Back in the dark ages of calendar management, our sales team members probably spent more time than they'd care to admit (at least in public, where people might yell at them) trying to book meetings with clients spread out across different time zones. They were constantly flushing away whole weeks scheduling and then rescheduling every time someone had something come up at the last minute.

It was super-duper frustrating, but after crunching the numbers, we simply couldn't afford to hire a personal assistant for every single team member, no matter how often some of them angrily demanded it. We were all out of ideas…

Then Membrain Meet was born, and we could suddenly schedule meetings with more than one person at a time, quickly and easily, and we didn't even need a fancy personal assistant to do it. Just one shared link that synced everyone's calendars based on their availability, easy as A, B, C. 

Our problems were solved, and it looked like the party would go on forever! Except the party didn't last as long as we thought, because it turns out that when a customer can only book a generic appointment, anything more complicated than a one-time call can be a real pain in the you-know-what. You get what we’re saying? 

So what's this update all about?

If you’ve ever struggled to make everyone work together, we think you’re going to love Appointment Types, a new feature in Membrain Meet that lets you offer up different, preconfigured appointments, each of which can be set up to include:

• Default agendas - let your contacts know what to expect
• Preset durations - stay in control of the schedule
• Custom fields - gather relevant information before the meeting
• Guest invites - allow your contacts to bring their colleagues along
• Custom icons - use your company's branding 
  
  

Appointment Types are already live and ready to make your life easier, so if you want to give them a try, have at it! You can also check out this help desk article or give us a call if you'd rather learn more about how they work first.

At Membrain we are big fans of simplicity, and we understand that until you can visualize your process, it’s incredibly hard to see where your Key Accounts are in their journey with your business.

This is why are so happy to announce we have added a Kanban view in our Account Growth Module. 

This view is powerful if you’re using Account Growth to track Key Accounts as they move through your Strategic Plan, with the clarity to see which accounts are performing as expected and which ones are lagging behind.

Its also great for project based plans that follow a clear structure - such as onboarding new customers, or project delivery - making it much easier to see the whole process from start to finish.

Being able to visualize both the progress and process of your accounts helps you to see your strategy in stages in a clear, visual way.

Better visibility into your process helps:

• Organize your accounts by their progress through the plan
• Spot Accounts that are not performing as expected
• Follow your strategy easily
• Increase your focus and productivity
  
  

Improving your process is why we innovate and since a better process leads to more growth, we can't wait for you to try this!

It’s now possible to customize the information displayed for Projects in the Active Pipeline and Account Growth Overview.

Need some at-a-glance prioritization? It's quick and easy to add fields to show you things like Products being sold, Next Step in the process or the Company the project is connected to in your cards. Someone on your team asking for the SP Key for your projects? 💥, done.

Different views for different needs. This is the game-changing customization our customers love us for. Adding any field from the Company or Project level lets you see much more information, at a glance. For instance, these Project Cards shown below show 3 additional fields. 

• Next Step
• SP Key
• Products

Being able to adjust the information you see in your Active Pipeline View and in the brand new Account Growth Kanban view gives you more control and mental freedom to make quicker decisions. Let's not forget how this makes using a CRM more enjoyable and easy. If those benefits aren't enough, check these out:

• Speed up collaboration with other departments 
• See your next steps for each project at-a-glance
• Stay on top of things, making prioritization a breeze
• Get a clear picture of what's in your pipeline, from any angle
  
  

Effortlessly toggling between views containing different information in your overview is just another way Membrain keeps making technology the servant to the human. With less time pulling together data, you have more time to do things that create value.

Stay on top of the carbon footprint of data you create with a new ability to “Copy Data From” available within your Sales Projects. 

How is this different than a good old fashioned merge, you ask? So glad you asked. “Copy Data From” allows you to choose what information you would like to move such as stakeholders, data, activity and even documents. Most importantly, you get to decide which versions you want to keep. 

Whereas, with merge, it selects ALL the information within a sales project and combines it, overwriting all information within the "copied to" project

As bespoke as using a pencil and paper, data fields can be erased and rewritten when you select or deselect which fields of information to carry over. 

