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.

Request a demo

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

The post The ultimate guide to business intelligence metrics appeared first on Insightly.

And one way to optimize conversion rates is to use lead scoring best practices.

As a refresher, lead scoring is a methodology where you assign value—often numerical—to different attributes such as visitor interaction with your brand. These points are then used to rank your leads in order to determine which prospects are ready for the next step in your sales process.

Here are seven lead scoring best practices that can help improve your conversion rate.

Lead scoring best practices

Define your buyer persona & journey

Use your existing customer database and research to better understand your market and create a more accurate buyer persona. You can start with customer details, such as age, location, language, occupation, company they work for, interests, and specific goals. Depending on your business, you may need to create more than one buyer persona.

Once you come up with your buyer personas, you’ll have a better grasp on their goals and the journey they take in order to achieve them. You need both buyer personas and customer journey to come up with a personalized marketing strategy tailored to attract your ideal customers.

Increasingly, consumers are only willing to engage with customized marketing messages specific to their interests. So develop personalized content to stand out from your competitors and generate better leads.

Include negative scores

Negative scoring attributes are just as important as positive scoring when deciding who are the qualified prospects in your list. This will not only make your scoring more accurate, but it will help you eliminate those who do not meet your criteria.

For example, you can factor in unrelated job titles (such as “intern” or “college student”) or behaviors such as “unsubscribing from emails” that will remove points from their overall lead score.

There could also be instances where a lead ranks high in your overall matrix, but is not your target customer. For example, a graduate student researching trends in your industry, who has attended all your webinars, signed up for all your lead magnets, etc., but has no intentions of paying for your products or services. This is where negative scores will come in handy.

Align your sales & marketing teams

Lead scoring is a sales and marketing methodology. Therefore, in order for the system to work, both sales and marketing must be in sync. The criteria of what makes up a qualified lead should be relevant to both teams.

Since your sales team are the ones interacting with the customers, they are able to offer unique insights which the marketing team can use to reevaluate and adjust your brand’s lead scoring matrix accordingly.

Without your sales team, your marketing team won’t be able to create a better lead scoring system. And without your marketing team, your sales team will be dealing with many unqualified leads. So be sure these teams operate in sync for most steps of the sales process.

Personalize your emails

Make use of your customer database in personalizing your emails. Information such as their name, location, and their recent transaction with your website might prove useful for your email content. If you are using a unified CRM for sales and marketing, then you have all customer data at your fingertips at all times, with full visibility into prior outreach and interactions.

Improve your response times

Customer response is so crucial, but a Drift study found that 58% of companies never followed up with lead and up to 90% of businesses don’t respond within the first five minutes. Failing to follow up or even respond quickly can immediately lead to lost sales.

In the digital age, where customers have easy access to so many options and can switch brands quickly, it’s crucial to stay in touch with your potential customers while they are researching options and thinking about your brand.

For example, once you’re able to set an appointment for a product demo, follow up with reminders and share relevant and helpful information. You can easily automate these tasks with tools like Insightly and save time for both sales and marketing reps.

Implement a follow-up strategy

As you study your lead scoring system, you will be able to pinpoint cold leads who need a little push or re-engagement with your business, a good follow-up strategy is crucial.

Leads are usually grouped in three categories, based on their attributes and behavior: cold, warm, and hot. A cold lead is someone who has shown any interest in your business, a warm lead has expressed some interest, and a hot lead is someone who matches your ideal profile, and is ready to do business with you.

Use the lead scoring system as a guide when developing a follow-up strategy. Since all leads have different relationships with your brand, you will need to find a different, most appropriate approach for each.

For instance, you can send cold leads basic information about your business, but share more detailed information about the products and services with people who have browsed your website and have specific questions.

Monitor & evaluate your results

If you are new to lead scoring, don’t fret when you are unable to pull it off the first time. Coming up with a lead scoring system is expected to be a series of trials and errors.

Make it a point to always monitor and evaluate your results so that you can continuously improve your lead scoring matrix. The more information you gather about your customers, the better you’ll be able to determine what kind of adjustments you need for a more accurate system.

With a properly implemented lead scoring matrix you’ll start noticing a significant increase in your business’ conversion rate and marketing ROI.

Ready to create a lead scoring matrix and align your sales and marketing all in one place? Request a free consultation and a product demo with an Insightly rep.

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Lead disposition helps you streamline your marketing and sales efforts, so that you spend the right amount of time trying to nurture or convert certain leads. There are a few tips to help you manage your lead disposition process, and one of them is having a clearly defined prospect scoring, or lead scoring, system.

In this post, we want to show you how to create a lead scoring system, so that you can better execute your existing lead disposition process.

Why use lead scoring

Let’s first take a look at why lead scoring is so integral to the lead disposition process, and the actual ways it can help you make faster sales from highly qualified leads.

Prioritizing leads

Use lead scoring to identify hot leads, or prospects that are most likely to convert into an actual sale. More specifically, use lead scoring to easily determine which of these leads have scored high enough in your matrix (more on this later in the post) to be moved into the next stage of your sales process.

On the other side of the spectrum are cold leads. Some of them may require additional nurturing, while others shouldn’t be disqualified and removed from the contact list. With lead scoring, you can effectively keep track of your recent interactions and attempts to re-engage or nurture any leads who show signs of dropping off or turning cold.

Identifying top subscribers and net promoters

One added benefit of lead scoring is being able to identify your top existing customers, who can become your net promoters or affiliates for your products.

Reviewing your net promoter score vis-à-vis your lead scoring matrix can tell you if any customer might be able to refer your products/services to other prospects or if they’re more likely to remain as passives (users who are satisfied with your product but are vulnerable to competitor offers) or detractors (unhappy users who may damage your brand and business growth with word-of-mouth).

Your lead scoring matrix can even tell you if your business is able to start implementing a referral or affiliate program. Determine how engaged and loyal your customers are, start predicting your net sales per product when you introduce affiliate earnings as expenses, and invite those loyal customers to be your first promoters.

