Visualize the metrics that matter most to your business

Melinda: Hello and thank you so much for joining everyone today we’re going to be chatting about Dashboards and Reporting   Insightly your CRM holds critical information about your business and how it’s performing and we’ll spend time in this webinar explaining why Dashboards and Reporting are so vital to your success and what   Insightly dashboards can do to help you get actionable insights from the data that you’re collecting in your CRM so on to our guests   I’ve got Felipe Iradando he is a sales engineering team lead at   Insightly and he’s worked in many different software verticals including the Internet of Things fintech customer engagement and now CRM he specializes in building out industry-specific use cases for   Insightly’s customers and demonstrating the capabilities of the   Insightly system and Felipe is joining us from Vancouver Canada I’ve also got Amber Livingston here from multi-family utility company and I’m going to interview her to get a customer perspective and how she uses dashboards to help her company visualize business performance and make their data actionable Amber has 17 years of Industry experience she’s actually owned her own Utility Billing company prior to working for multi-family and she sold her company in 2019. I’m really excited to have her speak to her use cases a bit later in the webinar so let’s get going I want to level set first there are three things that we’ll talk about during today’s webinar and again it looks like the vast majority of you are   Insightly users but you know not everyone on this call is an unsightly user or even a CRM user so obviously we’re going to use   Insightly as our example but know that we’ll also be 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 if you’re thinking about switching so we’re going to talk about why dashboards and Reporting are so critical to the success of your business then I’ll have Felipe speak to his considerations as he builds up reporting Frameworks for customers and Prospects and then he’s also going to share a demo he’s also going to let you know about a great new feature that’s coming soon   so look for more information there to come I’m also going to interview Amber so she can share more practical information about the types of metrics that her team tracks and how they use dashboards to grow and improve their business so let’s talk first about the challenges so what are we actually hear from customers so we hear from customers they start out by using Excel to visualize their data but they quickly find that it doesn’t deliver on what they need in real time and what I mean by that is that it can take a tremendous amount of time to gather data and do the heavy lifting of consolidating it and that might be workable if you have the resources to hire a n ber of business analysts to help you but many companies are working with much fewer resources and in fact I’ve spoken to a couple of CEOs customers of   Insightly who talk about how before   Insightly they were personally updating spreadsheets manually so it really is   it can be a heavy lift along with that it’s really easy for manual data entry mistakes to be made and then finally customers fund they’re spending time trying to align across groups to get to a single source of Truth all that said third-party tools really aren’t the answer either you need to get your data into that platform to be able to visualize it in most cases this means that you need a technical resource to map the data keep it updated the tools themselves the FTE required to manage it are additional expenses that many growing companies are actually not prepared to support and there may also be security issues as you’re mapping data it’s easy to lose permissions on the original data when it’s mapped into the third party application so building dashboards and   Insightly allows everyone even non-technical users to create interactive real-time visualizations in just a few minutes and with   Insightly you can customize around your unique kpis so your key metrics are visible at a glance and you have the ability to make decisions based on what’s happening with your business in real time and you’ll get a really good flavor of that when we do the interview with Amber   Insightly dashboards are a great way to get to a single source of truth that everyone at your company can align around you’re saving time on handoffs across teams your understanding of business and your business problems the solutions you need to get to the data that brought you there is consistent and in terms of   Insightly plans users on the professional plan can create up to 100 dashboard cards that can be shared across the company and users on the Enterprise plan can create an unlimited n ber of individual cards shared cards and dashboard cards amongst all users   Insightly offers about 50 different ways to visualize the data with maps for regional views gauges to demonstrate how close you are to quarterly or yearly goal attainment and bar charts to compare performance between teams   we’re also constantly iterating dashboards based on customer feedback and Felipe will also talk you through something that’s   new and coming very very soon so I’m going to now bring Felipe into the discussion to talk about his tips for developing great dashboards and then I’ll have him launch into the demo thank.

