Small or mid-sized biz? Think BIG with your CRM.

Val: Welcome to today’s webinar we hope  you’re ready to think big with us my  name is Val Riley I am the head of  content marketing and Insightly and if  you have product Market fit and your  business is growing you’re in the right  place we’re going to talk all today  about the ways you can set your CRM up  today so that when you have 10 20 30  times even 50 times as many customers as  you have today in the future your CRM is  a solid foundation you can build on  let’s meet our presenters I’m delighted  to have Melinda pressure with us today  she is our product marketing director  here at Insightly she’s been with us for  about two and a half years but before  that she was with some amazing logos  that you see on this slide and she has a  wealth of information to share with us  we also have Dave Osborne. Dave is the  chief sales officer at Insightly so  he’s responsible for all the revenue  he’s been with us for just over a year  before that he was with qualtrics and  while he was there they went from 10  million in Revenue to over a billion so  Dave knows a thing or two about scaling  and we also later on are going to meet  Lisa Riggs Lisa is the owner and CEO of  her own company Spirit socks USA she’s  also an Insightly user so she’s going to  put some of the tips you hear from Dave  and Melinda to the test   before we got started we had a quick  poll up and so these are the results of  the poll and Melinda I’m gonna pass it  to you so take it away.

Melinda: ll right   that poll is really interesting it’s  almost almost a nice bell curve in a  certain way so good to see that welcome  everyone let’s get started so to  level set there are three things that we  wanted to talk about during today’s  webinar now we realize not everyone in  this call is an Insightly user and you  know maybe some people aren’t even using  a CRM actually so   just know that we’re going to use  Insightly as our example here but I know  that we’ll be really just   speaking to CRM in general to give a  good sense of what you should be  thinking about when you consider moving  to a CRM if you’re not yet or even what  you should think about if you’re  considering switching at this point in  time so we’ll walk through five tips on  how to use Insightly to reach your goals  and we’ll get Dave’s leadership  perspective on those tips and then also  a deeper understanding of what Insightly  can do for each one of these points that  we’ll go over today  and then after that I’ll interview Lisa  to show you how she’s using him sightly  to support her business growth so Dave  let’s start by level setting for sales  leaders like you if your team isn’t  using the CRM as the central nervous  system of your organization your ability  to fully understand your business could  be compromised and so I’d like to start  with your perspective on how important  it is to align around a single version  of the truth.

Dave: Thanks Melinda it’s  incredibly important to rally around a  single version of the truth right and it  starts with agreement at the org level  about who your ICP is and what value  your company’s delivering even more  important is understanding and  optimizing the key Milestones along the  customer Journey right starting from the  top of the funnel and marketing through  the sales cycle through implementation  and then hopefully through ongoing  renewal and expansion also super  important to understand that CRM is not  a static tool it’s a living organism  that needs to adapt as you change and  scale so you need to be thinking about  this not only during your initial  implementation but on a regular basis as  your company’s growing some of the  questions we ask our teams all the time  is especially as a working  cross-functionally with marketing is how  are our prospectives finding out about  us   being really deliberate and  thoughtful about what are the key touch  points and Milestones along our customer  journey and the corresponding sales  process also critically important is  how are we ensuring that we have really  seamless handoffs between sales and  delivery to ensure that the customer  experience is incredible every single  time Dave to build on that point your  CRM is only as good as the data that you  capture and manage so Dave can you share  the primary considerations that people  should think about to ensure that their  CRM is easy to navigate and manage  yeah absolutely well first of all I  think it’s important that we understand  and recognize that most cros that I know  struggle with CRM hygiene right I I  think it’s a tale’s oldest time so I  don’t want anyone to feel alone if  you’re dealing with it and and you’re  struggling through it super common   and in many ways the CRM that you  choose to use isn’t as relevant to the  hygiene as much as driving consistent  behaviors and discipline on your team  and keeping your CRM data clean that  said there’s a few questions you can ask  yourself early in your implementation  process about what each team needs to be  effective in the roles right so really  basic things like what constitutes an  opportunity in your org you know I’ve  had the chance to work for several  different organizations and having that  fun alignment is super critical right  how do we Define an opportunity what’s  the right level of information in depth  that we that the team needs to  understand the health and quality  application of said opportunity  you know a lot of times sales reps  neglect to update CRM because it’s too  hard it’s too cumbersome it’s too time  consuming right so being thoughtful  about your page layout and design can be  a really underrated factor to consider  so making sure that your page