Empower your Life Sciences Business with Automated Crm Software for Life Sciences

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thank you for joining us today we're kicking off the second in a series of insightly product webinars with a focus today on workflow automation we're going to show you the advantages of using insightly's automation tools to streamline your business processes execute routine tasks at scale and boost productivity we'll also showcase examples of real-world automations that have helped customers and helped insightly i'm melinda pressure insightly's senior product marketing manager i've got jennifer neetz with us today to tell us more about how her company coex associates is using workflow automation to streamline their business process i've also got andrea ludigiani with me she's a senior manager of customer engagement at insightly and she's going to share a few of the ways that insightly uses workflow automation to streamline and simplify the way we work at insightly so jennifer i'd like to start out by inviting you to introduce yourself to the audience hi guys thanks for having me my name is jennifer neats and i'm the vice president here at coach associates i've been in the role of vice president for three years now however i'm in my 12th year as an associate here i actually started on the inside sales floor and have worked my way up through roles in process and performance and currently doing a lot of work in insightly so i'm happy to be here today great to have you andrea why don't you go ahead and also introduce yourself to the audience sure so hi everybody um i've been in an insightly for a little bit over three years and a huge focus of my job is enabling customers um on the insightly crm and marketing apps so that they can hit full adoption and get the most out of our unified platform so a little bit later i'll be showing you a few ways that you can use workflow automation to streamline processes communicate across teams and empower your users to focus on what matters excellent so let's dive into the agenda we're going to start with the business challenges that we hear most from customers as they work to solve their business process goals then i'll spend some time talking about how insightly solves those challenges and walk you through a few tips for building great workflows and then i'll interview jennifer so you can see how coach leverages automation and finally andrea will walk you through a hands-on demo we have um an insightly team member courtney online answering questions through through the q a if anything comes in um i expect us to take it the full 30 minutes for this presentation so if your question doesn't get answered um during the time we will definitely get back to you after this session and we'll get back to you just as soon as possible let's start drilling down into the challenges um that people see with uh that bring up a need for automation the first is the problem of human error even in small teams balls can be dropped simply when colleagues need to share information across teams quickly or nudge the next person in a process without workflow automation it's entirely probable that at least at some point in a complex environment a message will be late or be forgotten or not delivered at the right time in marketing we talk a lot about the need for timely relevant communication and workflows are at the heart of why automation is so powerful because this helps your team execute while reducing the risk of errors the next is inability to scale workflow automation can make it easy to send out hundreds if not thousands of notifications at any time of day or night this is the type of communication that you want to set and forget and let the power of the insightly app handle for you and finally automation solves the perennial challenge that most teams are faced with in this new world of multiple apps and matrix teams how do we reduce time spent on high effort low value tasks workflow automation can help you streamline and actually elevate your efforts as a team so what exactly is it it's a process that allows you to send notifications create tasks and triggers update fields and objects and fire web hooks and lambdas using the data that you already have in insightly and do it quickly and easily at scale this takes the manual work out of a process to avoid mistakes it can provide updates almost instantly and prevents important steps in a workflow from being bypassed or missed by someone who has a really important role to play it delivers scale flexibility and the ability to customize messages based on your data and ultimately workflow automation can drive improved adoption of insightly because your team doesn't have to wade through repetitive manual processes think about workflows as if then statements that you build right into insightly you set up workflows which are the process using three specific elements criteria triggers and actions let's look at a specific example on this slide and then andrei is also going to be doing a demo for you later in the presentation like we mentioned so you can kind of see how this works in action in this example what you want to do here is you want to notify the appropriate account team members both inside and outside your company about successful deals that you've won that have hit a 50 000 threshold you decide that you want to send a glowing success email to your sales leadership as soon as deals at this threshold are won you also want to formally kick off the relationship with the primary customer contact and in this case you want to do it a week after close so that you can give your internal teams time to group share information and create a plan so you set this strategy that's the process and then you name the process in this case you're going to call it opportunity closed one fifty thousand plus your next step is to identify the criteria in insightly that will be the inputs to defining this process in this example your criteria are record type which is opportunity and the evaluation criteria are current state is closed one and the bid amount is greater than or equal to fifty thousand dollars the final steps in the process are setting up actions and a trigger or a time trigger you can set up an immediate trigger or like i said wait a week or so whatever you determine to send