Felipe: Thanks for the intro as mentioned   working in Sally is the sales engineering team lead and I have a few tips that I see myself recommending to customers frequently as we talk about their specific dashboard strategies I’ve distilled them down to three quick tips that I think most if not all organizations could benefit from and these three tips are one to funnel and split your dashboards to gather data early and gather data often and to keep up with the latest trends what I’ll do is I’ll go through each one of these with dashboard examples that I’ve actually created within   Insightly so the first one is to funnel and split dashboards and really the way that I think about this is to split the the dashboards between the different roles so usually dashboards are seen as only for executives or managers to get crucial data at a glance on how the company is performing but really   Frontline employees are individual contributor dashboards have a lot of potential for the organization as well so that means having defined metrics for individual contributors that will end up leading to increased ownership for the goals that they have as as well as overall more consistent results because they know the metrics they’re supposed to be hitting so what I usually recommend to our customers is a three-tiered approach so that’s an executive dashboard a sales manager dashboard and an individual contributor dashboard and I’ll show what I mean by going through each of these inside so I’ll switch over here what I’m showing right now is a dashboard with an   Insightly there’s a lot of things going on here but what I’m generally showing is the chief sales officer dashboard so this is that executive level   dashboard that would be seen the interesting about this dashboard is it’s the most high-level dashboard that I’ll be showing today meaning it’s pretty much like the 30 000 foot view as to what’s going on at the organization so that’s everything that a director or executive would need at a glance what I have listed here as far as some examples we have the separate quotas for different teams so for example we have upsell and new business as well as that kind of   total quota percentage to goal that we have of combining these two together we also have the revenue by Service as well as by product so again all of this information we’re pulling from   Insightly because we’ve   put in that data and that lives in and tell you at the moment the nice thing about these dashboards as well from   Insightly is that you can modify them the way that you want so you can see that we have these different sizes so we have the smaller sizes for the quotas and the bigger one down here if you want to change the size you can simply click this button if you want to rearrange them it’ll do that as well and as you change the size the dashboard will also respond accordingly so we try to make it as easy as possible for anyone really to be making their own dashboards and really put the cards and the the information front and center the way they want to see it especially over from this dashboard into something   maybe a bit well let’s say one two down we can switch over to the sales and manager dashboard so in this case what this one’s looking for is it’s focused specifically around one specific team performance   the other nice thing about this one is we can look at specific team members so evaluate in this case for the sales manager evaluate where they are with their quotas   their pipelines that they have and being able to quickly identify which team members will need help or increased follow-up with how they’re achieving their metrics so for example what we can see here is the amount closed this quarter by the specific rep we can also see the pipelines that they have so we can look at both of those and see if anyone who needs help this quarter but then we’re also having some common cards with the tier above so in this case it’s the same upsell quota percentage   dashboard card that we have and so it’s being shared among the higher tier as well as this tier but the nice thing about that is that if any changes happen to this if we’re updating this for you know the entire organization all of those changes will be reflected across the different tiers so everyone’s on track on seeing what the information is and everyone’s consistent with one view into the data itself switching over from here to the individual contributor View so this would be I just put this one as my own so in this case these are my metrics on the left hand side the way that I built this is   basically the idea of coming in every day and seeing kind of what’s going on what my metrics are like what information that I have that I’m how I’m performing within this thing myself and again this is all W data but wanted to show this kind of as an example the other nice thing about these dashboard cards is that not only are they fully interactive and that you can move them around but you can also hover over them and see data within them so in this case I can see the bid amount the specific bit amounts for each of these example companies and I can also click into my tasks so for example let’s say that I start my day I open this up I see kind of how my metrics are going see what I need to focus on but I can also click into these test names themselves so I can sort in this case by the date do of my upcoming tasks in this case let’s do this to see the most relevant ones and then I can click into them to then open them up right here without having to leave the dashboard so from here I can see all the details that I would have in this task and as we’ve set up the CRM as well we also have a linked opportunity to this task so I can click that to see all the details for that opportunity all the information that I would need to kind of follow up on this task to make