layouts  are made making it easier for sales and  other teams to organize information  effectively can be a really critical  part along with the corresponding Fields  like what fields are we going to include  in each section of the page to make it  easy to navigate so bottom line  alignment on key definitions and  business critical details is super  important and a huge part of this is  making CRM hygiene a top-down priority  with all the corresponding discipline  and accountability to the sales and  customer success teams I want to show  this example from our demo account we’re  showing here an opportunity record   and that opportunity record has key  details like pipeline pipeline stage  forecast close date opportunity value  probability of winning all those  important details about the organization  and the contacts that will help deliver  a better picture of what’s happening  with this opportunity so the team can  get on the same page with where this  opportunity stands but know that you  have the flexibility to determine  objects fields and Page layouts like  Dave was talking about you Insightly  in particular is really well known for  customization capabilities and really  valued by our customers for that reason  and if you’re considering   CRMs make sure  you understand the level of  customization that   CRMs offer and how  much it may cost you to customize as  well and what we really wanted to do  with this webinar is help people  understand and plan for their optimal  future State as they grow so Dave  there’s something here that I think is  so important and that is permissions not  getting this set up properly is  problematic so you really want to start  thinking about this right away and I’d  love to get your thoughts and how we  think about this and Insightly.

Dave: Yeah I  completely agree not being thoughtful  about administrative permission can be a  huge mistake actually and I’ve seen this  many times where organizations neglect  this aspect and they end up paying for  it later in a variety of different ways  so you really need to plan for this as  soon as as possible so a few different  points I mean it’s all about data  integrity and how a commitment to  getting it right can influence the  entire organization for the better right  and what I mean by that is you want your  team to perform efficiently by having  access to the data that corresponds  directly to their profile and role so  they can perform their job at the  highest level possible right and so  Advanced permissions is a really  powerful aspect that helps make sure  that people have the right information  they need at the right time to do  their jobs right  it’s about eliminating distractions  right or potentially seeing detail  that’s irrelevant to their job we want  to eliminate all of that noise and make  them be really really focused like I  said so they can perform at their  highest levels you’ll also want to  consider setting up validation rules to  ensure the most critical information is  being captured right oftentimes people  put a lot of different fields and  sometimes things get lost in the noise  so making sure that your keeping things  simple but creating those validation  rules to make sure that the really  really key stuff is never being missed  another thing is restricting the right  to edit some data  I’ve seen in some extreme cases that you  know companies will have some  individuals go in and manipulate the  data to influence business decisions or  even hide poor performance maybe on a  personal or Team level which is  obviously a really big problem so you  want to make sure that you’re being  thoughtful about how do we prevent those  types of behaviors from occurring so  obviously your orgs will not be this  large and layered as you start out but  it’s super important to be thinking  about this as you grow and scale  absolutely so let’s kind of dive into  more specifics on this point around  profiles and roles and permissions  because I think in some ways this this  can be a little bit confusing and so we  want to dive into this so there are two  key elements that you need to think  about with permissions data profiles and  roles so profiles determine which  objects and Fields your users can view  on the page and what permissions that  users have to create read edit or delete  record words  and roles determine which records you  can see relative to others in an  organizational hierarchy and so to bring  this to light profiles determine what  roles can see and do in the CRM so what  you see on the left side of this slide  is I’m using three profile types that  may actually have slightly different  page layouts in the CRM we’ve got sales  marketing and delivery the profile  determines the type of information that  can be accessed for example the sales  profile would be set up to interact with  leads opportunities bookings  and if you are setting up a delivery  profile that user would have access to  projects project status project dates  project margin for example and your  marketing role might be able to see  what’s happening in the delivery  environment but might have read-only  access so they can’t accidentally change  anything about what delivery needs to  know about a project at any given time  what you’re doing here is simplifying  the work so people aren’t searching  through the CRM to find the data that’s  completely relevant to their role and  also securing and protecting your data  with need to know access especially  targeting access to functionality so you  have complete control over any changes  and then rolls on the right side they’re  focused on hierarchies of information in  this case we’re looking at a sales org  with the chief sales officer at