that could keep pace with expansion.

4over, LLC overcomes data roadblocks by centralizing all of its customer relationship data into a searchable ecosystem.

With a local presence in more than 100 geographic markets, 4over is respected as one of North America’s premier wholesale print companies. The company sells a number of different printed products through a network of third party resellers, marketing firms, and graphic designers.

With an ever-increasing amount of relationship, project, and pipeline data flowing into the company, 4over’s existing infrastructure could no longer support its growth trajectory.

“We’ve grown into a medium-sized organization and needed a more efficient way to track customer information beyond simple spreadsheets,” says Rita Ward, Overseer of Outbound Telesales at 4over. “We needed a reliable way to track who was working on what in real-time to avoid missed deadlines and miscommunication.”

By centralizing all of its customer information into a searchable, cloud-based CRM system, 4over has elevated its record keeping across the entire organization. Telesales, for example, tracks conversations with prospective customers, enabling the team to increase the effectiveness of outreach campaigns. Business development reps use the CRM to capture key correspondence and emails from any web-enabled device, streamlining customer engagement efforts and accelerating growth.

Continue reading about 4over’s success story.

Annexus Health overcomes data roadblocks by focusing on currency and recency of pipeline intelligence.

Research from the National Cancer Institute estimates that more than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, leaving many families in desperate need of affordable cancer care. The assistPoint platform, from Annexus Health, is a web-based software application that simplifies the process of matching patients to financial and nursing support programs.

With 250+ cancer centers already using assistPoint and thousands more in the pipeline, Annexus Health reached a pivotal point in its data management journey.

“We’re working with hundreds of cancer center organizations, each of which has multiple points of contact along with countless other data points,” says Kerry Bradley, Co-Founder of Annexus Health. “As the organization advances in its use of assistPoint, the number of linked contacts and interactions with each organization increases.”

Adopting a CRM that provides out-of-the-box integrations to other vital business systems has allowed Annexus Health to manage a rapidly expanding contact list without encountering stale data. “Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, and Power BI are some of the integrations we rely on,” says Bradley.

An integration to the company’s support ticketing software feeds real-time customer service data into the CRM without manual effort. “This keeps everyone in the loop, and it helps us avoid data silos in our business,” says Bradley.

Learn how Annexus Health is leveraging data to serve more cancer centers.

2. Disintegrated systems

Companies don’t typically intend to create data silos. In most cases, they form organically over long periods of time. In today’s marketplace of countless SaaS tools, there’s an app for just about every need. Each newly deployed tool brings incremental efficiency, but, without attention to system design, it can also lead to massive datasets that few users know about.

Let’s explore how two midsize companies solved the disintegration trap.

The Red Pen overcomes data roadblocks by tracking the student journey in a centralized source of truth.

Since 2011, more than 2,400 students from across the globe have trusted The Red Pen’s mentoring services. The company’s impressive track record makes it the go-to educational consulting firm for students hoping to study abroad.

With a world of students to serve, The Red Pen needed a better way to collect, organize, and track student relationship information.

“We had a lot of data, but we didn’t have an efficient way to organize it,” says Namita Mehta, Partner at The Red Pen.

Moving to a centralized customer database to track each student interaction eliminates confusion and delivers much-needed transparency to the team. Integrated inboxes combined with web-to-lead forms accelerate the organization’s ability to collect more student engagement data with less effort.

As students advance through the pipeline, won opportunities are converted into projects within the organization’s CRM, preserving a historical record of each relationship and eliminating the need for overlapping business systems. “Notes and emails stay intact throughout the entire customer journey,” says Mehta.

Continue reading about how The Red Pen harnesses data to engage more students.

Skidmore Group overcomes data roadblocks by gaining user adoption.

With a corporate history dating back to 1946, the Skidmore Group has evolved into a diversified holding firm that has built more than twenty successful brands.

Kitchen Art Design, one of the companies in Skidmore Group’s portfolio, needed a way to overcome scattered customer, project, and pipeline data.

“Customer information was spread across folders, handwritten notes, and inboxes. This made it difficult to understand customers and communicate with them,” says Rody van Vianen, Manager of Business Improvement at Skidmore Group.

