Our evolving CRM case-study: Insightly
Original title and post script (5/17/17): “Free isn’t always better, except when it is: a CRM case study”; After the March 2017 updates to the Insightly CRM, our relationship and experience with Insightly has changed! We are working on a proper update to this blog post. Stay tuned!
We’ve been brewing this blog post about our trusty, does-almost-everything-we-need-it-to, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for a while now.
Spoiler Alert: It’s Insightly.
It wasn’t until someone suggested *their* favorite CRM product to our @sealablife account on Twitter (their suggestion was an app we tested) that we decided it was time to share what we know about finding, testing, choosing, and maximizing a flexible, easy-to-use CRM tool. When we set out to formalize our CRM, it wasn’t essential that we find “free”, we have a budget for such things. So how did we end up happy and free?
Our Stats:
Established 2014 | HQ Location: Austin, TX
- 0: The number of dollars we spend on commuting and renting office space every year
- 3: Years we’ve been involved with the Austin Green Business Leaders as a Platinum member
- 6: Number of SeaLabinites currently creating awesome stuff in our Laboratory
- 18: Number of Austin coffee shop destinations we’ve frequented over the past year alone
- 42: The number of face to face #braintrust meetings the SeaLab team has had last year
- 100: Percent of clients from start-ups, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in-between
- 200: Average number of handwritten, addressed, and wax sealed cards we send yearly
Critical Needs
Connection — We love our clients and community and seek to provide human-centered services and personal connections with each and every one. One of our top client priorities is a desire to celebrate milestones with them — birthdays, anniversaries, etc. — tracking data and special dates are a must-have. And of course, easy access to both home and office email and postal addresses is crucial.
Pipeline Tracking — Sales and project tracking, milestones, and associated activity sets (with built-in reminders) help keep us organized. Established pipelines allow us to focus on present projects with the confidence that we have the data and systems in place to check in on both past projects and future leads, keep track of conversations and connections, and care for our clients before, during, and after project completion.
Basic Social Network Integration — We don’t have to see everything about their social networks inside of our CRM — an integrated profile photo is a nice touch. We appreciate easy links to the main networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), an ability to list multiple accounts within each network, and flexible cells to add networks that may not yet be supported (Medium, Dribbble, and Github come to mind).
Internal Notes & Reminders — This is a requirement for events, ToDo’s, and record-keeping. The human brain is an extraordinary piece of equipment but still has its limitations. We find writing down detailed notes in our CRM allows us to spend the majority of our time and limited daily mental capacities on the difficult user interface challenges and less time on the day to day details. We enter our data (anything from a birthday or anniversary to a set of activities geared toward keeping in touch), reminders, and notes before moving on to client work and creative endeavors with confidence.
Robust Mobile & Desktop Applications — The SeaLab crew is comprised of rockstar designers and developers from all over the world. In order to meet the needs of our whole team, we didn’t limit ourselves to one device or one system — but instead looked for an agnostic CRM that expanded across multiple devices and operating systems — so our team can stay connected wherever they are.
Finding
The first tool we tried was a base CRM product. The task was to take the customer data we were storing in Excel sheets, freshen it up, and make it workable. This first product was super customizable, easy to use, and free but the set-up was too flexible. A great amount of time was spent building modules and testing them rather than actually getting to use the software. The usability was also not a draw, the colors were pale and to our color-minded sensibilities, boring. The extremely flexible and customizable dashboard interface left us feeling lost (we needed some direction and constraints. Full freedom was a little daunting at this stage). We decided to take the opportunity to find something else.
Because this article is NOT about trashing the systems we tried, we are not going to list them here, but an amazingly exhaustive list and reviews can be found at Capterra, enjoy!
Every single one we tested had something valuable to offer, usually for a low (or no) price, and had an experience we could tolerate after making it through the sign-up screen.
