How to 3X ROI from your CRM

Gina: Good afternoon everyone welcome in. Thanks so much for joining us today we are joined by our amazing partner Insightly and are here to talk about “How you can 3x your ROI with your CRM” we are thrilled to have you all of you all of you joining us today including the CMO from Insightly Chip House thank you so much Chip for hosting this with us we’re really excited to get started.

Chip: Gina thanks so much and thanks to all of you for attending today as you heard from G we’re going to talk about how to 3x your ROIi from your CRM and I’m excited about because we have a couple of phenomenal guests with me today on the panel.

So first is Vanessa Hunt with over 20 years of experience in training marketing and CRM implementation Vanessa is dedicated to sourcing and implementing the best marketing automation CRM CPQ and ERP solutions for her clients. Vanessa is a keen linguist which I think is super interesting fluent in English French German and proficient in Italian.

She’s worked on many CRM projects delivering training across Europe in multiple languages and Vanessa loves hiking and bike packing anywhere there are mountains or lakes.

We also are excited to have Andy Kodner who’s the VP of Global RevOps for BizarreVoice. Andy is currently vice president of Revenue operations at BizzarreVoice Andy brings a foundation as a quota curing seller so he’s the real deal he’s done this before he spent two decades across the funnel and operational roles supporting the business at scale and from systems analytics and forecasting to process enablement and Communications Andy has worked to drive business in global technology organizations and smaller emerging companies alike from Oracle and AWS to ring central and Hyperion.

Chip: So as you can hear from those intros I’ve got a pretty exciting crew with me today that know more about CRM I think that most than most of us have forgotten. And myself again as Gina mentioned I’m the CMO at Insightly CRM I’ve been in SAS for the past 25 years much of it in marketing technology and sales technology.

Chip: I’m going to get us going here and kind of kick this all off so if you’re here CRM is important to you and your CRM in fact may be one of your biggest Investments that your company makes since it’s software that you renew every year whether you’re in the cloud hopefully you are anyway in the cloud or on a legacy CRM you’re likely spending hundreds to thousands per month every CRM should be the single source of Truth for your business if it’s not that you’ll never get Roi from it so that’s almost like a a starting point for all of us when it is the single sort of Truth or single source of Truth your team has the tool set to increase Revenue, decrease operational costs, create internal collaboration and deliver a better customer experience.

Chip: So this is our second webinar with rev genius we did one a few months ago talking about how your CRM can help your sales leader stay sane and if you haven’t seen that one we’re gonna go ahead and add that link in in chat so you can review that later on so well let’s get underway Vanessa do do you want to say hi and I’m going to pass it to Andy to say hi too and then I’m G to start asking some questions sure

Vanessa: Really nice nice to meet everybody thanks very much for joining us this evening this afternoon wherever you are my name is Vanessa I’ve been working in CRM for about 20 years and yeah still see some of the challenges that we had many moons ago but really delighted that we’ve seen so much technology Improvement in recent years and that CRM is much more accessible to to many sorts of companies now based in the south of the UK but love love Europe love traveling obviously to the us as well and I live at home with my husband and my little cat awesome will your cat make an appearance today well I was thinking she might do but I have locked her out at the moment so hopefully hopefully not but she’s adorable so got it and hi

Andy: Thanks for having me as well great to be here I’m joining today from San Francisco the weather is nice this is the nicer time of year for us also been in software in in general for a little over 20 years I was a salesperson in software prior to that so I got my start in CRM as a user which has given me a really nice Foundation I always think about hey what’s this going to feel like is someone actually going to do this and use it largely in the revops world now for for quite a while full funnel so it was sales operations but I was actually working in marketing operations without directly realizing it and I’ve really enjoyed the scope so seen a lot of things and I think that these Basics keep coming back because they are those Basics and I I think just because something is a basic doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable that Foundation has to be really strong to get your money’s worth and more importantly get your time’s worth so figuring out where to spend time is a is a blast for me it’s part of what I do when I get up every day is figuring out how to optimize things and make them smoother and faster and and love brainstorming on new ideas about that

Chip: Cool well thanks Andy well audience you can tell we have the right people for the job here and so let’s start digging in here and if you’re setting up technology to optimize your ROI the first thing you need to do is you have to onboard it correctly inside of your organization and this is really interesting because there’s been studies coming out for the past 20 odd years about CRM implementation and the percentage of those implementations that actually fail in organizations and that rate is something what disputed and there’s a lot of different studies about this but they range from 18 to 69% depending on which source that you’re looking at and so I think there’s an element of this that’s that’s obvious but Vanessa talk to us about why onboarding is so critical and how do organizations get it right yeah

