What is generative AI?

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) refers to models or algorithms that create brand-new output, such as text, photos, videos, code, data, or 3D renderings, from the huge amount of data they are trained on. The models ‘generate’ new content by referring to the data they have been trained on, making new predictions. 

The purpose of generative AI is to create content, as opposed to other forms of AI, which suit different purposes, such as analyzing data, making ad recommendations, parsing through applications, helping to control a self-driving car, etc.

As mentioned above, generative AI is simply a subsection of AI that uses its training data to ‘generate’ or produce a new output. AI chatbots or AI image generators are quintessential examples of generative AI models. These tools use vast amounts of materials they were trained on to create new text or images. 

The term generative AI is causing a buzz because of the increasing popularity of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s conversational chatbot ChatGPT and its AI image generator DALL-E 3. 

These and similar tools use generative AI to produce new content, including computer code, essays, emails, social media captions, images, poems, Excel formulas, and more, within seconds, which has the potential to boost peoples’ workflows significantly. 

ChatGPT became extremely popular quickly, accumulating over one million users a week after launching. Many other companies saw that success and rushed to compete in the generative AI marketplace, including Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Anthropic. These companies quickly developed their own generative AI models. 

The buzz around generative AI will keep growing as more companies enter the market and find new use cases to help the technology integrate into everyday processes. For example, there has been a recent surge of new generative AI models for video and audio.

AI features coming to Insightly Marketing

As you can imagine, generative AI lends itself well to marketing use cases. We’re building generative AI capability into Insightly Marketing, our marketing automation platform, in a number of areas, and partnering with the leader in generative AI, OpenAI, to do so. It will be a chat-like interface that’s familiar to users with an AI assistant built right into the editing experience.

Write brand new, original content

Let’s solve the ‘blank page’ problem. When you don’t know what to write or how to get started, AI will be your ally within Insightly Marketing. You will be able to use AI to write content for emails and landing pages without leaving the editor. Simply give the AI assistant some direction with a few prompts, and it will generate paragraphs of content for emails and landing pages that you can then use, edit, and modify to your needs. The new AI assistant can also be used to come up with some catchy titles for emails or headers for landing pages.

Rewrite Existing Content or generate content variations

Another useful task for our AI assistant is to come up with variations of content you have already written, or to rewrite existing content for use in A/B testing of emails or multivariate tests of emails which we already support.

Check spelling and grammar

Our new AI assistant can also be used to check spelling and grammar. Just give it the text you wish to check, and ask it to check for spelling and grammar and it will take a look over what you have written and provide edits or suggestions of how to better phrase passages.

Change length, tone or call to action

You will also be able to use the AI assistant to to change the character length of an email. Maybe you have some existing content from a blog post or a web page that you want to use, but it is a bit too long for what you would like to include in a short email. The AI assistant can write an abbreviated version that gets the main points across for you to easily use in an email.

(This feature hits close to home because we have a small but mighty marketing team here at Insightly. I know they often reuse and repurpose content for different channels like many other marketing organizations do. With them in mind, I know this feature will be well-received.)

Similarly you can change the tone of an email. If a team member has written some content you would like to repurpose, but you would like it rewritten in a more business oriented style, our AI assistant can do that for you in just a few keystrokes.

The new Insightly AI assistant can really speed up the email creation and landing page authoring process right there in the editor, and it allows you to do so without having to switch apps and change contexts.

AI features coming to Insightly mobile apps

We’re bringing the power of AI to our Android and iOS mobile apps too. We have a brilliant free feature in our mobile apps that allows you to bring in contacts into Insightly from business cards you receive from clients. You can use the camera on your phone and the Insightly mobile app to take a picture of a business card and Insightly will automatically bring that into Insightly as a contact.  Insightly recognizes the text on the business card and sorts out the name, company title, addresses, phone and fax numbers and email and website addresses on the business card and then saves them directly to Insightly.

With AI, this feature gets better. We’re launching a new version of the business card scanner that is infused with AI. Using the power of artificial intelligence, the new scanner system is much more accurate at recognizing contact titles and roles than the previous version and categorizing and importing all the relevant information from a business card without human intervention.

AI features coming to Insightly Service

Insightly Service is an application available on our platform for customer support ticketing. Customer success and service agents use it everyday to capture and resolve customer issues and queries. 