Essential features we require above all else:
Less than $9/user
Activity set creation and management
To-Dos generated automatically from activity sets
A flexible system
A contact list with multiple input types
Testing
The only way we know to test something is to use it: Import data, mess with the settings so that the filters put it where it needs to go, and start trying to make it function with real-time data. Can we group similar clients or better yet, can we group them in different data sets according to our needs at the moment? Is it easy to find the address for an individual or company? What if we want to send them an email (do I have to cut and paste or are there integrations)? Are social networks integrated? Is it customizable?
What got ditched right away:
- Yucky or — ironically — bad UI/complicated design
- Inflexible cells, an inability to customize
- Gimmicky in-app features of any kind (clunky calling, invoicing/billing features included, poor export options)
- Inability to grow or inflexible to small companies (e.g. expensive ground floor packages with huge pricing jumps with little gain)
- No activity set support at the ground floor (we wanted this out of the gate)
- CRMs aiming at large corporations with a price tag not even fathomable to our small services business
- CRMs that forced us into their style of thinking/organization rather than being flexible to our own system (e.g. we wanted SOME constraints but ultimately wanted to build our system our way)
Choosing
If it made it past our discriminating user testing for design, data, and flexibility we moved to the next phase. Strangely, we were wary of “free.” Free and simple caught another side-eye. Free, simple, and flexible made us skeptical.
We settled on Insightly.
When we chose Insightly, we knew that it treated our data the way we wanted: easy to read, customizable, logically placed.
Elements we learned to use and depend on are Activity Sets, auto-dates, and copious amounts of tags to sort our data in meaningful ways. Creating a repeatable project tracking system in this way allowed us to keep an eye on our progress, test hypotheses, and continue to grow and evolve our human-centric approach year after year.
Other pros
— Email integrations — Easy contact and company account creation, conversation tracking for each individual or company, and smart “automatic” relationship management made keeping up with everyone’s latest jobs and communications a breeze. Sending emails from within the CRM has also been helpful. We do not tend to send “mass” emails, but adaptable templates and a solid record of email communication are important.
— Tracking conversations — Emails, social media conversations & mentions, and meetings are critical. Emails can be cc’ed: and automatically pushed to the database- a must for address updates and to keep up with the job, location, and skill evolutions from our contacts. We use the “Notes” feature to track other important meetings & correspondence, including photos of our hand-lettered cards & custom mailers.
— Insightly Mobile App — They call it “Insightly on the Go” which Insightly released to both the iOS and Android app stores in 2015. Accessing data and updating files while out and about regardless of our teams’ phone preferences has been very helpful. We take lots of photos for our contact records and notes. Having the ability to (almost seamlessly) attach them from both Android and iPhone cameras to a contact is a huge plus.
Cons
Insightly is not seamless, we’ve had to find some workarounds. The cc: forward email feature doesn’t always pick up the contact details so we do a weekly sweep and make sure everything is sorted where it needs to go.
Currently, we are using the calendar features more often. As a visual team, this is the one area we wish was more robust and are always on the lookout for new features, training, and integrations. Any development around event tracking, reminders, calendar planning, and syncing with other team calendars is on our Wish List.
It took us a while to decide that the BEST WAY for us to filter our data is to use tags — until this step became clear we found it difficult to view and sort specific data sets.
Lastly, while pagination is a very useful interface choice as our contact list grows year after year, there are situations where we’d really love the ability to scroll through the entire list on one page rather than 50 people at a time.
Conclusion
A reliable, easy-to-use, affordable, and functional CRM provides the support we need to love people, conversations, and moments by bringing them to mind in an organized way. The database captures the details we need to remember, especially the ones that are harder to recall or easy to confuse as our database grows each year.
The more of our data collection and reminder generation process we can automate, the more time we have to focus on what’s most important to us: Human Connection. We don’t want EVERYTHING automated, but if we can get our framework of data set up in a robust system on a solid foundation of rules and guidelines, we are free to focus on creating jaw-dropping human experiences.
This is what works for us and we are always on the lookout for innovative features and products. Tell us what your favorite CRM is and why below!