a notification the action in each of these cases is an email notification but obviously the content of the two emails is going to be different since one email is to sales leadership and the other email is going to your new customer the email in the first case that will be sent to the sales vp is going to be an immediate trigger the email is going to go out as soon as the opportunity is closed one in this all the actions triggered by workflows will be added to a queue creating a log showing that your workflows are firing or going to fire so you can ensure that the processes are handled successfully by insightly as long as you're capturing data in insightly there really is almost no limit to the use cases that this can apply to the main things for you to consider are where can i achieve scale what's going to take the pressure off time constrained teams and what's going to help us reduce errors and improve our velocity we've included categories of notifications on this slide but i wanted to get a little bit more granular and spark some ideas for you about the types of of things that you can do with workflow automation so some of those examples might be when a lead is created you can let a sales rep know with an email that they should do a first follow-up you can send a thank you email to someone who fills out a form on your website and then let them know that someone will get back to them or send them a notification that they've registered for an event if a lead is stuck in a stage for a time period that you think is too long an email notification will fire to alert the team to take action you can apply the appropriate pipeline to a new opportunity you can email a manager for an approval you can email accounting to process a new invoice you can email account management to assign an account manager you can add a task for follow-up to a google or outlook calendar you can create a management alert for any opportunity over a dollar threshold and send another alert when it closes you can let a sales person know when to schedule a demo you can create an onboarding process with multiple steps of meetings tasks departments and reports and you can fire lambdas to send product samples out via a third-party application like shopify again the possibilities are almost endless and the point is really that if you have the data in insightly you can create a workflow to support it we also wanted to share some tips for creating really solid workflows so again it's just so important to plan before you build map out your full processes before you start entering anything into uh into the workflow plan and then build you want to also test your methodology cross-functionally with input from sales csm support get insights from other teams interacting with your customers to see how they might benefit from the process make sure your data is clean and up-to-date jennifer will have some additional commentary to share about this later in the interview but just clean data is is absolutely crucial to this process choose logical strong naming conventions once you have a long list of workflows it can really quickly become confusing or difficult to find a workflow and update it figure out a consistent naming convention methodology and stick to it and set a specific date to kick off a workflow so that records that aren't relevant aren't affected by that workflow for example you don't want to accidentally send an email to a customer about an opportunity that closed last quarter you only want the workflow to fire on future opportunities that close so i'm going to transition now to our conversation with jennifer so jennifer i'd like to invite you to tell us a little bit more about you and coach absolutely um coach is a full-service business growth agency we work with clients across the country to help them strategically grow their business and really to help them improve both sales and marketing operations and processes we implement what i would consider the best-in-class tools and resources really to help our clients think differently about business growth for instance we meet with our clients understand their growth challenges we put together a campaign that it features research targeted list and then our team implements that list into the insightly crm we strategically work that list as well as pair that with a full service marketing team in-house and so our teams are really responsible for prospecting pre-qualifying and positioning new business opportunities so we find the crm is kind of our go-to resource it's what our teams are in every day um we are using the crm as a way to communicate with our clients show them reporting and that's why it's so important that we had a um found a partner like insightly so we can communicate the data fantastic and that kind of leads into my next question how did you hear about insightly yes we found insightly online actually after several searches on crms i use a third-party resource g2 crowd and insightly was very highly rated we implemented actually this time last year so january 2020 we were a 15 year salesforce client even back before i joined coact and got to the point where um quite frankly we were just really unhappy with the level of customer service while we work globally we are a relatively small business and we were really looking for a partner not just a tool and we found that with insightly as soon as we met we worked with ben in the sales process we felt that he was truly understanding the uniqueness of our business and the fact that we work on multiple campaigns and really was able to communicate that insightly would be a great resource and tool to work with and so just the the next level customer service and attention we get um really drove us to engaging with insightly fantastic so let's dive in right now i'd love to have you share with the audience examples of the ways that your team is using workflow automation yeah absolutely um so only being a year end we are just scratching the surface of this i actually wrote down some tips that you gave on another idea i had but right now we are using workflow automation mostly in the area of opportunities and opportunity pipeline because we work on a variety of client campaigns and really our differentiator here at coact is quality opportunities not just leads it was very necessary for our