Product update webinar: new features and what’s next

Melinda: Hello there, thank you so much for joining us today. We have got lots of great product information and updates for you today and we’re really excited to have Anthony Smith our CEO and founder with us to deliver this to you. I am Melinda Prescher and I’m hosting today’s event. I’ve been with Insightly for over three years now.

 I have 15 years of marketing experience and I’m responsible for product and customer marketing. I’m so happy to have Anthony Smith here. Like I mentioned he’s our CEO and founder he started Insightly over 12 years ago and in addition to leading the company and all that entails he’s responsible for product design and development here at Insightly who’s the perfect person to get on the line and tell you everything that’s going on. 

So just a level set there are two main priorities that we have for today’s webinar whether you’re already an Insightly customer or not yet a customer and investigating what Insightly has to offer there’s really something here for everybody we’re going to talk about what’s new with the Insightly platform CRM Insightly marketing and slightly service and app connect and then we’re also going to talk about the fantastic features that are in store for the future so Anthony with that I’ll let you take over.

Anthony: Thanks Melinda I appreciate that all right so as many of you know Insightly has four products that make up our modern CRM platform the CRM sales force Automotion application our service application for customer support our marketing application and then to tie them all together we’ve got app connect which is our integration automation application so what we’ve been doing over the past six months is every month we do a major feature release that is normally focused on one of the four products in this week the engineering team worked for around two or three months on each product before moving on to the next product and developing features for that one so starting in about the second half of last year we worked firstly on a platform release improving and adding features that all four of the applications on our platform use so the majority of those Investments were spent on improving dashboard visualizations and some security improvements as well so it slightly already had great dashboarding capabilities with over 40 different chart visualizations like line charts bar charts high and donut charts Maps gauges and more exotic charts like bubble charts tree Maps we threw in some radar charts and some scatter graphs in there as well we heard from customers that they wanted to be able to drill down into the data from one chart into another chart by clicking through different sets of charts to be able to better understand their data I guess a great drill down example is starting off with a map of North America showing sales figures and then being able to click down into maybe one individual State on that map like New York state to show just the sales figures for that state and then maybe click in once more into that data to be able to see sales Executives and show the individual sales opportunities that were won within that state of New York so you can very easily create these types of dashboard drill down chart sequences now initially and we’ve heard from a lot of customers that they really like them so dashboard drill Downs have been a huge win for us and customers are really excited about it you should definitely check it out another feature that we released was being able to schedule a dashboard to be sent to you in an email so we’ll take a snapshot of any dashboard and send it out in an email on a given schedule so for example if you like to see one of your dashboards just before your 9 A.M meeting every Monday you can schedule an email to be sent out to you that’s comprised of big beautiful versions of every chart in that dashboard and you can have it arrive in your email inbox at say 8 55 a.m on a Monday just before that big meeting we also added the ability to print dashboards for those offline scenarios where paper printouts work best or where you want to draw on the charts    while we’re at it we also added new color combinations for charts and the ability to search for dashboards and for cards in a list if you’ve built up a lot of them we also added a couple of new security capabilities to the Insightly platform so saml is a standard for authentication and logging into one app from another and we’ve actually supported that standard for a couple of years now on our Enterprise plan if you use an identity and authentication platform like say OCTA Microsoft Azure ad or One login you can use saml for your users to easily log into Insightly in a single sign-on scenario without them having to remember multiple passwords we now support provisioning new users through saml and actually de-provisioning users as well so if you are adding employees to your organization or you’re doing a reorg and reducing your employee account you can automatically set those employees up as users in its sightly when you add them to your payroll system or have them removed from Insightly when they depart your company or without having to lift a finger so that saves you from having to manually   go into the admin settings of Insightly and make those changes when staff are either added or removed from your company and just make sure that you don’t   Miss some of those Security Options   when you have some staff changes we also added additional security logging to recycling so you can better track and monitor each employee that logs in and uses Insightly and order the product usage   that’s in a new user activity report that’s available within the other reports section of its early so that rounds out the improvements that we’ve made to the platform and in the next release we focused on Insightly app connect which is our integration automation product now this product has been huge for us all of our most successful customers use app connect to build out and to run Integrations between Insightly and other products they use daily like their Erp systems maybe they’re accounting and finance systems their marketing products or their HR tools you can build out an integration with a really simple drag and drop interface and you don’t need to be able to write code there’s no code needed and we actually provide pre-built connectors to over 500 different software applications to use in your organization Every Day app connect is our fastest growing product by far and we wanted to make it as powerful as possible for customers to be able to do more with we actually increase the scalability of the product by over 50 so now you can transfer thousands of records of information into and out of Insightly it every second we also added the ability to integrate with more parts of Insightly including adding and editing notes and tasks you can now do through app connect   you have better searching of Records in Insightly through app connect and you can also automatically follow or unfollow