this call and if I want to go back to the dashboard to go to the other task I can also just kind of close this from here and continue on my Merry way so having these metrics front and center allows me to understand exactly what I need to accomplish and how I can build my own narrative around my own performance and the goals that I have splitting up your dashboards this way as far as the different tiers allows you to make sure that everyone is capturing the right goals and metrics at your company it ensures that the visibility into the metrics that matter are available for everyone it also increases accountability for each level of your business moving on to the second tip so for me this one is to gather data early and gather data often so one of the main reasons for having a CRM is that it serves as the single source of Truth for the entire business so the data that lives here will go all the way from sales metrics like pipeline size closed deal amounts   quotas to marketing data like win loss by generation Source or leads by marketing campaign so the starting point of all of these insights is initially Gathering that data and making sure that we’re getting all the bits to be able to create a complete picture that we can execute on so that brings me again to the second point at the outset we want to aim to start funneling data into the system so you can create the dashboards that will show you the way and then once you have that data in the system you’ll be able to start building up the analytics needed by your managers your c-suite and your individual contributors as we just showed to   to really be able to get the the metrics that they need so they can understand how they perform it so to show this in general in a dashboard I’ve set up this one so the dashboard that I have here is a marketing and sales alignment one so it’s pulling in information from both the marketing side as well as sales and   it’s aiming to kind of consolidate that information and put it all together in one place I’ve also used this as a showcase to show the different types of dashboard cards that we have I know Melinda mentioned that we have quite a few so these are some examples we have tables we have stack bar charts   we have different sizes as well as different radial gauges pie graphs so pretty much a lot of different visualizations that you can use to set up your your information and these are all made possible because of the data that we’re pulling in   as an example I thought I’d go through and make an example card just to show everyone how it’s done and how easy it is to make it I’m just going to create a new card here the card that I want to make is going to be one that’s pulling information from opportunities and splitting those opportunities into the campaign source to see how much we’re actually retrieving from each campaign Source based on the sales that we get from those opportunities so as you can see here we have our graph and we have some categories as well as some filters and some sorting so I’ll just start working with this we’ll choose a stack bar actually because I want to have some nice colors in here and I’ll start pulling in the campaign source so in this case we have the data source of opportunities and I’ll start pulling that campaign Source field that we have from within there now let’s move this out of the way and we’ll add this campaign Source here and so what we’re already seeing is a general picture of the amount or at least the revenue that we’re getting based on the campaign Source we do we see that we have some information we should fix so we have this one that has no value so what I’ll do is I’ll just filter that out just to emphasize the ones that we want to see and to make this a bit nicer what we can do is we can also sort this we can sort this by the bit amount so I’ll just pull this and again all this information are fields that we’re getting from the opportunities it’s a bit better okay so now we have that information coming down this way   that’s my fifth grade math teacher told me I should always label my axes so we see that we have the right information here in the campaign source so I’ll put here and for the format I’ll put currency great so we have our campaign Source we have   our formatted bid amounts as well all we need to do is maybe add a s mary n ber here so let’s see the options we can make that a currency as well let’s just say this is revenue let’s do that and let’s just do this let’s see that perfect okay looks good to me great so from here then you can see that we’ve just quickly added this this card the nice thing about this is not only is it available now in this specific dashboard but any other dashboard can also pull from this card if you want to show that   so again this is kind of one of the really easy ways that we made it and sell you to be able to create new dashboard cards add them in and then be able to to just get that information immediately   the main thing to notice around this whole process I want to show as well is that   Insightly is holding all the data to make it possible to get these insights so it’s easy to really set up a card like this with yourself as long as you’re Gathering that data and making sure that it’s within the system again when thinking of how to start setting up these dashboards think of how you can gather this data so you’ll have a good base to be able to make these actionable analytics okay so the last tip that I have is to keep up with the latest trends so what   in general there’s always going to be new trends there’s going to be new insights understanding you can pull this data that you already have in the system and then being able to apply new tools and features to get the data that you’ve already gathered so what I’m going to be showing here are some screenshots of an upcoming new release that