1. AI coming to Insightly Marketing You’ll be able to use the AI Assistant in Insightly Marketing to help you in many ways: Write content for emails and landing pages. Ask for variations on content already written. Use variants to A/B or multi-variate test and get better outcomes. Use improved spelling and grammar check to avoid pesky mistakes. Ask AI to summarize an email that’s too long or change the tone from friendly to professional.
2. AI coming to Insightly Mobile Apps Get access to an updated business card scanner with AI that is much more accurate at recognizing titles and roles without human intervention.
3. AI coming to Insightly Service To save time spent reading through long threads of back-and-forth interactions, AI in Insightly Service will summarize the correspondence and the resolution provided.
4. AI coming to Insightly CRM Say goodbye to writing code for your calculated fields in CRM. With the Insightly AI assistant, you’ll be able to simply describe in plain English in a few words what you’re trying to do or accomplish, and it will automatically generate and write the complete calculated field formulas for you.

• Jay shared some of the data from his book, Talk Triggers, on ways to create experiences for buyers.
• With examples from DoubleTree hotels, UberConference, an accounting firm, and more, Jay shows how this experience transcends B2C and B2B. (Psst…it’s just about humans.)
• There are more than 2,000 tequila brands per Jay, and Chip shares that there are 1,700 CRMs on the market. Together, they share tactics for breaking through in crowded spaces.
• What technology enables the cultivation of B2B brand champions? Jay shares his tips.
• Jay breaks down how to engage brand champions via observed advocacy, ascertained advocacy and recognition.

Fun takeaways:

As the #2 tequila influencer in the world, Jay shares his expertise with this fine spirit.

• Watch us make a Batanga (aka a Charro Negro) – forecasted to be this year’s hottest cocktail
• Get tips for smelling/tasting/sipping tequila
• Learn what glass to select when sipping tequila straight
• Find out where tequila gets its name

Software Reviews is an experience-focused review platform helping businesses through the software selection process as it becomes increasingly complex. The firm gathers and disseminates data with a mission of ensuring everyone has access to the right information to make better decisions.

The organization publishes its Best CRM Software report and divides its findings among enterprise, mid-market, and small business. In its 2024 report, Software Reviews shows where Insightly wins against Salesforce for small businesses ($10-$50MM). According to the report, service experience, features, and capability are three areas where users like you say Insightly is the superior choice. This is helpful data for those comparing Insightly to Salesforce or considering switching from Salesforce to Insightly. 

Peek inside:

Vendor Capabilities
Net Score: Insightly 83%, Salesforce: 82%

What is rated? User satisfaction with a variety of vendor capabilities regarding their product offering(s). Look for strong and consistent performance across the board when assembling your shortlist, and follow up on areas of concern during the evaluation and negotiation processes.

Product Feature Summary
Net Score: Insightly 85%, Salesforce: 82%

What is rated? User satisfaction with a variety of product features. While strong and consistent performance across the feature set is preferable, you may be willing to tolerate low scores on features that don’t impact your primary use case or core objectives. Use this high-level data to help plan and structure your product evaluation.

Service Experience
Net Score: Insightly 90%, Salesforce: 87%

What is rated? 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 you can know whether you’ll be treated well before and after you’ve made the purchase.

Get the details! Download your copy today.

New email regulations, tech consolidation, and the independent buyer’s journey keeps growing. What’s a sales person to do in 2024? Jen and Chip are here to help! Here are there 5 new year’s resolutions for sales people to overcome these market challenges.

1. Understanding objections – the types and their meanings. Jen explains the difference between future vs. current objections and what they signal to sellers. Rather than focusing on overcoming objections, understand them – especially those that are recurring – to become a better seller.
2. Learn how to extract value from your personal pipeline report. Sellers: your pipeline report isn’t just for management. It’s a tool you can use and analyze to learn patterns in your processes.
3. Learn to leverage the status quo by communicating the cost of inaction (COI). We are more often selling against ‘do nothing’ than a competitor. Learn how to paint a picture where the pain of the same>the pain of change.
4. Writing emails that work and embrace COI. Learn the difference between problem prompting vs. solution prompting and see what tech is out there to help you write better emails. We’ll also cover the new 2024 Google/Yahoo regulations and their impact.
5. Jen and Chip talk about your personal brand via social selling –  this is the year to get it right! Jen explains what she calls social ‘sparking’ as opposed to social selling.  LinkedIn still reigns supreme for business social, so whether or not ICP is on LinkedIn, it’s time to engage. If you don’t get LinkedIn Sales Navigator from your company, it’s time to pay for it yourself according to the experts.  Learn time blocking tips and ways to use announcements on LinkedIn about job changes to generate referrals. 

