At my own company, a tech startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had to weigh the benefits and challenges of working remotely before deciding to become a remote-first company. Below are a few takeaways from our decision-making journey and tips to ensure remote work success.

Remote work benefits

1. Freedom to move

One of the positive aspects of remote work is that it provides freedom for employees to move and work from anywhere. For many employees, especially in tech and other industries that have traditionally been concentrated in specific geographic areas, remote work allows people to stay connected, collaborate and contribute without enduring a high cost of living or other limitations. At my company, this fact alone contributed to a higher employee satisfaction rate.

2. Custom workspaces

For quite some time now, open office spaces have been the norm for businesses across industries. Yet, for work that requires a high level of focus for long periods of time, an open office environment—with all its distractions and noise—is far from ideal. Remote work allows employees to design their own workspaces for maximum focus and productivity.

3. Bigger hiring pool

You can now compete for top talent anywhere in the country and the world. More than that, hiring remotely allows you to build a more diverse team in every sense, attracting people from different backgrounds and skill sets.

Remote work challenges

1. Loss of community

There are a few things that are hard to replicate in the virtual work environment, and among them are impromptu brainstorms, team outings and friendly conversations at the proverbial water cooler. For many companies, in-person interactions fueled a sense of community and were a big part of company culture.

2. Communication gaps

It can be hard to get a read on people during a video call. It’s also easy to miss social cues we often use during in-person interactions without even thinking about it. But just being aware of this fact can help you build understanding and figure out ways to close the communication gap.

3. Burnout

The past year presented new challenges for all of us in every aspect of life, including health, family and work. Working remotely while caring for loved ones and/or coping with social isolation came at a huge physical and emotional cost, causing burnout.

Tips for successful remote work

Every challenge is also an opportunity to learn and grow. Here are a few battle-tested tips to help you overcome the challenges of working remotely.

1. Think digital first

If you haven’t done so already, adopt digital tools and systems that are easy to use and meet your team’s unique needs. If all you need is Zoom and Google Workspace and you’re off to the races, that’s great. But if you’re planning to transition into fully remote work or a hybrid model where part of the workforce remains remote, then you’ll need more than just basic planning and communication tools. For example, you may need to adopt learning management systems to deliver everything from onboarding to HR training to ongoing internal product and service seminars.

We live in the digital age where new data is generated every second. All that information, including customer data, is useless if you don’t properly manage it and integrate different parts of business to implement continuous data-driven improvement. Consider a data management platform to keep your business and customer data secure, align remote teams around key performance indicators and track progress across the entire organization.

2. Prioritize communication

More doesn’t mean better when it comes to communication. Zoom fatigue is real, and meetings are no more popular now than they were when we worked in physical offices. Keep your meetings to the minimum and prioritize clear, consistent and written communication. Make face-to-face meetings more intentional and purpose-driven.

3. Encourage work-life balance

While working from home has its appeal, it can cause burnout. On the flip side of flexibility, the lack of commute and comfortable clothing are the absence of structure in terms of a clear start and end to the workday. The burden is on both leaders and employees to set clear expectations for work hours, response time and meetings, taking into consideration different time zones. It may seem overwhelming at first, but honest and open conversations can help find and maintain balance.

4. Check the pulse of employees on a regular basis

As time goes by, our sentiments about remote work and its impact on our lives may change. Don’t wait until you start noticing productivity dips or a lower employee satisfaction rate. It might be unrealistic for you to check in with everyone individually on a regular basis, but you can use brief surveys to give your employees an opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions.

5. Introduce remote work policies

Remote work may look different at different companies. To make sure your employees understand how remote work is going to affect their daily work and lives in the long term, consider introducing remote-work-specific policies. The policies can include anything from allowing employees to work anywhere within the same time zone or country to offering an ergonomics stipend to planning regular in-person outings once it’s safe to do so. At my company, we did a series of employee surveys to determine our team’s priorities and policies as we adjusted to a new normal.

At this point, it’s clear we aren’t going back to the way we worked before the pandemic. Now the task is to make remote work the best it can be and to keep work productive and meaningful.

The post What to consider when switching to long-term remote work appeared first on Insightly.

In order to thrive in a post COVID-19 world, you need to reassess the ways you connect with your customers.

Here are a few things to keep in mind before you do so.

Get rid of silos

Make sure all your teams use data to create a complete picture of the clientele.

Sales, marketing and customer service teams are working in silos—which causes a number of problems. Namely, it creates a fragmented image of your consumers and their journey across too many places for your team to be serving them at peak efficiency.

Getting everyone on the same page is a first step and one that is essential to re-connecting with your people and understanding them in a more complete way.