we have that we call drill down dashboards the scenario is that I’m a sales manager that wants to analyze my lead sources and I want to see which lead sources bring in the most Revenue but I also want to see how I can shorten the deal cycle and help my sales team sell faster so in this case what I’m initially seeing is a very similar chart to what we just created we have a lead source as far as the the different resources that we have for this for our sales and then we’re also having the s  of that bid amount so basically the revenue we have demo download social and trial so what I’ll be able to do once I have my drill down dashboard set up is once I click One of These Bars then I’ll be able to drill down specifically into that filter so in this case let’s say I wanted to click into demo and build that up with the next view would be would be something like this so we’d be able to see within that filter of demos that the lead sources are bringing in then we can split it up into different teams in this case let’s put it up into small business Enterprise in mid-market and then on the y-axis I’ve put the average days to close to see how long each of these teams is taking to close   deals that are coming in through demo so what this will help me do as a sales manager is I can see the small business as far as the average days to close it’s significantly higher than Enterprise and mid-market which I generally wouldn’t   wouldn’t ass e and so for my side what that would mean is that I can focus resources on providing a quicker customer experience for small business demonstrations specifically since I can see that it is kind of taking a bit longer for this team to be able to close those deals to give some more insight into what that would look like as far as setting this up   it would look something like this so this is again a screenshot on how we would be defining these different   dashboard cards and so you can see here the first one is those lead sources that I showed then we have an average days to close but we can keep drilling down we can keep adding more dashboard cards   and just keep filtering by clicking and clicking into each of those graphs there’s no limit to how many of these we can make although in general I would say the max would be around four or five that we’d want to do just because we’d be keep filtering it down each time   but again the idea around this is that we have a lot of flexibility to be able to analyze the data that we’re getting and really in a comfortable kind of nice way for the user interface to just click through the stuff that we need to analyze and then be able to take actionable results based on that so again so so this will help me know that we can focus resources on providing a quicker customer experience   and it’s always about seeing how these new features or functionality can be used with the data that you currently have so how do you show those quick screenshots on how we’re planning to support those users by building their own dashboards and flows   in the upcoming release to recap the few things that I mentioned is is to make sure that your dashboards are effective remember to split your dashboards into hierarchies remember to gather that data early and often and don’t forget to continue investigating with the latest trends and features   Insightly allows you to set these up yourself fully easily and comfortably without any extra involvement in the specific case that you need some significantly more complex data charts if you want some specific training on how it works or if you’d like help in managing the data that’s coming in we can support you so we pride ourselves on our customer support and having Technical Resources that can help you get a handle on your data and Define exactly what would work best for your dashboards so feel free to reach out to us if you’re interested in setting up these dashboards of your own and want to see how they could be implemented those are pretty much all the tips that I had today I’ll   pass it back to Melinda for the rest of it okay thank fully Bay that was you know great information I really appreciate you sharing your expertise today   so now actually let’s move on to my interview with Amber   Amber thank you so much for joining us today I’d love to have you just share a little bit more about you and multi-family Utility Company the company you work for 

Amber: Thanks Melinda   well I’m a project manager and an   Insightly administrator for multi-family Utility Company the company was founded in 2007 and it is one of the leaders in utility expense management and Building Services we offer customized utility Solutions all across the nation the company has won some awards our U.S based customer service team is bilingual and they’ve won a Stevie Award for best Frontline support and multi-family utility company has also been on Inc magazine 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies six times including most recently 2019. that’s really great to hear good information   why did you and multi-family choose   Insightly as your system of record well our sales team had actually already been using   Insightly and they were really happy they were big voices and advocates for   Insightly they were really happy with the way that it helped us track the pipeline and grow the business it can be customized to isolate and measure performance and it’s easy to get at a glance data and insights into not only sales performance but each team’s performance through the dashboards and through the reporting now I’m on the operations side of the business and so we were using a different tool but we needed a better way to track and manage projects things going on with our clients and just the overall solution that we deliver to our customers there is it sounds really simple Utility Billing but there’s actually