Insightly’s CRM solution gives you a way to see all of your customers and prospects in a centralized location. You can also use the flexible calendaring, notes, comments, and tagging features to keep track of important thoughts after getting off the phone with a client.
Before you can start managing contacts from within Insightly, you’ll need to add a few of your clients or prospects to the system. Import contacts and notes, or manually add the information for each new client and prospect you come across. In addition to including basic details like name and email address, Insightly provides you with space for including personal details and linking to the contact’s social media accounts.
Organizing contact information.
Lead management is an integral component within Insightly. By setting up leads, sales teams can keep track of anyone who appears interested in their products or services, but hasn’t actually verified his or her interest in the business. These individuals can be added to a company’s Insightly account through the Leads tab.
Regardless of how your leads are obtained (purchased contact lists, website forms, trade shows, or other marketing efforts), you’ll want to turn on the Leads functionality to enter those leads into your Insightly account. When you determine that a certain lead is qualified, you can convert the lead by linking the contact and organization. (Insightly doesn’t convert related contacts and organizations until leads are converted into opportunities.) You can manage the status of each lead, along with the source of your lead’s information.
Capturing information with Leads
Insightly’s Tasks feature can be used in a number of different ways, including making to-do lists, logging meetings and phone calls, and creating email reminders. The most common way to use this feature is by creating a list of all the tasks that need to be done before a certain project will be complete. You also have the option to set reminders on tasks, which means you’ll receive an email notification before the task is due. Tasks can be linked to contacts, opportunities, projects, organizations, and emails.
Click on the “Task” tab from the dashboard page to begin the process of adding a new task to you list. Insightly gives you the option to assign the task to a particular colleague and set a due date. You can also set the priority level and status, and update the progress-percentage as the task gets closer to completion.
Insightly now offers a way for business users to compose and send email from their Insightly accounts. Just select the lead or contact to communicate with and get started writing the message. Setting up email templates is one way that many Insightly users have found to make writing email messages even easier.
Send a new email message to a single lead or contact by clicking on the Actions menu when viewing that lead or contact, and then selecting Email This Lead or Email This Contact. You can send a new email from a template or compose your own from scratch. Although Insightly offers you the ability to send emails directly through its web-based platform, you also have the option to compose and send emails from your default program by clicking on an email address link in Insightly.
Composing email within Insightly
Insightly is one of the only CRM solutions that provides its users with a way to create a true 360-degree view of their networks. By linking together objects—including contacts, organizations and opportunities—with other objects, users are able to clearly see how relationships are impacted by certain actions.
Click on a contact and scroll down to the “links” section. To add a new link, type in the name of the contact, organization, or opportunity that the contact is associated with. For example, in addition to noting that Contact A is associated with Contact B, you can also include information about how those two prospects are related.
A pipeline is a linear series of steps, which Insightly lets you define for projects and opportunities. Users can view pipelines to see their progress along a path. A pipeline should include all the anticipated stages in a workflow, up through the completion of the project.
To create a pipeline, visit the System Settings, choose a pipeline name, and click the “Edit Stages” link next to the new pipeline. Insightly will draw the pipeline stages for you above your stage list. The next time you create a new project, that pipeline will show up in a populated list for you to choose from, and you can select which stage the project is currently at.
Creating pipelines in Insightly.
Insightly’s reports are based on opportunities and completed activities. Reports can be filtered by date ranges, and quickly reformatted for printing. A few of the Opportunity Reports that users can choose from include: Opportunity Category Breakdown, Reasons For Losing Opportunities, Opportunity Pipeline Stage Report, Total Incoming Opportunities, and Value Of Opportunities.
To generate a report, click on the type of report you want to create and customize the settings based on the dates, pipelines, tags, and responsibilities you’d like to use. When those selections have been made, you can generate a custom report. If Insightly’s reports don’t meet a particular need that your organization is facing, you also have the option to export your records. This enables you to create reports using whichever outside tool you prefer.
Generating detailed opportunity reports.
Using Insightly’s mobile apps, professionals have the ability to take photos of business cards and automatically create contacts or lead records in their CRM. This action takes place automatically, and it is available to all paid Insightly accounts.
To start scanning business cards with your smartphone’s rear camera, the the + icon within the mobile app and choose the “scan” option. Insightly allows you to scan a certain number of cards each month. Once you’ve snapped the photo, you can add tags, background information, and select visibility permissions for each new contact or lead. Insightly will follow up with an email update on each card you scan.
Most popular features of all Customer Management apps
Requires iOS 13.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
25 reviewers had the following to say about Insightly's features:
Insightly is perfect for well established companies who can spend on a CRM. The pricing is quite high as compared to new entrants in the market and support is very basic (only email).
Insightly is awesome for it's ease of use, deep Google integration and their mobile app. I primarily use Insightly for clients that are field sales reps and need to update contacts from their mobile phone.
Great for client management and task management.
Pros
I like the ability to customize the text fields to my needs and the task management function is hard to beat.
Cons
Could have better social media integration as well as better automated marketing to prospects and clients.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Having the CRM & Transaction management together is wonderful!
Pros
CRM & transaction management in one program, integrates well with gmail, ability to customize, email task reminders, mobile app
Cons
Tasks are jumbles in with emails instead of having each separate.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
The ability to have one place to track project progress and CRM was enough to get my team to plug our entire launch strategy into Insightly.
Pros
+ One interface for project management and CRM +Integrates with Google Apps, docs, email and even Evernote
Cons
+ Can't link files to tasks
You can link tasks to contacts, opportunities, projects, organizations, and emails. You can find out more here: http://help.insightly.com/how-do-i-use-tasks-in-insightly/
Overall, the system is good for a smaller organization that is not putting large stresses on their CRM. We ultimately outgrew Insightly in many ways, and often overwhelmed the system with our integrations.
