How Data Privacy Company Streamlines Operations with Insightly’s Enterprise CRM

We have data privacy consultant Kris. Wasserman from Assessment First with us
today.
Kris and his team use the entire Insightly platform, especially Insightly
CRM and AppConnect, Insightly’s integration engine.
He’ll talk really, really deeply about the benefits
that the Insightly platform drives for his business.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time.
I’m Melinda Prescher, senior marketing director at Insightly.
And today, I have the great pleasure
of hosting a special customer. Spotlight edition of Closing Time.
This episode will give you great insights into how our customer Assessment
First uses Insightly.
Now, without further ado, please welcome our guest, Mr.
Kris Wasserman of Assessment First.
Thanks so much for joining me today, Kris.
Hi, Melinda.. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Kris, It’s so great to have you and to kick things off I would really love
to have you tell us about yourself and about Assessment First.
We’re a specialized service provider that markets
directly to law firms, insurance carriers
that specialize in cyber liability insurance and their respective clients.
Essentially what our company does is we help companies
on the heels of a data breach or a data security incident
largely to identify
and extract sensitive personal information that may be buried
deep within extremely large volumes of unstructured data.
Ultimately, the problem that we solve for is identifying
who needs to be notified and why on the heels of a data breach.
You mentioned a little bit that, you know, you possibly have been involved
or have known about Insightly for quite some time for many years.
I’d love to hear kind of what your history with Insightly has been.
Sure. So kind of as a passion project.
Early in my career,
I was always trying to find better ways to track the work that I was doing.
So this is in the early 2000s when Salesforce.com was starting to make
a little bit of a splash in the CRM world.
And the company I worked for
had purchased it and handed it to me and said, Kris, figure it out.
Right.
I’m like, Guys, this is not built for a small company.
We were like, maybe $5 million a year revenue business.
At the time.
There was one and a half sales people
and it just didn’t make sense for us to have Salesforce.
But being that early adopter and being thrown into the fire,
I had to learn how to become an administrator
and that’s what I was using for years, working underneath
the umbrella of a number of different companies throughout my career.
Everywhere I went,
they always seemed to have some sort of lackluster deployment of Salesforce.
And by early call it 2010, maybe give or take a year or two.
I’m like,. This is getting way too complicated.
It felt like I went from algebra to requiring an advanced degree
in quantum physics just to move fields around or just to adjust workflow.
And I think that was part of the business model that they were doing
at that software company, is they wanted to build kind of an ecosystem
where other businesses could exist to consult on how to deploy.
And I’m like,. This doesn’t make sense, right?
I’m not going to drop 50 to 100 grand to have a consultant come in
just to move fields around or just to customize this to my own needs.
And that’s when I was complaining to a contact of mine.
I’m like, I lose so many hours of my day just trying to re-learn
how to use my CRM or how to re-learn how to administrate the CRM.
And now it’s requiring so much knowledge in terms of being able to write code.
And a friend of mine said, Look, if you’re banging
your head against the wall, you know, with these overweight,
you know, bloated CRM solutions, check this out.
This is somewhat I think it was somewhat new on the market at the time,
and it was just a CRM solution.
And the barrier to entry was really low.
Right.
I think at the time I was able to get like one or two free users
if your use case was very limited and all you needed was like
opportunity tracking and maybe some light contact tracking.
And then that’s how I started playing with it.
I use it for like largely for myself, as my own
CRM to support me as my own salesperson.
I had way more success as a salesperson getting the CRM to work for me
as opposed to every other instance of a CRM that I’ve worked in
at larger organizations it’s always me working for the CRM.
It was a way for like the folks up,
you know, at the top of the food chain just to make sure I was doing my job.
And it was largely me tracking, you know, what did I get out of bed and do my job
that day as opposed to am. I funneling up the right information
at the right time to help me close deals or identify opportunities
or stuff slipping through the cracks?
Kris you’ve invested actually in Insightly’s entire platform,
not just Insightly CRM, but Insightly Marketing, Insightly Service
and also AppConnect, Insightly’s integration engine.
So I’d love to hear about your decision to do this as well as your decision
to choose our enterprise level solution for your business.
I didn’t come to Insightly the way probably most enterprise customers do.
I was basically self-service.
I went to the Web site and the most you could purchase at the time directly
without having to talk to a salesperson was I think the pro.
And we were. I had a pro subscription for me
and one other user for about 5 to 6 months.
