Item: Insightly
Rating: 10
Author: Tommy L. Chambers

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use the CRM and project capabilities of Insightly to support and track sales and projects in my speaking and seminar business and my consulting business. I have also used Insightly in a previous retail business as a personal stylist and seller of custom menswear.

Pros and Cons

It's online and has different tiers. You can easily move between different product tiers as your business needs change.
I love the integration of sales pipelines with projects and tasks.
Integration with third-party software tools.

Would be great if you could integrate with your select email marketing platform, or if Insightly provided email marketing tools similar to mainstream platforms.
I am a Microsoft product user and would like better integration with those products.
Would be nice to have templates for different business types.

Desired Outcomes using Insightly

Insightly's inline visibility enables all who need to know to have access to info in real-time. No need for unnecessary meetings to simply supply status. The time savings enables more time to be spent on sales and project activities.

Alternatives Considered

I've tried Maximizer, PlanPlus by Franklin Covey, Trello, Salesforce.com, and MS Outlook with business Contact Manager.all of them have their strengths and weaknesses, whether it be complexity, simplicity, pricing model, flexibility, configuration requirements, etc. I've used them pay different points over time, so It's hard to do a direct comparison. One of the big advantages of Insightly was the ease to get started and minimal cost. I started with the free tier, which was sufficient for a small business with few users. I liked Salesforce.com quite a bit, but at the time I was using it, it was much more than I needed for my business, so I couldn't justify the cost. Insightly eliminated that risk. Also, Insightly made new features being rolled out available to the free tier as well, although they appeared to be drifting away from that approach.

Other Software Used

JIRA Software, Microsoft Office 365

Likelihood to Recommend

One obvious answer is that it can be used as a basic contact management system. Another obvious answer is that it is pretty well suited for CRM purposes: tracking leads, opportunities, and sales through a sales funnel. It's easy to setup sales pipelines. However, the pipeline capability can be used to track any type of step-by-step work-low processes. For example, we use it to track the sales processes for speaking and seminars, which is different from tracking consulting, and both of which are different from tracking retail sales. Once the pipelines were set up, all I have to do is select the appropriate product or service type and Insightly hides the way from there. For some rudimentary email blasts, Insightly allows you to send and track message responses from customer groups. Insightly can also be used as a basic project and task tracking system. Regular and ongoing task sets can be used with pipelines. For example, once a speaking engagement is booked, there are normally associated tasks that must be completed to make the event happen and Insightly allows a pipeline to be set up to track that task set.

Insightly is a feature rich CRM and workflow management tool for small businesses.

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Insightly