Customer relationship management (CRM) systems simplify the process of managing your customer data and relationships so that you can focus on what you do best. In this post, we will look at how a CRM is vital to your small business and why Insightly is the best platform for supporting your growth.

Why your small business needs a CRM

Creating exceptional experiences for your customers is crucial for all businesses. However, it is even more vital for small businesses. Unlike mid-size and enterprise companies, a single customer can make the difference between staying afloat or losing it all. This means you must go above and beyond to ensure that every customer has such a good experience, that they never consider looking anywhere else.

So how do you go about delivering these winning experiences? It starts with how you manage and utilize the information surrounding your customers. You need to truly understand someone to best serve their needs. In the early stages of your company, it may be tempting to manage your customer information using spreadsheets, physical documents, or even worse – in someone’s head. However, this leads to unwanted inefficiencies as your team must spend more time searching for information. If your team is weighed down by inefficient systems and processes it will lead to wasted time that could be better spent helping your organization grow.

A CRM gives you a centralized place for storing your customer information. By using a single tool, it is easier to ensure that your information is always up to date and easily accessible to everyone on your team. This leads to greater productivity and higher quality service given to your customers.

How you can streamline your sales and marketing with a small business CRM

As a small business with a small team and a small number of customers, you may be wondering if your company really needs a dedicated platform for storing customer information and managing relationships. However, you don’t need to be a large-scale business to benefit from a CRM. Here are some of the ways you can use a CRM platform to help your small business.

Get a 360-degree view of customers

A CRM serves as a central source of truth for everything you need to know about your customers. When you have holistic views of each customer, it is easier to craft high-quality experiences. You can personalize every interaction based on the information you have at your fingertips while ensuring that the timing of your messaging is always aligned. It also leads to consistent engagements across sales, marketing, and customer support.

Get more done faster

Managing all your data from a centralized location allows your team to get more done in less time. Instead of wondering where to find the information they need, everyone can access the CRM to quickly pull any insights as required. When you boost your team’s productivity, you lower your business costs while improving processes. This ultimately leads to more sales and better experiences for your customers. 

Qualify your leads more effectively

New leads are a potential source of revenue for your small business. However, not every lead will be a good fit for your company, and some will be more worthy of your attention than others. Without a good lead management system, your sales team will struggle to achieve their optimal results. A CRM helps you filter and manage your leads so that your sales team only focuses in on those most relevant to your business and more likely to close.

Key functionality of a CRM for a small business

Every small business is different, with a unique set of needs. That said, there are some functional requirements needed in a CRM no matter your specific use cases. Below we will examine some of the essential features to look for in a CRM for small businesses.

Pipeline management and visibility

A CRM should be the backbone for all your sales processes. You want the ability to visualize your entire sales funnel to know exactly where every prospect is in their journey and how they got there. When you have a clear understanding of your sales pipeline, you are better able to track each opportunity and can tailor your communication to only include the most relevant messaging to each prospect.

Contact management

CRM software lets you track every customer detail and interaction. This includes basic information like contact details along with more specific information like the last time you messaged them. A strong platform also comes with the ability to create custom fields for specific details that are important to your business, and the ability to add notes to each contact profile to reflect each interaction. With this information, everyone on your team can pick up a conversation without having to ask repetitive questions.

Workflow automation

Large, small, or a new startup, every business has repetitive tasks. These are often low-value actions but are required for the company to function. When your business is small, these tasks take up a larger portion of your available resources. With a CRM, you can program many of these tasks so that they no longer require manual input.

Integrations

A CRM solution is just one tool your business will rely on. Over the course of operations, you’ll also need tools for accounting, project management, and internal communication. The more effort you need to put into switching between different platforms to perform important tasks, the less time you’ll have for caring for customers and growing your business. This is why you need a CRM that has integration capability.  The best CRM software for small businesses will integrate seamlessly with the other tools used to run your business, making your important customer information available to any other process and system in the company.

Why Insightly is the best small business CRM software

Insightly is a highly customizable solution that offers a wide range of sales, marketing, and management features to help your small business operate more efficiently while creating world-class customer experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take a look at a few of the distinguishing qualities that make Insightly the best CRM for small businesses:

Quick implementation

A CRM won’t do your business much good if it is difficult to use or if it takes a long time to set up. In fact, nearly 70% of CRM implementations stall due to lack of adoption. Insightly is built with user-friendliness top of mind, ensuring your employees won’t have to waste valuable time simply learning their way around. Plus, the platform is quick to set up, so you can enjoy immediate benefits from adopting a CRM. This ease of use doesn’t limit functionality as you still get all the key features needed to manage your business. 