Vanessa:I think I mean it’s it’s frightening to hear those statistics isn’t it and and and hopefully that the lower one is the the more accurate one but yeah I think one of the key things is obviously involving people first of all in the decision about which CRM is going to be selected and making sure that you’ve gone through your due diligence to to select a solution that’s going to not only suit you today but also support you going forward and and having a really clear goal about why you’re changing technology you’re doing it just for the fun of it there there is a huge amount of of change for users for for employees in an organization when technology changes so you have to have some really clear objectives about what you’re trying to achieve and I think also that there’s a lot of people just asse that well it’s it’s a web app it’s it’s really easy to use it’s just like using a website but but actually the critical thing for users is is having clear processes and sometimes it’s not until you put a a CRM in that you realize well actually our our our processes are quite not quite as robust as we thought or we’ve missed out a huge chunk of processes there’s all this stuff that happens behind the scenes that the salespeople perhaps aren’t aware of and and we haven’t considered how the CRM impacts those users so I think knowing exactly what your plan is for implementing the CRM you know from the very start of the project and not last minute is is critical and and certainly as a consultant you know making sure that you leave an organization with people in place that can support it going forward it is a project there is an end date and you have to have the right team internally to support the CRM that you’ve implemented and some CRMs will require more technical skills than others and therefore you need to think about that in terms of your project and your planning but I think it’s a very a very customized approach and it’s very specific to each each company each SE sector and also the culture within an organization so yeah knowing your people first and then working out the best way to to help them learn that new technology come second I think you pointed out a couple of things there I mean the first is the plan and the second is the people right because you have to have an idea why you’re doing this in the first place what your goals are what your outcomes are that you’re trying to achieve and put together the plan and it’s going to include things like I would asse enablement and training and internal communication which is probably half the battle isn’t it yeah definitely I think even even warning people of what’s coming down the line and and you know so it’s not something that they find out one week and they’re being trained the next I think to your point change management and you know communicating what’s going well what’s maybe not going not going so well even but people will make assptions when you don’t communicate clearly so yeah that that Comm strategy is also so integral to to the training part as well one one of the things you you had said when we were talking about this before of aness was does your onboarding meet the vision of what you had proposed and so what did you what did you mean by that yeah I suppose it’s like when I well years ago when I first started in CRM I was an end user trainer and and often a huge huge benefits would be sold from the outset we’re going to be doing all of these things within the first six months and and sadly at that point CRM took a lot longer to roll out you’d be waiting for three months until you got the new drop of functionality for example and and so it just wasn’t realistic to give people the benefits they needed from the outset and so all the talk about what they would be able to do it was going to come but but not in at the speed and the pace that we’d anticipated and so basically it was generally a big disappointment and and you as a trainer and and Andrew will say the same you’re in the front line trying to explain to people why these things aren’t there and and finding all of the bugs in the first tests and so thankfully things happen a lot faster developments a lot more agile now and so those surprises don’t happen so much and I think we also are able to truly provide some benefits early on you don’t have to wait nine months 12 months and I think people are also seeing the importance of data and cleaning data before it gets into the CRM and there are many more tools to help us do that whereas back in the day it it was it was a nightmare data migration was always a big surprise on some of those larger projects yeah makes makes good sense so I mean if if it’s garbage in there’s garbage out nber one right and also just transparency and change management as you said before so and Andy I’m wondering how you think about this as a quota carrying sales guy and what you’ve seen well in your past anyway and now a sales leader how can we best roll out CRMs to the goom Market org so that they’re successful yeah look it’s a really important question because it’s all about time to Value not all solutions are created equal and I think sometimes there’s this there’s this need jerk reaction to think that going really fast at all costs is the end goal but I think that taking some really concerted time to consider some of the things we’ve mentioned but some others too who your audience is what are your goals you’ve always got to keep those up on the shelf right next to you you can’t lose sight of those and I think trying to work and measure how you’re doing against those goals is one of those things that can fly by and go off to the Wayside where you figure well let’s just keep going you have to keep checking in so that means checking in with different user bases you’ve got your end customers as your sellers you’ve got managers which do something very different you have all kinds of Supporting Cast you’ve got account management and client success and all manner of other jobs you’ve got operational people and you’ve got leadership and they will all use the app in different ways so really thinking ahead to what you want to make sure everyone gets as an outcome is not something to to treat lightly the old concept of build it and they will come with CRM never happened you can set it out there but people need to know what to expect when they get there they need to understand what they need to do when they get there and what’s expected of them and then they need to know exactly what to do when they run into a jam or they need some help so a lot of what I just talked about is a mixture of enablement plus training difference being the training is specifically hey how do I find how two steps on how to get this done if I don’t remember from my initial roll out whether it’s self-paced e-learning or whether it’s a a session with a live trainer and then enablement is that constant communication out to the teams be transparent what’s going on what have you found publicized successes hey did so and so in this particular job role was able to do this and they couldn’t do that before it took them you two-thirds longer so Time Savings dollar savings speed all of these things are great things to publicize because it makes people want to try the solution I think oftentimes when people try