To ensure a long-term solution to the problem, the team needed a CRM that was intuitive for a wide spectrum of users. “Our main consideration was ease of use,” says van Vianen.

Selecting an easy-to-use CRM has led to a strong adoption rate, better data, and fewer silos. Design consultants were the first group to adopt the CRM for enhanced sales pipeline management. Back office staff and production teams also use the system to track important details, such as customer payment and on-time delivery.

Implementing an intuitive CRM has delivered so much efficiency for Kitchen Art Design that the Skidmore Group now uses it to track investment opportunities, deals, and other information at the parent company level.

Learn more about Skidmore Group’s approach to data management.

3. Cumbersome legacy CRMs

A quick web search returns dozens of CRM products. Comparing the many features, benefits, and pricing levels can be overwhelming, leading some companies to base their decisions purely on brand recognition. While name recognition is one factor to consider, it’s not everything. More important is the CRM’s ability to adapt to your specific business model.

Here’s how DynEd and O2X improved their business processes by switching CRMs.

DynEd overcomes data roadblocks by implementing manageable CRM processes.

An impressive 25 million students have learned English by using software from DynEd International, Inc. The company’s approach incorporates a unique blend of AI-powered technology, tutors, and internationally recognized testing standards.

With millions of records to keep organized from customers, educational institutions, and business partners, the company’s legacy CRM had become unmanageable.

“Customer information would regularly be incomplete, which impacted the sales process,” says Edda Cortez, Lead Americas Sales Administrator at DynEd. A major cause of friction was the CRM’s clunky and complicated conversion workflow, which caused many team members to abandon the system altogether.

Migrating to an intuitive, easily customizable CRM has allowed DynEd to scale its sales processes. For starters, the team built highly customized, multi-stage pipelines to align with its exact sales management workflow. Reports and dashboards provide additional clarity to the deal tracking process.

“Once opportunities advance to a certain stage in the pipeline, there’s a stronger likelihood that the deal will close,” says Cortez. “This allows us to build more reliable forecasts and make smarter business decisions.”

Read more about how DynEd scaled its sales processes.

O2X overcomes data roadblocks with workflow automation

O2X is at the forefront of human performance education. With a client list that includes the US Navy, FBI, State Department, and many police and fire departments, O2X is known for elevating the performance of tactical athletes.

Seeking to elevate the efficiency of its own business processes, the O2X team needed to overcome its legacy CRM’s shortcomings.

“The system’s limited functionality did not meet our needs, which explained why so few of us actually used it,” says John Hall, Operations Manager at O2X.

The team switched to Insightly CRM, which made an immediate impact on productivity. Inbox integration, in particular, saved the team countless hours of manual data entry.

“The Insightly Sidebar allows users to quickly save contacts and correspondence without leaving their inboxes,” says Hall.

Workflow automation delivers additional efficiency, eliminating time-intensive administrative tasks. “Workflow rules, activity sets, tasks, email notifications, and project pipelines keep everything on track,” says Hall.

See how O2X uses workflow automation for other processes.

Next up, accelerating growth with data

The next, and final, article in this series will spotlight innovative ways that medium-size companies harness data to accelerate revenue growth, boost profits, and solidify customer loyalty.

As always, be sure to check out Insightly’s collection of customer stories.

Request a demo

The post Managing data: Top 3 roadblocks to effective data use (Part 2) appeared first on Insightly.

Spoiler alert: after implementing Insightly CRM, businesses grew their annual revenues by 20%. Below are more survey findings across the following categories: productivity, customer insights and relationships, adoption and use, and return on investment.

Increased Productivity

Regardless of business size, workforce automation and the ability to easily integrate existing IT systems with new products and services are critical to ensuring team productivity and sustained business growth. With its key integrations, like Office 365, Insightly allows businesses to automate common tasks and processes, as well as customize their CRM experience, so that teams can easily collaborate and spend less time on mundane administrative tasks and more time on high-impact work and creative solutions for their customers.

So, in order to better understand Insightly’s impact on productivity, we asked survey participants to compare how much time they spent on searching for information and other administrative tasks before and after implementing Insightly and Office 365 integration.

After adopting Insightly CRM, on average, respondents reported spending 1.4 fewer hours per week on administrative tasks, such as searching for information, reconciling different programs, and/or data entry.