One of the huge advantages of using Insightly’s unified platform of Insightly CRM, Insightly Marketing and Insightly Service is that your entire staff can see those valuable customer service tickets and Insightly marketing data right inside CRM contact and lead records. The integration between the three products and their data is built right into Insightly, aligning your teams and giving them the opportunity to create great customer experiences. 

Sometimes resolving customer service tickets with customers involves a number of interactions or the back and forth correspondence between customers and your staff can result in some lengthy exchanges.

Rather than staff members working in Insightly CRM or Insightly Marketing having to read and review all those interactions back and forth between the customer and staff to understand a ticket and what it is about, we’re bringing the power of AI to save you time. 

The AI built into Insightly will read through all the interactions and back and forth in a ticket and then generate a short summary of each ticket. The summary includes the nature of the ticket correspondence and the resolution provided. 

This allows your staff to be able to review all the tickets linked to customers very quickly without having to wade through the entirety of the correspondence for each one. It will save you time and give you a fuller picture of all the customer interactions and the state of the relationship.

AI features coming to Insightly CRM

Generative AI is not only awesome at creating and generating text for you, it’s also really good at writing code too. We’re utilizing this superpower-like capability to generate code to help you create new calculated fields in Insightly.

Calculated fields are new fields you can add to any record in Insightly CRM that calculate something and save the result – a bit like a spreadsheet. Calculations can include math operators like division and subtraction, text operators like concatenation, logical operators like true false assertions and branching, date time functions, etc.

Insightly customers can use calculated fields for calculating discounts or commissions on sales, for working out the tax on items, calculating scores or working out if a field has certain text within it, or for combining and calculating the total of several other fields.

Calculated field formulas in Insightly are written in computer code a little like Excel formulas, and you need a certain level of expertise and understanding to be able to write one correctly. We’re making it a lot easier for just about anyone to create one of these calculated fields by using the power of AI to write the formula for you. Just describe in plain English in a few words what you’re trying to do or accomplish, and our AI assistant will automatically generate and write the complete calculated field formula field for you. The benefit here is that you don’t have to know or understand any computer code to make it work. Just describe what you want and we can do the rest for you automatically and seamlessly using the power of AI.

Get ready for AI

I’m happy to share that we’re bringing the power of generative AI across our whole suite of applications in Insightly. In the near future, Insightly will be using generative AI to make your teams more efficient. Whether you use Insightly CRM, Insightly Marketing, Insightly Service, or even our mobile apps, you’ll get a helping hand from AI to do more with less. Stay tuned for more details as we roll out these updates. 

According to Statista, Salesforce spent 13.5 billion U.S. dollars on marketing and sales in the fiscal year 2023.

I won’t bore you with the specifics, but Insighty’s marketing budget does not start with a ‘B.’ Not even close. 

We’re small, and we’re scrappy, trying to get the good word out about a modern CRM that’s affordable, flexible and scalable. We also talk a lot about how switching from Salesforce to Insightly is really quite easy. 

So when an outside third party firm publishes data showing that Insightly stacks up pretty well against the pricer alternative, you take notice. 

Software Reviews – CRM category

Software Reviews is a division of Info Tech Research Group. Its mission is to “improve the B2B software experience for both buyers and providers.” 

To do so, they provide an experience-focused review platform helping businesses through the software selection process as it becomes increasingly complex. The firm gathers and disseminates data from actual software users with a mission of ensuring everyone has access to the right information to make better decisions.

Software Reviews recently published its Best CRM Software report and divides its findings among enterprise, mid-market, and small business. It includes a data quadrant for the category where it shows an axis for innovation, leadership, service and challengers. 

Software Reviews defines CRM as software that “enables an organization to manage the complete customer lifecycle and capture, integrate and analyze data across all customer touchpoints.”

In its 2024 report, Software Reviews shows data where Insightly outscores Salesforce for small businesses, and defines small businesses as having between $10 and $50 million in revenue.

The data shows that service experience, features, and capability are three areas where software users indicate that Insightly edges out Salesforce. 

