Remember that cool feature in Membrain that improves your ability to manage opportunities and identify which products or services are working for you as a business?

If your answer wasn’t the Product Database, how about heading on over to this blog and that blog to bone up on Products in Membrain before continuing to read this blog after those blogs. (Sorry, I just wanted to see how many times I could say blog in one sentence).

But you get the drift, ignorance is not bliss in this case because the latest update to  Playbooks for Products helps push things forward. Using encouragement and coaching, it helps the team create tasks when things happen on the product side, such as creating a new account growth or sales project on the back of a sale. 

This 2for1 update gives guidance and insight at the same time right within a sales project. Based on what the customer is buying, updating steps within a sales process is now more intuitive because automatic changes to your process are now determined by which product gets added to a sales project. 

Some changes can be quite dramatic depending on what your customer is interested in, and playbooks help the whole team smoothly navigate those changes.

Now you have one less thing to worry about.

Playbooks can be used for

• Products
• Recurring business models
• Licensing tools 
• Hiring Consultants or Project Managers 

Let’s imagine what this would look like if, for instance, you were a fruit company and one of your products was selling bananas as a service. 

When that product gets added to your sales project an extra step now pops up in your sales process called “Build Banana Business Case”.

If you click on that step, you now have the ability to add and assign tasks, upload documents and rope other people into the project. Highly crucial in this example, as you now need to create a business case to send to the customer.

Keeping with the fruit theme, another way playbooks can be used could be in tracking more details for hiring a banana consultant or project manager. 

After adding them in as a product, an extra step pops up in your process called “Scope the Project”. This step prompts you to collaborate internally on planning the project. Further along in the process you might also have steps pop up like “Hand over to Operations”, where you can even create an Account Growth project directly within this step.

If you’d like to see a video demonstration of how this works you can click on the video below. 

Head on over to our help center to learn more about how to use playbooks here.

Anew design tweak improves the pleasure level of adding context to content within the Content Hub. 

Instead of navigating a long list of all possible fields and parameters in Membrain to find and select the context you need, it only takes one click now to select the context and one click to pick the content.

Less steps. Less headaches.

Now everything that you learn about your prospects, opportunities and customers will feed into the recommendation engine to highlight valuable information at every step in your sales process. 

Think of this context feature like an Amazon book recommendation algorithm. The more you use it, the smarter it gets at narrowing down the type of content that is most helpful in the later stages of your process.

Examples of Context Options:

• Process
• Activity Type
• Stage
• Challenge
• Role
  
  

Let's imagine how a sales and marketing department might use context to handle storage and distribution of a valuable piece of sales collateral.

When Jeremiah, from marketing, finishes writing a blog post he needs somewhere to store it. Without the Content Hub, he might store the blog in a blog post folder, where the sales team might not know it exists, and potentially waste time looking for it. Without having context, they will also struggle to understand when to use it. 

Alternatively, if he is using the Content Hub to upload the blog he can now help the team not only understand that this blog exists, but also how and when to use it, by adding some context.

Context is like a label or tag. If the blog, for example, deals with why his solution is better than another competitor, Jeremiah would use context to “tag” the competitor, then choose which sales process and even which stage of the process this blog will pop up in. If it’s stage 3, he would probably choose the "objection handling" context. And don’t forget the power of adding a content card that might contain notes or best practices on objection handling.

Now, when he or his teammates try to send a customer an email or make an appointment, this blog will pop up as a helpful tool to combat the customer's objections.

3 more reasons this tweak will make you smile:

• Easily find out if you’re missing a case study for a specific type of customer. 
• Quickly clean up your uncategorized content
• Connect that random blog post to the right context with just three clicks
  
  

More than just a filing system that recommends content based on a folder location, the Content Hub is a smart tool that's always learning, giving it the ability to suggest helpful content when and where you need it.

If you’re ready to increase your dopamine, head over to our help center to learn how to set up contexts here

Tracking the footrace happening on the sales floor just got a lot easier.

Horizontal bar graphs are now the prettiest new feature to give you answers on the leaderboard scores with just a few blinks. One blink, John Smith is in the lead, two blinks, Jane Doe is creeping up, three blinks, Jimmy Johnson is apparently struggling at the bottom.

....And the whole team can track progress when using the Live Dashboard version in your sales bullpen.

In the time it takes you to pick up your coffee and take a sip, you now have a better picture on what's happening with your team. The ability to grab this snapshot data in a heartbeat makes you better prepared when navigating spontaneous conversations with your team or colleagues.

Struggling to stay on top of the data is a problem shared by many, but with Membrain, it's easy to build trust between managers and sales people when the answers are found so quickly, and we all sure could use a little more trust and faith!