a lot of complexity that goes into what we have to produce not only initially but every single month and so we looked at Zoho we looked at   Insightly we looked at Salesforce and ultimately at the end of the day we just went with   Insightly   the support package within sightly was a huge seller just from the onslaught all the way through even today   and just the price point within Silo was better than what we found got it okay   you mentioned that your sales team had been using   Insightly but you’re on the Ops Team so what was your Ops Team actually using prior to   Insightly and then how did   Insightly solve those challenges that you were seeing the Ops are offside we were using Microsoft Dynamics and so we just really weren’t getting the Hands-On service that we needed and it was really difficult for everyone across the company to communicate   really the the dynamic CRM became a frustration point for our Ops Team   so   Insightly was not only a great is not only a great tool because now we’re all using the CRM it’s a one centralized location one source of Truth for all of us but with the dashboards especially and the reporting we can get we’ve been able to maximize our ability to our visibility into company metrics but also track and measure   through the Milestone and progress through all the   Insightly dashboards and the reporting that we can get from it okay great and I know   you know since now your Ops Team and your sales team are both using   Insightly you’ve got some really great use cases that you want to share across both of those teams so I’ll have you dive into that right now well I’ll start with giving a few examples from the Ops dashboards that we have and then some sales dashboards   on the operation side it’s real important that we follow what’s called our implementation pipeline very closely as a company we are a very fast growing company and having the implementation pipeline in that dashboard gives us implementation metrics and this helps us forecast the current implementation workload not only now but in the coming months and in the coming quarters and it’s really tailored to a defined set of steps that it takes for us to deliver that service it not only tracks resources that we need in order to execute the steps but also helps us estimate you know when that implementation is going to come to a close and allows our director of operations and our sales team the visibility they need to be sure that we deliver the correct delivery date when you’re talking about communicating when we can get things done in the implementation phase to our clients the second really important dashboard that’s really helped our Ops Team and our leadership team is what we call an operational bug object we created this custom object and it’s just as it sounds okay so everyone in the company can actually log errors or issues or anything that they see going on that arise and this really allows our teams to keep track of all the things that are going on across the whole company and the dashboard that we created allows us to s marize and see the root cause of those things so that we can Implement Solutions and it gives our leadership team understanding if something is systematically wrong or is training needed or what the solution is that we need to execute there shifting over into the sell side of things scaling operations especially in a fast growing company is really key in making sure that we’re meeting the client expectation and we’re meeting our scheduled deliverables so because operations and sales is all utilizing   Insightly and the dashboards and the reporting company planning action items can be initiated proactively and not reactively because we have visibility to that we can track ourselves and understand the opportunities they’re working and what’s coming in that pipeline sales also uses a dashboard that actually breaks out sales not only by individual but by the team and it really brings   company transparency to a new level that enables our executive team and our Ops leadership team real-time access into the opportunities that sales is involved with and the expected close date and also what they’ve sold by month by quarter and it really just allows us to really expand and basically we can prepare for what’s coming because we have visibility to even what they’re working in the future in the expected close date got it okay so I’m hearing you say a n ber of really important things and I want to spell those back to you so first your company has gotten really successful at identifying the levers that are important to your delivery process tracking those things using the data to reduce the n ber of Errors reduce the length of time it takes to solve an error find find a root cause and eliminate it you’re also using the dashboards to look at your delivery business holistically in terms of understanding resource allocation so you can set expectations keep your customers happy and keep your leaders happy I’m also hearing that   the process from sales to delivery is made much smoother because delivery the Ops Team you’ve got access to what’s happening with sales pipeline so you’re able to collaborate really well and finally sales leadership can evaluate performance by rep ensuring that the team is on track and provides support if it’s needed and since this information is all in your dashboards everyone can very easily see where something stands so you spend much less time informing others about how the process is going project status all of those types of things that can take up time has Insanity actually changed anything else about your processes in a material way yes ma’am so   Insightly is extremely flexible and it’s we we realized early on with this tool it’s gotten everyone really excited about what else we can do to optimize our operational processes and automate