opportunities to go through an approval process by the manager i actually approve all opportunities my reps have for our clients so we have set up a workflow that allows our reps to simply click a check box on the opportunity page when they're filling out the opportunity and that will trigger a notification and email to myself it also logs a task for me and insightly and all i have to do is go in i can do it online or even on my phone on the insightly app i'm able to check through all the fields to make sure that they meet quality standards and that that it is a true qualified opportunity and i simply from there have to click a check box that notifies the rep that the opportunity is approved they do get credit on that for their bonus and metrics and that actually then triggers a notification to my entire team telling everybody that an opportunity was created we like to celebrate as melinda said celebrate the winds and so we have a couple selected fields we pull out off the opportunity and notify the team that an opportunity has been created furthermore every step of an opportunity we have created a set of tasks that trigger the reps to follow up depending on the stage of the opportunity so sometimes it might be follow up in one week with a phone call making sure that they send a handwritten thank you card and making sure that they appropriately communicate with our client and confirm any type of meeting so we use tasks that get triggered based on different actions great how would you say workflow automation is really helping you drive business impact and business benefit um yeah a couple different ways one um hands down better quality and we um you know with that approval process it was just necessary to ensure a quality data system quality opportunities and the fields that are filled out to the best of their ability which also helps with the cleanliness of the data and the crm also ensuring that the reps don't skip a step it really makes them think about the process of getting an opportunity through the pipeline especially those organizations that are working with outside sales reps it's very easy to get that meeting have the meeting and then move on to the next we found that making sure we have those steps ensures that all opportunities are moving through the funnel at an appropriate pace so nothing slips through the cracks finally the third way um saving time in the approval process um this one i i kind of have to laugh about it takes me three clicks now to approve an opportunity so just this time savings alone um in the quick notification and are reps not having to sit and wait for that information or hunt me down um so significant time savings great you mentioned that you feel like to some degree your team is just starting to scratch the surface of how you can use workflow automation to benefit your business have you thought at all about future plans for um leveraging workflow automation yeah absolutely the um one area consider us in phase 2.0 for our insightly implementation and just before the end of the year we started to work on what we consider are quality fields and we were having our reps manually check their quality every day and we had a set of quality measures you know addresses making sure that the account had a website phone number making sure that they were advancing their contacts in the sales funnel if they had completed conversations we actually took a look at all those manual processes and made them automatic now so i kind of call it our quality validation so we have it set so reps can't save their accounts if certain fields aren't filled in so that's one area the second area we're going to start to look at is queuing the sales process on the front end so we're already there with the opportunities but now taking a look at different fields and making sure that the reps are cued at the right time in a systematic way so they can come in get to work and know that they're calling the best contacts first that's just going to save a little bit more time when they come in and get to work in the day so we're really looking forward to using those activity sets and triggering actions based on fields great any last words of support or guidance or any other recommendations for the audience yeah you know we have worked with several clients that really struggle we hear reps adopting the crm and a lot of times i hear that they assume that there is a problem with the crm they don't like their crm it's not efficient and i often instruct them or tell them that really with the right type of support your the crm can do what you want it is possible um there is an element of having to change the whole behavior of the organization um i recommend and and we did this um when we went through the um finding of insightly is get a small team together i like to include my star reps as well as maybe some of my more challenging reps that are um maybe hard to adopt new technology put them together have them form a little crm team and process improvement committee really take a look at mapping out melinda said map it out on the whiteboard first run that by a group of people and um furthermore you got to really align what you expect we always say here that if it's not in the crm it didn't happen um and we have to stick by that and so sometimes you have to make a mind shift from the top and kind of say hey it's it's not a meeting and it's not going to qualify if these these items are in the crm so plan it out also take a look at what you expect and it is possible sometimes you may need to execute support with insightly or maybe a software engineer internally but it is possible got it i love it if it if it's not in the crm it didn't happen that is awesome thank you so much for that jennifer no problem thank you really is great to have you here with us and explaining how things work for you and your team so right now we'll move on to andrea's demo i am going to stop sharing right now and hand it over to andrea to walk us through the demo um all right so i'm gonna walk you guys through a few examples of some impactful workflows that you can create today that will save your team some time and energy ensure no opportunities fall through the cracks and reduce any potential bottlenecks created by crosstalk operations so the first one that we're going to do is kind of a simple place