How to start lead scoring for your business

1. Align your sales and marketing teams

The first prerequisite for your lead disposition process, and ultimately your lead scoring process, is to align your sales and marketing teams.

Marketing teams should know when exactly a lead is considered a SQL that’s ready to go through the next stage of the sales process. Sales teams can provide valuable insights about what makes leads convert to a sale, so marketing teams are able to tweak and improve their campaigns for lead generation and lead nurturing.

2. Revisit your buyer personas

Once you’ve aligned your sales and marketing teams, work together to revisit your buyer personas. At minimum, your personas should cover all these information:

• Name
• Demographics
• Pain points
• Goals
• Favorite features of your software or product
• Biggest concerns about your software or product
• Decision-making power
• Ability to buy

Revisit your existing customer profiles to update or change your buyer personas.

Having all the required minimum information plotted in your buyer personas can help you create a more accurate lead scoring system from the onset.

3. Create a lead scoring matrix or point system

A typical lead scoring point system goes from 0 to 100 points. But, of course, you’re free to design a matrix that makes more sense to your team and your business.

In this matrix, you will essentially be plotting specific behaviors or criteria that apply to a lead or customer, which is then awarded a specific number of points or score.

The most important thing to note while you brainstorm this matrix is to award specific behaviors—or criteria—that indicate a higher likelihood to purchase with higher points, and that these criteria or behaviors really do indicate higher interest to purchase.

Make sure to cover different criteria about your customer’s behaviors, then assign points based on each. Let’s look at a few specific examples.

Profile criteria

These include demographic information that apply to your customers. Businesses may assign a lead 1 point if they are a small local business earning X amount of annual revenue, but give them 2 if they are a medium-sized business earning Y annual revenue.

Leads may get 10 points if they are a sales manager but only 3 points if they are a junior salesman.

Behavioral criteria

Behavioral criteria are specific actions or behaviors your customers take to engage with your brand and may indicate interest to purchase or learn more about your product.

You will need to include behaviors that apply to specific campaigns, such as a webinar, for example. So leads are awarded 10 points if they signed up for a webinar and then receive 20 more points if they attended live.

Also consider any repeat behaviors that may indicate interest, including viewing a landing page or sales page multiple times or inquiring about a product via multiple channels.

For example, a possible lead scoring matrix for a website and domain host company may include “signed up for a free account,” “looked at current promo for hosting plan,” or “checked logo maker landing page 3 times” in their set of behavioral criteria.

Negative criteria

As best practice, include negative criteria in your matrix, which are those that tell you a lead is an unqualified lead and is not worth pursuing further. For example, they may be an intern or university student looking for general information or someone who is based in a country where you can’t do business.

This also covers behaviors like no email opens, clicks or other engagement with marketing campaigns for the past X months, unsubscribing from emails, or reporting your emails as spam.

4. Define consumer behaviors that point to interest

Create a range or threshold to indicate to your marketing team that a lead is hot enough to move into the next stage of the sales process. Anyone who doesn’t meet this criteria may require more nurturing, so your marketing team will be able to follow up with them.

Use your lead score to pinpoint several ideal scenarios that indicate a lead is now sales-qualified, then add up points for each to determine just what makes a sales-ready lead.

For example, perhaps a lead responded to a cold email campaign and asked for more information about your offer. Or another lead attended one of your webinars and clicked the link to your sales page.

5. Consult sales team for logic errors

Your sales team can provide valuable insights about your existing customers and the indicators that truly point to interest or require more lead nurturing.

Consult your sales team for errors in your assumptions, so your lead scoring matrix is as accurate as possible.

6. Connect with your CRM and other tools

Your next step is to plot your lead scoring system to your CRM. Wherever possible, integrate your tools together so that each behavior and criteria can be scored automatically, depending on your users’ actions. If you use a unified platform, like Insightly, you can streamline the entire lead management process and simplify sales and marketing integration.

7. Monitor and evaluate results

It’s best not to expect you’ll have the perfect lead scoring system in place right away. These tips are meant to help you create one as accurately as possible at the beginning. Over time, you will notice areas for improvement and update your system accordingly.

Keep monitoring your results. See if your assumptions about SQLs are reflected correctly in your lead scoring matrix. If not, adjust your point system to reflect the most accurate behaviors and criteria that point to SQLs being ready to purchase.

Start lead scoring to shorten your sales cycle

Speed up your sales cycle by targeting your warmest leads and spending time nurturing everyone else. Use the steps above to figure out exactly which leads are worth pursuing and which ones might require less effort, if any at all. Just be sure to keep monitoring your results to determine how to continually improve your systems.

Read more like this:

• What is lead disposition?
• 12 tips to generate qualified leads from a sales webinar
• Why use marketing automation?
• Lead generation vs. customer retention

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In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at customer data and explore best practices for customer data management.

4 primary types of customer data

Names and job titles. Email addresses. Support ticket records. Online reviews. Transactions. Cross-device usage patterns.

The list goes on and on…

Simply put, customer data comes in many shapes and sizes—and, from many sources, too. Making sense of customer data can seem overwhelming, especially without the right perspective. As a result, some companies fail to overcome roadblocks to effective data use, thereby diminishing the impact of their most valuable business asset.

To create some semblance of structure and clarity, customer data is often categorized into groups. Here are four primary customer data groups.

1. Basic data

Basic personal customer data forms your organization’s fundamental understanding of each relationship. Many—if not most—standard data fields in a CRM could be considered basic data. A contact’s name, email address, phone number, job title, and linked organizations are examples of basic customer data. Demographic data, such as gender and income, or firmographic data, such as annual revenue or industry, are also basic customer data.

When aggregated and analyzed across multiple contacts and/or organization records, basic data builds the basis for audience segmentation. Then, by using tags or reports in your CRM, you can begin to visualize how many customers share common attributes.

