Business intelligence (BI) is slowly but surely becoming a feature of most packaged applications. The latest example of this trend is customer relationship management (CRM) software from Insightly, which has been updated to include visualization tools that make it simpler to track key performance indicators across multiple geographies.
In addition, the latest version of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) application has added the ability to define business rules that, for example, prevent price discounts being offered below a certain threshold and the ability to embed mathematical functions to further advance analytics.
Tony Kavanagh, chief marketing officer for Insightly, says this latest release is part of an ongoing effort to make enterprise-class CRM application capabilities available in a CRM application targeted at small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) that rely on G Suite from Google to communicate with customers. That level of integration eliminates all the drudgery associated with entering data into the CRM application, says Kavanagh.
“We’re trying to fill that gap for the small guy,” says Kavanagh.
At present, Insightly has 25,000 customers that are now managing over a million customer accounts, says Kavanagh.
A large swath of the SMB market has yet to standardize on a CRM application and large numbers of startup companies are opting to rely on G Suite as a much less expensive alternative to Microsoft Office 365 for personal productivity applications and email. Kavanagh also estimates that organizations that have already standardized on a CRM application will re-evaluate those decisions every two to three years as the category continues to evolve.
The challenge facing SMBs is finding the CRM that not only makes it simpler to manage the business but is also simple enough for the average salesperson to want to actually use every day.