*Tip - you can limit the number of fields on the graph, so you can focus on specific scores. A further motivation for salespeople at the bottom to aim for making it to the leaderboard!

Bar graphs can also track things like:

• Most revenue by product sold
• Top products sold
• Potential revenue by product & health
  
  

Turning your data into real-time analytics that are actually helpful is one reason we have multiple options for the same thing. In our graph library you'll find many options to choose from when deciding how to lay out your own dashboard. Whether it's a line, table, list, bar or donut graph, this one central place allows you to stay on top of your organization's sales effectiveness and goal attainment.

The dashboard is really easy to use, vastly customizable and also really pretty to look at. Getting that perfect overview of a Sales Project analysis, Prospecting and Account Management and Sales Performance is crucial in helping you keep pipeline health and forecasting on track. 

If you're ready to dress up your dashboard with killer insights, check out this how-to article in our help center.

Adding context to projects and customers just got way easier with the release of Content Cards for Membrain Go. 

Access the collective wisdom of your teammates and management in our mobile app anywhere, anytime.

During a lunch hour workout at the gym, you can prep for a call by studying the best practices on handling objections specific to that customer. Or you can learn about the background and needs of specific customers while on the couch suffering through the inevitable Sunday WiFi slowdown. At least you will be doing something that makes you feel good while your neighbor just yells at Netflix to stop buffering. 😂

For the Full Monty on exactly how Content Cards can up your game, check out the full article here. 

Fika* with Membrain are live webinars where we highlight the most recent additions and improvements to Membrain, and give you a chance to ask questions and chat with us about all things Membrain.

*Fika [fee-kah] Swedish (v.) To slow down, have a coffee, and appreciate the good things in life.

For February's "Fika with Membrain" we took a deep dive into products in Membrain and all the benefits you will get:

• Gain great insights into historical, future, and forecasted revenues
• Navigate complex selling environments with multiple products and services
• Manage recurring business models in multiple currencies
• Get transactional data from other financial tools into your system

During this session, we went through the following:

(see recording at the bottom of post)

• Products in Membrain
  An introduction on how to work with products in Membrain
• Product Playbooks
  Dynamically adapt your process depending on what products the customer is exploring
• Quotes
  Easily send out quotes right from Membrain at the appropriate point in the process
• Bar graphs on product revenue
  New graph visualization can be used to create compelling dashboards and easily digested insights
• Product Import
  Import data from your ERP to get a 100% view of all revenues
• Product Graphs in Account Growth
  Visualize what a specific customer has bought the most of
• Products for "Whitespacing"
  Strategically approach customers about products they haven't yet bought, and get more specific in creating your "Account Growth Potential"

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.

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

- The Membrain Team

Capture the knowledge power of your team with the new Content Cards!

Just like Netflix recommends movies based on your viewing history, our Content Hub recommends specific content based on things like, who your customer is, size of the company, and industry. This smart content feature just got smarter, with a new feature we like to call Content Cards. 

Within our Content Hub, Content Cards are as customizable as there are stars in the universe. You can input veritably any information that helps educate, give context and or outline steps or processes to follow for specific projects.

Imagine a new sales team member jumping into an on-going sales project with a specific client. Without needing to bug other team members about who this client is and what they want, they can benefit from the information gathered from other team members through content cards. It's like having 3 x 5" research notes attached to each project. A virtual bulletin board that adds an extra layer of needed context in complex sales. 

Content Cards are that little superpower that connect the dots for multiple team members automatically. Cutting down or even eliminating the need for meetings. Cue the "tech is cool" music.....

Imagine the collective knowledge of your team members organized, documented and distributed at the right time to:

• Capture best practices
• Navigate common objections
• Share collective research and reference stories
• Outline internal guidelines and policies right inside of Membrain
• Offer the best possible sales advice at the right time

The value of this was recently articulated by one of our customers, Mike Thomson from Affinitext, who said, “Being geographically spread out, we have less ability to pass on our wisdom and experience. Membrain lets us do this, and it allows people to operate at a higher level.” 

In his book, Give and Take, Adam Grant uses his research to prove that helping others succeed can lead to extraordinary results. So, pull up those Content Cards and start giving!

The engagement matrix gives a whole new level of understanding to the behaviors of your stakeholders.

In sales, we all know that "people buy from people". What we don't know, or didn't until now, was what that process looked like. So today, we're taking you behind the scenes of how a new feature in Membrain will allow you to understand the connections between influence, timing, methodology, talent, process and emotion within your Account Growth projects. 

Imagine the things you could do with that level of insight? Makes you feel quite on top of things, doesn't it? To finally understand how the behaviors and interactions between you, your team, and your customers affect the outcome. 