things so we’ve really talked about as a company how important it is for us to not only be able to share data at a glance but also improve cross-team communication and so now that we’re in the process of automating tasks and we’re doing this through activity sets custom objects but the communication about these tasks is so much more easily seen and it lets us know when we need to take action if we need to approve something schedule an event communicate back to the customer and so much more and because of the visibility it’s really making it easier for all of the people within our teams to know what they need to do when they need to do it and it’s reducing any communication risks that we’ve seen prior through the operational bug that may be have may have been that root cause just by building those things and that automation Within   Insightly our ultimate goal as a company is to really have all of our operational processes set up and   Insightly through activity sets or the projects   and even custom objects if we need to because it gives us more actionable data in metrics to be able to improve the speed at which we deliver things to our clients   and ultimately that’s really important that we deliver excellent customer service fantastic so I’m just going to ask you one more question before we close out any final recommendations for the audience   my recommendation is don’t be afraid I know that anytime you have a new tool that you’re looking at or maybe if you’re new to   Insightly   it can be kind of scary for individuals because it’s new it’s something they need to learn this tool is super simple I have found and the customization really allows businesses to create that one source of Truth and get the metrics that you need to really accomplish a lot of business initiatives that you need wonderful well thank you so much Amber I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today I love your use cases and I’m just so happy that you’re able to share so thank you so I know we’ve gone a little bit over time   let’s maybe take a couple of those questions though Felipe I might call upon you to ask to answer one that I’m seeing so there was a question about the drill down dashboard so in order to use the drill down dashboard it   it relies on we use tasks projects leads Etc could we use the marketing dashboard with external imported data for example Quickbooks data we currently only use   Insightly CRM sure yeah   so as far as that question goes the answer is like the easy one is yes   so the way that our dashboards work you can actually leverage all of our products so that’s   CRM that’s marketing that service all from either one or multiple dashboards so for example I can have one dashboard that pulls data from any of those   products and then puts those that information side by side for the specific question around getting the data putting into into our system from QuickBooks so we have a lot of customers that are doing that they’re importing data from QuickBooks it can be done with our integration tool which we call app connect we can do it with an import through CSV or we can even do it through an integration with our API but basically as soon as we get that information in there I will be able to create the dashboards that can can pretty much pull the information from marketing service and CRM got it okay that’s great and I mean you know there was a mention of QuickBooks there so one thing that I’d like to have people take a look for is that we will actually be doing a webinar early next year     that we’ll kind of talk about that QuickBooks integration especially not just the native integration but also   the app connect integration with QuickBooks so be on the lookout we’ll start promoting that probably after the holidays   maybe just one more question there was a question about the differences between the plans   and I might save that one that one is on the answer is really on   on our website and I can also have someone follow up to give you more specific information about that   maybe one other I see another QuickBooks question so is it possible to pull Quickbooks data into   Insightly I guess you answered that one Felipe with   what you said about app connect so I think that one’s been answered too   and then maybe Felipe if you can answer this one is it possible with   Insightly to track who changes the data and when in my company several people can add changes into a project but we can’t see who has done it and when yeah so as far as then Sally and tracking those changes so we have a detailed audit report   within all of our uncity objects So within each object you’ll be able to see that report that has time stamps of all of the changes to the record and it’ll show the old values the new values the time of change and which user performed that change so again if there’s a specific project that you want to look into or let’s say an opportunity you’ll be able to look at that record and then see a whole list of just kind of all of the changes that have happened to that object and who performed it and what the changes were okay well I think there were a couple of other questions there as well but   you know we have gone a little bit long so I think   I’ll have someone from unsightly reach out to those people who who had additional questions that we didn’t quite get to today I really appreciate those questions those were great so just in closing   you know I want to reiterate   Insightly CRM is easy to adopt very customizable integrates easily with other applications that you’re using to run your business   and we hear from customers that they’re fully up and running with   Insightly in just weeks and growing Revenue   up to 300 in less than a year thanks so much for taking the time to join us today and I wish you all a really fantastic holiday season [Music]