Don’t ditch digital

Zoom fatigue is real and all of us are craving in-person connection. Though we’re on our way back to normalcy, don’t start planning for in-person conferences with customers for this year just yet.

Over the past year, you’ve (hopefully) spent time honing your digital communications and marketing strategy while recognizing the power of a well-crafted email campaign.

Your tone and candor in email is extremely important. You have to know your audience in order to be able to strike the right, personalized tone. Knowing your customers, and the needs and challenges they face, is essential to delivering appropriate communications.

Redefine “normal”

One of the good things to come out of 2020 is a more compassionate approach to workplace leadership.

If you weren’t taking a people-centered approach with your customers beforehand, you absolutely should be now. We’ve seen a big shift toward the “humanization” of marketing.

Sometimes it really is as simple as asking your clientele how you can help and voicing your support for whatever their current challenges are. Shift your thinking away from only achieving your own goals to supporting your followers in achieving their goals as well.

A customer-centric approach to marketing is essential to humanizing your marketing efforts and your brand. Make sure they feel heard and have an opportunity to discuss feedback with you. Use  satisfaction surveys, a closed online forum for customers, or direct outreach. Provide guides on using your products to navigate through a crisis, whether on continuing to manage remote work, or how to prepare for the post-pandemic world. Even if your services aren’t directly the most relevant, you can provide your people with curated content.

People are craving a return to normalcy, but it’s important to recognize that things may not be truly “normal” for some time and that may not always be a bad thing.

The post Reconnecting with customers in a post-pandemic world appeared first on Insightly.

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

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

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

1. Know your audience

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

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

2. Collect customer feedback

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

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

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

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

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

3. Make it easy to use & buy

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

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

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

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

4. Scale with your customers

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

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

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

Read more from Anthony:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about the features you need as a company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital technology and access to customer data are constantly reshaping the role of marketing, and as more and more businesses are reorienting toward a customer-centric focus, this extremely valuable customer data becomes a big part of that shift. Marketing is now a research hub, a creative lab and a growth engine—all in one. Marketing’s ability to make data-driven investments and accurately measure and analyze the success of those investments in driving sales and revenue has earned marketers a strategic seat at the decision-making table.

Yet, so many businesses are still struggling to determine where exactly and how much to invest in marketing, and how to measure the success of those dollars. As the CEO of a tech startup, I have my own perspective, which considers three major forces that shape the role of marketing today: leadership, technology and strategy.

Leadership & team alignment

While technology allows us to constantly push marketing boundaries (marketing automation, customer and behavior analytics, social media, etc.), it can quickly become overwhelming and costly. On the flip side, the delayed adoption of marketing technology can cost you customers and revenue. That’s where leadership comes in. When you make marketing technology decisions, hire staff and set expectations, think about it as an investment in growth. With marketing automation, including built-in customer and behavior analytics tools, marketing now owns a significant part of the customer journey and can provide strategic insights, such as brand sentiment, buyer intent and customer satisfaction levels, to sales and customer service. So instead of treating your marketing as mainly a lead generation machine, use its insights and capabilities to amplify efforts, iterate and pivot when needed.

Your customers see you as one brand: whether they get a marketing newsletter or talk to a customer support rep, they might form an opinion on your entire business based on one interaction at any point in their journey. Align your teams around the customer journey and your brand to ensure your marketing investments pay off. Just one bad customer experience or off-brand communication can ruin a brand image much faster than your team can build it.

It’s easy to spend money on marketing, but today you have the ability to plan, track and measure marketing’s contribution to revenue. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs), which can cover everything from email click rate to cost per lead to conversion rate (the ultimate performance indicator). Monitor results and use data to make decisions.

Marketing automation technology

It seems like every day there’s a new marketing tool or platform that promises to engage your customers like never before and set you apart from your competitors. Stay focused. Broadly speaking, your marketing technology should help you to address two needs: customer acquisition and marketing performance measurement. Customer acquisition encompasses everything from email marketing to advertising to content marketing, social media and more. In order to know what works and what doesn’t, you need to be able to track and measure the performance of each channel and individual campaign. The right marketing automation tool can help you to do that.

There are a number of modern marketing automation tools that are easy to use and more affordable than legacy systems. When evaluating a marketing automation system, make sure it addresses all your key requirements and easily integrates with sales and other business tools you use. Remember, you can’t unify your teams without the technology that allows them to coordinate activities, centralize and share customer data, and track performance. At the heart of your marketing and sales integration is lead disposition, or the process of moving a sales qualified lead (SQL) to an opportunity, disqualifying it as inappropriate or returning it to marketing for further nurture. Use marketing technology that allows you to set up a proper lead disposition process. This way, you can make the most out of your marketing dollars spent on lead acquisition and accurately measure marketing’s contribution to revenue.