Workflow and automation

Insightly comes packed with built-in automation features to streamline every aspect of your small business. You can use these capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks like updating records, sending followups, and routing leads to the best sales rep. By automating away your mundane tasks, your team can spend more time serving customers and engaging in other high-value activities. 

Robust integrations

If a CRM is to serve a single source of truth for your business, you need the ability to bring together all your other tools into the platform. With Insightly, you get powerful pre-made connections for hundreds of the most common business platforms. This includes communication tools such as Slack as well as social media platforms and email marketing tools like Gmail. By integrating Insightly with all your external platforms, you can set up workflow automation to eliminate redundant tasks and the need to switch back and forth between solutions. Via AppConnect, Insightly has more than 500 pre-built integrations available to you.

Customized reporting

Your business may be small, but you can still benefit from the enterprise-grade data visualization capabilities included in Insightly CRM. The platform allows you to create custom dashboards to visualize data and insights for any process happening in your CRM. For example, you can see how many opportunities you have in your pipeline and their projected value, given their current stage. Or, you can view roundups of important projects to know where you stand. By leveraging these insights, you can understand every part of your business to make decisions that drive the best outcomes.

Streamline your business with a user-friendly CRM system

Now you now know some of the immense benefits of implementing a CRM system for your small business. Don’t think you can put off adopting the software until your business is larger and more established. It will only get harder to implement the software when your team and customer base are larger.

Flexible, with affordable pricing, Insightly CRM was made with small businesses in mind, making it well suited to help your company at each stage of its growth. Plus, you can get started for free for up to two users.

Try out a free trial of Insightly CRM or get a personalized demo to see firsthand how the platform can support your small business.

The post Best Small Business CRM: Empower Your Small Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

In this post, we’ll cover some of the key reasons you need a CRM system for your eCommerce business and why Insightly is the best CRM for eCommerce.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM
• How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?
• What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce
• Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software
• How to win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM

ECommerce is growing, but it is also more competitive than ever before. Customers have countless online stores and marketplaces they can choose from when making a purchase, and it is easier for competitors to enter the market.

If you want to stand out in this hyper-competitive market, you need to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. This means creating holistic views of each of your customers to understand the needs of new buyers to show them the products they are looking for, and analyzing the behavior of past buyers to know how to best keep their interest.

This can be challenging as eCommerce stores inherently lack the ability to interact with customers in person as you would with a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Even more so when data is scattered across multiple tools. eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento have customer profiles, but the information is limited, normally only consisting of name and contact information. 

A CRM brings together fragmented data on customer actions from all touch points to give you a centralized repository for storing data and connecting sales and marketing teams. This data allows you to gain insights into your customers’ shopping behavior and purchasing habits. You can see everything from when a customer lasted visited your site to what products are their favorite. 

When this information is consolidated into a single platform, it is far easier for you to target customers with messaging that is relevant to them. By engaging in personalized marketing, you can drive more sales while creating a better overall experience for your buyers.

How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?

Adopting a CRM for your eCommerce store can have a big impact on your bottom line. Data accessibility shortens the sales cycle and fosters loyal, long-term customers and strong features improve your business operations. Here are a few of the ways you can use an eCommerce CRM to benefit your business.

Gain detailed insights for marketing

As an eCommerce business, you need powerful analytics and data to market your products effectively. With a CRM, data is gathered from all your marketing channels to provide detailed insights and reports into your eCommerce business.

You can see what pages are the most visited, how many people add products to their catalog, how many abandon their carts, and more. All of this data helps you understand the shopping patterns and preferences of your customers.  With this information, you can quickly identify your strengths and points of weakness in your shopping experience. For example, you might notice new customers prefer a specific type of product then choose to feature this product more prominently in your marketing.

Segment customers by interest

Segmentation is critical to ensuring that each customer receives an experience relevant to them. With an eCommerce CRM, you have the ability to create highly targeted segments for all of your contacts. You can then create personalized marketing message tailored to each of your customers.

These segments can be created using a variety of criteria. For example, you can create unique groups based on total spent, past products purchased, pages visited, and more.

Boost business efficiency with automation 

Without a system for streamlining all the tasks needed to run your business, even the most organized and efficient organizations can only operate at a fraction of their capacity. When your team gets less done, it ultimately leads to a poor experience for your customers and less revenue for the company.

A good eCommerce CRM lets you automate processes and redundant tasks. This gives your team more time to focus on engaging customers and creating the quality experiences needed to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce

With a better understanding of how to use a CRM to improve your eCommerce business, let’s examine the key functionalities to look for in a CRM solution:

Data security and compliance

Securing your data is vital to the longevity of your company. One data breach can tarnish your brand’s reputation past the point of recovery. Because a CRM serves as a centralized repository for all your customer data, it needs to be completely protected from all security threats.