Vendor Capabilities: Insightly wins over Salesforce

To measure vendor capability, Software Reviews examines 11 core vendor capabilities common across all Software Vendors. These capabilities represent table-stakes expectations for any software vendor, and are critical to driving a strong, long-term relationship between a vendor and a customer. The 11 core vendor capabilities that have been measured are quality of features, product strategy and rate of improvement, vendor support, ease of data integration, ease of administration, ease of customization, and ease of implementation.

Net Score: Insightly 83%, Salesforce: 82%

Why Insightly wins: All of these capabilities can be achieved within both Insightly and Salesforce, however, with Salesforce, complexity rears its ugly head. You’ll likely need to hire an integration firm, hire a dedicated Salesforce Administrator, or work with a pricey consultant in order to accomplish anything. Insightly is a highly customizable CRM, is easy to manage, and using AppConnect, is easy to integrate all with your existing team.  

When shopping for a CRM, be sure to speak to other clients who have successfully implemented the CRM solution you are purchasing, and ask specific questions about costs around administration, customization, and implementation. The responses will be enlightening.

Product Feature Summary: Insightly wins over Salesforce

To measure vendor capability, Software Reviews examines product features that have been chosen based on market relevancy and typical use within the category. Viewers can use this data to compare their primary use case and identify relative strengths and weaknesses across shortlisted vendors. The features that are examined by Software Advice include account and contact management, activity and workflow management, analytics and reporting, collaboration, customer service management, lead management, marketing management, mobile, quote contract and proposal, sales management, and telephony and call center management.

Net Score: Insightly 85%, Salesforce: 82%

Why Insightly wins: While all CRMs have similar features, Insightly’s ease of use helps it stand out. This means that not only do you have access to world class features, you’ll actually use them because Insightly is intuitive. Managing pipelines, tracking opportunities, creating proposals and quotes, and automating workflows are all table stakes in CRM, and Insightly puts them at your fingertips. Insightly’s mobile capabilities also shine in this report, since the Insightly mobile app (available for Android and Apple devices) is robust and convenient. 

Service Experience: Insightly wins over Salesforce

Software buyers know that good service matters. The last thing you need is to be disrespected by your software vendor or to get bogged down by their ineptitude or neglect. This section displays data related to quality and effectiveness of service, so buyers can know whether they’ll be treated well before and after they’ve made the purchase. Service is rated on the software provider being respectful, effective, caring, efficient and whether the team saves you time. 

Net Score: Insightly 90%, Salesforce: 87%

Why Insightly wins: Sometimes smaller is better. While there are likely hundreds of employees at Salesforce that provide support, they may not all be aligned. The team behind the software at Insightly is a tight-knit group of service professionals. They collaborate internally, consistently train and retrain, and drive each other to provide the best possible customer experience. Whether you choose to work on your own with periodic support, or choose a more hands-on support plan (e.g. Premier Support and Success), you’ll never feel alone when you need help with your Insightly instance. Insightly is also known for its guided onboarding program to ensure that CRM buyers are empowered from the beginning of the CRM implementation. 

Visit the Insightly website to read the full report and to see the data. 

Methodology and Data

Software Reviews is part of Info Tech Research Group. With practical advisory services and a data-driven approach, SoftwareReviews’ mission is to improve the B2B software experience for all software buyers and providers. Our pragmatic tools and detailed customer insights help software buyers maximize success with their technology decisions. We collect the most in-depth customer review data from both business and IT professionals to shorten the time to decision and action for software purchasers and improve overall buyer satisfaction. Combining deep buyer knowledge and experience, SoftwareReviews’ go-to-market practice helps technology providers better understand customer needs and accelerates planning and execution of go-to-market and product strategy. SoftwareReviews is a division of Info-Tech Research Group with over two decades of research-based IT advice and technology implementation.

Methodology for the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) head to head report

SoftwareReviews collects in-depth, first-party feedback from verified end users about their customer experience with their top enterprise software providers. Quantitative and qualitative feedback data is collected via SoftwareReviews’ proprietary online survey platform. The survey gathers over 130 data points on each product, allowing the end user to thoroughly evaluate their experiences over their full lifecycle using the software – from their selection experience through their purchase and service experience. Every review is meticulously checked through a robust quality assurance process to ensure it is submitted by a real person with valid credentials for using the software. End user experience and sentiment measures revealing product feature fit, perceived vendor capabilities, business value drivers, and the quality of the vendor relationship are accessible at both a high level roll up and a more detailed drill down. SoftwareReviews reports are available to download at SoftwareReviews.com/categories.

