Insightly has done a great job of focusing on a few key areas of CRM best practice, and doing those things really well. It’s a great candidate for the company making its first leap into a CRM, or the company looking to upgrade from their first set of CRM tools.

Customer Relationship Management is about more than simply tabulating a list of customers and contacts. At its heart, CRM is about understanding the relationship of the people you interact with to the companies they work for and the activities they're engaged in. Our customers no longer engage in a linear way, and then gaining insight to the complex web of interactions can provide a competitive advantage for a company by allowing them to engage with their customers when and where it will be most meaningful. The core principle of Insightly is to build and understand these relationships so you can effectively increase your sales, delight your customers, and deliver on project initiatives effectively.

Insightly is predominantly a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool at its core, though they have effectively layered in project delivery as well. The core of Insightly is focused on the notion of contacts -- the people -- with whom you interact. Over time, those interactions provide increasingly rich data, and Insightly helps you identify how various contacts are connected, related, or share attributes. As a primary activity, the intent is that this information helps you better sell to your prospects and customers, and "accelerating sales" is a big part of the Insightly pitch. But more broadly, those sales are coming as a result of happier customers, and more personalized messaging to prospects, courtesy of the ways in which Insightly links all these activities together. As a bonus, the lightweight project delivery tools of insightly offer an easy way for organizations to automate processes and keep track of initiatives in a single tool.

Our consultants at GRAYBOX recommend and implement tools that are effective, and Insightly can be a great option to meet that objective. Insightly isn't the most sophisticated CRM tool we work with, but where sophistication is missing, ease of use has filled the gap. Insightly is intuitive to use, and cuts right to several key areas of focus for its users, meaning there's not a lot of noise to get in the way of effectively servicing your customers or managing your pipeline. The contacts you engage with aren't engaged in a vacuum. You send them emails, track opportunities, and have action items to execute. Insightly offers tools to automate and track this process, send and track the effectiveness of emails, and relate all this data together to ensure you have full visibility into what's happening with your prospects and customers.

Insightly is a great tool for the business making its first foray into an official CRM. Best practices are present throughout, and there is an effective mix of easy-to-use features, and automation capabilities, to allow room to grow. Insightly has a really rich set of permissions and data management as well, making it well suited for some larger corporate environments, especially for the more nimble department looking for a fast way to cut through corporate red tape and quickly scale up an effective sales team. Insightly has done a great job of integrating with a number of best of breed third party tools, including Gmail and Outlook, meaning it's easy to incorporate Insightly into your existing tool sets without a lot of heartache.

CRM systems occupy an interesting niche in a business, often given less importance than accounting or project tracking, while simultaneously being asked to provide critical answers to customer behavior and sentiment, as well as forecasting future revenues based on sales pipelines. This tension can be challenging for a company to navigate, and the team of experienced GRAYBOX consultants can be an incredibly helpful asset to engage for the process. Understanding that a CRM is an answer to those questions being asked, identifying the right set of options to evaluate, and eventually choosing and executing on the right toolset for your business, requires a thorough approach, and the team at GRAYBOX is perfectly suited to partner with you in this endeavor.