Go-to-market strategy

With the ability to measure everything from customer sentiment to revenue contribution, marketing is no longer a creative function or an expense. Marketing is now your growth engine, with a goal to attract the right customers through the right channels at the right time with the right message. To make sure marketing serves its purpose, create a go-to-market strategy. Your strategy should define your target audiences, problem-solution fit and messaging. It should also outline channels and tactics you’ll use to reach your buyers and align sales and marketing around your business goals.

The strength and success of your strategy depend on the data you use and your ability to execute as a team. It all comes together here—team alignment, technology and leadership. A go-to-market strategy is your map and framework to address all the moving pieces, including your marketing investments. There’s a lot more to developing an effective go-to-market strategy, but the key point here is to show the extent to which marketing today can inform, guide and help execute your business goals.

Marketing technology can help collect data to build a picture of each customer and their interactions with your brand, allowing you to become a far more customer-centric company. Modern marketing is a lot more than a lead generation machine; it is now a more holistic revenue growth driver across the entire customer life cycle. I hope this article provided you with a renewed perspective on marketing and how it can best contribute to your business success.

Read more like this:

• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• What is disruptive marketing? Why is it so important today?
• From recession to growth: a historical perspective
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics

The post Marketing’s role in building a customer-centric company appeared first on Insightly.

As an entrepreneur, you spend a lot of time working on new ideas and business, solving problems, and creating something out of nothing. Sometimes the path is pretty straightforward. Other times it may feel like you are up against something no one has ever gone through or solved before. Regardless of where you are on your path, it’s always helpful to pick up some wisdom, practical information, or just a different perspective from your fellow entrepreneurs. With that in mind, here’s a shortlist of titles—a few familiar ones and some hidden gems—that offer timely insights and perspectives for entrepreneurs in 2020.

1. The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

Its whimsical title notwithstanding, the book provides helpful insights on restructuring companies for completely remote work. It’s an easy read that takes you behind-the-scenes at WordPress.com (Automattic, Inc), as the company challenged traditional work years ago and created a highly productive all-remote global team. The author shares real-life stories and observational insights into what it takes to build a work culture and drive success with remote employees. You won’t get the nitty-gritty operational side of managing remote teams, but you’ll glean a few ideas from Berkun’s personal leadership experience and lessons learned, including why you have to find and define team culture from within instead of replicating someone else’s practices.

2. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr

In his book, Doerr explains the hugely successful Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method which he learned from Andy Grove, a longtime CEO of Intel and then implemented at a number of organizations, including Google. OKR is a simple goal-setting framework that consists of four pillars: focus, align, track, and stretch. It’s a quick read with interesting inside stories that show how OKR can help companies, big and small, to focus on what matters the most and execute. Read this book if you have a bias for action and are looking for a clear and easy way to motivate and align your team, measure progress, and reach goals.

3. Manufacturing Demand by David Lewis

From sales and marketing alignment to revenue-generating ideas to marketing automation—this book covers a lot of data-driven marketing ground. Lewis, CEO of DemandGen, discusses five key elements of demand generation and how to implement them: buyer personas, the demand funnel, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and analytics. You don’t need to be a techie to take advantage of modern marketing technology and make data-driven decisions. Whether you are a business owner or marketer, you’ll find the tips and case studies helpful in developing demand generation programs and measuring results. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to sell products and services in our digital age.

4. Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon

According to Moon, in order to differentiate your product or brand from all others, you need to stop imitating your competitors and start innovating. Moon debunks traditional competitive analysis and comparative metrics, claiming they’ve created conformity and “competitive herd” which, in turn, makes it hard for companies to stand out in customers’ minds. Read this book if you’re ready to break away from the herd and do something truly different, even drastic. Even though the book is not a how-to guide, you’ll find a few specific ideas that will help you to create your own differentiation strategy, appeal to customers who have a ton of choices, and think of ways to dramatically change your business growth rate.

5. Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane

This is a story of how three guys in Copenhagen founded Zendesk to escape their corporate jobs and make customer service less painful. Svane (one of the founders) shares their journey from Copenhagen to San Francisco Bay Area, full of personal and business hardships, along with his unfiltered insights into what it takes to build and run a high-growth company. Learn why Svane doesn’t glorify failure, is not afraid of boring product ideas, and believes in giving back to the community. Even if you can’t relate to Svane’s experience as a tech company founder, you’ll find his direct style refreshing and the entire story engaging and inspiring. This book is also a great read for people in your life, whether they be family or friends, who may not quite understand what it means to be an entrepreneur, but want to know more about your work.