Considering a CRM? 

If a new CRM is in your future and Salesforce is on your list, you should also check out Insightly CRM. Start a free trial, watch a demo on demand, or get a personalized walk through of the platform from a team member. See what users and experts already know – that Insightly is a great alternative to Salesforce. 

As your organization evolves, you might consider trying to grow using some marketing tactics. Your goal is to feed your sales team by driving more leads, nurturing those leads and optimizing your marketing spend. Perhaps you are doing some informal marketing or advertising. You may be posting on social media. However, starting a true marketing function will catapult your results to a new level. This could take many forms. It could mean that you add a marketing resource to your team, engage with a marketing agency, and/or add some marketing applications to your tech stack.

Well, this is a great time to look at a marketing automation platform like Insightly Marketing. Let’s start with what a marketing automation platform is.

What is a marketing automation platform?

A marketing automation platform is a comprehensive digital tool that streamlines and automates various marketing tasks, allowing businesses to execute targeted and personalized campaigns at scale. It allows marketers to automate repetitive processes such as email, list building and maintenance, landing page building, and forms. A core function of marketing automation is the ability to nurture leads throughout the sales funnel by delivering timely and relevant content based on user behavior and engagement. 

You can have a marketing automation platform without a CRM. You can have a CRM without a marketing automation platform. However, the effectiveness of these two applications are compounded when you use both together. Let’s learn more!

How do marketing automation and CRM work together? 

CRM and marketing automation are two distinct yet interconnected systems that, when integrated, can enhance overall business efficiency and effectiveness while also aligning your sales and marketing teams. 

Integrating CRM and marketing automation ensures seamless data flow between the two systems. Here are some examples:

• Customer data captured in CRM is automatically updated in the marketing automation platform, and vice versa. This shared data ensures that both sales and marketing teams have access to a comprehensive view of the customer. 
• When leads are scored (based on intent) and graded (based on demographics) in your marketing automation platform, they can be passed into the CRM with that data and prioritized for the sales team.
• When leads meet certain criteria in the marketing automation platform, triggers can be set up to launch automated workflows in your CRM to notify the sales team, send targeted content, or perform other predefined actions.

Integration vs. the same platform – what’s the difference?

You may decide to purchase a CRM from one vendor and your marketing automation platform from another. Here are some reasons why this is not the best idea:

1. You’ll need to integrate the two. It’s clear from the points above that these two applications must work together well. You’ll need a powerful integration. If you use a no-code/low-code drag and drop integration tool, this can be fairly simple. But if you need to build an integration using IT folks or developers, this can get pricey quickly. Plus, if either application makes an upgrade that affects the fields you’ve integrated, your integrations can break. This causes havoc while you wait for the integration to be fixed.
2. Two-way sync can be trouble. You’ll want records that are updated in your marketing automation platform to be also updated in the CRM. For instance, if a contact’s phone number changes. Setting up a two-way sync can be complex, so in most cases, firms will have one platform supersede the other in terms of which is the ‘most correct.’ This often becomes confusing.
3. You’ll need login credentials for both platforms for your team. If you want your marketers to know what’s going on with sales and vice versa, you’ll want to give them logins to both your marketing automation platform and your CRM. Since you often pay by seat, this gets costly very quickly. 
4. Shared logins. When paying for logins for each person becomes cost prohibitive, some firms will have team members share logins. This is not a good idea in general. First, it can violate the terms of service with the vendor. Second, the platform assigns actions performed by anyone using that login to one user, so if any error is made, you’ll be unable to see who on the team made the mistake and may need additional training. 
5. Terminology blues. There is often a point where leads get passed from marketing to sales and therefore from the marketing automation platform to the CRM. It helps when both platforms assign the same meaning to words like lead, contact, prospect, opportunity, etc. This can vary widely across marketing automation platforms and between your chosen platform and your CRM. It creates confusion among your teams as well.
6. Finance doesn’t like multiple vendors. It can help out your accounting team to reduce the number of vendors you are using. Fewer invoices means less work for them and gives them more power to negotiate if needed. 