to start but it's an automated workflow that people really love because it saves their team a few steps when entering new opportunities into the crm so um because insightly allows you to have multiple pipelines for opportunities and projects we don't actually automatically apply apply a pipeline to a new record when it's created but you can use workflow automation to actually apply that pipeline so it's one less thing that your team really has to do so when you come into workflow automation it's in your system settings here we're going to create a new workflow we're going to give this workflow a name again kind of speaking to what melinda was saying you really do want a naming convention because at insightly we have like 150 and it gets really hard to find them if you don't have a naming convention for team as well as perhaps what the workflow is obviously going to be doing i always like to give a description as well and you choose the record type so in this case i'm going to do an opportunity when an opportunity is created i want to have a pipeline assigned to it so in that case i'm going to choose this evaluation criteria number one again when a workflow is created i have a workflow fire excuse me when an opportunity is created have the workflow fire go ahead and press save so now that we've created sort of the package for it we're going to start adding our criteria which is our trigger and the actions so add criteria here i'm just going to go ahead and apply my pipeline so when you start adding your filter rows in this case we're going to do pipeline equals the opportunity pipeline again you might have different types of pipelines so um oh you know what i'm actually going to show you a little trick so apply pipeline if i want it to be on every opportunity that's created i'm just going to leave this blank so i have my criteria name i'm going to leave my filter row blank and i'm going to go ahead and press save so you'll see here always when an opportunity is created now my action we're going to click action here and we're going to update this record so again we're applying our pipeline i'm just going to go ahead and do apply pipeline again the workflow action names all of these things are just really back and system information it's not anything that shows to your users or anything like that so it's really just meant to keep you organized as you're using and managing your different workflows so this is when i'm going to update my record to apply my pipeline which is my opportunity pipeline and to make it work you actually also have to apply the correct stage so we have different stages of our pipeline this is the default one that comes out of the box i wanted to start at stage one so i'm gonna go and press save so if i read this back our workflow is to apply a new pipeline to any new opportunity always and it's applying the pipeline at stage one so super simple now anytime somebody creates it the pipeline will be there in our second example we're going to build a workflow that actually sends a notification to a member of your team when an opportunity or project has sat in a pipeline stage for too long so this will benefit sales teams that struggle with final visibility accurate sales targets things like that so i'm gonna go back to the beginning you could also just click up there it's a new workflow process this one we're going to call sales time and stage notification my description is going to be to send an email alert to the user responsible when an opportunity sits for too long again this is based on opportunity records i'm going to click opportunity and i'm going to leave it on this third option which is the most common so this is just saying that insightly is constantly going to be checking your records um to see if it matches the criteria as soon as it matches the criteria it's going to fire the action and it's going to stop checking in the future which means it's only going to fire once save all right so now we add our criteria so in this case we're gonna do stage equals proposal [Music] i'm going to do pipeline equals opportunity pipeline and the stage equals proposal all right so to make this work we want this to fire seven days after an opportunity has entered the proposal stage that gives your team seven days to let somebody think it over but we don't want them to forget to follow up obviously seven days might be too many you could always do a few less so we're not going to do an immediate action because that would actually send the email immediately when something enters that stage we're going to instead do a new time trigger so when you do a new time trigger you can go ahead and put in whatever time you want you can see you have days and hours before and after and then you have your workflow criteria trigger date which is when this workflow goes into action or you do have your date fields available um so if you do have date fields on your ops you can also trigger things off of those fields being updated so now you'll see we've created a new container down here and so now we're going to go ahead and add our action here so we're going to send an email alert name so we're gonna do um what is that time in stage you have to choose who the email is gonna be sent from so you do have sort of these dynamic people fields up here or it's always good to have maybe like a generic account id so i'm going to use that one and then you select the two so i want to have it sent to my user responsible that's the person who's responsible for closing out this opportunity getting them to the win and i actually already built my email template so i can just plug my email template in here makes life a little bit easier you can do that in the email section of insightly and you'll see it uh populates the subject and it also populates the email body and these are dynamic s here so you can see hello first name or responsible user in this case let's pretend it's me hello andrea ludigiani opportunity name has been in the proposal stage for seven days follow up provide update and then another good practice is include the url so this is a record url it's available here in the dropdown so if you include the record url it's going to make it really easy for your team to simply click on that url from the email it'll take them to insightly directly to the record that they have to