A good CRM meets all the industry-standard security compliances. There are security features like two factor authentications and all data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Customization

No two eCommerce businesses are the same. This means that there is no standard CRM layout or set of features that will work for every company. Because of this, a good CRM for eCommerce needs to be highly customizable.

You want to be able to customize the interface and functionalities as needed. This means customizing sales funnels, building custom reports, and creating custom fields and templates to use for your records.

Integrations

When evaluating CRM software for your eCommerce store, it is also important to find a platform that can integrate with the other tools your business uses. To start, the CRM will obviously need to work with your eCommerce platform in order to gather data such as orders and sales histories. Other useful integrations include accounting software and any lead generation tools.

Like automation, strong integrations help you save considerable time. It frees you from having to hop back and forth between different platforms to review data or complete tasks.

Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software

Insightly CRM is designed to help small and medium eCommerce businesses provide the great experiences needed to make a difference in a competitive market. It lets you bring all aspects of managing your customer relationships into an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform. Here are some of the distinguishing features that make Insightly the best CRM for eCommerce:

Holistic and unified data

Today’s buyers interact with your business through a variety of touch points. Someone may first discover your business through social media, view your store on their mobile device and complete their purchase through their laptop. You need the ability to track this entire journey to really understand your customers.

Insightly connects data from all these interactions to give you a unified view of all your leads and customers. With the data, everyone on your team is on the same page and has access to the information needed to create successful campaigns. They can then have more meaningful interactions to boost conversions while working better without the need to switch between tools. Customer support can know someone’s purchase history in real-time to quickly find a solution to their problem.

Audience segmentation

Age, location, browsing behavior, and other characteristics reveal a lot about how to best target a customer. Insightly gives you the ability to segment your audience according to their interests and stage in the customer journey. It ensures that you always send the right message at the right moment for each individual.

Advanced automation

Small and mid-sized eCommerce stores need tools to get more done with fewer resources. Insightly makes it easy to create workflows to break down your manual process into smaller, repeatable steps that the CRM can perform automatically. You can automatically update records to reflect each customer interaction and save time by automating many of your administrative processes.

With Insightly, you are also able to automate your email marketing efforts so that your team can focus on devising winning campaigns. For example, you can set up an automated email message for previous customers that have not engaged with your business for a few months. Or you can create an abandoned cart series targeting anyone that leaves your site with items in their cart.

Quick implementation and ease of use

CRM software should make running your business easier. With Insightly, you get a platform that is easy to implement and quick to learn. You don’t have to spend unnecessary time onboarding your team. 

Insightly CRM has an intuitive user interface and the features are easy to use so that all team members can utilize full functionalities of the CRM. With Insightly AppConnect, you can quickly set up an integration with eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magneto. Plus, there are hundreds of other pre-built connections to help you integrate the other apps and tools that your business needs.

Win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

The right CRM software helps your eCommerce business provide great buyer experiences that retain loyal customers. With Insightly, you have an all-in-one tool to know every detail of your customers while improving processes to run your business more efficiently.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your eCommerce store standout.

The post Best Ecommerce CRM: Improve Your Customer Experience with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

Today’s sales organizations are facing challenges unlike any they’ve seen before—but the most successful teams have always been flexible, agile, and adaptable. The key lies in recognizing potential pitfalls and finding smart ways to overcome them.

As we move to the midpoint of 2022, we’ve compiled this list of top sales challenges for 2022, along with tips and recommendations for navigating them successfully.

Challenge #1: The Great Resignation

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 48 million people voluntarily left their jobs in 2021. This unprecedented exodus from the workforce—dubbed “the Great Resignation”—has hit sales teams especially hard, with average turnover rates estimated around 35 percent.

Even in the best of times, attrition makes it difficult for sales teams to operate effectively. Sales leaders are forced to focus on hiring and onboarding instead of strategy and execution. Performance suffers as depleted teams struggle to meet revenue goals. And morale declines as those who remain are left to pick up the slack. The best way to protect your team—and the bottom line—is by retaining the employees you already have.

How to manage it

Here are some tips to increase retention and minimize the impact of the Great Resignation:

• Show your appreciation. This should be obvious, but employees are less likely to leave when they feel valued. Take the time to recognize accomplishments and celebrate milestones. Invest in sales training and provide opportunities for career growth. Most importantly, treat each person as an individual—not just a cog in the sales machine. 
• Clarify your employer value proposition. Of course your comp plan should be competitive, but retaining your sales talent is about more than money. Give them something to believe in! Develop clear messaging about your company’s culture, your mission, and your products—and show how you’re making a difference in the world. (This is especially important for Millennials.)
• Uncover the real problems. Despite your best efforts, some people will inevitably choose to leave. As painful as they may be, exit interviews are your best opportunity to discover the issues that are driving talent away, so don’t treat them as a formality.