something if it’s not really smooth the first time you probably get them to come back once more without any carrot or stick encouragement come back another time and it doesn’t work you have a problem on your hands getting them to come back that third time gets tougher and tougher so helping them understand what’s in it for them is something that I I never really Overlook I always think about it from those different points of view seller executive and everything in between they have to get something out of it and it’s got to be clear yeah I think those are great points Andy and a CRM should broadly be considered as a tool of productivity right and so if you’re doing it right you’re going to have prod it and the individual users should feel that yeah relative to onboarding I know that the bulk of our customers or good share anyway choose to use our guided onboarding service and in general achieve go live in like 1.1 months versus an average for the industry of several months but it’s as you said it’s not about speed it’s really about quality and getting the data right and getting the communication and the the enablement right when you do those things right you end up getting the speed because you don’t have to pause and fix things along the way you end up going faster in total yeah that sounds right so one big piece kind of transitioning to the second element here for Roi is being able to use the capabilities of the CRM to its fullest and if you have a CRM worth its salt it can do automations and you can automate a nber of different things and it’s it’s I think pretty obvious why automations would create more efficiencies in your organization and then thus Roi Vanessa I know you have a lot of experience with this doing with this with different types of organizations and so we talked about what you termed traditional automation what do you what do you mean by that yeah I think traditional automation is using the The pointand Click approach being being able to build logic with with simple tools and again you know many CRMs provide workflow automation but but some of them are easier to use than others and and and that’s also an important aspect of buying the the the system or the platform that you choose so the people behind the scenes that are going to be building this workflow automation they need to be able to to to work it out and and and build workflows in future and and so really all we’re doing is we’re we’re basically saying these are the steps that a user would traditionally take and where they would click with their Mouse and the things they would do and basically we’re getting technology to perform those steps for us so it it could be something as simple as sending a notification email internally between teams it could be creating a new type of record that will then be used Downstream in your process but the it really is critical first of all that you’ve you’ve got your processes pretty much nailed down down before you start automating because if your if your data is still in you know kind of in in transit you maybe haven’t confirmed all of the lists of values or the options that you want in a pck list and you start building out your workflows you’re going to end up having to do some rework so so I don’t necessarily bring in workflow right at the beginning apart from where those processes are really clearly defined and where we’re already sure about the data but workflow automation doesn’t just mean using tools to to create records or update fields and do those types of things it could be as simple as having a dashboard that you schedule or a report that you schedule so every Monday I get my exception reports of the opportunities that are missing some data perhaps or maybe I get a warning that we’ve got a nber of tickets or cases that are about to go over their SLA so that might be an automated report so I think sometimes people think oh it’s automation I must build a workflow and so you’ve always got to come back to that question about well why why are you trying to automate it what’s the the outcome that you’re trying to achieve and and then let’s look at the options because anything that you build needs maintenance and so you’re also looking not only for what will give you a quick result but also that what’s really maintainable going forward and sometimes creating some custom code or or getting a developer to to help you create a nice formula field might be the thing to do because that only ever changes once in a blue moon but most of the time with things like workflow it allows you to customize your code on an ongoing basis but in a a very methodical and simple way for traditional users business users like like ourselves and I’m assing when you’re working with a customer customer or a client Vanessa you might have some of the automations ideated and that you’re building at launch and many more you’re sort of training them to build over time I would asse because yeah yeah it’s really yeah sorry I was I just getting excited because I was just going to say it’s really wonderful when you when you see a user build their own workflow and and create something that they’ve never done before and and so sometimes I really like to talk walk through the approach and then have them build it and again depending on the tools that you’re using some of them will include commenting and allow you to write comments directly within the workflow and it’s just really great to see people pick up those tools and use them and then be able to give people feedback on how they might develop them in a slightly different way to be more performant but yeah that that’s kind of really exciting when you see that happen yeah there actually was a question that just came in for you Vanessa and it’s what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve and what’s the maintenance and I think that’s I don’t know if that’s related to automations or yeah so sorry I meant yeah in terms of any so any solution that you build and anything that you can figure has a certain amount of effort so sometimes the the the quickest cheapest way to provide the answer to a question might be to create a list view that’s really quick to do if I start building a workflow maybe I’m going to be start looking at half an hour’s development or an hours development and you’ve got to weigh up okay well what time am I saving by building it this way what’s the time that I’m saving for users and also how often does this happen so one of the things that you often find early on a project is that people will come up with all of the exceptions that prove the rule as my French teacher used to say they’ll they’ll come up