the top  who has access to all relevant sales  objects across the entire Global org  as the hierarchy flows down through  levels the VPs are limited to their own  Regional View and what’s happening  beneath them in their org and beyond  that managers can see their bookings  numbers and their individual  contributors numbers but they can’t see  up they can’t see the VP numbers the  other regions numbers or the entire  roll-up to the global leaders numbers  the point is that you have control to  make decisions about who can see what  data depending on the requirements for  your org so this is a screenshot showing  you how and where to assign a page  layout to a profile and so what you do  here is you go into system settings  and objects and Fields and system  settings and you choose opportunity  and then you click layout assignments  because you’re picking out layout  assignments in the opportunity and then  you edit those assignments and we’ve got  two separate page layouts and two  separate profiles and then you assign  the layout to the profile of your choice  and save it it’s that simple  Dave let’s transition to tip four  workflow automation is so important to  so many of our customers it’s a key  reason why they choose Insightly and I  mean there are almost infinite use cases  I’d love to hear your leadership  perspective on why this is so important  to you and any sales leader yeah  absolutely well first of all if you’re  not leveraging automated workflows  within your CRM you are not doing it  right you are missing out on a critical  Force multiplier for your business and a  common misconception is that workflow  automation is only important for bigger  companies that’s simply not true it is  so relevant for small teams and only  gets more important as you grow right  because even with smaller teams balls  can get dropped along the way through  the customer Journey simply because  people need to share information across  teams quickly or nudge the next person  of the process if there’s a delay along  the way right  workflows are so important because they  help your teams execute at the highest  level possible why while at the same  time mitigating and reducing the risk of  Errors right it helps us scale and takes  the pressure off the administrative  manual work on my specific teams right  as we set up workflow automations it  makes it easy to set up hundreds if not  thousands of notifications at any time  of the day or night right which is the  type of communication you want to set  and forget and let the power of CRM in  our case let the power of Insightly  handle that for you right because at the  end of the day I want my team to focus  on delivering incredible customer  experiences not  working through repetitive manual tasks  and workflow automation makes all the  difference here  absolutely so let’s look at a use case  so let’s say that you want any  opportunities that reach at least ten  thousand dollars in Opportunity value to  automatically receive a high priority  check mark in the opportunity record so  that you can pull lists of high priority  accounts and track them more easily  so you’ve set your strategy and you want  to give the process a name in this case  you’re going to name this process  opportunity opportunity value greater  than or equal to 10K Mark that as high  priority  your next step in this process is to  identify the criteria and Insightly that  will be the inputs to defining the  process so in this example your criteria  are record type  you’re going to be changing  opportunities it’s going to happen in  the opportunity object  the evaluation criteria are bit amount  greater than or equal to ten thousand  and then the final steps in the process  are setting up actions what’s going to  actually happen and the trigger or a  timed trigger so you can set up an  immediate Trigger or a delayed trigger  in our example the high priority  checkbox will be checked automatically  when the trigger happens either a record  is created and the bid amount is greater  than or equal to 10 000 when the  opportunity is created or at some point  later in the process when the bid amount  hits that Mark  this just makes it easier for you to  capture the information you need without  forcing your team to go through manual  steps that take up more time or  potentially cause errors  so let’s take a look at this example   the workflow automation was what you  saw on the previous slide it was already  created in system settings and then when  we perform the action that is to say we  create a new opportunity we enter the  bid amount we don’t have to check the  high priority checkbox it’s done on our  behalf and we’ve got a record of this  high priority opportunity and can track  it via record   via the reporting so Dave let’s  transition to the final tip so we live  in a data-driven world and leaders want  the best tools to help them manage and  grow their businesses   how do you think about this from the  reporting and and dashboards perspective  and what do you hear from customers yeah  we do live in a data-driven world I mean  we have so much data right and when  you’re growing a business scaling a  business and looking to make decisions  you know you can make decisions based on  data or opinions but I’d much rather do  it Based on data and when I talk to a  lot of small companies typically they  start out by using Excel right some or  simple tools like that to visualize  their data but you know they’ll quickly  outgrow it they’ll find it’s not  delivering what they need it’s clearly  not real time and again in today’s  fast-moving world if you’re reviewing  old data that’s no longer relevant  you’re looking in the rearview mirror  time has already passed