The next installment in my “5 Reasons Why…” focuses on Insightly’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. Insightly provides customer relationship and project management software to small businesses worldwide. More than 550,000 users in 180 countries leverage Insightly’s cloud-based application to manage customer interactions, leads, proposals, sales opportunities and projects from any device at any time. Designed to work the way you work, I found Insightly is very easy to use, yet powerful and it includes integrations with Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook, Mailchimp, Evernote and more making it an extremely flexible integration into just about any organization. As I perused the Insightly offering, I narrowed the pluses down to these five key features to focus on for this review.
Opportunity Tracking and Project management. The top reasons people turn to a CRM are organization, efficiency and sales. A business’s major use for a CRM is to manage their contact interactions and sales but what happens to when the product you sell is a service or that your business model revolves around project management, then what do you do? Hearing that this was a big issue, Insightly stepped in and created a CRM with project management integrated, which was the first of its kind. With opportunity tracking you can see incoming business as well as closed deals so you can predict revenue along with the ability to know if a customer is in need of a renewal. You can easily convert these opportunities to projects! With Insightly project management you can assign tasks to people and groups, track projects against milestone dates and receive notifications with reminders, tasks assigned and tasks that are completed. This capability gives your business the full visibility to see customer journey, from first touch to sale to service received to make sure that nothing was missed and there are no inefficiencies in the process.
Ease of use. There are a lot of CRMs out there, and all claim to transform your business into an efficient sales machine. I can tell you from experience that you will not see these success metrics unless your CRM is fully utilized by your company. Insightly has created a system for small businesses that is easy to use and easy to manage so that adoption is fast. Everyone can easily learn how to use Insightly and how to make it work for them. With this you will see productivity soar instead of getting lost in your CRM.
Contacts and Linking. Managing contacts is a critical component of a CRM and I found it to be very easy with Insightly. Unlike many CRM’s which only allow hierarchical relationships, Insightly developed an easy way to create a network of your contacts called linking which allows you to link multiple items to multiple items. So for example, your contacts might have relationships with multiple companies -- maybe a former employee is not a supplier or a current customer is a referrer -- all this information is important for you to maintain your overall business relationships. The Insightly interface allows you to create and view these links easily and so all the important contact information you need is at your fingertips. You can also assign tasks to yourself or other team members and have them linked to a contact, so no vital activity is missed.
Email. Knowing that most people work from their email, you need to use an application that has this seamless integration between email and CRM so that all communications are easy accessible. Insightly’s great integration with Google apps allows you to not only save an email into Insightly, but to create tasks, contacts, projects, opportunities or events all from your Google GMail. Same goes for Microsoft Outlook 2013 and Office 365. If you don’t use any of those particular email clients, Insightly provides you with an email link to forward any email to Insightly and it will link to the contact of that email address. It’s extremely simple.
Customization and Integration. Certain CRMs have different focuses on either different departments or verticals and are hard to customize. Insightly prides itself on being a general all purpose tracking system which allows you to make Insightly work for your business needs and requirements. Adding custom fields, custom categories, custom stages and more are easy with Insightly. Also Insightly has great integrations with apps like MailChimp, Quote Roller, Evernote, Zapier, and is constantly releasing new ones to give their customers the ability to seamlessly manage all their applications. They are also working on an integration with Quickbooks Online (available later this year). Since businesses are changing the way they work everyday why not have a system that is flexible yet powerful like Insightly.
Ready to See for Yourself?
Are you ready to check it out yourself? You can watch a very informative video on the Insightly product offering and capabilities. Next, stop by their pricing page to compare your options. You can also instantly signup for a free account and start using it today.
Opportunity Tracking and Project management. The top reasons people turn to a CRM are organization, efficiency and sales. A business’s major use for a CRM is to manage their contact interactions and sales but what happens to when the product you sell is a service or that your business model revolves around project management, then what do you do? Hearing that this was a big issue, Insightly stepped in and created a CRM with project management integrated, which was the first of its kind. With opportunity tracking you can see incoming business as well as closed deals so you can predict revenue along with the ability to know if a customer is in need of a renewal. You can easily convert these opportunities to projects! With Insightly project management you can assign tasks to people and groups, track projects against milestone dates and receive notifications with reminders, tasks assigned and tasks that are completed. This capability gives your business the full visibility to see customer journey, from first touch to sale to service received to make sure that nothing was missed and there are no inefficiencies in the process.
Ease of use. There are a lot of CRMs out there, and all claim to transform your business into an efficient sales machine. I can tell you from experience that you will not see these success metrics unless your CRM is fully utilized by your company. Insightly has created a system for small businesses that is easy to use and easy to manage so that adoption is fast. Everyone can easily learn how to use Insightly and how to make it work for them. With this you will see productivity soar instead of getting lost in your CRM.
Contacts and Linking. Managing contacts is a critical component of a CRM and I found it to be very easy with Insightly. Unlike many CRM’s which only allow hierarchical relationships, Insightly developed an easy way to create a network of your contacts called linking which allows you to link multiple items to multiple items. So for example, your contacts might have relationships with multiple companies -- maybe a former employee is not a supplier or a current customer is a referrer -- all this information is important for you to maintain your overall business relationships. The Insightly interface allows you to create and view these links easily and so all the important contact information you need is at your fingertips. You can also assign tasks to yourself or other team members and have them linked to a contact, so no vital activity is missed.
Email. Knowing that most people work from their email, you need to use an application that has this seamless integration between email and CRM so that all communications are easy accessible. Insightly’s great integration with Google apps allows you to not only save an email into Insightly, but to create tasks, contacts, projects, opportunities or events all from your Google GMail. Same goes for Microsoft Outlook 2013 and Office 365. If you don’t use any of those particular email clients, Insightly provides you with an email link to forward any email to Insightly and it will link to the contact of that email address. It’s extremely simple.
Customization and Integration. Certain CRMs have different focuses on either different departments or verticals and are hard to customize. Insightly prides itself on being a general all purpose tracking system which allows you to make Insightly work for your business needs and requirements. Adding custom fields, custom categories, custom stages and more are easy with Insightly. Also Insightly has great integrations with apps like MailChimp, Quote Roller, Evernote, Zapier, and is constantly releasing new ones to give their customers the ability to seamlessly manage all their applications. They are also working on an integration with Quickbooks Online (available later this year). Since businesses are changing the way they work everyday why not have a system that is flexible yet powerful like Insightly.
Ready to See for Yourself?
Are you ready to check it out yourself? You can watch a very informative video on the Insightly product offering and capabilities. Next, stop by their pricing page to compare your options. You can also instantly signup for a free account and start using it today.
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