Challenge #2: Coming out of “pandemic mode”

As we emerge from more than two years of pandemic-induced uncertainty, sales teams everywhere are struggling with the questions of a new reality. Live events are starting to return, but will they ever be the same? How do sales meetings work when my prospects work remotely? Are the virtual processes we put in place on-the-fly appropriate for the long term? 

The fact is, the Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses to innovate, and some of those innovations are more efficient and effective than the old way of doing things. Rather than waiting for a return to “normal,” smart sales teams are seeking a way forward—which requires a creative, hybrid approach that blends digital channels with traditional in-person interactions.

How to make it work for you

As you prepare your team for post-pandemic selling, here are a few recommendations:

• Learn how to work virtual events. In-person conferences are making a comeback, but virtual events are likely here to stay. Without a traditional booth to make connections and book meetings, you’ll need to get creative with your event strategy. Every virtual event is different, so investigate the event platform and agenda to identify the best networking opportunities. Then get involved with the event itself. Attend as many sessions as possible and participate in sidebar chats to make organic connections. 
• Adjust tactics for digital leads. A greater percentage of leads are likely to come from digital sources (rather than trade shows), so you may need to fine-tune your nurture tactics to move them through the funnel. Email remains a go-to channel for sales communications, but consider adding a personalized video to build rapport without face-to-face contact. 
• Invest in training. Now more than ever, sales is an evolving field. A proactive approach to training will keep your team up-to-speed on emerging skills that can help them sell in a virtual-first world. Regular training also keeps everyone aligned and ensures you’re all working toward the same business goals.

Challenge #3: Gen X buyers take the reins

We’ve touched on the Great Resignation, but there’s another employment phenomenon that’s impacting sales teams: the Great Retirement. The Baby Boomers (currently 58-76 years old) are retiring in droves, and the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated their employment exodus. As of late 2020, nearly 30 million Baby Boomers had retired—and a year later, more than half of adults age 55+ had joined them.

As Baby Boomers vacate long-held leadership roles, a new and different cohort is taking control of B2B buying decisions. Generation X is a much smaller population than either Baby Boomers or Millennials—so they’re frequently overlooked—but understanding the nuances of “Gen X” is now critical to selling success. 

How to embrace it

As you navigate this new generation of B2B buyers, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Gen X values authenticity. Unlike Baby Boomers who don’t mind being “sold,” Gen X buyers value marketing that is personal and authentic. Earn their business by becoming a trusted advisor. Your sales messaging should demonstrate how you can help them achieve a specific business result, like saving money or avoiding risk.
• Gen X questions everything. As the original “latchkey kids,” Gen Xers were often left to fend for themselves, and major economic events like the dot-com bust shaped their formative years. As a result, Gen X buyers tend to be independent thinkers who value data and unbiased research. They want the straight, unvarnished truth—and they want to see the proof, not just the pitch.
• Gen X is tech savvy. Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen Xers have spent their lives adapting to new technology. While they aren’t digital natives, they’re comfortable with a wide variety of digital channels and tech platforms. But they’re also a nostalgic group, so the occasional direct mail campaign may land well—if it’s authentic and well executed. 
• Gen X has unique communication preferences. While Gen Xers are often stereotyped as loners, the isolation of the pandemic affected Gen X buyers just as much as everyone else—so they’re likely ready for some face-to-face contact. Their feelings on phone calls are somewhat ambivalent—they’re more likely to answer than Millennials, but far less likely than Boomers.

Challenge #4: Remote work limits expansion opportunities

“Land and expand” is a popular sales strategy—and with good reason. Starting small and building on that foundational relationship lets you earn more business and land bigger deals throughout an organization. Studies show that 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations influence more than 90% of B2B buying decisions.

Of course, expansion becomes more difficult in a remote workplace because your customers aren’t having those everyday water cooler conversations. That means you’ll have to get creative—and proactive—if you want to connect with internal decision-makers.

How to overcome it

Following are some ideas to help jumpstart your expansion efforts:

• Do your homework. Develop a clear value proposition to explain how your solution can help different parts of the prospect organization. The selling points that resonated with your initial contact may not have the same impact in another department.
• Use all the tools at your disposal. Tools like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo make it easy to identify additional prospects within an organization. Your CRM data can also provide extensive insights on the people who make purchase decisions at your target company.
• Be proactive with outreach. If you have a solid relationship with a contact, ask for referrals. Requesting introductions to specific people is usually more effective than a blanket referral request—which makes your prospecting research even more important.

Challenge #5: Lack of alignment between sales, marketing, and success teams

Internal alignment isn’t a new challenge, but it’s even more common among remote teams. In many organizations, the tools to enable remote work were selected hastily and implemented haphazardly, leading to poor integrations and siloed communications. And remote teams tend to communicate less overall, which creates more opportunities for misunderstandings and conflicting priorities. 