update so if i go ahead and press save we've created our workflow and if we read it back it's just saying anytime an opportunity has entered the proposal stage wait seven days and if no change has been made to that go ahead and send an email to the sales rep so something to keep in mind is if for whatever reason the stage were to change they move out of proposal this would no longer fire this would no longer be relevant or um the criteria no longer apply and it would void out this action from taking place so a very similar variation of this particular workflow could also be to automate sort of the review approval or handoff process that can be used with our quotes feature as well as opportunities or projects so let's say for example a quote reaches the review status stage or an opportunity or pipeline or project pipeline has reached the review stage if you had something like that you can automate the handoff by having an email sent to the appropriate parties to review the record at hand so the only difference for that example and the one i just showed you is you would in that case use this immediate action and not the time triggered action so the next one we're going to look at is a little bit more sophisticated only because it is in working in conjunction with another sort of key feature that we offer which is this web to lead form builder for those of you who are not familiar with web to lead form builder it's a way of connecting forms that you have on your website to insightly crm so if somebody completes the form they'll automatically be created as a lead in your system and your team can take over from there so assuming that we've already built this that's a webinar for another day but um and you start having leads being generated in your crm we're going to create sort of a confirmation or thank you email that would automatically be sent to any new lead that's in your system so i'm going to go ahead and new workflow process so in this example i have a contact us form on my website it includes a few custom fields to find out what they're interested in as well as finding out how many uh let's say employees or users they have at their company so if it were on insightly's website it might say what are you interested in um insightly marketing insightly crm or both and then how many users are you are you interested in bringing onto our platform so record type in this case is a lead because again we're milding this off of our leads and we could again do this once when the record is created option because as soon as the lead is created we want to have an email go back to them saying we've received your information someone will be in contact shortly so we've created our container now i can add my criteria so this is lead source equals contact us form again that's something that i've customized in my system lead sources are really important for keeping obviously your leads organized finding out which channels are bringing in the most business so they come in here and find source i have my web contact us page something i've customized and also incorporated into my web to lead form so it's automatically applied to any lead created from that form and now my immediate action is going to be to send an email again in this case we're not sending an internal email we're sending an external email so let's see uh lead thank you slash confirmation let's say uh again you can have this sent from various people you can have it sent from the person who's responsible for uh managing that lead it could be a personalized email in this case i want to do just kind of a generic someone will be in contact with you shortly email with uh you know the confirmation of the field values that they provided so i'm going to do my generic and then under 2 we'll see that lead email address has become available and again i have an email template here so web to lead thank you in my web to lead thank you i've been able to incorporate in the lead first name someone will be in contact shortly and then confirming the information they provided on that form including they're interested in value so maybe they're interested in crm a number of employees would populate here as well if they provided that on the form thank you insightly team save so reading it back when a lead is created with the lead source from our contact us page an immediate email will be sent to them thanking them and sharing the confirmation of the information they provided you could also add to this workflow by also creating a task for your team to reach out or maybe a task to assign this lead if you're not using lead assignment rules you could also send an email internally all sorts of stuff so that's all for sort of the hands-on examples that i wanted to show today i did want to speak a little bit to a little bit more complex way that you can use insightly or workflow automation more specifically so we do also offer the ability to easily connect insightly to other platforms using the web hook and lambda functions that are available under actions so webhooks export data from the crm to other platforms this could be used to sync customer data into systems like your billing or accounting systems or if you're not using insightly marketing perhaps another marketing or emailing platform the lambda function on the other hand is actually code written by a developer and uploaded into insightly and this code can be triggered via workflow automation and do things like cross object updating so if you have opportunity information that you want to have show up on the organization that's linked to it that would be a lambda it can also create custom integrations with other platforms or before more complex calculations so both of these do require some coding knowledge so if you don't have anybody in-house who can do that for you you can always contact our professional services team and they're available to build custom solutions for your business so that's all for me melinda back to you okay sounds great thank you so much for that opening it back up and want to give people um just a way to contact us our team would love to learn more about how we can help you reach more of your objectives through workflow automation so absolutely don't hesitate to reach out and get in touch with us to kick off the conversation thank you so much for joining us today