we need to be  more predictable and be able to have  a better forecast to do ability about  what decisions or things are coming  around the bend with regards to our  business  it also takes a tremendous amount of  time to gather and do a lot of heavy  lifting of Consolidated and a lot of  small teams just don’t have the  bandwidth their head count to do that  well along with that I mean a common  a common factor that people don’t  consider is risks right but it’s really  easy for data entries to be made when  it’s done manually  and as you scale think about like a  potentially worst case scenario if  someone who owns an important  spreadsheet or to leave the company  right they’re taking all that data with  you which sets the company back in a  really really tough position right so   you know customers find that they’re  able to spend time trying to align  groups to get to a single source of  truth right inevitably different people  may be using different processes or  systems to develop the lens they’re  using to Define key metrics kpis okrs  right and it makes it really difficult  to align on a shared vision and grow  together as a business right that’s part  of the reason why so often you see  conflict between sales and marketing  right  there really shouldn’t be multiple  versions of the truth right so making  sure that all teams are seeing off the  same sheet of music hypothetically is  super critical to ensuring and creating  business Harmony absolutely Dave  and of course from the marketing  perspective we want to be completely  aligned with sales it’s so important to  us and we we can do that   in a number of ways including with  you know great reporting and dashboards  so great dashboards Empower you to share  business performance with anyone in your  company at a glance  they should help you understand more  about your business help you get to the  right answers faster and should generate  even more thoughtful questions about the  directions you can take your business  so Insightly dashboards are incredibly  customizable the dashboards are  incredibly simple to create and can show  you any parameter about your business as  long as you’re collecting that data in  the CRM  and so I’m sharing here screenshots from  a custom sales dashboard with   with a variety of cards so we’ve got  sales by product type sales by rep high  priority opportunities which is a  dashboard I built in about two minutes  for this webinar and total pipeline  by sales rep  all plan types come with built-in  dashboards and our professional and  Enterprise plans come with customizable  dashboard cards so you’re more than  equipped to review your business at a  glance and share that information across  the company you can do almost anything  within sitely dashboards and our  customers love the way that they provide  a quick view to business performance  Our Help Center also includes additional  information about all of these tips that  we’ve talked about today and is a good  resource to learn more about Insightly  whether you’re just considering  Insightly and would like to learn more  or if you are already using Insightly  and would like to learn more about what  you can do to maximize the value that  Insightly brings to your organization.

Val: All right Dave Melinda great tips thank  you so much   now I’d like to introduce our very  special guest Lisa Riggs as I mentioned  earlier Lisa is the founder and CEO of  spirit socks USA it’s a certified  women’s Business Enterprise and she also  is very proud of her Better Business  Bureau rating a plus nice work Lisa   it’s super important for Lisa to give  back to her community so she donates  five percent of company profits to  providing stocks to the homeless in the  US great story already Lisa and we can’t  wait to hear more about you and in  slightly so let’s take a listen to Lisa.

Melinda: Hey Lisa thank you so much for joining  us today   I’d love to get your thoughts about  the conversation that Dave and I had did  anything in particular not ring true to  you and did anything in particular  resonate  you know I really like the workflow  piece that workflow automation is just  critical to removing those manual tasks  for us so things just happen  automatically I think it can just  increase the speed of scaling a business  growing a business increase the speed of  sales by everybody being you know United  on that workflow and working together  and and again you know like like Dave  mentioned if somebody leaves or if  somebody’s sick or you know emergencies  happen they take that data with them but  that workflow automation just it  prevents that from happening so I  thought that was a really key piece  wonderful well you know you’ve been an  Insightly customer for a long time I  mean close to the time when Anthony  Smith our CEO actually started the  company so talk first about your  decision to choose Insightly yeah.

Lisa: Actually it was I was a startup as  well and I was really just looking for a  CRM that was a affordable but be you  know mostly customizable that’s really I  knew I was going to grow my business and  I was looking for a CRM that I could  customize for myself and then one that  wasn’t extremely complicated right   and so I I really liked Insightly for  that   as well as the fact that Insightly  was a startup and then the Insightly was  in San Francisco I was in San Jose I  loved supporting local and just the  you know the customization that they  offer or that you offer with images and  all of those things were just it was a  key piece excellent and   you know when you and I first spoke you  mentioned that people think that it’s  possible to manage their business on  spreadsheets but that really isn’t true  .

