Getting your product or service off the ground isn’t easy. Before launching, go-to-market teams need to drum up interest and acquire leads. On top of that, they need a way to gather intel about their prospects and segment leads based on many criteria.
Insightly is a modern customer relationship management (CRM) software designed for go-to-market teams and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Unlike legacy CRMs, the platform is easy to set up and highly customizable. With a full suite of top-notch features, Insightly gives you everything you need to manage leads and grow your business fast.
Insightly Review: The Good and the Bad
Your business may have specific needs that aren’t addressed by a cookie-cutter CRM platform. With Insightly, you can build custom fields, workflows, page layouts, processes, and more. The high level of customization means you can make the platform your own, helping your team get the most out of the CRM.
What Insightly Is Good At
Sales pipeline and lead management: At the core, Insightly helps you better manage leads so that no potential sale slips through the cracks.
You can upload leads any way you prefer, from lead forms that sync with your marketing automation tool, a CSV file, or even good old-fashioned business cards.
From there, Insightly offers a lead routing feature so you can assign prospects to the right sales rep during each stage of the pipeline. Leads can be assigned based on round-robin, territorial, or specific company details like industry or company size.
But it’s not enough to simply contact leads once—you need sales pipeline management since, often, deals can take months or even years to close.
The Opportunities tab in Insightly gives you visual insight into what stages each prospect is in. This lets your reps know which leads to prioritize so they can close red-hot prospects first.
All opportunities are shown in a Kanban view, which is helpful for managers who want to keep a pulse of their team and maintain a birds-eye view of the pipeline.
In addition, you can configure the pipeline stages to fit your business’s unique sales cycle. The pipeline stages can also be customized to track post-sale purchases to help you stay on top of customer activity and promote repeat purchases or upsells.
Insighly even employs automation features, where you can trigger events to occur when a stage is met.
For example, you can send a reminder to reps to follow up with leads once they’ve successfully completed a product demo.
Customizable reporting: For many businesses, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day sales activities and lose sight of the bigger picture. The good news is that Insightly holds a wealth of information about your business for you.
With Insightly’s advanced reporting features, you can gain a comprehensive view of your business whenever you need it.
Reporting works in a three-step process:
- First, you’ll select specific fields you want to filter your data by. You can even create custom fields to track unique data that matters in your business. For instance, you can add a certain field like “deal value” to capture the monetary value associated with an opportunity.
- After that, you can filter and summarize the data based on specific values.
- Finally, you’ll save and share your reports with colleagues.
Every time you build a report, you’ll have the ability to create visual charts to better interpret your data.
Insightly gives you eight different charts to choose from, including a line chart, horizontal bar, pie chart, and funnel chart, just to name a few.
Below is a funnel chart created in Insightly to showcase how you can see the opportunity value in each stage of the sales pipeline.
Marketing automation and email marketing: Turning leads into paying customers is a complex process. 70% of buyers define their needs on their own (and often do their own research on your brand, too) before engaging with the sales team.
Traditionally, marketing and sales teams worked separately. But this disconnect made it hard for both teams to get the insights they needed.
Insightly Marketing offers a journey builder that visually maps out your campaigns for prospect outreach.
As a result, you can build trust by nurturing your leads along the way. With your email sequences in place, you’ll always stay top of mind for customers.
The tool also allows you to build landing pages and forms so you can collect more leads on your site.
Sales reps can use the bulk email feature to contact their prospect database. Insightly will track important metrics of all emails, including open and click-through rates. That way, you can tweak your email templates over time to optimize for higher conversions.
Insightly works synergically between the CRM and Marketing platforms. For example, you can segment leads based on engagement. From there, you’ll build out nurture sequences and score leads appropriately.
That way, you can send more tailored email campaigns based on their engagement and deal stage. For example, with cold leads, you can create win-back campaigns to allow them to re-engage with your brand, while with active customers, you’ll aim to drive upselling opportunities.