And then once I started adding employees, I’m like, all right,
this is you know, there’s more behind the scenes here.
I want to play with it. Right?
So some of it was, you know, show me all the cards.
I feel like I’m only playing with half a deck here.
And that’s when I started.
So I think to I think to sign up for the enterprise package, right,
you have to talk to a salesperson because there’s a lot of discovery
involved making sure that the right because it’s not, you know, one size fits
all solution.
I really feel like they custom built a package
that was unique to my use case scenario.
I’m also I’m a small business.
I like to personally get in there and tinker.
I know the CRM does exactly what I need it to do.
There are these future state solutions that I need that are going to be solved
by AppConnect and the Marketing and Service piece had a lot of value.
I’ve used, you know, similar platforms to the marketing.
I’ve used competing platforms to the marketing solution.
And to be completely candid, the marketing and the service solution
that we have in place, we’ve been using largely in one off ad hoc scenarios,
we haven’t fully extracted the full potential out of those just yet.
And it’s largely just because of where our priorities are right
now, as is leveraging the CRM and AppConnect to become,
you know, the hub in the hub and spoke system
or that single centralized source of truth for our business,
which is expanded quite a bit.
And we’re doing a lot of things that. Insightly was never built for probably
and quite frankly, our marketing,. We don’t do a lot of outbound,
you know, what I call spray and pray marketing, where you just blast
people with,
you know, spam email saying we’re the great,
we have the greatest solution since sliced bread.
And that’s not really how our sales process works.
It’s not finding new logos, finding new customers.
Were largely a lot of repeat work.
So the marketing and service we’ve we’ve used a little bit.
I’ve created landing pages for quick surveys and
to get feedback from our customers and track those responses.
We built some really cool. Christmas card solutions
where we actually send out a physical postcard that has a QR code on it
that people scan and it takes them to actually an Insightly landing page
and they get to choose their client
gift as opposed to just everyone getting a dusty bottle of wine.
So some neat little solutions that we’ve put together.
But most of them are ad hoc, really, the, you know, the beating heart,
the aorta of our business is the Insightly CRM.
And, you know, the the highways and byways, all the different,
you know, organs, if you will, that make up, you know,
this $6 million man of a business are funneled through AppConnect.
So that was the big boon for us.
And then
honestly, even without AppConnect, we’ve been able to do so much with just,
you know, bending, calculated fields to our will
and building really, really cool dashboards around it.
Kris, I’d love to hear more about how you’re using dashboards,
what you’re looking at and how you use that to drive your business.
Sure.
First and foremost, the first thing we built was,
in essence, a dashboard that’s meant to be client facing.
So we started tracking all of our opportunity and project data
directly within Insightly and use the dashboards there to cobble together
something like a framework for providing a regular update to our clients
so they get information the way they need it.
On a regular cadence, it always looks the same way
so that they become very familiar with our sort of brand, right?
So it’s consistent.
And anytime you’re dealing with databases, anyone who’s done it a long time,
you start with the end in mind.
What information
are you trying to extract and what story are you trying to tell with it?
And so we started there with the client facing stuff.
But in terms of the dashboards, this has become like a huge push.
The entire company is like everyone in every role has their
own dashboard with their own cards that they’ve built for themselves.
So think about the three probably most common
sort of lenses that you’re looking through.
So you’ve got someone like me who’s on more the CEO ownership level.
I care about financial data,
I care about utilization, and I care very, very heavily about trends.
Right?
Having historical information inform future decisions.
You could do that with a simple bar chart,
but then you’ve got like the leadership layer, right?
These are the folks that are overseeing, you know, the ten, 15, 20 practitioners
that are hands on in any given project and being able
to it’s largely a game of air traffic control, right?
Making sure that the projects don’t collide with one another.
We’re not missing deadlines.
You know, there’s legitimately 500 discrete steps from
we find out about a new engagement to we’ve delivered it.
It’s out the door.. The bills have been paid.
We’ve purged all of the customer data off of our systems.
And usually it’s like one person doing steps one through five,
another person doing six through ten,
and then someone the first person jumping back in doing 11 and 12.
So all those baton handoffs is really painful to manage
if you’re doing it in the team’s chat or if you’ve got to do multiple meetings
in a day.
I’m always of the mind.
Anything that can be, any meeting that could be replaced
with a dashboard, a report or an email should be replaced.
Well-said, Kris,
I’d love to hear specifically what tools you’ve integrated AppConnect with.