 

Within one grid, you can customize away to track things like

• Number of activities
• Last viewed page
• Time spent
• Who's engaged with who and when
• Customer mood
  
  

 

 

Allowing you to visually see who's the most engaged and also who is not engaged but has a lot of influence. See where I'm going with this? It's like standard metrics and some personal "notes" got together and had a baby we liked to call the "Engagement Matrix".

 

Now your John Smith from the 7th floor basement in accounting knows that CEO Jane Doe had a conversation with a primary stakeholder last Wednesday. He also knows the frequency and time stamp of engagement with 3 other members of his team. Along with knowing the latest bit of content they engaged with. But, the coolest thing, is the emoji attached to said stakeholders contact ID to identify their mood.

Previous identification of the latest mood of a stakeholder usually required multiple emails or conversations internally. We are now giving you that valuable time back. It might seem like a small thing, but cumulatively, having this level of insight in a customizable easy to see visual grid will have a big effect on the outcome of your projects.

 

We give you power. By giving such a deep level of insight into the why behind behaviors, it’s no longer a matter of figuring out HOW to change. But when to change.

 

A new feature to help you work faster and happier  

How much time and worry have you spent on managing data? Membrain's mission to elevate the sales profession means freeing you from tasks that suck more time and energy than they give back. Which is why we're excited to tell you about a new capability we added to Membrain.

Remember all those times you had to jump between software programs to create, track and then follow-up with website or event sign-up forms? Each jump leaving a trail of data behind like a 5-year-old with a big bag of skittles that his puppy gnawed a hole in. Except your data aren't yummy skittles. They are vital pieces of information now scattered between numerous "interfaces" that require you to spend precious time chasing and cleaning up. An exhausting never-ending dog chasing its tail.

Well, no more!

Drum roll please.....

.....introducing Membrain Forms. Your one-stop-shop to get information from your prospects, start to finish. Create forms directly inside Membrain, and embed on your site, or link in an email, or as a standalone page. You'll automatically start seeing the contact information for those that submitted your form populate inside Membrain. And if that isn't all, a new project and many other actions in Membrain can also be created!   

Some stand out benefits to make you 😀 :

• Feed your Account Growth with surveys
• Customize away with Zapier to feed form data into numerous tools 
• Gather feedback on implementation projects or how to improve after sales calls
• Streamline information sharing to improve follow-up

So, no more data graveyards in Wordpress or marketing automation tools. 😅

Save time, reduce human error and worry less with Membrain forms. 

For detailed instructions on how to implement and use, head on over to our Help Center here.

Fika* with Membrain are live webinars where we highlight the most recent additions and improvements to Membrain, and give you a chance to ask questions and chat with us about all things Membrain.

*Fika [fee-kah] Swedish (v.) To slow down, have a coffee, and appreciate the good things in life.

For January's "Fika with Membrain" we took a look at different ways to get more productive with Membrain. We presented various features to help you spend your time even more wisely.

During this session, we went through the following:
(see recording at the bottom of post)

Collaborating with Comments & Mentions

• How to use comments & mentions in Membrain (from projects, activities, and more) to get the collaboration going.
• How to mention colleagues inside of Notes.
• Benefit from Membrain Guide and email notifications to stay updated.
• How to use the new comment view to find and stay on top of conversations!

Efficient emailing 

• The powerful combination of templates and snippets
• How Content Hub can add an extra layer of intelligence
• The nifty capability of "Send later" to get the timing just right
• How batch emailing can increase efficiency
• Easily see when people open and engage with your emails

Getting things done with task management

• Handle the task list - Quickly reschedule tasks and use shorthand (like just writing "Oct 4" instead of tricky date formatting) to reschedule tasks
• How to use assigned tasks to collaborate! Collaborate on tasks using comments and stay on top of completed tasks with the guide. 
• How tasks in the process (incl. assigned steps) can help you streamline the internal processes for your team.

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.

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

- The Membrain Team

It's a known fact that Sales people perform better when they have well defined goals. Something to aim for which, when reached, gives that ultimate sense of achievement we all strive for. 

As we're ramping up for a new year, it's time to ensure each and every person on the team has achievable and up-to-date goals to focus on for the coming year.

Sounds time consuming, right? Well, in the spirit of productivity, we'd like to remind you of how Membrain's Goal editor can make this task a breeze to complete. 

Get started with goals for your team and download
Membrain's Whitepaper and Realistic Goal Setting Kit

It's now possible to configure goals for one person, and then apply those goals to another, with just a couple of clicks. 

And for larger teams with multiple salespeople with similar goals, take advantage of the user management list view and apply goals across the board in one fell swoop. 

Excited to read more? Go check out our Help Center article and learn how to use this powerful new update for easy goal setting across your organization

Or reach out to support@membrain.com and we'll be happy to walk you through it.