Half of the respondents reported improved coordination among marketing, sales, and customer support departments; 49% saw improvement in employee productivity.

76% of respondents reported having more accurate customer, sales, and project data, after adopting Insightly.

Deeper Customer Insights, Meaningful Customer Relationships

Recognizing the importance of customer data in building meaningful relationships and cultivating brand loyalty, we asked our customers how their understanding of customers had changed after integrating Insightly and Office 365.About 67% of respondents reported their understanding of customers improved by “a lot” or “a great deal” after implementing Insightly and Office 365 and, on average, reported managing five additional meaningful customer relationships (per representative).Fast Adoption, Ease of Use

For any CRM — to justify its total cost of ownership and deliver long-term value — user adoption and consistent, as-intended use, are non-negotiable. With that in mind, we asked survey participants to share the time it took them to integrate Insightly CRM and Office 365 and describe their ongoing use of Insightly.

For 50% of survey respondents, it took less than 10 minutes to integrate Insightly with Office 365.

After implementing the integration, 85% of respondents reported “regular” or “high” use of Insightly for day-to-day work. Positive Return on Investment, Growth

Insightly CRM was designed as a turnkey solution for businesses, providing them fast time to value. In our survey, we asked if businesses saw an increase in their revenues and how soon after implementing Insightly they observed results. Here’s what we found.

Those who’d been using Insightly for a year or longer reported more than 20% increase in annual revenue.

Of all the respondents who reported a positive return on investment, 45% saw results within three months after implementing Insightly CRM and Office 365 integration.

For more details on Insightly CRM and the Office 365 integration, including a case study of a healthcare tech company that’s been using the integration to manage customer outreach and ongoing relationships, please read here.

Download the survey results infographic.

To get a personalized walk-through and see the power of Insightly CRM and Office 365 integration first-hand, please request a demo.

Request a demo

The post Grow revenues 20% annually with Insightly + Office 365 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.

February can sometimes serve as a hard dose of reality. This year was finally going to be the year you realized all those ambitious resolutions. Unfortunately, with January being a month filled full of budgeting, accounting, and other year-end obligations, you probably haven’t had a spare moment to think strategically.

Don’t feel too bad – you still have the better part of the year to make progress.

With January now a distant memory, it’s time you finally sat down and refined (or built) the strategic plan for your business. In this post, I’ll share seven questions to get your strategic juices flowing.

1. What worked?

You probably have a gut feeling about what worked last year. Take, for example, that email campaign your marketing team deployed in mid-July. It was so successful, in fact, that you’re already planning several more like it this year.

Looking beyond the “big wins” of last year, what else worked? What was your seventh-best or eighth-best initiative? How did these programs impact to the company’s bottom line? Without the right data, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Smart business decisions are based on reliable information, which is precisely why you need to connect with your leadership team as soon as possible. Challenge them to identify their five to ten most impactful initiatives, complete with budgeted and actual results. If you receive pushback about data accessibility, you may have identified an issue to solve in the new year (see question #3).

2. What didn’t work?

While you’re at it, go ahead and ask the team to also identify the biggest disappointments of last year. Again, don’t just settle for anecdotal evidence. Ask for specific evidence that something was a failure.

Here’s a classic example. As a marketer, I’m routinely asked to measure the performance of various advertising campaigns. Before I do any analysis, the client will often have a preconceived notion about what didn’t work. However, this opinion may be based entirely on a single KPI, such as number of leads or revenue impact. While these metrics are important, they may not tell the whole story. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that I brought the following numbers to you.

Based on the table above, which campaign was the biggest loser?

If we base success (or lack there of) purely on lead volume, then campaign #1’s meager budget was destined to fail from the get-go. Looking at the data holistically, we learn that this campaign actually had the best conversion rate and most affordable cost per lead. In other words, face value failures can sometimes represent your greatest opportunities for growth!

3. Is anything broken?

The skeptic in you might be tempted to ask what isn’t broke.

As imperfect as your business might seem, the simple truth is that you don’t have time to fix everything. When looking at broken things to fix, you need to cut to the chase and solve the problems that have the greatest impact.

When answering this question, it’s wise to do so through the lens of:

The customer experience: Are customers cancelling or abandoning because they don’t feel loved? Does your product or service need a refresh? Would a better CRM help your company engage more customers and leads?