Sure.
The easy ones, the top of the list that were most impactful.
Right out the gate, we integrated directly with QuickBooks,
so all of my invoicing and payment information is updated
in real time in Insightly as things are done in QuickBooks.
I don’t have to cut and paste anything.
We build Custom Objects in Insightly that tracked the invoices that went out,
they’re immediately linked to our projects.
And I know the second a project is closed in air quotes
because all of the invoices have been sent and they’ve been paid in their entirety
and that just saves countless, countless, countless hours.
Beyond that, we’re heavy Office 365 So
and we do everything, our whole company is remote.
We kind of were born out of the pandemic and we don’t have a single brick
and mortar office space.
So everyone lives and dies in Microsoft Teams
and we have a very structured setup to our channels.
So every engagement that we have gets its own chat room
and there are certain internal processes
where again, clearing out the clutter from people’s inboxes is key.
So we’re able to take ephemeral information, conversational data
and store it in Teams
and not have it clutter up our CRM and it’s not cluttering up our inbox.
And a lot of it is driven by automated alerts.
As key things happen in Insightly, we’re actually sending emails
into a Microsoft Teams channel
and it pins that post for everyone who’s working on that project.
So the little ones here and there, or a big one
is we use a document review platform that’s an on prem solution
that’s got a sequel back end that is not cloud based.
So most of the CRM, like the Insightly AppConnect integrations
are designed to glue cloud products with Cloud products.
And we were able to actually build through like web hooks and through APIs, we’re
able to call directly into the document
review database that we use to house all of our client data.
We’re able to now extract metrics out.
How many documents got loaded in, how many documents survived
after calling it down, after applying searches,
how many documents have had human beings put eyes on it today versus tomorrow?
What’s our pace?
All of that metrics, all of those daily logs of utilization
that would otherwise require a human to cut and paste
and track and manage a bunch of stuff on a spreadsheet happens automatically.
And so now my leadership team can actually monitor our labor, right?
How much are we pushing through?
Is this project harder than the last one?
What’s our pace?
In order to do that manually,
it would require us to hire five more people just to do data entry.
And now, just through the magic of AppConnect,
we’re able to automatically pull some of those utilization
specs from an on prem system that no one’s ever heard of.
Unless you’ve worked in the legal space.. Right?
Then sky’s the limit, right?
Like anything I can, so PandaDocs is huge for us.
That’s all of our service contracts.
We’re doing a lot right now in terms of building
a, so we have a couple of different types of clients.
We have clients that are managed sort of services that serve them,
service themselves, right, where they just
utilize our technology and our tools and our workflow.
But we don’t actually do the work for them, we just give them the tools
so that they can do it themselves, but they need access to certain things.
So we’ve we’re building essentially a portal
which is a separate layer outside of Insightly
that allows us to push information out and bring information in.
But still having that sort of separation between our users and our
internal systems, which are the CRM, because our CRM is plugged into so much,
we can’t give our external users direct access to the CRM.
We need to create this
sort of demilitarized zone where we can push information out and pull it in.
And so this is allowing us to effectively create an app
for lack of a better term, that’s unique to our business
so that our suppliers have a place to go, our customers have a place to go.
And all of this is again, trying to funnel as much as possible through,
our existing repeat customers, they know our workflow,
they don’t need a phone call, they don’t need an email,
they just need to hit go and approve things at various stages.
And now we’re giving them a fast lane.
So without Insightly and AppConnect, being able to do all of this
carrying of buckets of water, if you will, which is I mean, half
my career has been carrying this information over here,
updating this person with what just happened or playing telephone.
There’s so much inefficiency that gets built into an organization
as it scales with just trying to funnel the right information to the right people
at the right time.
A big part of our future development cycle is largely based on
what can we do in Insightly, right?
And if the limitations of Insightly don’t allow
for us to move quickly with a certain initiative, we’re like,
Let’s put that one on the shelf and let’s focus on this one.
Because it’s low hanging fruit.
The return to value is that much quicker.. That’s great.
Okay, Kris, that’s all the time we have for this episode.
Thanks so much for these insights and for joining the show.
Thanks for having me, Melinda.. This is great.
Looking forward to what you guys come up with next over there at Insightly.
Always fun. Thanks.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
Remember to like this video.
Subscribe to the channel
and ring the bell for notifications so you don’t miss a single episode.
We’ll see you next time on Closing Time. She