any record and Insightly through an app connect integration we added new triggers so you can react and respond to more data changes and exactly data and you can even do comparisons on those data changes between the old values and the new values and any change that was made so you can build some very powerful Integrations really easily with Insightly app connect but if you would like our fantastic Professional Services team to build them out for you you’ve actually got that option too we’ve built out probably hundreds of Integrations from our pessimist and we’ve got a ninja team available to listen and to understand what you want and then to translate that into a rock solid integration for your business so either you can do it yourself with our simple drag and drop interface or if you don’t have the resources or the time to do that get our Professional Services team to come in listen to what you want to build and then be able to spin that up for you pretty quickly and have your integration ready to go in a very short amount of time okay let’s move on to the Insightly marketing product so earlier this year we focused on improving the marketing   the email marketing capabilities of Insightly marketing so sending out really engaging emails to your customers is one of the primary use cases that we see in exactly marketing and we made some major improvements to that this year the first feature in our lists that we’re launching later this month is marketing email reply management so if you send out large batches of emails quite often you want to be able to have your customers be able to respond back personally to those emails rather than just having them come from   no reply type email address so when you do that you’ll find that you often get inundated with automatic replies from recipients with out of office messages vacation responders mailbox full messages or bounce notifications that your mail did not reach its intended mailbox it’s hard to sort through all those auto reply emails and you can easily miss the recipients that actually chose to write back to you personally with important information or thoughts that they wanted to share with you so now with inside the email reply management we actually take care of sorting through all those auto replies and the bounce messages and the out of office replies and we send you just the personal replies from h  ans for you to take action on them that dramatically lowers the work that you have to do each time you send out a big batch of emails and it still allows you to personally read and respond to customers so I think you’ll find that very beneficial for your business if you use that and if you’re sending out large vol  es of emails to your prospects and your customers okay another big email sending feature that we added is the ability to send out transactional emails using Insightly marketing so transactional emails a non-marketing emails that you might send to your customers like for instance shipping notifications billing emails notes on changes to your terms of service or other legal notices and you want to be able to send out those emails to contacts that you have and it’s slightly even if those contacts have unsubscribed from one or more of your marketing email lists Insightly now supports sending out those transactional email type   messages to listen prospects within its early so you’ve got that option as well the next feature we added was batch rate limiting and that was actually at the request of a couple of our customers when they were sending out large batches of emails let’s say 10 000 emails at a time they wanted to break up that large send of emails out into smaller chunks smaller batches of maybe two and a half thousand emails each and space those apart with maybe an hour in between each batch so that’s basically what we built so when you go into slightly and you set up a large email to be sent out you now have the option of breaking that large email up into smaller batches and you can choose the time spacing between those batches and you can do all of that in just a couple of clicks another small feature not listed here that we just added that’s actually coming out this month is a link to view an email in a browser rather than just having the email visible within the email client so you can add this little kind of magic link into any email template and then when the recipient views an email   using that template in their email viewer like Outlook or Gmail they can click a link to view that email in a web browser as well so that rounds out the improvements that we’ve made to the email sending capabilities and certainly some other additions that we also made to Insightly marketing are the ability to see all the captured UTM parameters from links that prospects clicked on to arrive at your marketing tracked website so you can see actually under the prospect Tab and slightly marketing all of the campaigns that attracted each customer to your website we actually capture each of the parameters the UTM parameters and the URL and then we save those into the prospect object so you can see all of the links they clicked on that had UTM parameters and what those parameters were that correspond to the marketing campaigns that you’ve run we also added custom events to the prospect timeline so either through JavaScript or through our API you can have prospects trigger custom events that get saved to your prospects timeline like e-commerce transactions order transactions subscription upgrades maybe shipment or even manufacturing Milestones that you might have in your company then you can filter the list of prospects do you have buy those custom events so that you can Target those prospects that are slightly marketing very easily maybe you send them out an email maybe you include them in one of our Journeys but you can actually dissect and and build out lists in the slightly marketing with those custom events that you’ve created that represent something meaningful maybe a milestone that happens in the customer journey within your company okay finally we’re adding multi-touch attribution metrics and reporting to it slightly as well so that you can look at your marketing spend versus the closed one opportunities that you have in Insightly CRM to determine if your campaigns were profitable and if they represented a good return on investment or not and   a new ability for also the prospects to unsubscribe from some lists and not from others through a preference Center web page so there are two features that   we’re adding in   upcoming release multi-touch attribution and   preferences Center for   subscribes and unsubscribes from the different marketing email lists that you have okay moving on to our next product Insightly service so coming up next month we’ve actually got a big release of features in in certainly service improvements and enhancements to that product we’ve got to start off with two new sidebars to improve agent productivity when working with figures so when you go and you view an individual ticket