Project and task management: Managing tasks and projects can be difficult, especially if you’re using separate tools for project management, marketing automation, and CRM.
Insightly offers a built-in task and project manager all-in-one tool. You can create projects for any part of the business. It works especially well for post-sales transitions, allowing you to easily convert opportunities to projects once the deal is closed.
You can assign tasks to team members, and the pipeline will show you each stage of the project so you can see how it’s coming along.
When you drill down to the task level, you can make a list of things that need to be done. The beauty of using Insightly for project management rather than other tools is that you can link them to opportunities, contacts, and team members. Tasks that you associate with certain contacts will appear under the appropriate organization records as well.
CRM Dashboards: Insightly’s CRM dashboard delivers real-time insight into your performance metrics, sales activities, and other KPIs all in one place.
For example, are you wondering who your top sellers are? Want to see a comparison of your actual versus projected revenue?
With the dashboards, you can turn your data into visual graphs and display them on the main homepage of your CRM. That way, you’re always up to date regarding your most important metrics.
Every Insightly paid plan comes with three standard dashboards:
- The opportunities dashboard has ten built-in cards to track and forecast revenue for your sales team.
- The project dashboard provides visibility of your team’s productivity at a glance.
- The leads dashboard helps you monitor lead generation activity.
On top of the three standard dashboards, higher-tiered plans let you build your own custom dashboards. All you have to do is drag and drop the types of data you want to add to the dashboard.
Here are just a few of the hundreds of metrics and data points you may want to add to your custom dashboard:
- New leads
- Closed leads
- Seals pipeline data
- Sales team activities
- Conversion rate
- Quota progress
- Customer retention and churn
- Customer satisfaction
Because every business is unique, having the flexibility to highlight critical data and build granular data visualizations will help you make smarter business decisions.
Mobile app: If you’re a company that does business offline as well, Insightly offers a mobile app so you can take the power of contact management and sales tracking on the go.
The CRM can sync with your calendar, data, and contacts from your phone.
It even comes with a business card scanning feature. Every time you collect business cards from a tradeshow or networking event, you scan the card, and it’ll upload the contact details into your CRM database.
Even better, you can also record audio notes to the CRM. Instead of juggling between written notes, you can easily use the audio notes feature to summarize key points from your sales meetings.
This feature is perfect for outside sales reps who need to take their prospect’s details and notes with them when traveling to different sites.
Insightly’s Potential Drawbacks
While Insightly has a lot to offer, there are a few potential drawbacks to consider before deciding if it’s the right CRM solution for your business.
Integrations are limited unless you pay for AppConnect: While Insightly CRM does offer some integrations, it is limited. On any of the paid CRM plans, you get integrations with Google, MS 365, PandaDoc, QBO, and Xero.
That means it’s missing important integrations such as Mailchimp and HubSpot unless you pay for AppConnect, a paid integration tool.
This tool is an additional expense you must pay for, separate from the Insightly subscription. It allows you to link and integrate other business software applications.
Insightly CRM lacks advanced project management features: While we wouldn’t expect it to compete with the big-name PM tools, Insightly’s project management dashboard doesn’t have a ton of visual components that make it easy to track the progress of each project.
For example, Insightly doesn’t include any resource management features, Gantt charts, or dependencies.
Resource management allows you to visually see how tasks are distributed across team members. That way, you can prevent overloading or underutilizing employees. It also lacks time-tracking features, which can be helpful if you want to know how your sales reps or support agents are spending their time.
On top of that, it’s missing Gannt charts and task dependencies. This allows you to create a realistic project schedule and see all of the milestones in between. For example, a marketing team would need dependencies to know when a project needs to be handed off to the next person. Or a sales team selling custom solutions may need to require milestones in place to sell to their enterprise clients, which is where Gannt charts can be useful.
Relatively expensive: While Insightly offers plenty of advanced features, the price may be a little high if you’re looking for a simple CRM tool.