Choosing a CRM is a critical decision for your organization. You’re already taking a major step towards success by thoroughly researching your options.

This guide contains key comparison data you’ll need to make an educated decision in selecting a CRM that will grow with your business. You can use it to compare pricing, terms, and rankings. You’ll be able to ensure you get the features that your organization requires. Plus, you’ll see which platforms can help unify your teams and increase customer happiness.

For each vendor, you’ll see a list of pros and cons, a summary of ratings from popular review sites like G2 and TrustRadius, and then a feature-by-feature comparison chart. The guide includes comparisons with: Copper CRM, HubSpot, Monday.com, Nutshell, Pipedrive, Salesforce and Zoho.

Can you try before you buy? That’s a big factor in your CRM selection. See which CRMs have a free option in perpetuity which offer just a free trial right here in this guide. Rather than go to 8 websites and take notes and screen captures of each, get everything right here in this free guide.

Be sure to check out page 17 – it has a handy quick reference chart that summarizes the guide for an executive-level briefing.  

1. You can shift your perception of AI in 2024 (& relax a bit). AI caused a panic in 2023. In 2024, you’ll see that subside. AI is an ingredient, not an entree per Jay Baer. It’s what you DO with AI that makes a difference. We’ll see more apps incorporating AI for you in 2024.

2. Is ‘The Great App Layoff’ over? Maybe. Many businesses shed about 10% of their apps last year in a quick cost-cutting move. Apps that bring true, repeated value to businesses were safe, though and will continue to be.

3. Fewer vendors serving multiple teams is still winning…for now. As buying committees have grown, it’s important for apps to benefit multiple teams.

4. Yes, customer experience will still reign. Businesses consistently rank their customer experience higher than their customers do. There aer important lessons to learn from this phenomenon. Businesses that work on closing this gap are the ones that will win in 2024.

Here’s a peek inside: 

The survey explores key questions about what specific applications businesses are using and how successful these businesses perceive the applications to be. You’ll see how budgets make an impact, particularly for small businesses with tighter budget constraints.

A big theme is integration. Whether integration is through an all-in-one platform, direct software integrations , or an integration software tool, ensuring that technology integrates seamlessly is critical to success. An overwhelming 88% of respondents say this is important.

Three big trends emerge in the research: AI (artificial intelligence), personalization, and data security. While each presents it’s own set of unique challenges, they are all top of mind in MarTech. Half of small and mid-size business marketers surveyed expect that emerging AI and machine learning will have the most significant influence on how digital marketing strategies are executed in the coming five years. Solutions that enable personalization will also have a significant impact on digital marketing strategies according to 43% of small and mid-size business marketers. Data security was identified as key by 37%.

Key takeaways:

Small and mid-size business marketers are hopeful that AI will help improve their marketing strategies in the future, most significantly in the areas of improving content personalization, increasing content generation, and allowing for more automation of routine tasks according to be 46%, 45%, and 45% of those surveyed, respectively.

Data still reigns. When asked about the most important data sources, small and mid-size business marketers most commonly report relying on data from sales teams to make effective decisions – most commonly derived from their CRM. Data and metrics collected from website and search tools, social media tools, and email marketing solutions also important for small and mid-size business marketers according to 39%, 33%, and 32% of those surveyed, respectively.

A final theme of the research centered around cost. Much like the top challenge of overall cost that small and mid-size business marketers are faced with, rising costs and staying within marketing technology budgets are also the top concern regarding the
future of the tech stack according to 59% of those surveyed.

Download the full guide today.

Let’s level set: every CRM should be the single source of truth for your business. If it’s not that, you’ll never get ROI from it. When it is the single source of truth, your team has the tool set to increase revenue, decrease operational costs, create internal collaboration and deliver customer experience.