inside Insightly service we’ve got a right hand pane that has some sidebar options that can kind of come out and then you can you can add some   additional actions and view some additional data in each of those sidebars so one new sidebar that we’re adding to that allows you to see at a glance any tasks that are associated with the ticket currently being viewed and the status and the priority of those tasks if they’re started if they’re not started if they’re in progress or completed who completed them and when so it provides a good list of the different tasks that have been worked on associated with that ticket and kind of the status of where those tasks are at you can also easily create new tasks associated with the ticket and assign work out to other individuals in your organization they might have to do something that’s based upon the request in order to solve or resolve the ticket so we’re also adding a new sidebar that displays which web pages a contact has previously viewed before they lodged a ticket so with Insightly marketing we’ve got a web page tracking available we’re actually integrating that with Insightly server so you can then see what web pages on your marketing website they might have visited before they launched a ticket or if they were in your portal which knowledge based articles that they viewed   so do you get a bit of a better picture around the path that they took before creating a new ticket maybe if they looked at a couple of knowledge based articles and then they wrote in with a ticket you might want to think about   enhancing those knowledge base articles or maybe changing them to solve what the customer is asking for   so that you can do Flex of tickets in the future so we’re also adding new reports around SLA exceptions and compliance so you can much more easily see exactly which tickets breached your slas and when and by how much we’re also adding another report around knowledge-based articles and a further report around portal usage so you can see exactly who viewed knowledge-based articles or who logged into your portals in report format finally in excitement service we’re adding a couple of extra tools for Ticket management so when you view a ticket you can easily split that ticket up into two separate tickets or create an additional ticket from that ticket for those types of scenarios where maybe the contact has put multiple issues I’ve listed quite a few things in the one ticket and for organizational capabilities you actually want to split that ticket out into the individual   points that you want to address with the customer so those types of ticket manipulation options that you have that is   something that we’re adding to a future version of Insightly service pretty soon let’s move on to project management I think for at least the the past couple of years we’ve   had a lot of customers using the project management section of inside and wanting to see some improvements and new capabilities to the project management section of it slightly so so   we’re executing on that later this year    by taking the project records and their Associated tasks and the meetings that you might have associated with projects and then   in one example being able to render those out in a Gantt chart visualization so you can easily see dependencies on a project you can see the status of the different tasks within a project how far along in the execution of a project you currently are in that classical gancha style view   another feature that I’ve heard quite often revolves around time tracking on tasks and Insightly and   it’s something that we’re going to be adding as a new capability to tasks so that you can actually accurately capture the exact time and hours and minutes that it takes one of your employees or the person to sign the task to complete the task   finally adding the ability to schedule and to allocate tasks with the appropriate resources so that each of them remains utilized each of those resources remains utilized but not over utilized on the critical part to finishing a project on time is something we’re looking at adding as well so those improvements to the project management section of it slightly will start to appear towards the end of this year   and   and then into the early parts of next year as well so you you should look out for those for sure and then moving into early next year we’re focusing on the CRM product and improving the capabilities that we have around one aspect of CRM which is the products and the price books and the quotation engine that we have inside and sightly so being able to generate quotes and invoices and having those sent out to customers for them to be able to digitally sign   and execute is something that we’re looking into be able to assign those those   those   doc  ents   in their web browser or on their mobile device and then having the results sent back to you so that you have a fully executed contract or quota or proposal and having all of that as an integrated part of Insightly another thing that we’re looking at adding to the the products Price Books and quote section of Insightly around opportunities is around approval processes for opportunities so if you’re wanting to for an example   change a field and Insightly   on an opportunity maybe it’s the discount maybe you wanted to have an opportunity product and it’s your opportunity and you wanted to give it like a 30 discount over what the list price is maybe that’s above a certain threshold they’re ordinarily you can discount so that discount approval would need to go to your manager for them to be able to approve that particular discount before you send it out to the customer   for them to be able to to execute and to accept so being able to orchestrate   that approval process via email   you make the change the opportunity that approval gets sent out the manager approves that change then it gets set back and and then the process continues on and the proposal gets sent out orchestrating all of that and routing those changes to making sure that you know if maybe your manager’s on vacation it goes one up to someone higher up in the organizational hierarchy and being able to orchestrate all of that   is something that we’re looking into early next year   for opportunity Management in excitement so I guess that gives you   in a nutshell a little bit of an understanding of what we’ve worked on in the recent past whether it’s the platform or whether it’s Insightly marketing with some improvements to email sending or whether it’s the service product where it’s a great improvements to slas into reporting into the sidebars OR to project management Gantt charts and time tracking and some of the improvements that we’re going to make in the next couple of quarters when it comes to   to working with proposals and   and with quotes   some of the changes that are being made to Insightly to make you more productive in in your work in in using the CRA some great improvements there and   with that I think I’ll hand it back to the lovely Melinda.