Melinda: I’d love for you to dive deeper into  that point in particular yeah I thought  Dave covered it well you know there’s  I I know you know I’ve met a lot of  startups along the way and I do know a  lot of people think that Excel is a  great way to do it because you can use  Google Sheets right so team members can  see it but you know the detail isn’t  there the 

Lisa: The workflow the pipeline the images  are just not there I use tasks quite a  bit Insightly for my sales follow-ups  that’s not on an Excel spreadsheet and  the the you know the main piece too is  is just getting it out of your email and  getting this into something that’s  organized and and so I highly recommend  you know   CRMs I just think it prevents  your business from growing if you stick  to that Excel there’s just no way to  track and the nice thing about Insightly  is you can upload the Excel spreadsheet  straight into it so it’s boom it’s done  which I use all the time when I go to  conferences and come back with you know  large numbers of leads you just upload  that straight into the leads portal and  it’s all there for you in an instant  wonderful    you know when we spoke before too you  mentioned that you actually have other    CRMs approaching you   to see if you might switch from  Insightly including some of the big  Legacy companies out there I’d love for  you to share more about what Insightly  does for your company that others do not  yeah so what my company does is we  customize socks uniquely for each  customer and so we obviously present  more than one design we always have  multiple designs and so it’s critical  for me when they turn into a sale and I  put them in projects that I not only  record the data about their sale but I  upload the image of their sock design  because when they come back for reorder  I want to know which one they ordered  and I can go back it just helps me have  a full amount of data and so it was  actually Salesforce that was approaching  me and they have a great system but we  got to that point I said having this  image is critical to me and they said we  can’t do that you need to stay with  Insightly and they haven’t called me  since so it was convincing no foreign  we also talked about tracking lead  sources and I’d love to have you speak  to your process for that because I know  this can be somewhat complex yeah we  have as most businesses do right the  leads are coming in from quite a few  different areas and so I I work all the  time to customize that lead Source it’s  it’s just that pull down box and add the  different things and with every new  opportunity or every new lead that comes  in we we   categorize it for where it came from  it will allow us to analyze our  marketing budget it will allow us to  know which leads are converting right  there’s so many things that we can do  with that so that’s a really key piece  for for me of you know understanding not  only   you know conversions to sales but my  marketing budget so finally I’d like to  have you talk about Time Savings and  efficiency  yeah you know one of the things  Insightly offers my team is just that  just communication right we use  pipelines to track things along the way  you showed some pipelines in this in the  slides and that way everybody knows at  any point in time where that lead  opportunity project is in the process  without having to talk to each other  without having to send an email or talk  on slack and that’s that’s a real time  saver for us it also helps if somebody  takes a vacation or leaves the company  for us to pick up right where that was  and the customer has no idea the  customer is not affected because on our  end we’ve got it really handled and  so it’s it’s key to to be able to speak  across or to be able to have all  employees you know look at that pipeline  instantly know and then do their job  absolutely I think   if I remember right you also  mentioned something about you know tasks  being really important to you and  following up on tasks setting reminders  with tasks if you need to order or  reorder something and it really helps  you from a process and organization  standpoint too which I think is really  good and really important yeah the key  piece for me in sales are those tasks  every single opportunity has a task  assigned to it and as soon as I complete  that task we we assign another task  because until they until we convert that  sale and it’s it’s critical the other  thing that’s so important with the leads  and the opportunities like I said is  just getting them out of your email out  of your inbox right being able to put  them in the CRM and then create that  pipeline that workflow for that because  I don’t know I’m sure other people out  there can relate but my inbox gets full  pretty quickly and you just you lose  things right they just they get buried  and if you have a CRM it’s all right  there and so it’s just critical to get  it out of your inbox into the CRM and  then you can you know you can create  tasks to follow up you can create those  pipelines you can really maximize this  opportunity that’s come to your inbox  wonderful Lisa it has been so great to  hear from you how Insightly has helped  you create more velocity through your  process and you know even understand the  key drivers that are helping you sell  more so you can analyze your business  and and grow and deliver great  experiences    anything else that you’d like to share  about the value of Insightly to your  business before we close out you know  the one thing I would advise for all  Insightly users is it’s very  customizable and so customize it to how  it’s going to be most productive and  effective for you it’s it doesn’t take  long to do and it can really increase  your efficiency  wonderful thank you so much you’re  welcome guys that was amazing appreciate  it I understand