Misalignment has significant consequences, including tension between teams, poor customer experience, and missed revenue targets. So it’s in everyone’s best interest to give sales, marketing, and success teams the tools and support they need to work together effectively.

How to fix it

Here are some tips to help you build (or rebuild) alignment between internal teams:

• Leverage technology to improve communication. Real-time chat tools like Slack, Google Chat, and MS Teams can go a long way toward replicating face-to-face conversations. Because they’re so easy, they encourage more frequent and informal communications.

• Schedule recurring meetings. Regular sales team meetings are a must, but you should also schedule monthly or quarterly meetings with marketing and support teams. Meet in person when you can or use video conferencing to increase engagement on remote calls. 

• Get on the same platform. Giving everyone access to the same data is a huge step toward improving alignment. A unified CRM platform (like Insightly) serves as a single source of truth, to give cross-functional teams a 360-degree view of each customer. 
• Optimize integrations. When evaluating your tech stack, consider the tools your team already uses. Any new additions should integrate easily with the tools your team relies on, to increase adoption and utilization.

Meet your toughest sales challenges head-on with Insightly

At the end of the day, the solution to most sales challenges boils down to three things: consistent processes, internal alignment, and deep customer insights. The right CRM puts these goals—and more—within reach.

Insightly CRM was designed to help growing teams develop and manage customer relationships through a simple, scalable platform. Insightly is the only solution that aligns sales, marketing, and services on a single, shared data platform for unprecedented transparency and a seamless end-to-end customer experience. And with its intuitive user interface, Insightly CRM puts customer insights at your fingertips for more strategic decisions and better business outcomes.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your company achieve its business goals. 

The post 2022 Midpoint: Solving the Top 5 B2B Sales Challenges appeared first on Insightly.

Watch the webinar to hear the full set of product updates, or get a summary of Insightly’s new features below.

Watch the webinar

What’s new with Insightly AppConnect?

AppConnect is an integration automation platform that allows you to connect Insightly and its data to all the other software applications you use to get work done every day. Out of the box, it includes over 500 pre-built connectors to applications across HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Productivity, and Data storage.

Updates to Insightly AppConnect:

• Added new Marketing, Data Storage, Database Programming Language Connectors
• No usage or record limits or restrictions on data transfers with AppConnect
• New bulk action to run an AppConnect integrations across multiple records
• It’s now much easier to set lookup field values in a recipe in AppConnect

What’s new with Insightly Service?

In September of 2021, Insightly Service was added to the platform. It’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use service and support application that’s built natively within Insightly, connecting seamlessly with all the applications you use today to run your business. Since then, we added a new mobile application for both Apple and Android users, while also updating three key areas of the Service product:

• Knowledge Base 
• Ticketing Management
• Customer Portal 

Knowledge Management Improvements

Insightly’s Knowledge Base is a convenient reference designed to save time and resources for customers. It’s also a great source of all documentation that teams need when learning about the product.

Updates to the Service Knowledge Base within Insightly Service:

• Reorganize articles in bulk
• New Insightly API endpoints for knowledge article management
• Generate a table of contents in an article automatically from a new editor button
• Archive knowledge articles in bulk from within list views
• Last published date field to article lists and details
• New reports available for knowledge base articles

Ticketing Management improvements

Ticketing is at the core of a team’s ability to track, respond to, and manage customer service requests and we have a significant number of feature updates to report here as well.

Updates to ticketing management within Insightly Service:

• New mobile and tablet applications
• New API endpoint for Insightly Service
• @ mention other agents within a ticket comment
• Ability to see when other agents are viewing or responding to a ticket
• Automated customer satisfaction surveys
• Additional capabilities around ticketing merging
• Improvements to processing incoming emails 
• Auto-hiding of quoted reply text in the ticket view 
• Improved visibility of customer service tickets

Customer Portal improvements

Another Insightly Service update is to our community management experience. You can use the customer portal to organize, manage, and order community content like topics and posts, moderate user comments, flag posts and comments as spam, or edit and clean up user-posted content.

Updates to the Customer Portal within Insightly Service:

• New capabilities for moderating, editing, and approving community posts and comments
• Insightly now monitors and auto-flags offensive and spam user-generated content using AI to save time
• Ticket forms in portals can now be completely  customized including custom fields
• New ability to customize 404 pages

What’s new with Insightly Marketing?

Check out these updates to the behavioral analysis and segmentation functionality of Insightly Marketing.