2. Interaction data

Sometimes referred to as “engagement” data, “interaction” data includes the many touchpoints that customers have with your brand. Interaction data is particularly useful for informing decisions that pertain to the buyer journey. Pageviews, ebook downloads, social shares, email inquiries, and demo requests are common examples.

Interaction data is often anonymized and aggregated for high-level reporting purposes (with the ability to “drill down” for further insights). For example, marketing consultants spend considerable time studying interaction data in web analytics platforms to understand campaign effectiveness and return on advertising spend (ROAS). In addition, some marketing platforms provide user-level reporting to track where each customer came from.

3. Behavioral data

“Behavioral” data offers insight into the customer’s experience with your actual product or service. (Note: The difference between interaction and behavioral data can seem fairly nuanced depending on your business and industry.)

Technology companies are frequently cited as premier users of behavioral data, such as free trial sign ups, user account logins, feature utilization, user license additions, deactivations, and downgrades.

That being said, almost every organization maintains some type of behavioral data (even if they do not realize it). If you’re a service-based company, you probably send detailed invoices that inform customers about why they’re being charged. Why not leverage this data to hone in on your most popular solutions? If you’re a manufacturer, you regularly receive purchase orders that are tracked in your ERP. In addition to helping you accurately fulfill your customer’s request, each purchase order represents an excellent opportunity to understand customer preference and identify future trends.

4. Attitudinal data

“Attitudinal” data helps you understand what customers think about your company and the solutions that you provide. Unlike the other three types of data, attitudinal data delivers a first-hand account of what customers actually think. Online reviews, support ticket comments, and satisfaction surveys are sources of attitudinal data.

Here’s the big problem with attitudinal data: Some customers are louder than others when it comes to expressing their opinions about your company. Does one scathing review from a dissatisfied person truly reflect the sentiment of your entire customer base? Probably not. That’s why consistent and proactive collection of attitudinal data from a statistically significant group of customers is key.

Collecting and managing customer data

Once your team has established a firm grasp of these four primary types of customer data, they can begin discussing how best to collect it. Here are a few questions to think through as you formulate your data collection and management plan.

What are our data goals?

On its own, data offers minimal value to your organization. Start with the big picture. Do you want to harness data to improve customer experience or develop new products or features? Is accelerating revenue growth or profit maximization the primary motivator? Discuss and agree on your “why” before getting bogged down in the minutiae of data talk.

How do other companies in our industry leverage customer data?

You’re probably not the first company in your industry to seek a more data-driven culture. Research how similar organizations have leveraged customer data in a secure and scalable way. What are their data goals? Supplement your planning efforts with your findings.

What data is essential?

Accessing and integrating customer data requires effort and, likely, an upfront opportunity cost. As a result, you may not be able to have all of the data that you want on day one. What data is critical to the current and future health of your business? How does it align with your stated data goals? Sequence the most essential data first and build a backlog of secondary data to revisit in the future.

What is the cost of accessing and managing data?

In addition to intangible opportunity costs, you may also encounter tangible expenses, such as software and consulting fees. Does your current CRM offer the right mix of integrations to properly ingest and report on your essential data? Does your CRM vendor charge a premium for AI-driven features that make predictive analytics a reality? If you do not already have a CRM, what is the cost to evaluate and implement a system from the ground up?

Do we have the right tech stack?

Sometimes less is more. Trying to integrate multiple systems is more work than just starting over with a unified platform that does everything you need.

Case in point, I have one client who is thinking about switching CRMs. For years they’ve relied on separate CRM and marketing systems, creating constant confusion in the customer data management process. Insightly Marketing, which consolidates CRM and marketing under one platform, could be a viable solution for simplifying and elevating their customer data.

What are the risks?

Data protection regulations (like GDPR) along with industry-specific data security requirements are becoming commonplace amidst our data-centric economy. Understanding security risks and implementing safeguards to protect customer information are key steps for any company that wishes to use data.

How will we maintain clean data?

No one wants bad data. Without the right systems and processes, however, bad data will become an all-too-familiar reality. To keep data clean, implement proactive data deduplication measures, keep your staff well-trained, and look for opportunities to eliminate manual data entry.

What is our expected (and actual) ROI?

Anything worth doing should be done the right way. The use of customer data is no exception. If your primary goal is to reduce churn, put a hard number on it. For example, “We expect to reduce churn by 10% by effectively using customer data.” Once agreed to, set a process to measure progress toward the achievement of this goal.

Maximizing data’s impact

It’s clear that customer data is more important than ever before.

With the right mix of tools, systems, and processes, your organization will put itself in a position to effectively use customer data and, ultimately, achieve more goals and grow business.

How are you managing your customer data? What are the systems and processes you use to help you make the most of your customer insights?

You can get a free needs assessment from Insightly and discuss best solutions for your immediate and long-term customer data management goals. Request a demo—it’s free and no commitment is required.

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The post Customer data: everything you need to know appeared first on Insightly.

It happens to everyone. But why?

Let’s explore how bad CRM data happens to good teams—and how to fix and prevent it.

What is “bad data” and why does it happen?

What exactly is “bad data” in the context of your CRM? Defining bad data can seem like a rather subjective exercise. That being said, from a marketing consultant perspective, bad CRM data usually comes in one of the following forms:

Errant records

Example: A lead record contains the wrong email address and/or phone number.

Incomplete records

Example: An organization record contains zero relationship links to related contacts.

Inconsistent records

Example: Some lead records use proper capitalization, while others are all lower case.

Overlapping records

Example: One customer relationship is being tracked across duplicate contact or organization records.

Valueless records

Example: Your company runs an online ad campaign that generates dozens of non-business email addresses that are clearly fakes.

As illustrated by the previous examples, bad data does not originate from a single source. Rather, bad data usually creeps in over time as a result of lax business processes, broken systems and integrations, and subpar decision-making. In short, bad data comes in many forms and from many places, which is why fixing it can be such a challenge.

