Item: Insightly
Rating: 10
Author: Jan White

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Insightly as a sales tool, to organize contacts, emails, tasks, etc. We also use the Projects section to organize and track the ads we sell each issue, as a check and balance with our existing database and to generate commission reports. We also run a conference each year and have just implemented a procedure using insightly.

Pros and Cons

Easy to customize.
Tracks emails.
Tasks are invaluable.

Response to problems/tech help is good, but it would be much more helpful to be able to chat with tech support either via phone or a cyber chat.
The leads are a touch confusing. Emails being sent out are sometimes creating organizations (which they are not supposed to).
Additional fields to add another email or contact in the lead would be very helpful (often more than one person to deal with when developing potential client).
It is a pain to have to fill out the link's role/title when converting organization to opportunity.

Desired Outcomes using Insightly

Centralized contact management

With all sales reps working outside of the main office and our magazine growing, it was imperative to create a resource that can be accessed by the head office at any time. We did have a situation when we first started with Insightly where a rep's family member had a massive heart attack very close to our deadline and the rep (understandably) disappeared for over 3 weeks. If we hadn't had the centralized systems and I hadn't been able to access correspondence, then I don't know how we would have pulled things together. Proved to us how important this is to our business.