Good choice for extremely cost-sensitive businesses
June 14, 2018
Good choice for extremely cost-sensitive businesses
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Insightly
Insightly is being used by our Sales and Marketing Departments. It addresses the problems associated with keeping track of individual salesperson's contacts and activities with those contacts. It also helps salespersons to see some of the communications with their customers through our underwriting department. Finally, the app helps the salespersons to keep track of customer information when they're away from the office.
- Insightly competes extremely well cost-wise with almost all other CRMs with similar capabilities that are out there.
- The customer service portal contains a lot of helpful information that is fairly easy to search and navigate. When at a loss, contacting a real person for help via email is easy.
- The contact and organization records are easy to search and download. Duplicates are fairly easy to merge.
- We started using Insightly when it was still in its Beta phase. Back then--when it was free for us to use--we expected big changes and were prepared to quickly adapt to them. Unfortunately, since those early years, Insightly continues to make huge changes to aspects of the CRM that are extremely disruptive to our business as our reliance on its predictability and reliability have also increased. While the latest changes to the overall interface (from "classic" to "new experience") are not being forced on users at this time, the company has stopped servicing the classic interface. Furthermore, some earlier changes (e.g. to the way records were formatted etc.) were made without warning and caused significant data loss and lost work time to remedy.
- Some aspects of the CRM are not as customizable to our particular business model. The projects and opportunities are somewhat useful but would be vastly more useful if we could have more options to customize.
- Over the years the ability to have a personal video conference session periodically with an Insightly specialist about general questions specific to our company has been eliminated. This was a huge value-add that Insightly has taken away (even for paying customers).
- Increased Sales
- Improved efficiency
- Centralized contact management
- Streamlined business processes
We have definitely improved efficiency with Insightly's centralized contact management, particularly by allowing all salespersons to see (at the same time) who has been doing what with whom and when etc. While this hasn't necessarily reduced the number of meetings, it has made meetings faster and easier. The ease with which salespersons can view and share information has also increased transparency and teamwork in our office and, ultimately, likely improved sales and salespersons' attitudes. The weakest part of Insightly for us is with regard to overall business processes. As I mentioned previously, the opportunities and projects aren't quite as customizable as we need for our business model. For example, opportunities contain a pretty standard/basic sales pipeline for a generic business but it's very linear and doesn't adequately capture/reflect our typical process within our niche insurance sales space. The reports feature has also increased our efficiency and enabled us to have more productive meetings and really pinpoint certain issues. It's also great to be able to give salespersons quantitative feedback about their activities based on Insightly data.
Came down to one issue: cost. Honestly, we have already made such an investment in training staff persons and otherwise integrating Insightly with some of our other software that the cost has now become a barrier to entry for our first choice CRM (at least for now) since we'd have to re-train the staff, reintegrate with all of our other software systems and even hire a consultant to help with the transition of data.