Fixing bad CRM data

There’s not a magical solution for fixing bad CRM data. There are, however, several steps that you can take to improve your situation:

1. Identify good data and its sources

Before you get bogged down with negativity, it may be wise to first identify the success stories in your CRM. For example, is there a specific advertising campaign that consistently produces large amounts of highly qualified leads with zero (or minimal) data discrepancies? Or, perhaps the use of drop-down menus has streamlined data entry and minimized oversights. Carefully study what works and plan to do it more in the future.

2. Identify and fix largest sources of bad data

We’ve already established that bad data comes from countless sources. But, is it possible that a few sources are responsible for the largest chunk of your problems? If you struggle with duplicate records, perhaps your web-to-lead integration is misconfigured and requires an adjustment. Or, perhaps your CRM administrator does not understand how to properly import trade show attendee lists and could benefit from additional training. Spend time investigating the situation and look for easy fixes that could eliminate hundreds or thousands of issues with minimal effort.

3. Identify and fix less frequent sources of bad data

After correcting the largest issues, it’s time to move on and address the myriad of other less obvious causes of bad CRM data. Here are just a few examples and fixes:

Sales reps don’t have time to worry about entering clean data: Sales reps are very busy people and not everyone is always “detail-oriented.” On the other hand, good data is essential for modern sales teams. Data integrations can simplify the collection of key business information, thereby freeing up sales staff to focus on what they do best—sell.

Customizations are out of control: There are many stakeholders to keep happy when your CRM is your central source of truth. Sales reps want to know everything possible about their leads and contacts. Support agents need a way to track customer satisfaction and prevent churn. Accounting wants the ability to flag problematic accounts. These wants and needs can often manifest themselves as CRM customizations, which can clutter your CRM with unused or misused data fields. Unused and misused data fields lead to bad data. Therefore, be strategic and selective when agreeing to implement a stakeholder’s request for CRM customization. Consider all possible use cases of a customization feature and find a solution that will stand the test of time.

Lack of structure for free-form text fields: VP of marketing. VP Marketing. Vice President, Marketing. These variants essentially mean the same thing, but, when expressed differently, can create confusion and muddy your reporting and segmentation data. Look for ways to standardize the assignment of job titles or consider using tags to categorize contacts by persona.

Deduplication is too complicated (or risky) to mess with: Deduplication can seem like a scary thing, especially when you do not have a formalized lead disposition process. In reality, deduplication prevents staff from wasting time by keeping your data clean. Deduplication workflows vary by CRM provider, but, if you’re an Insightly user, be sure to check out the SmartMerge guide.

No one is validating the data: Banks hire auditors to ensure their financial data is in compliance. Your CPA reviews your business and personal financials to help you file an accurate tax return. But, who is auditing your most valuable business asset, i.e. your CRM data? Ongoing data validation in your CRM is a key step for maximizing business insights and identifying new sources of bad data.

Preventing bad CRM data

In addition to ongoing data validation processes, what other steps can you take to prevent bad CRM data? Here are a few ideas:

Rely on data-driven indicators, such as MQL-to-SQL: What percent of your MQLs (marketing qualified leads) are actually accepted by sales? If the number is low or on a downward trajectory, you may be dealing with an underlying data issue. Does sales have the information it needs to accept a certain type of lead? Is marketing attracting leads that are in the wrong stage of the buyer journey? Sales and marketing metrics, such as MQL-to-SQL ratios, can serve as leading indicators of data-related issues before they become bigger problems. Check your lead disposition process. Use Insightly’s quick guide to learn how to set up and/or improve your lead disposition.

Leverage AI in your CRM: It’s easy to get overly excited about your CRM’s sales and marketing features at the expense of lesser-known technical capabilities. For example, Insightly users will be glad to know that their CRM automatically checks for duplicates each time contacts are added or a data import is performed. Be sure to fully understand and use your CRM’s duplication prevention safeguards.

Frequently reinforce data cleanliness: Your teams can play a pivotal role in maintaining data cleanliness, but only if they understand how to do so. Create standard operating procedures for entering data into your CRM and distribute them to staff. Keep these procedures up-to-date and require managers to ensure their staff have read and understand them. When you hire new staff, make the CRM data management training a mandatory part of onboarding. Look for other ways to make data and data cleanliness an essential part of your company culture.

Out with the bad

No doubt, bad CRM data is a real problem for businesses of all sizes. However, with the right approach, it’s a problem that can and should be resolved. By proactively rooting out bad data and implementing sound business processes, you and your team can maximize the usefulness of a CRM and, as a result, make better decisions, align teams, and grow business faster.

Learn more about the importance of proper customer data management and pick up a few best practices from Insightly’s data management blog series:

• Why customer data is increasingly important (Part 1)
• Top 3 roadblocks to effective data use (Part 2)
• How to accelerate revenue growth with data (Part 3)

To learn how Insightly CRM can help you solve your customer data management needs, request a demo.

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The post How to fix bad CRM data appeared first on Insightly.

Businesses of all sizes—regardless of industry, product, or service—are facing an increasingly complex situation when it comes to managing all of their data. Customer data can be especially difficult to manage; yet, it’s the most important type of data that a business owns.

So, what should a modern organization do to effectively manage all of their customer data? Implementing a CRM is an essential step. That being said, simply signing up for a new piece of software (or switching CRMs) is no guarantee for success.

To reduce risk of failure and maximize the impact of customer data, forward-thinking companies take a strategic approach by proactively organizing and centralizing their customer data. In this post, we’ll discuss why customer data is so important, how a CRM can help, and best practices for structuring your CRM so that it provides clarity (and not confusion).

Why a structured approach to data is worth the effort

Before we dive into specifics about organizing your CRM, let’s briefly reflect on why doing so is worth the effort. After all, you’re a busy person. Your team is busy. Spending time on non-revenue producing activities, such as data organization, can feel like a major distraction.

On the other hand, failing to effectively manage customer data can have devastating consequences on your business. When data is spread across inboxes, spreadsheets, shared documents, and other data silos, your teams cannot perform at peak efficiency. They spend more time chasing down customer contact information than actually engaging the customers they aim to serve.

