Insightly does best at what it's designed for: Providing CRM solutions for small businesses
Updated June 03, 2015

Insightly does best at what it's designed for: Providing CRM solutions for small businesses

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Gratis

Overall Satisfaction with Insightly

Insightly is being used as a CRM for tracking:

  • Sales pipelines and communication with potential students as they go through the inquiry, application, admissions and enrollment process
  • Contact info and communication with partners
  • Marketing data through custom field questions, i.e. how students heard about us, first method of contact, etc.
  • Upcoming tasks for continuing contact with students and partners

Pros

  • I really like the custom fields, they help with gathering specific information for status and marketing reports. We like to use them specifically to identify what types of marketing tools are brining in leads by entering the answer to the question "How did you hear about us?"
  • The custom tags are great for organizing contacts and opportunities into different groups. Since I've found that the easiest way for me to link emails to contacts is to use the organization tool, my Student and Partner contacts are all in the same list. By labeling my contacts with custom tags like "student" and "partner" it's easy for me to create reports for custom tags that include contacts from certain groups and exclude unrelated contacts; i.e. I can create a report with all my contacts tagged "student" and view my data more accurately -- without "partner" contacts mixing in there.
  • The task tool is definitely my favorite. I'm usually managing about 20 leads at a time that are always in different pipeline stages. Tasks helps me to set reminders for myself to follow up with leads at certain times, update notes, etc.

Cons

  • I really wish I could more easily link emails to contacts. For example, one of my favorite things about Insightly is that it's a great address book tool. I can enter contacts and connect contacts to each other whether it be by employer, company they're employed with, how we know them etc. While most of these contacts are leads that will go through pipelines and likewise are great to link to Opportunities, unfortunately, I do have contacts that I just simply contact and would like to track those contacts with -- for other users' reference, my quick reference, etc. These contacts aren't going through pipeline stages, they're just partners I keep in touch with. While there is a way to link emails to contacts it's VERY round about -- I have to forward the email to a specific email, then find that email in my emails list and manually link that to my contact. In the Opportunities tool, a unique email forwarding address is create for each Opportunity, meaning that all I have to do is forward/bcc emails to that address and the email is automatically linked and stored to my Opportunity. The annoying thing is that then I have to create an Opportunity from my Contact to more easily do this -- but doing this with Contacts that aren't leads makes no sense as then I have a group of Opportunities that aren't all truly leads. Why could they have not just created an individual email forwarding address for each Contact and then forward that on to the Opportunity when you create an Opportunity for the Contact?? The Opportunity forwarding email automatically connects with the Contact anyway...why not make my life easier for when I just want to keep track of someone's information and communication for my own records? ;)
  • I wish that I could mass delete a tag from a group of Contacts or Opportunities. Currently I can delete a tag altogether and I can delete a tag from individual Contacts and Opportunities, but what if I accidentally added a tag to a group Contacts/Opportunities in the past and then realized that I should have tagged them with something different. Currently I have to go through every since Contact/Opportunity to delete each tag...no big deal when you've only messed up on 3, but when it's 150 contacts...that's tedious.
  • I like that I can customize my company logo on my Insightly dashboard...but at least when I first started using I could change the background color. It made customization/branding pointless...since the background color was bright blue, etc and not part of my branding at all.
  • Insightly has definitely increased employee efficiency by helping us to better manage relationships and conversations that representatives have had with leads. We used to use Trello...that was ok, but sooo hard to search information and create reports
  • I would say that lead conversion is a little faster, but this will continue to improve based on our own sales practices
  • We definitely have better customer service because it's easy for us to manage past conversations and make notes so we know what to follow up on and easily continue past conversations with leads and partners.
Trello is not a CRM and for this main reason we stopped using it. To be completely honest though, we have only used Insightly as our first and only CRM. We shopped around for others but made our choice primarily on cost and general user ratings at the time. We also thought that it would integrate with Hubspot, which unfortunately it doesn't - we read a blog that said so...didn't do enough research on that part. Luckily though, Mail Chimp integrates with both Insightly and Hubspot, so we generally use that pipe for exporting email lists, etc.
Insightly is definitely a very manual tool. If you're working with hundreds of leads a day, I'd recommend a more automated tool like Salesforce. While you can automate Insightly, I haven't had a chance to yet as I'm not a developer. Insightly is great for small/medium sized companies with slower lead generation. It's very affordable and easy to use. As we continue to grow and increase in lead generation though, I do see us moving to a more automated CRM in the next couple years.

Insightly Feature Ratings

Customer data management / contact management
10
Workflow management
9
Opportunity management
9
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
7
Quote & order management
Not Rated
Interaction tracking
9
Channel / partner relationship management
6
Case management
Not Rated
Call center management
Not Rated
Help desk management
Not Rated
Task management
9
Pipeline visualization
5
Customizable reports
10
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
Not Rated
Scripting environment
Not Rated
API for custom integration
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
10
Single sign-on capability
10
Not Rated
Mobile access
Not Rated

Insightly Implementation

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