Pros
Very easy to connect to third party or self-developed integrations via API.
Cons
API changes caused fatal errors in several of our integrations over the course of our time with Insightly.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
Insightly has an easy to use interface and is very customizable. Also, it allows for a lot of integration.
Cons
I would like to be able to see custom reports and dashboards like other CRMs. It is also a little more pricey than Apptivo and others.
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
Email transparency, Google Mail/Apps integration, easy project management, great data structure (people, accounts, opportunities, etc), and a very non-invasive interface have had an incredible impact on our business.
Cons
Reporting is currently focused primarily on the sales/opportunity side of the product, with the project management functionality having minimal reporting capabilities (for now).
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Insightly
Don't undervalue how impactful having complete transparent access to sales email is. Beyond quality control, it allows everyone to stay in sync and ensure that what you sell is exactly what you deliver. I can't overstate how important this has been.
It's a specialized tool, so I wouldn't recommend it unless I have the time to sit down and show someone how to set it up. But overall, the platform is robust and scales well as your needs evolve.
Pros
Setting up the product is straightforward Logging sales activities, leads, etc. is easy Collaborating with a team is easy, and the internal task management flow is solid Email logging is very nice and effective
Cons
The UI is very dated, and feels like a step up from Microsoft Access The visuals in general are lacking -- I'd like to see better reporting No email tracking (i.e. tracking opens), so we have to use hubspot sales for that
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
We were attracted to it because it combined CRM and Project Management.
Pros
Great CRM and Pipeline Management out the box!
Cons
Very very poor project management. You will need to use other packages for almost anything.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Insightly
If you want a good cheap CRM, look no further. If you want an integrated CRM/PM, it doesn't really deliver.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll pass this on to our product team because all feedback helps us improve. With regards to exposing our product road map -- it's common that privately held companies do not make their product road map public. If you have specific questions on features please send an email to laura@insightly.com and we can let you know if they are on the roadmap. Thanks.
After using many CRM systems from Salesforce, Zoho, Apptivo, Pipeline Deals, Pipedrive, Base CRM and more, Insightly is a 'breath of fresh air' (even though that is getting a bit stale lately - more on that shorty).
Pros
Here are just a few pros: * Easy to use and learn * Integrated Light Weight Project Management * Fast Response * Great note taking * Easy task tracking * Great for sales cycles and customer service alike * Useful Integrations * Better User Interface than most (every tried Salesforce and couldn't find anything?)
Cons
A couple of Cons: * Service - The guys and gals at Insightly need to learn to listen and pass information 'up the management chain' * Task and Event Handling need improvement as reported by many clients * Need fully functional 2-way sync with Google Calendar * Need real workflow functionality instead of clunky Project Management (to their defense, lots of systems 'miss this one')
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Insightly
Though there are some negative, I would say this is the best of the pack and relatively in-expensive for all you get. I would make looking at Insightly seriously a must for anybody wanting a flexible and easy to use CRM - that is from small to medium size businesses.
Easy yet powerful CRM software for everyday use.
Customer management, a place to keep staff on task and abreast of new projects or to-do items
Pros
Clean design Relatively easy to use and manage clients, spaces to add notes, contact info etc Ease of working together with our team to keep on top of projects and clients
Cons
Intermittent bugs or failures to save or filter a search Limited filtering of tasks and lacking organizational tasks Email functionality is somewhat frustrating to use/implement when forwarding.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Insightly might offer the best bang for your buck when it comes to CRMs. The ease of use is great and the layout/design is very clean.
Pros
Easy to use, intuitive design, and the certain functions like the task list, calendar, and project management tools were top notch.
Cons
If you plan to do a lot of email marketing, this may not be the CRM for you.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
I came across Insightly looking for a Project Tracking Tool that integrates well with Quickbooks.
Pros
The ease of use and integration with Google and Quickbooks.
Cons
Nothing so far!
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering Insightly
Use the free trial first for a while before you decide.
Decent low cost CRM software compared to the pricier software that set the industry standard.
Pros
There are lots of integration options with third party tools.
Cons
I think tasks management has to be improved so that it's easy to enter a task.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Also, check out their own forums of customer support, and social media sites to see what other customers have had to say about the software.
Pros
It takes the CRM and the Project management aspects of running a business into the cloud along with scheduling and solves a lot of problems for the business I set up who are still using it today.
Cons
Looking forward to better social media integration - this is currently not a real feature and something that our heavily social dependent business would really benefit from
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
It meets most of my needs for that company, especially around understanding people's relationships to one another and in social media. I've also used the project management feature when managing group activities.
Pros
And it is very awesome the way it manages social media account information.
Cons
I get frustrated with the poor report features and when I want to download and manipulate in Excel, I get all the tags in one field, so essentially I can view the tag list nicely online but I can't export that (for example to send an email to the group).
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
I like the free version.
Pros
Email tracking and templates. Great reporting capabilities.
Cons
Lead and contact information split into separate tabs.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Occasionally
Likelihood to recommend
Some more sophistication to go on their pandadoc integration but overall pretty happy with Insightly.
Pros
Easy, mobile, integrations, email integration.
Cons
Would like to support custom fields from all types of elements, opportunities, contacts, orgs in their pandadoc integration.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
I love it for lead management, easy to send and track emails, but only if you agree to thier branding on all of your communications
Cons
There wasn’t much difference between this and social hub and the free crms.
Rating breakdown
Time used: Free Trial
Frequency of use: Occasionally
Likelihood to recommend
This is a very good Sales executive/Customers management software application that simplifies and integrates daily workflow.
Pros
Also, the task dashboard report that keeps you up to date on what you need to do.Comes in handy when you have a busy schedule.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