Organizing customer data in a central, shared database overcomes the inefficiencies of data silos by providing:

• Quick and easy access to relevant customer information
• A single source of truth for internal collaboration
• Transparent reporting for enhanced accountability
• Less confusion, fewer overlapping systems, and a lot less craziness

And, you have to keep in mind the growing concerns about data privacy and security—especially in light of recent regulations, such as GDPR. In today’s business environment, proactive data management has rapidly become an essential element of compliance and risk management.

How a CRM helps

One of the most challenging aspects of managing customer data is knowing the right way to structure it.

Sure, you could keep everything in a spreadsheet on a shared network drive. That’s certainly one approach to managing customer data (and, surprisingly, one that many companies still rely on). However, do-it-yourself solutions, like spreadsheets, have a number of obvious drawbacks—not the least of which includes a lack of structure.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine that you’ve been tasked with building a spreadsheet to house all of your accounts, contacts, and leads. Where would you even begin? Should leads and contacts be maintained on separate tabs? Which column headers (data fields) would you create? What would be the best way to draw connections between organizations and their related contacts? Where will sales reps add their updates and notes? Organizing customer data in a spreadsheet is not as easy as it may seem. Too much flexibility, it turns out, creates nothing but confusion.

Compare this approach to that of using a CRM, like Insightly. Unlike a spreadsheet, most CRMs come with prebuilt data structures that help you bypass basic questions about data organization. As an example, Insightly’s standard record management structure looks like this:

Prospective customers are entered as lead records. Leads are converted to opportunities, organizations, and contacts. Once opportunities are won, they’re converted into projects. Each lead, opportunity, contact, and project has a set of standard fields that help to ensure consistency of data collection.

As a relationship advances, the entire customer journey remains perfectly intact. Nothing gets lost along the way, and there’s no time wasted building pivot tables for reports. Everything feeds into a customer data management system that’s already been tested by tens of thousands of customers who have gone before you. (Of course, you can always customize your CRM to your exact needs, if necessary.)

In short, a CRM provides an intuitive, out-of-the-box solution for collecting and managing data in alignment with your customer journey. After all, not every customer buys on day one.

Best practices for keeping data clean & organized in your CRM

Simply adopting a CRM will not solve all of your customer data management headaches. Yes, the standardized data structure will help; but, it’s also possible that new CRM-related issues can occur. To prevent such issues and elevate the usefulness of customer data in your CRM, consider these best practices.

Stay focused on adoption

Some companies fail to successfully implement their CRM. Failure has many causes, but lack of user adoption is certainly at the top of the list. Adoption is not a one-time project. Smart companies establish ongoing accountability measures and training programs aimed at maximizing system utilization—and, as a result, ensuring that users are collecting customer data as expected.

Integrate & consolidate systems where possible

Relying exclusively on manual data entry is not a fail-proof strategy. People forget and make oversights. Supplementing manual data collection with automated CRM integrations increases the flow of customer data and lessens the administrative burden on end users.

Better yet, look for ways to reduce the need for third-party integrations and simplify your tech stack. For example, with a unified CRM for sales and marketing, users no longer need to build data integrations to third-party email marketing automation systems.

Set guidelines, definitions, & naming conventions with accountability measures

What exactly is a “lead”? When should a lead be passed to your sales team for follow-up? Should operations use the customer’s name when naming project records? These are the types of questions you’ll frequently encounter without a well-defined set of guidelines, definitions, and naming conventions. Even then, you’ll still need a way to audit the system and proactively minimize bad data.

Limit user permissions

Members of your sales development rep (SDR) team probably do not need access to sensitive customer billing information. Likewise, a graphic design contractor who occasionally helps with email marketing campaigns may not need access to customer names or emails. Be selective about who can access and edit your data.

Be strategic about customizations

True, it would be nice to know each customer’s date of birth so that account executives can extend their birthday greetings. But is this data field actually necessary to the success of your business? Does it move the needle enough to impact your bottom line? Scrutinize every customization idea in light of its impact on business.

Customizations, when used strategically, can be helpful. When used flippantly, customizations can create clutter, distractions, and muddy your data.

Dispose of data when appropriate

Collecting and organizing customer data should not be confused with data hoarding. Not every record should be retained indefinitely. Developing an effective disposition strategy can keep data tidy and align with ongoing data security and compliance initiatives.

Elevate customer relationships with better data management

Data management processes and systems may not help you increase sales or decrease the cost of goods sold on day one. However, when done the right way, prudent use and collection of data can have a lasting impact on the long-term health of your company—especially as you scale your operations to serve even more customers.

Ready to organize your customer data? Request a demo with an Insightly rep to receive a free business and data needs assessment.

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The post How to organize customer data in a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Now let’s go over the basics of setting up a lead disposition process and how to clear common obstacles along the way.

Setting up a lead disposition process

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that you and your team see the benefits of lead disposition and want to implement it at your company. Where do you start?

According to Insightly’s CMO, Tony Kavanagh, a logical first step involves aligning sales and marketing around a shared set of definitions and processes.

Agree on definitions

The following terminology must be collectively defined by marketing and sales operations and understood and agreed to by everyone in marketing and sales.

• Prospect: anyone in your database who has ever expressed a basic level of interest in your product or service
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): prospects whose activity indicates that they are more likely to become customers based on prospect scoring (as compared to other prospects)
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): MQLs that have been reviewed and passed to sales for follow-up
• Opportunities: Converted SQLs who have expressed a willingness and ability to buy

Agree on the ground rules

Once basic terminology has been defined, sale operations should provide marketing with a clear explanation of how leads will be managed from acceptance through disposition. A well-defined prospect scoring mechanism (see next section) should expedite the handoff from MQL to SQL. The goal should be for sales to accept leads as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing the amount of time that a lead sits in your CRM queue.