Insightly CRM’s Plus plan is its lowest paid plan, and for one user, will cost $29 per user per month (billed annually). This can add up fast. Even if you only have five users, you’re looking at paying $1,740 upfront annually.
Insightly Plans and Pricing
Insightly isn’t just a CRM solution. It offers four core products, with the CRM solution being the main selling point.
The platform has separate tiered pricing plans for each product, or you can buy the Insightly All-in-One plan to get access to all of its products.
All prices are billed annually, but some plans offer free trials, while for others, you’ll need to contact their sales team.
CRM
Insightly CRM is the flagship product that helps businesses sell smarter and grow faster. It comes in three plans:
- Plus: $29 per user per month
- Professional: $49 per user per month
- Enterprise: $99 per user per month
So which should you choose?
The Plus plan is for small teams with only several sales reps to handle all outbound outreach activity. You get all the basic features you’d expect from a CRM, like lead management, automated emails, opportunity, task management, and customizable reports.
That said, most businesses will probably want the Professional plan. It adds lead assignment and routing, so you send prospects to the right team members during each step of the sales process.
The Enterprise plan comes with a few extra bells and whistles. For example, you can easily embed and send quotes and price books to help close deals faster. There are also even more customization features to make the CRM feel branded and unique to each person’s role.
Marketing
Insightly Marketing is where you can capture and nurture prospects. You’ll be able to fine-tune the customer journey before you hand off leads to your sales team.
It’s extremely complementary to the CRM product, ensuring both the marketing and sales teams are in lockstep. All data is integrated so sales reps know exactly how the prospect has engaged with your brand.
The pricing depends on usage. The more prospects you have to upload, the higher the monthly costs will be. The product starts at $99 per month, allowing you to contact up to 2,000 prospects.
Each plan has essential features such as email marketing automation, journey builder, hosted landing pages, prospect scoring, and more.
Most growing teams should opt for the Professional plan, which offers prospect tracking and behavior-based analytics. That way, you can send the right message to the prospects most interested in buying at that time.
AppConnect
AppConnect integrates with over 500 third-party apps. That includes the most popular software in finance, HR, sales, marketing, support, IT, and ecommerce.
Just about every major app you use for your business you should be able to integrate. For example, integrating QuickBooks with Insightly can help your finance department get insights into your financial health. Also, it’s much easier to track all sales orders and invoices.
Pricing is based on usage. The more tasks performed with these connections, the more it costs. AppConnect starts at $249 for 25,000 tasks per month and incrementally increases from there.
Service
If you want to get more value out of each customer and deliver an exceptional experience, Insightly Service may be right for you. It’s a customer service software that lets you track and assign tickets, create auto-responses, create a knowledge base, and more.
Nowadays, companies are expected to be on every platform, so having customer service software helps unify all messages and support queries in one place.
Pricing starts at $29 per month, and you’ll get just about most features you’ll need. If you want to assign more than two roles, add portal customization, or send customer satisfaction surveys, then you may want to consider the Professional or Enterprise plan.
Insightly All-in-One
With so much software available in the marketplace, business leaders are struggling to figure out which tools they need and which software to pick.
Insightly All-in-One gets rid of that problem. It unifies four of the Insightly products into one bundle.
With all plans, you get access to Guided Onboarding and Premier Support and Success to help you implement the system into your workflow.
This is a great deal, considering you don’t have to pay separate subscriptions for a CRM, marketing automation, and customer service platform. And that’s just money saved. You’re also saving yourself time not needing to learn how to use different systems from different brands.
Best of all, you’re saving up to 30% by buying them in a bundle rather than paying for each Insightly product individually.
Final Thoughts
Insightly is a robust all-in-one solution for managing leads, building marketing campaigns, automating workflows, and customizing dashboards to fit your unique needs. The project management feature is a nice bonus since it links to your contacts, opportunities, and more. You have options to use just one or two of Insightly’s products or bundle them together for a comprehensive CRM solution. Either way, the platform is designed to scale with you, which makes it a solid choice for growing businesses.