You can then delete, archive or even keep the original Sales Project once you have copied over all the data fields you selected.

This feature cleans up your data when:

• Multiple salespeople working on the same opportunity in 2 separate sales projects inside of Membrain. Now you can combine each salesperson's best pieces of information into one Sales Project. 
• You want to copy over information from a Sales Project to an Account Growth Project.
• Duplicate data was accidentally created

Here's to another level of clean data coming at you from Membrain! 💥🚿

Sending a well-written email to multiple contacts is a great timesaving way to deliver your message to leads and existing clients.

And using Membrain's batch email features along with email templates, snippets and content from the Content Hub helps sales teams communicate with a unified, professional language every time.

Templates and Snippets are great for ensuring a common high standard across the team when communicating with your customer base.

So what's new?

We are happy to announce that batch emailing from Membrain can be more personalized with the ability to automatically bring in additional information from the contact or company level, and now even the from a Prospect, Sales Project or Account Growth Project!  

Imagine being able to auto populate any piece of information you capture in Membrain about a prospect or customer, such as:

• What webinar did they recently watch?
• What product or service did they buy?
• Recent activity?
• What challenge or pain point do they have?

Think of this like a productivity and marketing tool combined. By auto-populating highly personalized information into your emails, you are not only saving time, but increasing the likelihood that your email will get opens and clicks. Can anyone say 💥

A few use case examples

• Use personalization's in snippets to paste into common tasks. Include all relevant information to complete the task like Sales Project number, order information, etc. 
• Speak directly to a challenge or pain point your prospect has, as long as that information is populated within Membrain.

Fika* with Membrain is an informal live webinar where we discuss the all things Membrain, and give you a chance to ask questions and chat with us.

For June's "Fika with Membrain" we discussed how to control those roller-coaster results by bringing more structure to your workflow. We went over some pretty advanced capabilities and had a lot of fun geeking out with our users on this one!

• Keeping Pipeline Healthy
• Improved Transparency & Analytic Capabilities

During this session, we went through different examples of automated events and rules:

(see recording at the bottom of post)

• Updating a date field when a specific step is completed such as a proposal sent.
• Triggering the creation of a new Account Growth Project when winning a Sales Project.
• Updating a custom field to "Customer", when winning a Sales Project.
• Adding conditions to prevent creation of an Account Growth Project when already a "Customer".

Recording

It was great to see so many join in for the live session, but if you couldn't make it, here's the recording.

*Fika [fee-kah] Swedish (v.) To slow down, spend time with someone you care about and learn more about each other.

Stay tuned, we look forward to seeing you at the next Fika with Membrain!

- The Membrain Team

Automated Events in Membrain are a great way to stay on top of things. They can be used for coaching, celebration internally, guidance, and communication.

Our next expansion to the level of things you can automate within events is the ability to “Set Field Value” when an event happens.

Being able to "Set a Property" based on an Event opens up a world of opportunity to control your data.

Previously it’s been possible to do things like trigger the creation of an account growth project when a sales project is won. Now you can:

• Add and remove values from a list
• Set a specific date such as “14 days from when the event happens”
• Incrementally increase a number every time something happens

Types of Field Editing Options

• Numeric 
• Dates
• List
• Text fields
• Currency
• Single/Multi-select
• Links

There are infinite ways to use this new feature, but here are just a few examples that we have seen in action so far: 

• Manage complex automations
  
  When you win a sales project, create an Account Growth Project and set the Customer Type Field to "customer".💥 Add a condition to this rule that ensure an Account Growth Project is only created IF the Customer Type Field is NOT set to Customer - giving you more control over your automatic workflows
  

• Stay in control of your Data 

When a Customer returns to buy more products or services, add that option to the "All Products Purchased" list on their Company Page

• Date Based Example

Automatically set a date 3 weeks after winning a sales project to ensure the salesperson follows up with the delivery team on a project that’s supposed to start at that point.

• Number Based Example

Count the number of times an event within a process has occurred, such as how many times a specific project has had a red flag.