Segmentation improvements

Segmenting your customer base and targeting a subset of people with exactly the right communications or journey is now easier than ever in Insightly Marketing with powerful new capabilities. Users can now segment and filter prospect’s static and dynamic lists by activities including:

• Emails sent
• Journeys completed
• Forms filled
• Web pages viewed
• Links clicked
• Video’s viewed
• Emails opened

Email system improvements

Email systems often include security software that opens and scans every incoming email for malicious content and scams. Those automated bot email opens and clicks can cause issues for marketers in journeys and email analytics. 

Insightly Marketing now includes newly added AI-based capabilities to detect and filter out these automated bot clicks and phantom opens so marketing journeys that branch off email opens or clicks work reliably, lead scoring is accurate, and email engagement analytics are correct.

What’s new with Insightly CRM?

The Insightly team has also been working on ways to not just improve each product’s functionality, but also the integration between products. In the past 6 months, we’ve invested heavily in the integration between Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM to make it more seamless.

New Cross-Object List Filtering Capabilities

Easily combine Marketing data and CRM data together in the Insightly platform with new capabilities in list filtering:

• Filter CRM contact and organization lists using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects 
• Filter Leads in Insightly CRM by using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects
• Filter opportunities by the linked organization fields

New Quotation Productivity Improvements

Easily manage, search, and generate quotes with these updates to the quoting experience within Insightly CRM:

• You can now use the same list filtering and search functionality in the standard list views to quote products, including the ability to filter by multiple fields and search within a list
• Added support for custom fields on quote products and quote line items, and in our API
• Now configure fields displayed in modals for managing quote products & quote templates
• New capability to quickly clone a quote
• Now one click to email linked contacts in opportunities, projects and organizations

What’s new with the Insightly platform?

Rather than just affecting one application, there are several improvements that will affect the entire Insightly platform:

• Configure Insightly to display a fixed number of  columns of data in any details view
• New improvements to email notifications after  bulk updating records
• Search dashboard lists to find the right dashboard & a new setting to lock all dashboard cards in position
• Automatically log back into the last app used
• New detailed login history of every user login for security purposes
• Audit logging now includes a history of changes to made to related links

If you’d like more information about these new features and how you can leverage them within your current Insightly plan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Looking to upgrade your plan to include Insightly Marketing, AppConnect, or Service? Request a demo.

Request a demo

The post Q2–2022: Product updates to Insightly AppConnect, Service, Marketing, and CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Behavioral segmentation is a way to organize customers into segments based on the actions they take with your website, marketing content, sales team, your brand–really, any interaction they have with your company. Once you organize customers into groups based on the actions they take, you can more effectively target and market to them.

When done correctly, it can seem like marketing magic. It’s something you should be doing and it’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s break it down together.

What is segmentation?

Segmentation has been around forever, both informally and formally. It means dividing customers into smaller groups and speaking to those groups in specific ways. Examples include dividing by location, gender, or age. 

When we talk to segments rather than a whole group, we can speak more specifically and therefore have a more personalized conversation. 

For example, if you’re a window installation company emailing your US customer base in January, you can segment using location and change the header image to something snowy for your contacts in Minnesota (north) and something sunny for your contacts in Florida (south). 

The benefit is that the customer receiving your message feels that it’s personalized to them. 

While standard segmentation such as age, location, and gender can be powerful and make customers feel known, behavioral segmentation takes it a step further.

Breaking down behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation in marketing uses data from actions your prospect or customer has taken and allows you to segment those contacts into lists based on those actions. 

For example, you can group prospects who visited your website 10 or more times in the month of January but did not purchase. These prospects show high intent and so may be on the cusp of a purchase. You might consider sending this segment a discount code valid through the first week of February to see if their behavior (site visits) can be turned into a purchase with the right incentive. 

In the first example, it was the person’s location (Florida or Minnesota) that determined the segment; in the second, it was the person’s behavior. The first is geographical segmentation, while the second is behavioral segmentation.

Behavioral segmentation goes beyond demographic segmentation to help you better understand your audience and give them the right message at the right time.

What are the benefits of behavioral segmentation?  

Personalized experiences: At its core, behavioral segmentation lets you create personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. When consumers feel as though a brand understands them, they react more favorably to that brand. This increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue.

Data-driven decisions: Behavioral segmentation allows marketers to make more accurate decisions based on user data since your most (and least) engaged prospects are easy to isolate.

Budget allocation: Behavioral segmentation makes it more clear where to allocate resources. For example, prospects with multiple website hits are likely in-market vs. those with one or two.

How does Insightly Marketing enable behavioral segmentation?  

Tracked Custom Events

Tracked custom events allow users to create a custom event and when it’s triggered by a prospect’s actions, the behavior can be used to alter a prospect score or segment audiences and communications.

This can be useful when you’ve got a behavioral tracking use case that isn’t included out-of-the-box with Insightly Marketing For example, if there users are accessing an online portal, you might consider tracking behavioral data from their interaction with the portal. Or, you might want a combination of activities (clicking on an advertisement and visiting a specific website page) to be tracked or segmented for future communication, offers, and outreach.