they’ll say oh what happens you’ve got this process and this is automated but what happens when this happens and then often if you ask well how frequently does that happen and and should that happen and is there another way we could prevent that you don’t want to find yourself building workflows for things that only happen a very limited amount of time there might be other ways to to achieve that so yeah it’s about finding the the right solution and not crack using a hammer to crack a nut as they say yeah makes good sense and so on the sales side Andy I know that you experienced the benefits of automation all the time as deals are progressing through the funnel but what else comes to mind for you for automations yeah we spent so much time putting information into CRM systems I I think there’s a lot of well what’s in it for me it feels like it’s either for every job level sellers feel like it’s for their manager managers feel like it’s for their VP VPS feel like it’s for finance and for the company and I think that this has been an ageold problem with with CRM and you know to get things out of it automations are one of the first so people have to do less where the company and the individual start getting more out you know I’ve been I’ve really been looking a lot more lately too at AI I think this is really been a big deal because the concept here on my on my mobile I’ve got two or three different apps now not just chat GPT but also online there’s Ai and then there’s generative Ai and I think both of them have some really interesting promise as a as a a partner along with CRM so to get your automations to be right and I’m sure Vanessa would agree with this you’ve got to make sure your process is really clear so before you set your automation up you’ve got to know exactly what you’re trying to do and when you’re trying to get there when you’re setting up AI it’s really the same thing it’s it’s no different than having Clarity if you’re setting up an office in another location around the world so we’ve been looking a lot at this wave of AI which is not a fad so generative AI to create content and to generate proposals and to do different things based on your customer information and then AI in general a lot of the new applications that are compliments to your CRM are really changing the way we’re starting to interact with this CRM system in sales organizations client success organizations and marketing organizations where it looks at your data it looks at your activities integrating with other things be it emails or your calendar to make suggestions it will start to see patterns that maybe as a han you’re not going to see and it serves up you should speak to so and so so and so is pipeline Mr manager seems to be low make sure to speak to them by this week to improve it otherwise your odds of making the quarter go down these suggestions are much more at your fingertips and it’s really changing the way that we’re able to not just interact with CRM but it’s giving us something back finally just like workflows and automations do it simplifies this gives us real suggestions and but it’s based on your business which is really nice it’s not General suggestions they’re things that you can take action on yeah I think there’s a ton of promise for AI and CRM no question and excited to see how it emerges over time so I I think one of the things you mentioned there is just getting more out of your CRM and one way to do that is it helps you go faster and kind of what I’ve learned I think there’s more research come that has recently come out one from the author Jay bear and he has a book called the time to win if you’re interested it’s it’s funny it’s like a $10 book and it’s literally like that big but you can learn a ton from this book in a little bit of time but one of the things that he uncovered in his research is that customers would pay up to 50% more if they never had to wait and 53% Report spending more for the fastest brand just the first to the deal the first maybe to the demo request when it came into your organization or the first to the lead I mean it’s it’s kind of T amount if you think about it if you’ve been to Disney you’ll you’ll pay more to get the fast pass to go right to the front of the line and I think customer behavior is just like that in b2c in B2B also and so what can your CRM do to help you go faster and one thing I think it can do is for example use lead assignment rules that move from maybe a form and immediately assign it to a round robin or directly to a person or on to their calendar to optimize their ability to respond drift we’re actually a customer of drift for for chat on our website and they have researched that only 7% of companies respond in the first five minutes and 55% took over five days to respond to demo requests and so clearly a lot of organizations are failing here and Vanessa what would you say you have to put in place with the CRM to help organizations go faster yeah I think yeah to your point there’s there’s a huge amount of business that’s lost by people not responding promptly so the first thing is your autor response as soon as somebody fills in a form on your website but actually nowadays there’s a lot to suggest that people actually do want you know to talk to chatbot they do want to get answers immediately I mean recently I I put a a query into support and I was amazed at the response I got back because it was perfect and solved my problem immediately and I didn’t need to speak to anybody and that was that was really surprising for me because I’ve been a probably a bit of a a late a late Comer to the whole AI side of things but I think I read a statistic years ago that said something like there was a seven you were seven times more likely to win business by being the first business is to respond to your customer so when your customer’s on your website and they fit in that form or they ask for a demo they’re in buying mode you’re not going to go in a shop into a shop and ignore the person that’s in the fitting room ready to buy something but but it’s just frightening how how much we do that in in business and I think also making people really clear about you know how how quickly you’ll respond and and just keeping to your promise you know if if you are a small business you know you’re not going to have the same kind of capacity as a larger business might but actually it’s it’s usually the larger organizations where you get lost in the loop you you aren’t assign to the right person or you think you’re getting a demo but you’re actually getting a pre-qualification call before a demo which I find incredibly frustrating when