we have a ton of  Insightly customers on the call which is  fantastic but if you’re not a current  user or you’re new to CRM or a CRM is in  your future we would really like to talk  to you see our Insightly CRM is super  easy to adopt very customizable  integrates with everything you’re  already using we hear from customers  that they’re up and running with  Insightly in just weeks and growing  Revenue up to 300 in less than a year  one of the aspects of Insightly that is  that it’s a true platform you know in my  previous role I’ve only been with  Insightly for under a year but we  were using Salesforce and pardot and it  was really like a wall between marketing  and sales and Insightly marketing is a  full featured marketing automation  platform built for marketers and the  same platform as a CRM plus there’s  Insightly service a customer service  ticketing system that we ourselves use  to support tons of customers so as your  business is growing because we know  everybody on this call is thinking big  plan for the future and choose a CRM  that can grow with you that is truly a  platform that offers additional features  for all your teams to align them and  make sure everyone’s moving in the right  direction  all right those questions have started  rolling in so I’m going to start  lobbying them at you guys if you’re  ready   this first one looks like it might be  for Dave Dave at Insightly who is in  charge of actively managing the CRM  updates rules and data hygiene because  as we’ve learned that’s a big job yeah  at Insightly it’s it’s owned by our  sales operations team   which is is pretty unique right I  mean we’ve mentioned a few different  other competitors and oftentimes you  know CRM is so heavy that it requires  like a team of Administrators to  actually make it work so I think that’s  another kind of interesting fact about  our business and most of the customers  that I speak with is it’s it’s a shared  responsibility you know that someone in  the operations side of the house will  typically take in addition to many of  their other roles so it is customizable  but it’s it’s easy enough to make  adjustments on the fly so for instance  likely at sales operations that that  owns it and helps kind of proliferate  that across the different organs so  so yeah I guess how do I know when I  need to fire hire a full-time CRM admin  well I mean kind of to that last Point   you may not actually get there I I do  think because I mean and Insightly you  know we have a few hundred employees and  we still don’t have a full dedicated  admin right so I think it’ll depend  on the serum you choose right because  some of them do require very specific  skill sets to operate and manage but an  Insightly you know we’ve you know one of  the the differentiators for us is kind  of our modern approach and how we enable  organizations to not require those  admins I would say this though Val I  think a critical thing though is  defining who owns it right who is the  person that is owning it because you  know if you have multiple admins so for  example if we have a marketing admin in  a CS admin a sales admin that is making  adjustments to fields and objects on an  ongoing basis you may invertently create  issues for yourself right you may create  workflows that contradict each other and  start breaking things so I do think   it is important to have you know call  it a task force or you know just a a  a group of individuals that is  responsible for owning this so that as  we’re trying to make changes to help  grow and scale the business that we’re  being thoughtful about the needs and  also Integrations that other departments  may be leveraging so that we don’t have  any interruptions along the way thanks  Dave   

Val: Speaking of Integrations we got a  great question from Robin about  integration with Google workspace Gmail  Robin you’ll be happy to hear Insightly  was born in the Google Google world so  we’ll get someone to respond  specifically to your question it’s a  great one and we have a great answer  David also looks like I skipped one   what other types of information should  you consider when thinking about CRM  hygiene I think that was a follow-up to  the first question  yeah well it’s funny because like those  are just little details that you often  don’t think about that as you you know  as the business runs things start  breaking down so yeah there I think  there are little tips like that so for  example   you know for States when you’re  putting that into a CRM field is it  going to be abbreviated is there going  to be the full name right are you going  to be okay with all caps or you know no  caps or do you want to have that uniform  you know Lisa brought up the example of  going to conferences and uploading lists  of leads that you got and this is this  is why I see this breaking the most as  we’re uploading that CSV or Excel  spreadsheet into the CRM and you know  the formatting is off which is I mean  aside from the aesthetic problems could  also create some Downstream issues as  well so I think you know when I talk  about discipline accountability you know  that those are behavioral things that  leaders can from a top-down perspective  you know we have reports to help Drive  compliance and hygiene right making sure  fields are updated on a timely basis and  we have the most up-to-date things there  but there’s also some consistency  factors that you should consider so that  you know things don’t start breaking  you know you’re trying to do your job  right you’re uploading things but you  know sometimes those things can have  unintended consequences Downstream right  I mean Lisa I mean I’d love to hear your  thought on that I mean I’m sure you’re  experiencing that as well right in terms  of when when you do these things and  you’re like oh wait I maybe missed  something here yeah I mean I think you  spoke to almost everything it’s just  funny how the little details that you  don’t think about can come back and get  you but it’s you know it’s easy to fix  and and it’s something I think too to if  you’re thinking about it going in I  think you’re just much less likely to  have those going forward so it’s great  that this conversation is being had and   and you’re right like just the states  the all caps is one that bugs me no all  caps like it needs to be appropriate and  and some things do come in that way and  so how do you fix it how do you know how  do you how do you move going forward I  mean we might all have to change our  ways because gen Z like they don’t use  capitalization at all when they text so  I can’t imagine once they start getting  into the CRM what that’s going to look  like but anyway   