Automated Events solve a bunch of problems like:

• Lack of Transparency
  Produce data & insights automatically instead of having sales people do manual work (with human error)
• Lacking analytical capabilities 
  Clean up your data with automation when certain things happen
• Unreliable forecasts
  Produce better data using process events

So let’s help you make it easy to Execute Your Process and Optimize Your Strategy with better management of your data. You can check out this help center article to learn more about Automated Events.

If you're loving Membrain Forms, then you won't ever want to miss the excitement of a new form being submitted.

Whether it's a new order coming through your website, a prospect asking for information about your products or services, or perhaps an existing customer answering your feedback request - it's super important you're on the ball and ready to respond ASAP.

Send customizable alerts to whom you want - and how you want - when a new Membrain Form is submitted.

Up until now, new form submissions could alert you via either email or by setting up a webhook. Powerful yes, but not always the most effective way.

So we added some more options to make setting up these notifications easier, informing your team in a way that suits you and your organization best. 

• Membrain Guide - alert the individuals who should be aware - right from inside Membrain
• Slack or Microsoft Teams - broadcast to the individuals or #channels across the broader organization, so they don't miss a beat
  

We hope you enjoy these new updates. Why not jump on over to the Help Center and follow our step-by-step guide for setting up these new alerts or getting started with Membrain Forms.

Applying Process Rules is a great way to help stay on top of what's important and keep your Pipeline healthy.  

Rules are customizable alerts that help you prioritize your efforts and focus on the Projects that may be at risk or need extra attention. Depending on the severity of the problem, alerts are shown on the Projects with a blue puzzle piece, yellow flag or red flag. 

This latest update includes 2 new features for Process Rules:

1. Highlight the issue and make it stand out by giving your Process Rule a unique name.. 
2. Offer more detail about the problem, and include coaching and even suggested next-step actions to your team, so it's clear what needs to be done.

Learn more about Process Rules and how to customize them to your teams needs in our Help Center Article "Process Rules"

Today we’re doing a round up of our most popular productivity functions in Membrain.

We’ve got some that are shiny and new and some that are old, but still gold. If you’re sick of software annoying the crap out of you, then this post is for you! 

In fact, our team claims these productivity functions greatly improve their enjoyment of using software. Instead of being the annoying little brother that pesters you with questions, Membrain is like the cool older sister that helps you sail past the queue at the ice cream parlor on a hot a day because, well, she’s just so cool and makes life seem so easy. 

So no more terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days using your CRM. Instead, pass Go and collect €200 with... 

Keyboard Shortcuts:

• C for Calendar 
• M for Mail (Sales Inbox)
• S for Search
• T for Tasks
• G for GoTo Menu
• H for Content Hub
• V for Comments
• Ctrl + right/left arrow to jump to the next sales project or prospect
• Ctrl + S for Shortcuts 
• Within your email composer you have quick access to shortcuts, making it easy to insert a Snippet, Membrain Meet Link or Personalization.

Or Favorite:

• A snippet
• An email template
• A dashboards

You can also spread your comments like wildfire with  

• Centralized Comments area (live feed)
• Ability to comment on an email from the sales inbox
  ….#YouGoGossipGirl

P.S. - A huge achievement for Sales People Collaboration and Coaching for Management. ...

...Or get the party started with Multi-Person Membrain Meet!

Nina, our Head of People, is loving our new ability to schedule meetings with multiple colleagues. It allows her to quickly spot the gaps between multiple calendars, making it easy for her AND the people she invites to the meeting. 

Sebastian, our Sales Manager, is able to jump back and forth between different views in milliseconds with keyboard shortcuts, saving him time, headaches and money. 

George, our CEO, couldn’t live without the GoTo Menu allowing him to navigate to menu tools like Dashboard, Contacts, Pipeline or Settings, with just one stroke of the keyboard.

How many times per day do you navigate to the menu? 10, 50, 100, 500 times? Between the mouse scrolling and clicking, each time is probably taking you 3-5 seconds. Costing you potentially 42 minutes per day. At a minimum it’s costing you one minute. Just to navigate to a menu, find and access what you are needing. Those minutes add up!

You don't have to be a power user to get in on these time saving productivity functions in Membrain, so why don't you give them a whirl and let us know how you like them!