InsightlyProduct Overview
About Insightly
Insightly is a customer relationship management (CRM) software for small to medium sized businesses. Built specifically to help businesses increase customer loyalty, Insightly offers marketing in addition to sales features. Such features include lead routing, workflow automation, email, interaction documentation, role permissions, no-code application development, mobile apps, and analytics dashboards.
Insightly helps sales teams discover new leads, nurture them, convert them into deals, and keep them as loyal customers. Salespeople use Insightly to assign and contact leads while they’re hot, to track deal progress, and to increase efficiency by automating administrative sales tasks.
Insightly offers support through email, phone, and through professional consultations. Users can also seek help from Insightly’s help center and community forums, and the company offers developer API support. Small to medium sized businesses from all over the world use Insightly for their CRM and marketing needs.
Pros of Insightly
Onboarding a new CRM can be painful for managers, but Insightly eases this process by offering extensive training videos and responsive customer support. Once onboarding is complete, the software functions smoothly and keeps important data from contacts and leads connected and up-to-date.
Insightly also offers some limited project management features in the form of to-do lists. As some users have noted, this tool works in theory and in practice, as it gives salespeople an easy way to jot down notes for next steps without having to leave the system. Insightly is by no means a fully-fledged project management solution, but the project management features it includes are appropriate.
Cons of Insightly
While Insightly is one of the best CRM solutions for small to medium sized businesses, it isn’t perfect. Insightly has only been around since 2009, but some users feel the system’s user interface (UI) looks and feels outdated. This doesn’t impact the functionality of the software, but it can present challenges for managers trying to increase adoption of the CRM among their sales staff, especially among younger salespeople.
Pricing is another point of controversy among Insightly users. Insightly was originally created for small businesses but has gradually expanded its tiers to accommodate the needs of medium sized companies. The features small businesses need still exist in lower tiers, but the higher-priced tiers offer more features. Some small business users find the features offered at lower tiers lacking while the features they need are out of their price range.
Breakdown of core features
While Insightly does offer unique features that set it apart from other CRM solutions, it’s still important to understand how its basic features perform.
Managing leads and contacts in Insightly
Every entry a user makes is called a record, whether that entry is a person, a project, or an organization. Insightly always stores the record of a person as a lead or a contact, depending on whether or not your company is working with them. When you’re ready to start working with a particular lead, Insightly converts them to a contact and lets you create a new opportunity for them. From there, you can move contacts through a pipeline based on the various stages you create. Insightly links contacts to their corresponding opportunities, organizations, projects, and emails, so you always see the full picture when viewing a contact card.
Email in Insightly
Like most major CRM solutions, Insightly allows you to send emails without leaving the system. Connect a Gmail or Outlook account by signing in with Google or Microsoft, respectively, or enter your email server information to send emails through Office 365 or another email service provider. Insightly lets you create a custom email signature, and you can write new emails from scratch or from a template. You can send bulk emails in groups of 50, and the email composer allows you to use standard and custom fields.
Workflow automation in Insightly
If you choose the Professional tier or higher, Insightly gives you access to workflow automation. This feature is especially handy for larger sales teams who work with high lead volumes, as you can program the system to send automated emails to leads based on a number of criteria. Insightly also lets you automate reminders to yourself so you don’t forget to, say, call a new lead a couple days after receiving their contact information. Under system settings, you can create custom rules with specified criteria and actions. This saves salespeople time in the long run by reducing the need for repetitive, manual interactions.
(Last updated on 08/14/2019 by Forrest Brown)
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