So your CRM is your established single source of truth. Let’s squeeze out more ROI.

Onboarding the right way. The CRM implementation failure rate is often disputed, but always high. Ranging from 60-90%! But why do they fail?  Effective onboarding is key. One question Vanessa suggests asking yourself is “Does your onboarding meet the vision of what you proposed?” This introspection can help move your team to success. Modern, cloud-based CRMs can typically deliver faster go-live times.

Speed from your CRM.  Customers will pay more for speed. Stop making leads wait for manual processing. Use lead assignment rules to avoid delays in responding. Vanessa suggests you create automated follow-up, templates  and have collateral ready to go. Andy adds that you can avoid time lost searching for information.

Prioritize your email + sales intelligence integration. If you ask your reps what apps they work in most, and they’ll likely talk about email. If your CRM has an email integration, install it.

Spend time in relationship linking data. It is super important – especially for mid-sized businesses – to know how people are connected. Makes your CRM more valuable to AEs by making them looked connected and saving embarrassing oversights. Vanessa notes that connecting to referrers and others relevant contacts/companies is a key area for growth.

A critical business driver is the creation and use of CRM dashboards. If you are paying for a CRM and still pulling out data and manipulating it in a spreadsheet, you are NOT getting full ROI. Andy stresses that dashboards are a must because you get u

A key integration is the integration with a marketing automation platform. While the panel already discussed email integration, marketing autoation is probably THE MOST valuable integration you can set up. Ascend2/Insightly survey). The survey showed that 36% of companies with aligned technology on their GTM teams showed a significant increase in revenue compared to just 14% of those with less alignment.  Sales<> marketing alignment means that sales has awareness of marketing campaigns, and marketing gets a live look-in into what’s closing.

• How to foster a CRM ‘single source of truth’ mentality
• Making the CRM a daily (or hourly) habit with your team
• Ways to make the CRM your #1 forecasting tool

Sales leaders have a lot on their plates. Recruiting, retention, churn, and more. Join this webinar to learn how to make your CRM the one ‘easy button.’

What are the 7 ways?

• • Making your CRM the single source of truth
    • If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen
    • Enforced by leadership – walk the walk
    • Managers use the CRM on 1:1s
  • Keep your data clean with data hygiene practices
    • Driving consistent behaviors and discipline to keep CRM data clean.
    • Use of CRM validation rules to support this
  • Ensure you are enforcing definitions
    • What constitutes an opportunity in your org? BANT or something else?
    • How do you define it? 
    • And what’s the right depth of information the team needs to understand the health of that opportunity? 
    • Pipeline stages and probability of a close for each. How do sales leaders develop this and enforce it?
  • Customize the CRM to support your business
    • Page layouts for your business
    • Sales reps neglect to update CRM because it’s too cumbersome and time consuming – so your page layout design can be an underrated factor to consider. 
    • Set up page layouts to make it easy for sales and other teams to organize information effectively
    •  What fields are included in each section of your page layout to make it easy to find and act on information 
  • Keep it simple (and safe) by limiting data access
    • Using permissions for data integrity
    • Keep people focused and avoid distractions
    • Also keeps customer data safe and secure
  • Eliminate time-sucking tasks
    • Using workflow automation
    • Reduce repetitive, manual tasks
    • Allow reps to focus on great customer experiences
  • Real time data at a glance (Helping you hit quota)
    • Building dashboards that mean something to the business.
    • Reports that help you forecast better so you can pivot early if necessary.
    • Keep executive leadership informed
    • Visible on mobile devices

During this webinar, Blyden and Insightly team member Luke Wade talk through optimizations that Blyden and his team have set up using AppConnect, the low-code/no-code integration tool that is part of the Insightly platform.

Blyden and Luke talk through the problem areas and pain points the agency had, and how Insightly CRM + AppConnect addresses them. Blyden and team have set up an AppConnect recipe for Harvest, a time tracking application used by the agency to accurately bill hours to clients. The team at Elevation Ten Thousand also uses Asana for project management, and has an AppConnect recipe built to have it communicate with the CRM. The team uses QuickBooks Online to manage their agency finances, and Blyden and team have a recipe in place there as well for billing.

Watch this webinar for the details in how these recipes were conceived, built, and how they make the agency more efficient and profitable.