Forms 

No matter the plan you choose in Insightly, you have the option to create multiple forms to support your marketing campaigns. To get granular, create unique forms for each campaign  so you can tie every form completion to the action that caused it. Then message those prospects based on the specific offer or asset with which they engaged.

Files

You likely have assets that speak to different phases in the buyer’s journey. Perhaps an article is at the top of your funnel, so you can create a follow-up campaign with industry-specific information for those who read the first article.. If you have a lower-funnel piece, like a pricing guide, your follow-up campaign may include a demo or trial call-to-action. 

Redirect Links

Again, there is no practical limit to the number of links you can have in Insightly. If an asset is ungated, meaning there is no form associated with accessing your eBook or article, append a UTM to the link so you can track the exact journey the prospect took to get to it. Then, segment based on that link to continue the conversation in context.

Use behavioral signals within Insightly Marketing

Your marketing team needs a powerful tool to drive leads and create opportunities. Behavioral segmentation is just one of the many features used to drive and nurture leads for your sales team. Insightly Marketing includes this feature, plus offers customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, beautifully formatted automated emails, and more.

Insightly marketing is also part of a powerful platform that puts your marketing automation tool in the same suite of products as your CRM and customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform.

Get a demo of Insightly Marketing today.

The post How to use behavioral signals in marketing campaigns appeared first on Insightly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration is essential to unlocking the true power of a CRM. Integrations add functionality to CRMs and build a reliable source of truth you can count on to make decisions across your entire organization by connecting every single application you use to run your business.

When done right, CRM integrations reduce organizational silos, save time, and bring an in-depth customer understanding to your entire organization. 

This clarity is where the CRM magic happens.

What is CRM integration?

A CRM is mission-critical sales technology that guides and manages interactions with current and potential customers. It helps companies build relationships with their target audience to improve the customer experience, increase sales and improve profit margins. 

Given this definition, it’s easy to see why your CRM must be integrated with the rest of your tech stack. CRM integration allows customer information to flow freely between all the applications you use to run your business. It’s a 360-degree view of customer data since your data synchronizes across all systems. 

CRM integration creates an accurate, comprehensive picture of your customers and prospects. It improves how you communicate with customers, delivering more value from every interaction.

Why integrate your CRM with other tools?

Sure, you can run your CRM without integrating it with your other systems, but you’ll be missing out on a host of benefits. When you integrate your CRM, you can expect to experience the following: 

• Increased customer interaction: Delivering solid customer support should be at the top of your list to guarantee customer satisfaction. Sharing data quickly among platforms gives an up-to-the minute view of data across your business, empowering your team to serve.
• Reduced manual processes: Manually transferring data from apps to spreadsheets is labor-intensive and error-prone, and keeps  businesses from maximizing their human resources. Plus, manual processes are more prone to errors, leading to a potential decrease in accuracy and, in turn, customer satisfaction. 
• Improved reporting: When data across systems is shared, you get an end-to-end view of your organization which empowers your team and your leaders to make better, more informed decisions. 

Additional benefits include: 

• A complete view of your customers for all users
• Improved, long lasting customer relationships
• An overall increase in sales velocity

The no-code/low-code approach

So, you’re convinced that integrating your CRM is the right move. You may now be wondering how expensive and time consuming that is going to be. The answer depends upon the type of CRM you have implemented. It’s true that some CRMs will require you to work with an outside firm, require developers to write code, and it will a long time to enable your requests.

However, if you’ve selected a modern, unified CRM like Insightly, the process looks much different. Insightly’s AppConnect is a dynamic and easy-to-use, no-code integration engine. It lets you build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization.

Using AppConnect, Insightly facilitates CRM integration without long development cycles. The best part is that you don’t have to be a software engineer to build integrations in your CRM system due to the intuitive, user-friendly interface. So if you’re already using Slack, GSuite, NetSuite, Oracle, or any of hundreds of other platforms, AppConnect is ready to help.

4 Essential CRM integrations for functional teams

Now you know that CRM integrations allow your team to maximize and optimize tasks and perform their jobs more effectively. The more you can integrate CRM technology with your teams and their workflows, the better you’ll be able to focus on what counts — your customers’ experience and their goals. 

You likely want all of the integrations right now, but how do you decide which to prioritize? Talk with your teams to discover and understand their frequent and high visibility needs to gain momentum when kicking off enhancement projects. This approach will simplify processes and provide a clear roadmap to help you determine and prioritize what integrations will deliver the best ROI and limit scope creep during the building sessions. The good news is that Insightly AppConnect is so easy to use, that you can tackle many integrations right away.