When it comes to disposing of SQLs, there are only four possible outcomes:

1. SQL is converted to an opportunity
2. SQL is not ready and is reverted to a prospect for further marketing
3. SQL times out (i.e., after 30 days) and is reverted to a prospect for further marketing
4. SQL is not a real lead and is completely deleted from the system (rare, but possible)

Regardless of the outcome, the need for sales and marketing alignment cannot be understated. Marketing depends on a continuous flow of feedback from sales to understand why certain leads were converted, deleted, or reverted. Sales depends on marketing to effectively nurture converted and reverted leads so that the pipeline never dries up.

Lead disposition, when done correctly, elevates sales and marketing alignment by necessity.

Build, refine, and align your infrastructure

Clearly defined terminology and rules make it easier to identify technology and automated workflows that enable effective lead disposition. At a minimum, you’ll need:

• Prospect scoring and grading mechanism that leverages activity data (such as website interactions and email engagement) and aligns with the buyer journey from visitor to lead
• Comprehensive nurture programs that complement your lead disposition rules
• Shared set of reports and business intelligence dashboards that reflect the buyer journey and include performance and profitability data by customer segment
• Tightly coupled CRM and marketing systems (or, better yet, an all-in-one system or a unified platform, that provides a single source of truth)

Of these four elements, ensuring CRM and marketing system alignment might be the most important to tackle first. After all, it’s hard to align teams around a common objective when data is spread across multiple data silos.

“When marketing and sales applications are disparate systems sitting on separate databases, failure to implement robust lead disposition process rules is forgiven, as implementation is difficult,” says Tony. “Neither marketing nor sales are willing to step up and own the process, and both sides can hide behind the artificial walls that separately-implemented technologies create.”

Don’t waste your lead acquisition efforts

As you think about a lead disposition process at your company, consider all the efforts that go into lead acquisition. Regardless of their size, industry, geographic location, or product/service category, all businesses want more leads that convert to customers. You spend a lot of time strategizing how to create awareness with larger audiences, engage them with compelling content, and turn anonymous visitors into leads.

Lead generation is hard work

Building a conversion-friendly website is an art. Creating high-impact content requires a unique blend of writing talent and SEO knowledge. Designing click-worthy banners and social graphics is an iterative process that involves multiple stakeholders.

Lead acquisition costs money

Pay-per-click advertising provides an excellent way to reach a large number of potential customers at scale. Unfortunately, paying per click can get expensive—especially in highly competitive markets. Some companies pay as much as $25 per click in order to drive consistent traffic to their websites. Assuming even an optimistic visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 5%, you’re looking at a cost per lead of $500. Leads are expensive to acquire, and it only gets worse with new market entrants.

Gain clarity with lead disposition

Your sales team is looking for higher quality leads with less clutter. Marketing wants transparency into why some leads convert and others do not. The best way to keep both teams happy is through lead disposition.

Challenge your staff to stop thinking of your lead queue as a final destination. Leads either become your customers, or they don’t. It’s time to build systems and processes that support this mentality. Your sales reps, marketers, and customers will thank you.

Looking for ways to align sales and marketing and make the most out of every lead? Connect with one of our reps to see Insightly’s unified platform at work.

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The post How to set up a lead disposition process appeared first on Insightly.

When a prospect asks for a follow-up, he or she is opening the door to future engagement.

Unfortunately, despite your sales team’s best efforts, such requests inevitably seem to slip through the cracks.

In this article, we’ll discuss why your reps forget to follow up with prospects and how to correct the issue. For the purposes of this post, we’ll use lead and prospect interchangeably.

Reasons why some reps don’t follow up

Everyone seems to be on the same page during your Monday morning sales meetings. Each deal in the pipeline is discussed thoroughly, next steps are agreed to, and the meeting ends. However, as the week progresses, you feel increased levels of anxiety. Why aren’t your reps following through on more of their promises? Are they intentionally ignoring certain leads, or is something else awry?

The answer is complicated, but it may have to do with a variety of factors:

Lack of structure & accountability

Maintaining a spreadsheet-based approach to sales management isn’t helping the situation. With no clear differentiation between leads and opportunities, your default sorting rule places too much emphasis on those deals further along in the pipeline. Granted, they’re important, but so are the leads that aren’t fully validated yet. In effect, spreadsheets artificially diminish the perceived value of your leads.

Poor record-keeping

It’s entirely possible that your reps are actually engaging with prospects. Perhaps they’re just forgetting to update your tracking documents. After all, your reps are great at selling, but data entry isn’t their greatest skill. Integrating their inboxes to a CRM would mitigate the issue. Unfortunately, everyone is far too busy with data entry to evaluate vendors. It’s a vicious cycle.

Too many other tasks

Setting aside twenty minutes each day to follow up with prospects sounds easy enough. In reality, every minute of the workday is jam-packed with proposals, quotes, and demos. Creating automated follow-up workflows would add efficiency and build capacity. But, sadly, with your current setup, automation isn’t feasible.

Misaligned goals

Your reps receive commissions when deals close. Everyone wants to push pending deals across the finish line, but at what cost? Aren’t leads important? Perhaps it’s time to revisit your compensation model to encourage a healthier balance of lead engagement.

As a result of these and other issues, you’re fairly confident that some leads aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Prospects are starting to feel unloved, which isn’t beneficial from a revenue or reputation standpoint.

How prospects interpret the silence

When prospects expect to hear from you, but don’t, they can interpret the silence to mean one of several things. None of the following interpretations are particularly helpful for forming lasting business relationships. (In fact, they’re very difficult to overcome once a perception has been formed.)

“I guess they just forgot.” No one likes to be forgotten. Sure, communication is a two-way street; the prospect could follow up just as easily as your sales team could. On the other hand, if your company can’t even remember to follow up during the sales process, what else will it forget to do in the future?

“We must not be big enough to get their attention.” Rightly or wrongly, business owners can be notoriously skeptical of sales reps — especially when his or her company’s size is an impediment to being taken seriously.