6. The House That Race Built edited by Wahneema Lubiano

The book is a compilation of essays by prominent writers and scholars, including Toni Morrison and Cornel West, on race, society, power, and culture. You’ll get a historical perspective on legal, political, and cultural constructs that preceded the events of 2020 summer. Regardless of your background, these stories will help you to better understand the history of racial injustice in the United States and its impact on generations of Black Americans and the society in general. As an entrepreneur, you might be absorbed by your business and projects most of the time, but if there’s one thing we’ve all learned this year, it’s that “we are all in this together” and each play a part. These stories will challenge you to do your part as a leader, and do it with an awareness of people’s unique experiences, humility, and authenticity.

Read more by Anthony Smith:

• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business
• How to manage customer input in product development
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020

The post 6 books that helped me as an entrepreneur appeared first on Insightly.

In the new post-pandemic world, businesses have had to rethink operations, culture, and even customer relationships to ensure survival and continued growth. For many businesses this has meant a rapid digital transformation. Based on my experience as a tech CEO and business leader, here are a few insights to help you continue that digital transformation in three key areas of your business.

Business operations

Whether you had to introduce an online sales channel, transition your team to a fully remote work, or rethink your digital ad campaigns—you had to rely heavily on technology to implement changes.

Now you have to shift focus to better preparing your business for future disruptions and growth. Your new strategy should include careful consideration of how and where your valuable business data is stored, so you can better measure progress towards your goals, assess risks, and take a proactive data-driven approach to operations and growth.

To do that operationally, remove roadblocks and bottlenecks between teams to speed up execution and enable continuous innovation. If you have not already adopted an ERP or CRM system in your business—now is the time to invest in one that is both easy to use and flexible enough to fit your future requirements. This type of foundational technology will speed up digital adoption across the board, and as your business faces new challenges and growth you will be able to adjust and course-correct without wasting time and resources.

Organizational culture

For many companies the new normal means all-remote work and restricted in-person interactions and gatherings. And while we can easily connect with each other and stay productive thanks to a plethora of communication tools, there’s something to be said about people meeting up in a shared physical space where spontaneous conversations can lead to breakthroughs, creative ideas, and innovative thinking. Your company culture won’t just follow along into the digital realm or somehow reshape to fit the new normal. If you want to keep your people engaged and inspired, you need to be proactive about rebuilding your organizational culture and include it in your overall business strategy. One way is to reinforce your shared values through clear messaging and opportunities for people to take action—as a team or individually—to support internal diversity and inclusion and/or contribute to causes and projects that reflect your values in the society at large. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s also the only way a modern business can stay relevant and build meaningful relationships and trust both with the employees and customers.

Customer relationships

In a time of crisis and post-crisis recovery, you have a great opportunity to double down on your existing customer relationships, test new ideas, and find new opportunities. Find ways to identify with your customers and focus on serving them and they will become your biggest source of new revenue. Chances are the majority of your customers are now spending most of their time online. Develop a digital brand strategy that reflects your company values, provides customers with helpful information, and sets your business apart from its competitors. Use marketing automation tools to quickly build and execute campaigns, measure performance against your baseline expectations for engagement, and tweak as you go. If you are considering launching an online sales channel, make sure you select an e-commerce platform that aligns with your business model, is easy to manage, is SEO-friendly, and can scale as you grow.

Don’t wait for the economy to rebound, customers to start buying, or life to return to what it was a few months ago. Now is the perfect time to take a proactive approach and lean on strategic partners and your technology providers who can help you execute on your digital transformation and prepare for future growth.

Considering the importance of digital transformation, your technology providers should be on your partner shortlist. Don’t just auto-renew your software subscriptions. Reach out to your vendors to discuss your goals and explore options to solve your problems. They can also help you to decide on strategic digital investments—whether it’s to introduce AI, implement a new CRM system, or launch e-commerce. If your technology vendors and partners are not willing to help or have no solutions that can solve your problems and help with your digital transformation, it makes it that much harder to succeed, and it might be worth finding new vendors and partners.

The worst thing you can do now is stay inactive or stick to your old strategy and tools that do not reflect the new reality we’re all facing.

***

Ready to start digital transformation in your business? Request a free CRM needs assessment and Insightly product demo with one of our reps, to see how we can help your business adapt and grow in the new economy.

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The post How to approach digital transformation in the new normal appeared first on Insightly.

As a result of the coronavirus, businesses of all sizes and industries are facing unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty. At the center of this crisis is a deeply human concern: our own health and well-being, and that of our loved ones.