Finance and accounting

Empowering your team by integrating their SAP, Quickbooks, and DocuSign processes into a CRM can free them from unproductive platform toggling. They can automate the entire end-to-end process and securely sync and store vital vendor and organizational data, too.

Frequently used requests or processes (payment, invoicing, ordering, quoting, etc.) can be triggered and routed automatically to and from platforms like SAP and Quickbooks that record each step’s signing-off (DocuSign) status and history. CRM integrations also allow you to make sure all needed and required compliance documents are automatically uploaded and organized proactively, so you don’t have to put in the effort to meet regulatory filing and audit checkpoints.

Using integrated dashboards, you will never be far away from reporting status. All your spend and revenue data is ready and at your fingertips to provide critical insights and empower agile business decisions in real-time.

Human resources

Hiring great talent can be a challenge. With integrations to Talent Management platforms like Greenhouse, you can automate referrals and recruitment processes like scheduling interviews, and manage interview feedback communications effortlessly.

Enhanced integrations can also help save HR staff time by keeping job descriptions up-to-date, improving resume scoring, and surfacing better candidate choices, all while syncing it with your HR solutions and platforms.

It can take a considerable amount of time to hire someone, and you want to get them onboarded and productive as fast as possible. Integrating apps like BambooHR, Workday, and OKTA can automate onboarding and offboarding sequences for account generation or deletion, and grant permissions, benefits selection, and HR-based equipment provisioning.

IT and operations

Any downtime means a loss to the bottom line. IT integrations can help detect problems and proactively initiate incident resolution processes. Integrating your CRM with platforms like ServiceNow can automate and prioritize incident ticket generation, which will help decrease resolution times. Users can stay up to date with real-time communications via chatbots and collaboration tools like Slack. This can serve to communicate status in areas like ticket escalation, ticket assignments, and incident alerts. Help Desk staff can access best-practice knowledge libraries from multiple systems, so they have one source of truth when researching solutions.

Sales and marketing

When marketing and sales are in sync, the odds of success dramatically increase. Teams can elevate and strengthen marketing and sales impact by integrating a number of applications to help support and enhance collaboration. Some examples include:

• Keep lines of communication open with the Slack connector. Celebrate victories with closed-won deals auto-populating to a “wins” channel. Receive alerts to approve deals or when prospects are hot and ready for a call. 
• Rather than going back and forth between systems, trigger quotes and invoices via an integration with Quickbooks online, access your online store using a Shopify integration, or trigger DocuSign to get the deal sign-off now.
• Generate roll-up reports on campaign effectiveness without switching apps when you integrate with your ERP (e.g. NetSuite).
• Leverage communications tools by integrating with Gong and SalesLoft to get insights into lead qualification.

These are just a few examples of the benefits of enhancing your sales and marketing collaboration; in fact, there are hundreds of sales and marketing applications you could use to create velocity through the sales and marketing process. 

Insightly: An integrated CRM that goes beyond integration

Your business is about more than just transactions. It’s about building customer relationships that make your clients feel valued and confident about their purchases. 

You already know the importance of centralizing customer knowledge in one place, so your entire team has instant access to essential, reliable data. 

Insightly AppConnect is a powerful automation tool that makes it easy to build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization. 

Test out the Insightly CRM with a free trial to see all the great features and discover how you can grow your business today.

The post CRM integration: What it is, why is it essential, and 4 key integrations appeared first on Insightly.

Top reasons for switching CRMs

The top three reasons why companies decided to leave their previous CRMs were:

• Poor implementation
• Difficulty of use
• High cost

The survey participants could select multiple options, and the majority selected more than one reason. Other reasons included dissatisfaction with customer support and low return on investment (ROI).

Top reasons for choosing Insightly

Every participant selected two or more reasons for choosing Insightly. 70% of customers said they chose Insightly because they liked specific product features and because of ease of adoption and use. The next most cited reasons were attentive sales people/process and cost.

Top areas Insightly solved for customers

90% of surveyed customers said Insightly met or exceeded their expectations. The majority selected Insightly’s product capabilities and features as the reason why. Quality of onboarding and value for the price were the other two reasons.

As far as specific business areas where Insightly has made a big difference, the majority of survey participants selected the following:

• Improvement of standard sales processes
• Customer data centralization
• Lead management

The other areas of improvement included team productivity and data integrity.

While every company is unique and reasons for switching CRMs can vary widely, our survey shows that at the end of the day companies want to get the most value from their investment in a CRM system. That starts with high adoption and usage rates and product capabilities that align with any given company’s goals and CRM expectations.

To learn more about why companies switch CRMs, check out this blog post.

Ready to switch from your CRM? Schedule a free needs assessment and a product demo with one of our reps to see if Insightly is a better match for your business than your current CRM system.

Request a demo

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