When your marketing automation platform and your CRM are from the same vendor, you can skip all of the above issues. Why? Here’s how Insightly CRM and Insightly Marketing solve for this:

1. There’s no ‘integration.’ The apps use the same data set.
2. There’s no sync. Again, same data set.
3. Logins are not a worry. Insightly Marketing has unlimited users so all marketing team members and all sales team members can have a login to the marketing automation platform at no additional cost.
4. Terminology (e.g. contact, lead, etc.) used in Insightly Marketing are the same as those used in CRM. 
5. One invoice per year…easy peasy.

Why would you not choose to use the same vendor for CRM and marketing automation?

Here are some reasons why people may not choose to use the CRM and marketing automation platform from the same vendor.

1. We bought one…then the other. It’s possible that when you purchased your CRM that there was no marketing automation platform available from the vendor. (Psst…Insightly Marketing came along years after Insightly CRM.) So perhaps it’s time to ask a bit during your next QBR or renewal meeting.
2. The CRM and marketing automation platform can’t possibly both be ‘best in class.’ This was probably true years ago, but advancements in SaaS in general have helped all martech apps be better, faster, and more feature rich. It’s worth a demo to see what features are offered today. Also, be sure to zero in on the features you use everyday vs. added bells and whistles that are cool, but not super useful.
3. We’re in a contract. For a while. Leaving your CRM or marketing automation platform can take some time, so don’t wait until renewal time is here. Start researching what your vendors offer so you’ll be prepared to make a change and you won’t be rushed.
4. Migrating our data will be a pain. It’s not as bad as you think! The professional services teams in today’s SaaS companies have done every kind of migration out there, so it’s always an option to see how they can help mitigate this work. 
5. We like what we have – integrations and all. This is a great spot to be in, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look for other options and challenge the status quo.

Amplified results from CRM + marketing automation

We’ve talked about some of the benefits of having your marketing and sales teams on the same platform. Now let’s hear from real businesses with real results. 

Example 1: Sullivan & Stanley

Sullivan & Stanley is a UK-based consulting firm that chose Insightly CRM and Insightly Marketing. Kevin Corne, COO, says his  team was on a mission to select a platform that could provide a single version of the truth across sales and marketing and grow with the firm as well. The team selected Insightly and he says it “drives the frictionless model that we wanted.”

The marketing team agrees.  “Now that we have a platform where we can have both worlds [marketing and sales] in one, it’s a real game changer,” said Callum Chambers, Head of Marketing & Brand. “It is much easier with the simplicity of accessing the data at the tip of your fingers.”

Insightly has helped marketing and sales become more cross-functional informing the teams, whether your in marketing, sales or delivery, as to what’s going on,” Corne says.

Learn more in this short video:

Example 2: Sport Court Las Vegas

Sport Court is an industry-leading modular sports flooring designer and builder serving both residential and commercial customers across the U.S. and in more than 170 countries.

Sport Court’s Las Vegas location wanted to grow and scale, but was lacking in the proper tech stack to get them there. They needed a CRM and marketing a marketing automation platform that was customizable and would scale with them. After implementing Insightly, the business grew its revenue by 242% through lean systems and new processes, and also saw improved customer service outcomes.

“Customers, in general, are busy and have a life outside of their relationship with us and our product,” says Mike Reynolds, owner of Sport Court Las Vegas. “That’s why we’ve set up a constant email drip campaign with previous customers in Insightly Marketing – because sometimes customers will call me after six months, a year, or even five years down the road when they’re ready to build a new custom home. We need to be sure we’re not forgotten about in that time.”

Learn more in this short video:

Explore the benefits of marketing automation and CRM in one

Peanut butter and jelly. Peas and carrots. Burt and Ernie. 

Some things just go together. CRM and marketing automation belong on this list. If you’re not using the same platform for both, it’s a great time to check out Insightly. With a best in class, modern CRM and a powerful marketing automation platform, your teams will be aligned and you’ll see amplified results. 1 + 1 = 3. Watch a demo of each today, or ask for a personalized walk through of both!

Your CRM can also serve as a powerful analytical tool to help you identify what’s working—and what’s not—across the entire customer lifecycle. But leveraging the data in your CRM to uncover meaningful insights can be tricky. That’s where CRM dashboards come in.