Melinda:  Thank you so much Anthony that was great and so I know that our wonderful team has been answering a lot of questions in the background    and so I think we we have very few questions to answer live Anthony    there’s one about email reply management and the question is does that happen automatically or is there a setting or something in the journey to make that work    and when when is this going to be released.

Anthony: It’s just going through the final part of the QA process now so when you set up an email to be sent out   it’s just one   little drop down that says do you want to use Insightly email reply management or not and if you choose yes then    when you send out that email and you get the replies back and certainly will automatically sort through all those replies it’ll put the automated replies the out of office replies that I’m on vacation replies to one side and it’ll send you via email that actual replies from h  ans so that then you can take action on those so when you go to to send out an email and you set that up    it’s just one of the one little additional   drop down that you have to be able to choose do you want to use Insightly email reply management or do you want to handle those replies yourself or or use the no reply email address so you might have used in the past so pretty easy to set up and then we handle all the rest from there great    there’s a question about app connect and recipes or connectors    the question is you know people are looking for I think more doc  entation on the connectors and recipes    people understand that a lot of the recipes are bespoke but    you know seeing some examples   is really helpful for people to get an understanding on how to maximize the value of app connect and so the question is is anything coming in the near future so more videos or more recipe examples we’ve actually got our customer service and customer success teams building out a range of videos to be able to help with   like little three or four minute Snippets   videos to be able to help out with certain aspects of app connect if you have a customer success plan within saily you can also just   email our our customer service team to be able to get any assistance that you have   on app connect   as I said there are a lot of different connectors available now and new connectors are being built and released   every month to to connect app connect up with different products that you might have in your organization so   keeping up with that is   sometimes a little bit hard   but    the the team is always here to be able to help you out and to be able to     to be able to build those out for you if if you so choose   you can easily do it yourself though and we will be adding some some more videos to to kind of make that process a little bit easier for those people that learn via visualization sounds good    there’s a question about Zoom info integration    and and the question is    are we working on any Zoom info integration for contact and Company data management I’m not sure if app connect already has a zoom info connector   but they certainly have an API so you can build an integration with zoom info pretty easily using that Vector    and   and get the contacts and the organizations from zoom into Zoom info into Insightly pretty easily okay. 

Melinda: Just one final question that I’m seeing here Anthony are the project management updates and time tracking for tasks coming in the base CRM or a different product or module is the question so I get I’m guessing this is like across the platform or something yeah so   we definitely want to add it to the to the projects      the the projects the data   inside of Insightly so whether or not   we’re gonna spin that out into a different project management app or whether we can extend out the project capabilities that we have in the existing cro map we’re still trying to figure that one out so we’re   we’re in the processes of Designing that so if you have some strong thoughts either way leave those in the comments and we’ll certainly   take those into consideration because   it’s kind of it’s it’s on the drawing board as we speak so we’re trying to work through some of those scenarios right now fantastic well that was what we had for questions so I’ll close it out now    like I mentioned before we’ve got you know tons of Insightly customers on the call today and that’s great and if you’re not a current and slightly customer and a new CRM is in your future we’d love to talk to you Insightly CRM is easy to adopt really customizable and integrates really easily with other applications that you use to run your business I mean we hear from customers that they’re fully up and running within slightly in just weeks and you know I actually am responsible for customer stories and videos I hear from customers all the time how much they’re able to grow Revenue with Insightly I mean up to 300 percent in less than a year after implementing    we’re also offering 30 off the entire platform    when you buy as a bundle so there really is no better time to consider Insightly so thank you so much for spending time with us today thank you Anthony thank you to the team answering questions great to have everyone on today and we’ll see you again soon thanks bye [Music]

[Music]