“They don’t have their act together.” Aside from your organization’s marketing materials and website, your sales force forms an initial impression to prospective customers. Forgetting to follow up leaves an unmistakable mark on the perception of your company.

“They’re not able to serve our specific needs.” It’s difficult to establish a value proposition without having a conversation. Obviously, conversations can’t happen unless someone from your team reaches out.

In short, prospects shouldn’t have to beg to hear back from your team. When a prospect and sales rep agree on a follow-up date, they’re essentially making a verbal pact that your company must live up to. Silence is a violation of that pact.

Using technology to effectively engage leads

So, how can you break the silence and give prospects the attention they’ve requested (and deserve)? For starters, I would recommend forming a transition plan to migrate off of your spreadsheet-based system and on to a CRM. Spend time identifying a well-integrated CRMs and/or vendors that provide convenient data import options, field mapping features, and informative step-by-step onboarding documentation.

Although there are dozens of CRMs you could potentially consider, it’s also important to pick one that delivers the right mix of lead management features and integrates with your marketing platform. If your goal is to engage more leads without overwhelming your sales reps, look for a system that at least offers these key features:

Task delegation & tracking

Create accountability by linking tasks to specific lead records. In doing so, you’ll help your sales reps stay better organized. You’ll also create much-needed visibility into prior and upcoming activities for your leads.

Email scheduling

Based on your sales team’s workload, they don’t have time to send lead follow-up emails during normal business hours. However, firing off a batch of emails at 7 pm on Friday evening won’t deliver the results you’re looking for, either. Identify a CRM that offers email scheduling, which allows users to queue up emails in advance and ensures leads are engaged at exactly the right moment. Who knows — you might even delegate this task to a sales assistant or fully automate it.

Bulk follow-up

Depending on your lead volume, manually scheduling follow-up emails can still consume substantial time. Some CRMs offer mass email capabilities, which help you engage multiple leads in a single step.

As your business grows, you’ll also need to better align your sales and marketing, ensuring a proper lead disposition and consistent messaging. In this case, a unified CRM for sales and marketing might be your most effective option for data integrity, user adoption, team alignment, and ROI.

Engage more leads in the pipeline

In summary, the vast majority of your customers started out as leads. With perseverance, your sales team nurtured these leads through the pipeline. Some relationships developed quickly, while others took time to fully blossom.

Either way, one thing is unmistakable: your sales pipeline depends on efficient lead management. It’s time to drop the spreadsheets and use technology to take lead engagement and customer relationships to a whole new level.

Want to learn how you can use a CRM to better manage leads? Request a demo to get a free needs assessment and see Insightly CRM in action. No commitment required.

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The post Why failing to follow up sends the wrong message to prospects appeared first on Insightly.

With data playing such a pivotal role in today’s business landscape, how can your company increase data accessibility without spending a fortune on data scientists and complex algorithms? Look no further than your CRM.

In this article, we’ll share 11 easy-to-configure CRM reports to guide your decision-making.

1. Total booked revenue

Key metric: Booked revenue for your company during a predefined period of time, most likely year-to-date or quarter-to-date.

Why it’s important: You can’t grow your business without a detailed understanding of reality. Booked revenue provides a high-level indicator of the company’s overall success trajectory. Tracking revenue from closed deals is certainly not a new concept, but it’s absolutely vital for a variety of business processes, such as forecasting, preparing budgets, ordering materials, and making staffing decisions.

2. Revenue performance by team member

Key metric: Booked revenue by sales representative over a given period of time.

Why it’s important: Collectively, your sales team is one of your company’s greatest assets. As with any team, however, not everyone is an equal contributor. Analyzing booked revenue at the individual level makes it easier to identify superstars, rising performers, and, yes, even those who underperform.

User-level data also offers transparency into who is actually using your CRM. Is it possible that “underperformers” are just forgetting to update their deals, thereby leading to underreported revenue? Perhaps they need a little extra encouragement (or training) to fully adopt your CRM.

3. Pipeline by team member

Key metric: Value and number of open opportunities, broken down by team member.

Why it’s important: Next to booked revenue, sales pipeline is arguably your most important sales team KPI. Obviously, pipeline translates into sales. In theory, the more pipeline each sales rep brings in, the more business they’ll eventually close.

User-level pipeline data is also helpful for identifying discrepancies in your funnel. For example, if your lowest producing sales rep consistently has the largest pipeline, there may be a problem. Is his close rate really that bad? Or, is he just pumping your CRM full of low-quality opportunities to inflate his pipeline numbers? Either way, something needs to change.

4. Total pipeline value

Key metric: Value of all open opportunities across all sales reps and pipelines.

Why it’s important: Pipeline is the lifeblood of your organization. All things being equal, a dip in pipeline value will negatively impact future revenues. Total pipeline value is therefore instrumental for detecting and correcting issues before they get out of control.

Filtering expected revenue for specific pipelines can also be useful, especially if your company offers solutions with vastly different sales lifecycles. Is your total pipeline being dragged down by a product-specific quality control issue? Has an unexpected downturn in one sector of the economy impacted your sales forecast?

Start with the big picture and drill down into data that answers the tough questions.

5. Pipeline by opportunity state

Key metric: Value and number of open opportunities, broken down by opportunity state.

Why it’s important: Missing last month’s numbers is a major bummer. That being said, no sales forecast is 100% accurate. Don’t just chalk it up to bad forecasting. Rather, diagnose the situation by diving into the opportunity state data.

Did someone drop the ball last month? How many big deals are still on the verge of closing? What steps should be taken to get more opportunities across the finish line? Opportunity state reports provide your team with rapid answers to complex questions like these.

6. Win rates

Key metric: Number of won opportunities divided by the total number of opportunities.

Why it’s important: Sales reps are competitive people who like to make their bonuses. Win rate data help reps stay one step ahead of their pipeline. If, on average, 50% of your opportunities convert into paying customers, sales reps need to have at least twice as many deals lined up to hit their numbers.