Dashboards are among the most important tools in a robust CRM platform. In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into CRM dashboards and how they can benefit your business.

What is a CRM dashboard?

CRM dashboards provide a real-time snapshot of your sales activity, performance metrics, progress toward goals, and other KPIs in one central location. Using visual elements like charts, graphs, tables, and gauges, a CRM dashboard can turn your customer data into a reliable, accessible resource for smart decision-making.

Need to know who your top sellers are? Looking for a comparison of actual versus projected revenue? Want to create visualizations of average deal size, win rate, or opportunity status? Need performance results from the latest marketing campaign? CRM dashboards can put all this information at your fingertips for instant analysis and deep, granular insights. 

7 roles that rely on CRM dashboards

CRM dashboards are incredibly useful for planning and decision-making across a variety of functional teams. Roles that can benefit from using a CRM dashboard include:

1. Sales reps. CRM dashboards can help salespeople track their pipeline and progress toward individual goals, as well as managing tasks and prioritizing deals appropriately.
2. Sales leaders. With the right dashboards, sales managers can see how the team is functioning as a whole and assess the health of the sales pipeline. They can also evaluate individual sales rep performance and identify opportunities for coaching and feedback.
3. Marketing teams. Marketers can set up CRM dashboards to track campaign performance and measure the quality of marketing-generated leads.
4.  Account managers. Teams that are focused on building and maintaining client relationships can leverage dashboard insights to prioritize projects and uncover trends.
5. Customer service and support teams. CRM dashboards allow customer-facing teams to examine key metrics like average response time and satisfaction scores. These insights are useful for increasing efficiency, improving customer experience, and reducing churn.
6. Data analysts. The CRM dashboard is an excellent source of business intelligence data for analysts looking to identify trends and guide their organization to better decisions.
7. Business leaders. C-level executives can use CRM dashboards to assess overall business health and monitor progress toward key business goals.

Key benefits of CRM dashboards

The clear benefit of a CRM dashboard is that it gives you the power to slice and dice your data in almost any way you can imagine. CRM dashboard functionality lets you examine performance from different angles and drill into the metrics that matter most. But there are also plenty of less-obvious reasons for using a CRM dashboard:

• Real-time updates. Unlike CRM reports, which are static documents, a CRM dashboard updates in real time based on changes in your data—so you always know the information is current.
• Better team alignment. A CRM dashboard gives every team member access to the insights they need to stay on track—without clicking around in the CRM software or wading through tons of data.
• Consistent strategic guidance. At any given moment, CRM dashboards provide a clear picture of where things stand—and where the sales team should focus their attention—which can lead to better overall sales performance.

4 reasons to customize your CRM dashboards

Because every business is unique, most modern CRM software platforms give you the option to customize your CRM dashboards. Customization provides an added level of flexibility to highlight the data that’s most important to you, organize it how you want, create granular data visualizations, and drill into exactly what you need to see.

While pre-built CRM dashboards deliver common insights every business needs, there are some compelling reasons to customize your dashboards. These include:

1. More flexible analysis: Custom dashboard widgets allow you to display data over any given time frame, for a more granular view of sales activity, pipeline status, sales forecasts, and progress toward goals. For example, you could customize your dashboard to show lead source over the last 30 days, opportunity value in the current quarter, or year-to-date deal volume.
2. Better data filtering: Tweaking the data that’s displayed in your CRM dashboard can dramatically increase its usefulness. For instance, you might filter your sales data to show closed deal volume by team, individual, or region. You could compare actual sales numbers against revenue goals to analyze performance by team, individual, or region.
3. Easier viewing of high-priority data: Customization lets you tailor the layout of your CRM dashboard as well as the types of data being displayed. You can rearrange the order of dashboard widgets or resize various elements so it’s easy to see the data that’s most important.
4. Versatile data visualization: In a custom dashboard, CRM data can be displayed in a variety of visual designs—including bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, tables, and speedometer-style gauge charts. So you’re free to choose the graphic style that best aligns with the data you’re analyzing. For example, a gauge chart is a great choice for displaying progress toward a quarterly sales goal, while year-over-year revenue comparisons are easy to digest in a bar graph.