Revenue-producing activities: Do your sales reps forget to follow up on opportunities? What percentage of the sales team’s day consists of administrative work rather than making calls? Is it time for an overhaul of your lead management process?

Inefficient back office tasks: Is information getting lost between your CRM and your external project management system? Could you reduce confusion simply by aligning project and sales management into a single system?

4. Where do we waste the most time?

If you can’t pinpoint any “broken” systems to fix, you might try looking for a common symptom: wasted time.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we all do things that are less than optimal. In fact, one of my strategic initiatives for this year is to identify ways that I waste time. Each time I do something that seems like a time waster, I jot it down for future optimization.

Here are a few goodies I’ve discovered so far:

• Deleting marketing emails that I never bother to read (without unsubscribing first)
• Clicking through endless folders on my computer to find documents
• Constantly pushing out due dates on overdue tasks
• Dealing with overlapping reminders on my smartphone
• Spending time on things that I could have paid someone else to do

As the saying goes, you can’t solve a problem unless you first know that it exists. Although I don’t yet have solutions for these time wasters, I’m at least becoming aware of them.

Lead by example and begin studying your own work habits. You’ll likely inspire others at your organization to do the same!

5. What will soon require attention?

The business landscape is always changing. That’s never been more true than in today’s digital ecosystem.

You may not have a crystal ball, but you know your industry as well as anyone. By this time next year, what external forces (if any) will have changed enough to require your attention? What are experts in your field projecting? Are customer tastes and preferences evolving? How will all of this impact your company’s position in the market?

Taking things one step further, it may even be prudent to prepare a situational SWOT analysis, focusing specifically on the forward-facing aspects of the analysis: opportunities and threats.

To illustrate my point, let’s say that your company supplies injection molded parts to the automotive industry. For years, there have been rumors that your largest customer intends to bring this process in-house, thereby negatively impacting your order volume. Lately, you’re seeing evidence that this may becoming true. The threat is obvious—a significant impact to short-term revenue. On the other hand, the opportunities could be worth thinking about:

Opportunities:

• New capacity
• Expansion outside of automotive
• Greater margin potential
• Diversification of risk

Waiting around for things to happen is rarely wise. Smart business owners (like you!) are always a few steps ahead, especially when it comes to anticipating market forces.

6. What can (and should) be automated?

In today’s world of APIs and workflow automation, it’s amazingly easy to automate certain business processes. Alas, knowing what to automate first is where many business owners get stuck.

If you’re unsure of what to prioritize for automation, here are a few ideas:

Recurring tasks: The delegation process itself is a great place to start. Which tasks do your team members commonly forget to do? Do they (or should they) occur on a predictable pattern? If so, adding a recurrence pattern to your tasks might be a smarter way to delegate.

Pipeline administration: When an opportunity advances from one pipeline stage to the next, there’s typically some action required by your staff. If your pipeline has a “Quoting” phase, common sense tells us that a proposal should be prepared at that time. If only it were that apparent to everyone at your company! Stop hoping for results, and automate the assignment of activity sets.

Order delivery: The moment a deal closes, a race begins to deliver goods or services within the customer’s expected time frame. There’s not a moment to lose, which is why manually transferring information from your CRM to another system is particularly inefficient. A better approach involves keeping everything in one system and simply converting the sales record into a project.

7. Which systems align with our goals?

After digging into the prior six questions, you may begin to notice a common thread stemming back to your company’s technology footprint. Do some of your systems overlap in functionality and create more confusion than value? Or, conversely, are some systems being underutilized, thereby causing your team to do unnecessary work? Would an integration between certain applications create new economies of scale for your business and boost user adoption? These are all questions worth asking.

Remember, a software application offers minimal value on its own. To maximize the value of your company’s technology, it’s important to continuously ensure alignment with your strategic vision. As this vision evolves, so too should the systems deployed by your organization.

Get the Conversation Going

Asking the right questions can be an excellent way to launch an effective strategic conversation. As you work on this year’s strategic plan, consider asking more questions and pushing your team to collect the right answers.

Looking at the truth can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but it’s exactly what you need to do when building a more viable strategic plan.

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