I’m looking for software for my clients and also I think you need to be a bit careful about your your assignment rules I think again people do have certainly location that’s obviously very important to make sure that you’re reaching out to people in the right time zone but sometimes we have to answer these questions about how big our organization is and and those sorts of scoring or qualification rules may actually exclude somebody that’s making a buying decision on behalf of somebody else so obviously that’s key when you’re talking about software but also like big ticket items maybe somebody’s an agent for somebody that wants to buy something but they might get excluded because the the stats on their organization don’t match the the high value ones that that organization is trying to attract so I think certainly have being really clear about how you’re going to root th those calls and if you can’t take a call or have a meeting immediately again providing people with the right kinds of things whilst they’re waiting so lots of people are doing that these days you get an email with links to resources videos but the chances are the moment that somebody feels in that form they’ve already watched all the videos they want to watch they really do want to speak to somebody and it is important right now so just doing everything you can to make sure that you can speak to a person if that’s what the customer would like and and and not trying to you know make everything too technology focused because it it just feels very very imp personal and everyone wants to to speak to a real han at some point I think yeah I think if we if you can put the your yourself in the shoes of the prospect or your customers when they’re doing the Outreach like you said they’re probably at the point where they feel like they are in the virtual waiting room ready to go and there maybe their wallets out even but definitely they’re interested in talking to somebody and you you can use the technology to help you out there I mean Andy anything you want to add for what you’ve seen work best for optimizing lead assign for for Speed and just quality too yeah I mean look if if anybody finds a way to add more time without making us busier please look me up on LinkedIn and give me a call I have a Business Partnership idea for you I I would say that it’s building on what Vanessa just said time is the big limiter for all of us so whether inside of your business whether you’re a few people or whether you’re a bigger organization the time is really precious with with throughout the day so I’m always looking for ways to add efficiency meaning I want to get something done in less time but get to the same exact outcome without having to spend a lot more energy and I think that we spend a lot of time looking for information searching for it it’s in different locations it’s in different formats it’s in a it’s in a a a format that I’m not familiar with I have to take time so factoring all of that in as leads come in you want it to be very predictable you want it to be measurable I also want to make things very transparent and visible so that people are able to see how many they’re getting where they’re going what the trend is like so that they’re able to take action I love this app I’m getting happy faces everywhere at the bottom the the bottom line there is the same thing it’s always been make it easier for people to do what you need them to do what you’re asking of them set the expectation up front make it easier for them measure it and off you go and it sounds very simple because it really is these are really important Basics and again it’s no different than somebody that’s got you know one partner with two people in a small company or a great big organization you’ve got to find ways to make it easier for people to do what you’re asking them to do and getting the leads to the right person to eliminate any disruption speed to lead is key lead goes to the wrong person they’ve got to send it to somebody else or sorry that’s not mine and then no one follows up you’re not getting that business so at all costs get it routed the right way do it efficiently and make it easier for people to take the action great tips there and so we’ve learned that integration is critical for CRM systems especially a typical organization right now is leveraging what 10 20 30 50 or more pieces of software sometimes even the go to market team team has more than that and if you think about a sales rep right ask them what they work in most and they’re likely going to talk about email I looked at some stats and looks like the average sales rep spends about 21% of their day just writing emails and they send on average about 36 emails a day and they spend tons more time certainly in the CRM reacting to emails and things like that and so a lot of CRMs ours included does integrate with Gmail with with Outlook helping you you basically use that as your dashboard for interacting how do you think about this is is this a common request that you get Vanessa when you’re installing a CRM and what are some of the more common things that you’re integrating with yeah I think I mean as much as people would say oh the CRM has to be the source of truth that that’s true to a certain degree but email does email really well so I don’t think we’re ever going to get anybody away from inbox from their inbox whether that’s Gmail or Outlook and I don’t think there’s a need to I think what what’s critical is that we have the ability to log and track those emails and and take what you know the the top 20 or 30 % of communications that we we do want to store and we should have a history of and and have those within our CRM so one of the first things that I do is is you know help companies Implement that little integration for any CRM and obviously Insightly’s got a neat one as well because that’s really your stepping stone into the CRM but what I do like to explain is that your inbox is everybody else’s demands on you and your time whereas when you’re in your C RM you are focused completely on your contacts on your companies on your priorities and the other day I was looking for an email in Outlook and and I knew I’d sent something and I couldn’t find it and I thought why why am I looking in Outlook I’m going to go straight into my CRM look at the contact and Company record and I know that I’ll see it there because we’ve got so much stuff going on in our in our inboxes so I think that actually using those kinds of Integrations is a great way for helping people see will actually if we do bring this activity into the CRM look at all the reports that we can then you know