Considerations for dashboard customization

As you design your custom CRM dashboard, it’s important to make sure it will meet your needs and the needs of your extended team. Consider the following when creating and customizing your CRM dashboard:

•  Sales process and customer lifecycle. Your CRM dashboard should encompass the most important business activities throughout the sales cycle, including post-sale communication and support.
• Important KPIs. Selling is a complicated process with plenty of metrics—but that doesn’t mean they should all show up in your CRM dashboard. Focus on the KPIs that are most critical to your team’s success, so your dashboard provides a meaningful overview of business performance.
• Appearance. CRM dashboards contain a lot of information, so it’s best to keep the layout simple. Maximize white space whenever possible and stick to a limited color palette that aligns with your corporate brand.
• Ease of use. Your CRM dashboard should provide an easily digestible snapshot of the metrics that matter most. Make sure the widgets you select are organized to tell a clear and compelling story—without unnecessary clutter.

Remember—while it’s easy to modify a CRM dashboard, constant tinkering will only cause confusion—and eat up precious time. Instead of making tweaks on the fly, invest the time up front to create a dashboard that aligns with your business needs, then set a schedule for testing and modification so you can optimize your dashboard on a regular basis. Gathering feedback from team members will help to ensure your CRM dashboard is working as effectively as possible.

Bring your CRM data to life with Insightly CRM dashboards

Every paid Insightly CRM plan comes equipped with dashboard functionality to help you visualize key metrics, share information across your organization, and make smart, data-powered decisions. Plans at the Plus level include a set of standard dashboards, while Professional and Enterprise accounts also give you the ability to create your own custom dashboards.

Insightly standard dashboards

Three standard dashboards are included with every paid Insightly CRM plan. Each of these pre-built dashboards contains a set number of widgets—or Dashboard Cards—that allow you to visualize your CRM data through charts and graphs. Standard dashboards can’t be modified, but they include the most common—and most useful—data points for any organization. 

• Opportunities Dashboard is the largest of the standard dashboards with 10 cards to help you track sales performance, including Total Sales, Sales Pipeline Funnel, Top Sales Reps, Win Rate, and more.
• Projects Dashboard includes four cards to analyze projects as they move through the sales funnel: Project Pipeline Funnel, Projects by Status, Projects by Rep and Status, and Projects Completed by Month.
• Leads Dashboard also has four cards for monitoring lead gen activity: Leads by Status, Leads by Source, Leads by Month, and Top Reps by Lead.

Insightly custom dashboards

In addition to the three standard dashboards, higher-level Insightly CRM plans allow you to create and modify your own custom dashboards. Professional plans allow up to 100 cards on each dashboard, while Enterprise customers can add an unlimited number of cards to their dashboards. 

Creating a new dashboard is a simple drag-and-drop process. Just follow the step-by-step instructions for building your dashboard, then populate it with Dashboard Cards to visualize your most important data. You can also add, delete, resize, or rearrange your cards at any time. 

Following are some common data points and metrics you might want to incorporate into your custom CRM dashboard:

• Sales team activities
• Sales pipeline data
• Sales performance/quota progress
• New leads
• Closed deals
• Conversion rate
• Sales cycle length
• Customer retention/churn
• Customer satisfaction/NPS

Ready to get started?

Insightly is the only CRM solution that offers robust customization on a shared data platform to deliver a single, unified view of every customer. Our simple, scalable platform aligns cross-functional teams for better decision-making and a seamless end-to-end customer experience.

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

You have the perfect email.

The subject line is engaging. Not quite click-bait, but not boring either.

The pre-header draws you in.

The graphic is meaningful and catchy.

The text is a masterpiece.

And then…it flops. 

Why? 

Your perfect email never even makes it to the inbox. 

You have an email deliverability issue.

What is email deliverability? 

Email deliverability is the measure of whether or not email is received in a recipient’s inbox.

Success: Mail delivered to the inbox. Failure: Mail delivered to the spam folder — or not delivered at all.

Al Iverson, Director of Deliverability Products and Services for Kickbox, shared this definition in a recent webinar with the Insightly team. 