Val: Melinda this one might be for you   if you had a sum up a main thing when  choosing and implementing a CRM what  would your advice be  like one tip I guess yeah exactly I mean  I think the main thing that you really  have to consider is just keep it simple  and so we’ve talked a lot about building  for the future   but what I also want to say about  that is that it doesn’t have to mean  using a lot of complexity or spending  you know a tremendous amount of money  and when you look at CRM options that  are currently available you might be  kind of tempted to invest in something  that is more complex than you need  thinking well I need this to grow for  the future but    just be careful remember that the best  CRM is the one that perfectly fits your  needs and don’t go out of the way for a  CRM that has features that you won’t use  choose something that’s effective  customizable can grow with you without  being unnecessarily complicated and  expensive and this will really help  ensure that your team  adopts the CRM effectively and and also  I think stay flexible the effectiveness  of the way your team is working with the  CRM is really your best indicator of  whether the CRM is performing to  expectations and if it’s not what you  know how it could be improved this  technology exists to help you make the  most out of your customer relationships   but if you you know if you fail to  use it correctly if it’s too complex if  it’s too hard to adopt then those  relationships that you’re trying to  build with your customers aren’t going  to translate into better customer  experiences can I speak to one thing as  a customer as well you know I’ve been a  customer of Insightly for five or six  years at this point and Insightly  continues to add new features continues  to grow with the industry and so I’ve I  certainly haven’t felt like things  weren’t there that others had because as  Insightly grows you know those features  are coming and and what I found as well  is the company is very open to  suggestions to you know hey when is this  coming when is this coming and up every  time I’ve asked there’s been something  in the works and you know it’s been  there in six to 12 months so as a  customer I can attest to you know if  it’s not that what you’re looking for  isn’t there now ask them see if it’s  there and then be confident that they’re  growing and adding more features every  every day I think Val can I throw one  last thing into the ring this is such a  great question right   you know I think a couple different  thoughts like to me when I think about  CRM right this it’s not a new technology  right I mean this has been around for a  long time right it started like back in  the 80s when we just had rolodexes on  our desk right and then we had see Bill  come along we had contact management  system put in your computer Siebel put  it on-prem right and then you know 30  years ago you know Salesforce came along  and put it to the cloud and that’s kind  of where we’ve been for the past 30  years right but what’s the reality of  that state well you’ve almost got like a  dichotomy right on one end of the  spectrum you have these kind of easy to  use systems that you outgrow really  quickly right they don’t have the  features the functionality the  administrative permissions the security  someone asked about security   reporting and you have to you have to  move on to something more robust right  at the other end of the spectrum you  have the more Enterprise players right  but they’re going to be really expensive  they’re going to be heavy they’re going  to take six to 12 months to implement  and then as we talked about before  you’re likely going to need a team of  Administrators to even make it go  so I think one thing that again I speak  with hundreds of of companies a quarter  that most don’t think about that I think  is super important to think about is  what is the total cost of ownership to  bring on a system like this right  because you have the technology costs  which are explicit usually you’re going  to see in a proposal but what are the  other soft costs or Downstream costs  you’re going to have to incur right one  being implementation right how long is  that going to take to get off the ground   you know what’s the ongoing  administrative requirements right I  think oftentimes when you think about  CRM the price you see in a proposal is  often just the tip of the iceberg you  know and then there’s a whole lot of  other expenses underneath the water That  You Don’t See coming so be thoughtful  about that right if if the vendor is not  disclosing or talking through that you  I’ve seen it way too many times you know  prospective customers are shocked at how  much they end up spending per year on  something like CRM so I don’t know just  just my two cents great tip Dave 

Val: Thank  you Lisa Melinda Dave thank you so much  this was a wonderful webinar I had a lot  of takeaways I’m sure our audience did  too and thanks everybody for joining us  [Music]