get from that and how using the tools in the CRM whether whether we’re automating whether we’re using email templates whether we’re using emails where we’ve got a sequence of emails going out from a salesperson let’s see the the outcome and the and analyze what’s the benefit is from that activity but whether that’s generated directly in your CRM or in the inbox it’s more about the reporting and the insights that we can derive from that kind of metadata or or data so I definitely wouldn’t say it’s not a good thing to do that it’s like one of the first things I want to do and it’s really frustrating when you can’t do it because of security reasons or whatever and then simple things like using SSO single sign on if you’re in a larger organization just making it easy to get into the CRM and then I think at the beginning of an implementation we it is an opportunity to say okay well we know that everybody uses their own emails you know they they use their own templates and they they copy and paste and you know there’re are standard things that we do all the time but any new CRM or any upgrade in a CRM also gives you an opportunity to revisit those common tasks that you perform and and give people some best practice so again that’s about the value that we talked about earlier giving them the five best email templates that we use and sharing the the knowledge that you’ve already got amongst your team I think that’s that really helps with with adoption yeah I agree Vanessa and if you think about it time is truly money for most organizations and it maybe if it’s even heightened more for the sales team right and so if if if the email inbox is sort sort of where they spend a lot of their day how can you you know you integrate your CRM such that they can easily create a contact right from the email system into the CRM without having to have both windows open all the time yeah so Andy I I know that you have some opinions on this so what are your thoughts about sales rep time and productivity yeah before I mentioned the whole build it and they will come thing never really works instead go to them so if people are already in email put your cont content and feed your sales intelligence apps and whatnot in a way that you’re already feeding it into CRM they’re already there you can do a lot of the interaction with your email right from the CRM or from the CRM rather from the email that will feed the CRM so either direction is really good without having to go to another app or another destination or another portal location or whatever the case may be having sales intelligence apps out there now especially conversational intelligence the likes of gong or what was chorus that’s now part of Zoom info as they’re interacting with your emails and your phone calls the intelligence that that gathers out of your email and then feeds it back to you you don’t have to ask anyone to go anywhere different to do that so I don’t view this as saving time it’s the opposite it’s time you have to spend but you don’t want to lose time instead so it’s really about coming to your teams and allowing them to stay where they are and what they’re used to so they can get work done without having them to disrupt their day and go to another location so there’s really a lot of investment that can take place up front but it’s not a lot of lifting so you get a lot of value out of some of these sales intelligence apps conversational intelligence in the email in the CRM they’re there any way come to them yeah I I think it’s a great theme not necessarily saving time but ensuring that you’re not spending spending more time because I think as as a leader even like when I think about our go to market motion it’s easy to say we want one more Bell and whistle but you have to think about the downstream impact of that to the team so I want to pick up on this concept of relationship linking and that’s another thing that can M help make you more productive as an organization so for a lot of businesses especially midsize even larger businesses to know how people are connected inside of the CRM maybe they’re related to Deals as influencers or other relationships just truly makes your CRM more valuable and also kind of more plug-and playay so to speak for the AES making them more productive do you have other examples of that that come up in the work that you do Vanessa yeah so I think I got I I I sort of went ahead a mo a moment with the the or chart plus and the or chart Hub that I mentioned in the help because I think there’s two things there’s there’s the certainly being able to define a relationship within the CRM is hugely important so for some organizations if they’ve got broker relationships that they’re trying to reflect they might have a buyer and a seller or a buyer and multiple sellers that they need to associate with an opportunity or a deal so just in terms of somebody’s processes there could be multiple parties is involved also if you are working in in an organization where you maybe have a Channel or a partner model you might need to reflect who your partners are working with you or your referers or your introducers so there’s a lot of relationships that are standard things every day that we need to be able to Define clearly and so certainly your CRMs allow you to define those relationships label them and categorize them and show how people are reflected on the opportunity clearly you it’s your point Who’s the decision maker who’s the the buyer and and am I speaking to enough people within one organization is critical and then if you want to visualize that kind of information or present it in a in a visual way there are some really nice apps that Fe that are populated from the data in your CRM and one that I was looking at and literally just this week because of the AI thing so the or chart Hub one has heat Maps so it also shows you once it’s populated the the chart from your contact data it can either do that automatically using AI or you can do it manually yourself but then it shows you with a heat map where are your strongest relationships or how frequently you’re communicating with people so I think when you start showing sales teams and managers that kind of visual information that is effectively populated by the contact data that you’ve already got that’s when you then start seeing you know people get EX excited about cm in the same way that we do that’s that’s super interesting and when you think about it in the CRM things exist maybe in multiple States in leads and opportunities prospects contacts orgs things like that and especially in a B2B sense you’re you’re now org selling more than individual selling