He explained that the basis for deliverability is reputation. Reputation is based on metrics from your email sends, and it is driven by feedback. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to know if your email is wanted or not and they learn that based on the behavior of your recipients, (e.g. did they open it, scroll it, click on it, interact with it?)

Let’s take a step back, though. Because, as Iverson explains, it really starts with spam filters. Spam filters are used by ISPs and mail providers for safety purposes. They prevent phishing, business email compromise…really the bad stuff. To avoid trouble with spam filters, you want to show the ISPs that you are one of the good guys. 

In 2003, the US federal government enacted CAN SPAM to ensure consent, honor opt-outs and prohibit falsity and deception. ISPs can still block email that is CAN SPAM-compliant so you should consider it the baseline with which email marketers must comply.

So now you understand deliverability, spam, and the associated regulations. Let’s see how effective marketers use this information to hit the inbox. 

What is a good send vs. a bad send?

According to Inverson, there are some aspects of email that ISPs look at being ‘good’ and can boost your email sender reputation. They include interactions, high opens, high clicks, low bounces, TINS (This Is Not Spam) clicks.

Conversely, these are issues that negatively affect your reputation: complaints, spamtrap hits, high bounces, low opens, low clicks.

To improve your email sender reputation, you should send wanted mail that is expected by your recipients to email lists that have good list hygiene. 

Based on that, it’s clear that you should avoid using third party data and for sure avoid purchasing lists. While these are tempting strategies that may appear to help you in the short term by accelerating your list growth, they will do more harm than good in the long run.

In summary, if someone did not overtly sign up to receive email from you, they are more likely to report it as spam which will hurt your reputation and make it harder for you to deliver mail to everyone – even those who want your email messages. 

How to build your list the right way

So, you’re not going to purchase a list or use third-party data…great. How, then, do you get your message out to the masses and ensure your emails get delivered? You need to build a list and that takes time and effort.

First and foremost, you need great content. It should be timely, relevant, insightful, and engagingly well-written. Offer people your content in exchange for adding them to your email list. Make it simple for people to opt in by keeping forms on landing pages short and sweet. 

To keep people on your email list and to keep adding more addresses to your email list, your content must be fresh. Yes, it’s difficult to come up with fresh content all the time, but it can be done. Keep in mind that there are a lot of great storylines you could get out of a single effort. For example, a customer interview could become a blog post, a social post, a customer story video that’s posted to your website, and a webinar. (Psst….the blog post you are currently reading started out as a webinar.) 

Once you get great content, iteration is important. Every marketer should be testing to find out what’s resonating, and then building future plans based on what you learn.

Finally, have a deep understanding of what your prospects are looking for. Use your sales team’s intel, review the competition, know your sources of information and the channels that are important in your industry. Know who your thought leaders are. Listen to sales calls for more information about pain points and develop content to meet them. Make sure that you know what your prospects and customers need, and then serve that content to them in a way that’s easy for them to access. 

As you can see, a content marketing strategy takes time. Just like building your email list for the best email deliverability, a great content marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight.

Measuring email deliverability

Measuring email deliverability starts with your email sending platform. After every email, you must look at opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, etc. Look at each send, but also look over time for trends so you can anticipate any issues before they grow into a larger problem. 

Hot tip! If you choose Insightly Marketing, your email reports will be easy to read and learn from for your next send.

Beyond your email delivery platform, there are additional tools you can use to up your email deliverability game. For example, an email verification tool (like this one from Kickbox) can help you ensure upfront that the data you are collecting is valid.  You can even integrate email verification into your sign-up process so that bad addresses are rejected.

Not ready to step up to a paid service?  Kickbox also offers a service called KBXSCORE that allows you to share your email and get a quick score on authentication, blocklist issues, configuration, content checking and more. This one is 100% free, so there’s no reason not to take the extra step and give it a try.

Deliver your email with Insightly Marketing

Email is a high ROI tool for your marketing team. According to a recent survey, it drives $36 in return for every $1 spent. With that data point in mind, there’s no reason not to use email in your marketing mix, but you’ve got to do it well. 

Insightly Marketing allows your team to build beautifully formatted automated emails and report on deliverability easily. Plus, it includes advanced features like behavioral-based segmentation, customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, 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 today or start your free trial.

Watch the full webinar:

Email Deliverability 101

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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