Ready to switch from Salesforce?

Why switch from Salesforce to Insightly?

Built from the ground up with the latest technology, Insightly is a flexible CRM that provides businesses of all sizes and industries with a secure, and powerful platform without the high cost and complexity of legacy CRMs like Salesforce. Highly ranked by software rating sites like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius & more, Insightly delivers on all of these essential CRM qualities at a fraction of the cost.

Power: Insightly provides scale, flexibility, security, and powerful CRM capabilities out of the box, without the high cost of Salesforce. You can customize Insightly to your specific industry and business requirements and team preferences. Insightly uses the scale capabilities of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform—which is almost an infinite scale — to store extreme amounts of data and analyze them in a very fast time frame.

Transparency: Insightly’s pricing is clear and straightforward. You don’t need to hire expensive external consultants to help you implement Insightly or a full team to operate it day-to-day. Insightly has all the resources you need in-house to get you up and running quickly and with the fastest path to positive ROI in mind. On average, it takes half the time to set up and start using Insightly than it does to implement legacy CRMs. In a recent customer survey, 70% of respondents reported positive ROI within the first year of implementing Insightly CRM.

Simplicity: Insightly’s simple and intuitive user interface (UI) requires minimal training and ramp-up time and makes it easier to integrate your CRM into every team’s daily work and existing business processes. In a recent Insightly customer survey, 57% of respondents said they considered “easy adoption and use” as a key factor in choosing Insightly and 77% reported using it daily. 

Easy Switchover Process: Insightly’s one-click data migration tool was designed to help Salesforce power users switch systems quickly and painlessly. The tool facilitates complete, seamless migration in minutes, depending on the size of your dataset. All you have to do is export your data and share it with Insightly. To make sure you’re up and running quickly, Insightly also works with your team on a CRM needs assessment, onboarding, and user training.

5 steps to a successful CRM switch

Step 1: Assess your CRM needs

Conducting a CRM needs assessment will help you to decide on which data you will migrate to Insightly CRM and clarify your CRM goals in light of your overall business strategy. It will also help you to determine the scope of features and capabilities, customizations, integrations, and user preferences. Finally, a CRM needs assessment can serve as a benchmark to measure your ROI after the implementation. 

Performing your needs assessment

Consider forming a cross-functional team that includes senior leaders along with midlevel and frontline users, so you have both big picture and daily user perspectives across different business lines. Make sure to include current/future CRM administrators and an IT person in your CRM needs assessment taskforce. It’s also helpful to have at least a couple of outside-the-box thinkers on the team. While you need a cross-functional team to collect feedback and execute the plan, you also need someone who will rally the troops, hold everyone accountable, and ensure successful delivery, i.e. someone who will own the project. This might be your lead IT resource, a sales leader, or data and operations manager. When selecting a project owner, look for someone who is detail-oriented but also understands the bigger picture and is a good communicator.

Determine your CRM goals

Defining your CRM goals has less to do with features and more to do with outcomes. Use these goals to foster greater alignment among stakeholders and focus on and measure what matters the most to your business. You can get as specific as it makes sense for your business and use a familiar framework like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based). Work with an Insightly rep to assess your CRM goals and plan the entire switchover process from there. Set specific benchmarks that make the most sense for your business and business stage. For example: 

• Achieve a 90% MQL-to-SQL ratio 
• Lower new customer acquisition costs by 5% in six months 
• Reduce annual operational costs by 15% 
• Grow annual revenue by 20%.

Collect & analyze feedback

Put together a plan for soliciting feedback from across the organization. You’ll probably get a mix of detailed and brief responses. For a more data-driven approach, design a brief survey that addresses the common pain points, such as disorganized information, poor client and supplier management, inefficient collaboration with team members, and difficulty managing projects. Consider using the following categories to group ideas, issues, and feature requests: 

• Important features
• Costs and licensing
• Scalability
• Integrations
• Support

Step 2: Clean & structure data

Insightly CRM is your opportunity to start fresh and leave the junk behind. Bad data creeps in over time. Common examples of bad data include duplicate records, unused custom fields, overlapping tags, confusing dropdown menus, and various hacks/workarounds. Before switching from Salesforce to Insightly, challenge your team to identify only those records, fields, and objects that are truly needed. You can always save the “extras” in a CSV file, in case someone needs that data later. You can easily clean your data in Insightly CRM, but it’s best to start with a clean slate. Taking a somewhat minimalist and deliberate approach could offer additional clarity, reduce confusion, and expedite CRM success. 