7. Won & lost opportunities by reason

Key metric: All closed opportunities (won and lost), broken down by state reason.

Why it’s important: As we discussed in the buyer journey series, understanding buyer motivation is a key step for pivoting toward a customer journey mentality. Tracking specific reasons why customers choose (or fail to choose) your company provides data-driven insights into buyer behavior. Stakeholders across product development, marketing, sales, customer success, and other departments can then use this information to design innovative solutions that resonate with potential buyers.

8. Lead volume by source

Key metric: Number of leads created during a specific period of time (probably monthly, quarterly, or year-to-date) from different sources.

Why it’s important: Marketers (digital marketers in particular) spend most of the day figuring out how to increase lead flow. Social media, pay-per-click ads, and content marketing are common tactics used by marketers to generate leads. The reality is that some sources generate more leads than others, which is why marketers need source-specific lead reports in your CRM.

9. Lead quality by source

Key metric: Number of leads converted into opportunities, broken down by source and lead rating.

Why it’s important: Generating hundreds or thousands of low-quality leads is counterproductive and fosters misalignment between marketing and sales. Feeding marketers with lead quality reports from your CRM enables them to refine the marketing mix and deliver higher quality leads.

10. Contact volume

Key metric: Number of contacts created during a specific period of time.

Why it’s important: Don’t forget that the letter “R” in CRM stands for “relationship.” Each business relationship involves two or more people, which is why contact volume can be an early indicator of pipeline and revenue.

11. Sales territory maps

Key metrics: Number of leads, number of customers, sales revenue, product sales volume, etc. in any given geographic region — state, region, or country.

Why it’s important: With sales territory mapping you can monitor sales performance across different geographic regions to identify areas with the most (or least) activity, determine potential opportunities, and allocate resources accordingly.

Accelerate your business with CRM data

In conclusion, CRM reports and dashboards can be an excellent source of business intelligence for your company. Take time to explore the prebuilt and custom reporting options that your CRM has to offer.

Learn how Insightly customers like IT Consultis gain insights from dashboard reports and use the knowledge to better manage their sales and grow revenues.

Ready to explore Insightly CRM dashboards and build your own reports? Request a demo below and get started.

Request a demo

The post Top 11 CRM reports in 2019 appeared first on Insightly.

We were happy to receive feedback from our customers and in this release we’re introducing advanced reporting tools, new dashboard visualizations, and platform and productivity improvements that we’ve developed with our customers’ feedback in mind. We’re also unveiling Insightly’s new help center and community portal with user guides, FAQ section, and content for specific use cases and industries.

Watch the Q2 2019 Product Release Webinar where Insightly CEO Anthony Smith introduces new features.

Check out the new Insightly Help Center.

New Quotation & Product Reports

Our new advanced custom quotation and product reports allow you to select and filter opportunity products and quotation line records, group and sum them, and build reports that you can schedule and email straight to your inbox on a custom schedule.

You can also:

• Run these reports at anytime from within the reporting system
• Share these reports with other users
• Set custom user permissions

Availability: Enterprise Plan

Product & Price Book Dashboard Additions

You now have the power to drill into product and quotes data and visualize trends and spot patterns using over 75 different chart and map types. Chart and map both opportunity products and quotation line items with our new dashboard visualization capabilities.

For example, you can map out which of your products have sold best in different states or territories, or how many quotations have included specific products at different times of the year.

Availability: Enterprise Plan

Custom Fields in Tasks & Events

Better manage your time and projects with our new custom fields in Tasks and Events. Track exactly how much time it takes to perform different individual tasks and automatically roll up that info to see the calculated summary times for all tasks in a project or opportunity. To learn how to do this and to better understand calculated fields, check out this step-by-step tutorial in our help center.

This new feature makes a lot of our customers happy and is available on Insightly web app as well as on our Android and iOS apps.

Availability: All Plans

Drag and Drop Layout Editor

With our advanced layout editing you can easily organize all relevant and important information and declutter your view in both details and related tabs.

Use drag and drop tool to easily add and remove fields, change the order of fields on the page, and modify sections for different users in both details and related tabs. Choose which tables or grids you would like to see on the related tab and in which order.

Availability: All Plans

Flexible Multi-Column Layouts

This is another widely-requested feature from our customers that brings total flexibility in the page design and views. You can now customize individual sections on a page layout to be adapted to multi-column instead of single column. View all key information in small laptop displays and large external monitors at the same time, with the software switching to multiple columns if the screen is wide enough.

And because you can set the multi-column layout per section, you can preserve the single column layout where it makes sense for you.

Availability: All Plans

Improved Data Entry, Linking, and Lookup

Save time and clicks with our new data entry and productivity additions.

Add a record (contact) and simultaneously link other records to it (organization data) in the same motion. You can do the same with inline linked records for all forms in Insightly, including your custom objects and fields.

Gain more visibility and insights into the depth and scope of your relationships with any contact. Use new table in the related tab to view peers, co-workers, and other key connections of your primary contact. With our new page layout editor for the related tab, you can also choose where on the page you would like to see this new table.

Availability: All Plans

Notifications

Never miss an Insightly notification simply because you’re in another app or browser tab. This is great for multitaskers who are always switching between apps as well for users who keep lots of browser tabs open.

By default, on a Mac the notifications pop up in the top right and in Windows they appear in the bottom right. Both operating systems also keep a history of those notifications, so you can click to see prior notification from earlier in the day.

Availability: All Plans

Insightly Help Center

Our customer success and service teams have been hard at work improving the Insightly help center to make it easier for our customers to search for relevant content and learn new tips and insights.

Look up articles and videos with beginner guides, product tips, and best practices to make the most out of Insightly.

Check out the new Insightly Help Center.

Coming soon: Insightly Marketing

During the webinar, Insightly CEO Anthony Smith also previewed brand new Insightly Marketing! To get a sneak peek, watch the webinar.

The post Insightly’s reporting & productivity tools just got more powerful appeared first on Insightly.