and so the CRM has to enable that well I was yeah and I it’s interesting that I’ve certainly seen a trend over the last couple of years that there are more people involved later in the buying process so you’ve got those people that are doing the selection and the validation at the beginning of that that that the sale but it’s you often find random people popping up later on in the process as you’re getting closer to making a real decision and so again some of these tools will actually identify and say well you’ve got to proposal stage but actually doesn’t look like you’ve got enough contacts in your database or you’re not speaking to enough people with the right kind of role based on what we already know about your your usual win rate or the the usual nber of people that you’re speaking to at this point so yeah there’s some really interesting tools that that will work alongside your CRM to highlight that kind of information as well good stuff well I want to make sure that we get to one of the most important features of a CRM which is reports and dashboards and when I think about how how I’m engaging as the CMO with our CRM it’s often in this way right I’m getting data out of the CRM I’m looking for Trends I’m looking for Revenue by Channel by stage by segment things like that as a marketing leader and so if you don’t take the time to set up your reports automate your reports build your dashboards you’re not going to get full Roi out of your system what else comes to mind what are what are some of the more important charts Andy that you use in your CRM I mean this is where it really brings it all together this last segment that we just talked about relationships I had to just kind of sit here and not get too excited because the relationships are so key but bringing those connections together it’s all through these visualizations so reports and dashboards it’s not just building a report that you ask someone to put together and you go look at it once in a while it’s the so what it’s I’ve got a question I need to get an answer so I can go do something so it depends on the team of course so whether you’re in a product team you’re in a sales team you’re in marketing or client success there’s obviously so many different cuts but for us to track our business we start early where we look at lead vole and Trends by location and also by source so we want to see are leads coming from events in marketing are they coming from emails are they coming from social and secondarily we want to look at so for example in the organization I’m in today we’re we’re getting to the midsize level we’re just starting to get channel Partners we want to know the business they’re bringing to us again via relationships our board often is the source for many we want to look at those those relationships as well so tracking the lead sources and of course if sales is dring up their own pipeline which we’re about 50% quite high in terms of of lead gen for a sales organization so Pipeline and lead by Source really critical where is it coming from conversion rates so of those leads how many are getting into the sales pipeline then and then how is it going what stage they’re in so how advanced and how long you’ve been working with them Who’s involved in the sales cycle we just talked about the relationships I don’t mean to bring the AI piece in again I make it sound like I’m using AI for lots of things we’re just starting to look but I saw an app very literally yesterday that would say Hey you haven’t spoken to Mary Smith yet at this company Mary Smith is involved in 85% of deal signatures you need to speak to Mary Smith it was fascinating so the concept of bringing it together sales stage reporting how long deals are in certain stages setting those up setting up workflows to give you alerts if something has been there too long is a great reporter a dashboard to be able to manage your business so things aren’t sitting idle you’re keeping them moving and the activities are taking place and then of course things like making your business more predictable so you need forecast reporting you need projections you also need to see customer status so not just what’s booked and what’s in the forecast and what your looking at for that particular quarter but what’s happening next quarter next month how are you doing toward those targets so making this very visual allows you to take those questions of hey how are we doing this month whether you’ve got investors aboard your a private company or you’re a public company being able to get faster answers happen because these reports and dashboards smarize all of that data often from they could be even different sources if it’s not all in your CRM you could have most in your CRM but bring in from another source and these dashboards bring it together in one place whether you’re using quote business intelligence tools or whether you’re using what’s baked into your CRM system or even if it’s a a Google Sheets or an Excel file these can give you the ability to answer those questions faster with less work so that you can keep the business moving it’s it’s a to me it’s a must you can’t have CRM and just use list views you have to get these smarized views with these reports and dashboards to really get value out of it yeah I 100% agree and in my experience nothing will make your CEO happier than when you send him the link and it he gets up up to the minute executive visibility on everything that’s happening inside the business I think that that is something that will saves a lot of time for everybody Downstream because they’re not having to prepare a manual spreadsheet right and and so U and it makes the business run better because the know know is better and the outcomes are better what what are some of the top dashboards you build Vanessa for for people yeah a lot of it’s around definitely around pipeline and and and how the nber and vole of of of opportunities at one point so it’s certainly a lot around the sales side of things but I try for every business I try to look at what are the what are the reports and dashboards that we need to help us manage what we’ve got now so you kind of your operation workspace or your operational dashboards and then I think there are dashboards that allow you to look back and allow you to look forward so if we’re looking back we’re looking at past Trends and what insights we can derive from those so that may be looking at the nber of tickets that we handled last month or the nber of opportunities that we closed last month and then what we need to do to improve those nbers going forward and then you’ve got reports or dashboards that will