Step 3: Define roles

To ensure ongoing data integrity, define user roles and assign user permissions accordingly. Identify your ‘administrators’ with advanced permissions and visibility and regular users with limited or simple permissions. Start with a simple hierarchy of roles and reporting and assign user permissions based on roles and scope of usage. While you can transfer all user data from Salesforce to Insightly CRM, you’ll need to set up a new hierarchy of roles in Insightly CRM. Moving to a new CRM is a great time to rethink past roles and make updates accordingly. 

Remember to audit user roles and permissions on a regular basis, as users can be a major cause of data integrity issues. Errant data uploads, accidental record deletions, and bad habits can quickly erode the reliability of your customer data. As with any company-wide initiative, maintaining data integrity should be hardwired into your organization’s way of doing things. Here are a few ways to infuse data integrity best practices into your company culture:

1. Limit user access to only the systems and permissions they need to perform their jobs 
2. Create work instructions and operating procedures for collecting and modifying data 
3. Use out-of-the-box system functionality and limit custom fields whenever possible 
4. Integrate data integrity into your onboarding process for new hires 
5. Establish clearly defined roles so everyone knows who is in charge of data uploads and integrations
6. Regularly solicit feedback from users to understand their data challenges 
7. Make it easy for users to request custom BI dashboards and reports (if they are not permitted to build their own)

Step 4: How the data migration process works

When it comes to migrating data, all you need to do is export your Salesforce data and provide Insightly with access to your exported files. Insightly takes care of the rest. You’ll provide your master data file to the Insightly team. Using proprietary Salesforce data migration tool, all data for all fields from all standard objects will be transferred, including: 

• Calendars
• Tasks and events 
• Emails and notes 
• Leads 
• Accounts 
• Users and roles 
• Contacts and Opportunities 

It doesn’t end there. Most implementations of Salesforce have dozens of custom objects that are built for the specific needs of their business. Insightly can handle all of them. 

The Insightly team uses the Salesforce-to-Insightly migration tool to populate your brand new Insightly account for your business using your Salesforce data. Once your data is imported, the team will walk you through the new account, share best practices, and discuss any concerns you may have. 

The team takes great measures to preserve all existing data relationships you have in Salesforce and migrates your data over with high fidelity. For example, the team checks for duplicates to make sure your lead statuses and other metadata from Salesforce are not already default values within Insightly. 

Here are a few system requirements to keep in mind: 

• You must have either the Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited Salesforce plan to export your data from Salesforce. 
• You must purchase an Insightly Professional or Enterprise account with a Premier Success Plan. 
• You must be an administrator in Salesforce to export a full backup of your data.
• You must have not exported your data from Salesforce for the current month (based on your Salesforce plan level.)

Step 5: Review

Although there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for quantifying return on investment, here are a few tips to help you start measuring Insightly CRM performance after you’ve implemented the system. Circle back to your CRM goals (which you set during the needs assessment stage of the switchover) to track progress. Get specific. You can use Insightly’s out-of-the-box dashboards or build custom dashboards with drag and drop. Easily organize, view, and share dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs) across sales, marketing, and delivery. 

Make your KPIs accessible – Defining a bunch of KPIs offers minimal value without transparent reporting. Use Insightly CRM to build custom reports and dashboards and slice and dice the data for analysis that’s most relevant to your business. You can then convert all the data into charts or export to CSV format for further analysis. 

Automate the review process –  KPIs are often ignored unless they’re woven into a formal review process. If you already have an operational review process, build custom CRM reports and use insights in strategy discussions and business decision-making. 

Continuously tweak & refine – No process is perfect on day one. But by setting clear goals and tracking KPIs, your team will be in a much better position to make adjustments. Be sure to occasionally ask for candid end-user feedback. What do they like about your CRM? Are users creating unnecessary workarounds? Collecting this type of qualitative data will supplement the quantitative data found in your CRM reports. And, the Insightly team will be there along the way to help you make the most out of your CRM and reach your business goals.