There’s no real playbook to follow, and at times, navigating this new reality feels like an experiment. When this is all behind us, we’ll all have stories to tell. How will this experience change us? What can we learn from it? It’s probably too early to reflect and make conclusions, but sharing our observations and insights can help us to make sense of what’s going on, stay connected and prepare for what’s next.

With that in mind, I want to share my notes on how my company transitioned more than 100 employees to fully remote work, as well as offer a few suggestions on how we all can continue to adjust to a new way of doing business.

Facing the reality early

Economic changes, market downturns, disruptive technologies, competition — these are familiar forces that have shaped how we run and future-proof our businesses. They all cause stress, but the anxiety surrounding the coronavirus is exacerbated by the fact that it is first and foremost a human crisis that blurs the lines between business and personal.

At my company, our first response was to protect the health and safety of our employees, and that meant deciding to transition to fully remote work even before local authorities advised doing so. As knowledge workers in a technology company with remote team management experience, we were in a better position than most businesses to take immediate action to protect our employees and communities.

The key takeaway here is that as a leader, you shouldn’t be afraid to face the reality of a crisis early. Responding right away can make a big difference, even if you don’t know what to expect.

Transitioning to 100% remote work

From a technology and infrastructure perspective, using a number of collaboration and planning tools, such as Slack, Google Suite and Zoom, made the entire transition smooth and helped avoid interruptions. Many of our employees had been working remotely one or two days a week already, so they had proper setups at home, including high-speed internet access, virtual private networks and security precautions.

But the technology side is only one side. There’s the human side, which is a lot bigger than just using some tools and new gadgets. Whether it’s worrying about getting sick, figuring out how to homeschool children, or taking care of family and friends, an extreme amount of stress has become part of people’s daily lives and can impact work and productivity.

If your company has recently transitioned to 100% remote work, ensure you’re staying aware of all these factors, leading with empathy and giving your people space to figure out what works for them. Make sure they know we are all in this together.

Managing and motivating remote teams

As I mentioned earlier, we couldn’t predict how this transition would turn out. Two months later, our teams are even more productive than before and have kept up performance. Some of our staff thrive with less time spent on face-to-face interactions and commutes, thus producing great work with more focused time.

To help manage and motivate your own remote employees, encourage your human resources and people operations teams to create opportunities for people to connect with one another in meaningful ways. Virtual luncheons and check-ins, dog walks, yoga sessions, cooking lessons, talent competitions, story time for your employees with children, and company newsletters with helpful resources are just some ways you can try to engage and support your people as they adjust to a new work reality.

I’ve also learned that company culture and a sense of humor play important roles in motivating and engaging teams. Fun Zoom backgrounds, silly hats and pets can bring some levity to a tough situation and help maintain a fun company culture.

Adjusting to economic uncertainty

While we’ve been able to quickly adapt, I am fully aware of the different realities our customers are facing in different industries across the world. It’s important that you consider supporting clients who use your company’s services. At the same time (and depending on your industry), you might need to consider reducing sales targets, as many companies are postponing purchasing decisions until they have more surety around their revenues.

The situation is changing fast, and we have only a few weeks of data. We also don’t know how much new government policies and legislation will affect businesses in the U.S. Finance, analytics, sales and marketing teams in organizations around the world are struggling to make sense of the situation and plan ahead. What is the drop going to be? How much will massive unemployment affect us? Can we stick to our current plans and guidance from the market and/or board of directors?

One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with this uncertainty is to constantly assess and monitor events as quotes and figures come in so you can continuously recalibrate on all fronts and continue to innovate and service your customers wherever they are.

Learning as you go

It’s hard to think too far down the road right now, so remember to learn as you go. At my company, for example, we’re looking into creating more flexible remote work policies. Our old preconceptions about working from home have been proven wrong: Our employees have been extremely productive and, in some ways, even more efficient while working remotely.

Beyond that, I believe these uncertain and difficult times have reminded everyone of our ability to come together, support and uplift one another, and persevere in the face of great adversity. They have also given leaders an opportunity to develop resilience, reevaluate company policies and see their team spirit at its best.

Read more from Insightly CEO Anthony Smith:

• Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business
• How to manage customer input in product development
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020

The post Navigating uncertain times with the new ‘business as usual’ appeared first on Insightly.

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

A brief overview of AI application in B2B

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

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

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

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

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

How can AI benefit your business?

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

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

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

How to introduce AI in your business

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more like this:

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

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

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

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

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

1. Remember you’re the expert

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

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

2. Analyze & organize customer feedback

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

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

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

3. Decide on priorities

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

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

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

4. Set clear & honest expectations

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

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

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

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

5. Know your customers

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

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

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

Read more articles on Forbes.

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