tell you future things so this is back to that exception reporting we we want alerts around the fact that we haven’t got enough leads in the pot or we haven’t got enough business in our pipeline so for every business it’s obviously everybody’s trying to sell something or or maybe even in nonprofits you’re looking to win funding so you’ve you’ve got something that’s measurable and that you’ve got a direct nber but it’s then trying to work out all of the activities that have an impact on that nber and generally there are only two or three levers that you might need to to pull but it’s finding out which lever you can you can pull first that’s going to have the biggest impact or or increase on your your Revenue but then also looking at customer service I think we do focus a lot on sales and marketing but also if you’re running projects in Insightly or you’re using tickets or cases to help you with customer service that’s really going to have a huge impact on your customer customers and their customer experience so looking at the timings for those as well so yeah a lot of the dashboards I’m building are I like to kind of call them workspaces because a lot of the time it’s that workspace of information that’s helping them then plan their day but obviously with with the sales side of things as Andre mentioned that’s looking also to the to the Future and the the pipeline that we’re working on this week is what’s driving our business for next year or the year after it’s not what I’m doing this week that’s going to have an impact on how the year goes yeah makes sense thanks Vanessa and and I know that we probably have to get to the last point that we have for today because we’re getting near the top of the hour but we’ve talked a lot about sales I also want to talk about marketing and Insightly thinks of oursel as an all-in-one CRM we also have marketing Automation and service in the same platform that allows you to leverage that single source of data also the single view of the customer and and we did some interesting research last year with Ascend 2 and this was about sales and marketing alignment which is something that your CRM can do and 36% of companies with aligned technology on their GTM their go to market teams showed a significant increase in Revenue compared to just 14% of those with less alignment and so we we were excited about that data because it shows the benefit of aligning Marketing in sales and I’m curious in in practice how you see that with the the organizations that you’re working with Andy and and Vanessa the ability to integrate in your marketing Automation and take action from your CRM and connect it to to marketing I think it just makes from where I sit given that we run our whole company on our own technology it gives us that continuous view of the customer journey and that has a lot of benefits look this is one of the things I think about first when I get up every day is is staying aligned between the marketing organization the sales organization the customer success organization overall I I don’t like the concept of handoffs I like it to just be a smooth flow all the way through the cycle so the more I can help stay aligned in the systems whether they’re different systems or the same system net result for the user base and the business should be similar I don’t want there to be specific big events that have to happen that have points of failure instead I like these to be just like these are normal handshakes that happen so the alignment I mentioned earlier when we were talking about dashboards a few moments ago this concept of coming from lead to pipeline so as you progress through you know funnel or stage or whatever setup you happen to have I want to be able to track that and I want to be able to to see across all of it without any delays without any slowdowns again we we keep getting back to time we keep getting back to another common theme which is first in sometimes the per the the client’s wallet is open you if you miss that opportunity we can control this so I love when the the system and your Automation and your process around it is as seamless as possible so that you’re able to capitalize on all of that otherwise it just slows things down and you you could have some missed opportunities so it’s just more awareness from sales to understand where marketing is spending their time and their budget maybe they’re event Events maybe there are specific online campaigns you name it and then vice versa for marketing to understand okay well what happened as a result did sellers take action how did the sales teams do as a result of the Investments that we made so making that Crystal Clear is nothing but upside I feel like it’s it’s something critical for our business and I felt that way for quite a while at a bunch of different companies it’s it’s so true well I know that we’re almost at the top of the hour any final thoughts Vanessa that you would add to this yeah I think on the marketing side I think often again there’s that those silos aren’t there of the sales team does this the marketing de does that and and I think now with CRM where that data is shared fully from marketing between marketing and sales it just allows people to see what the other other side of the equation is doing and and actually the fact that you are getting better qualified leads that those prospects that you know attended your last webinar are you know more likely to convert or the Outreach that we’ve been doing using a telemarketing team is is having a great impact on the quality of meetings that we’re getting so yeah there’s lots of things you can use scoring to help you see that the quality of leads that’s coming across the the the fence is better but also I just think in terms of learning and again adoption back in the day when there were lots of disparate systems you’d have one person that knew the marketing system and one person knew the sales system and neither of the people knew the gray bit in the middle and that was always a bit of challenge so I think just being able to train people more easily because they are using the same platform form is going to make the learning easier and obviously then you can experiment and optimize accordingly well we’re in a new day and the CRM can serve as that connective tissue Vanessa Andy thank you so much today and thanks to everybody who joined us today for this webinar I really appreciate your time and the cat is here but she’s just on the floor so I was waiting for her to jp up the cat cat new one to arrive it’s top of the hour all right have a great day every thanks everybody thank you everyone thanks have a good evening