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.

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 the December "Fika with Membrain" we took a look at the new Content Cards, a very useful feature with unlimited possibilities. We presented improvements on the graph and analytics side of things, with a focus on performance graphs. See below for more details, as well as the recording of the session.

Content Cards

This new capability gets an instant facelift with headers that help make Content Cards easier to scan for the eye ahead of, during, or after key activities and meetings. 

• Competitive information - Help the team identify strengths, weaknesses, and other insights against the competition
• Internal processes - Outline key policies and routines that may not relate to a specific process or step. This could be negotiation policies, steps to manage when a customer churns
• Value Propositions - Equip your team with your value proposition, elevator pitches and help them more easily explain the unique value you bring to your customers
• Call scripts - Want to make sure your new hires have everything they need to make a great first impression? Build interactive call scripts, and link them together to common questions, objections, and similar.

These are just some examples of what Content Cards can help your team achieve! We're looking forward to hearing your feedback on this exciting addition to Membrain.

Performance Graphs

Creating performance graphs that help you connect the team's performance to their sales goals, effectiveness objectives, and activity metrics have always been incredibly powerful. However, previously these graphs have only been possible to visualize with line graphs. In the session, we went through several examples and use cases of these brand-new visualizations!

• Track the sales of each team member or team compared to their goal, or year-on-year
• Visualize the quota attainment to see not in absolute numbers, but instead as a relative percentage of their goal
• Keep pace on key activities during the week or month and visualize them using donut, column, line, number, or table graphs!
• And of course: Share all this on a TV in the office or embed it on your intranet to share all the exciting progress with the team using a Live Dashboard!

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

As many have noticed, there was in the software world a recent discovery that a commonly used software library called "Log4j2" had critical vulnerabilities. Let's take a look at what's happening. 

Understandably we have gotten some questions from our customers and partners if Membrain has been affected by this. We'd like to share some information on what the the incident is about, what it means, and a clarification that Membrain is unaffected by this vulnerability.

The team here at Membrain is aware of the situation related to the newly discovered security vulnerability connected to "Log4j2" (CVE-2021-44228). We will continue to provide updates to this issue as it develops in this post. 

• Membrain do not use Log4j2 as a logging tool.
• As a software Membrain is not susceptible to or affected by this vulnerability.
• Your data in Membrain remains safe.

So let's take a closer look at what this is all about.

What is Log4j?

Log4j is a widely used library for logging in software applications (for example for error messages and similar). It is used in enterprise software applications, including those custom applications developed in-house by businesses, and forms part of many cloud computing services.

Essentially, it's a practical and time-saving resource for software developers to minimize the efforts needed to build these types of tools internally. As a policy we at Membrain, for this very reason, try to minimize any dependancy on third-party components to ensure the security and integrity of our customer's data.

What is the vulnerability?

On December 9, 2021, the vulnerability CVE-2021-44228, also known as Log4Shell (more details safely accessible here) was reported. It could allow a system running Apache Log4j 2 version 2.14.1 or below to be compromised and permits Remote Code Execution (RCE). This allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the host (more technical information safely accessible here).

So what does that mean?

Remote Code Execution essentially means that an attacker has the ability to send and run anything they want on your system, effectively giving them full access to all your data. 

This gives hackers a wide array of tools to cause harm, including stealing system credentials, getting deeper access within compromised networks, and stealing data. This issue is a monumental event that you will likely hear more on in news outlets for months, if not years, to come.

Is Membrain affected?

No. Membrain does not utilize this library and our customers can be confident that you can safely use Membrain, and that the safety and security of your data is and always be a critical priority for us.

Our technical team will continue to review and monitor any updates as it related to this on-going issue in the software world.

Sending custom quotes is a central part of any complex B2B sale. To make this process easier for salespeople, we’ve added an option to quickly and easily send a quote directly from within a Sales Project.

Creating a quote is easy! Just hit the new Share as Quote option now available from our Products tool.

How does it work?

• The content of the quote is based on the Products information in that specific Sales Project, so there's no need to manually add information. It's all right there, ready to go.
• Add a title and an optional description to include more details in the quote, or personalize it for your audience. 
• Use the Preview Quote option to review the quote before sending it. And even share it internally to get feedback from your colleagues before you send.
• Looks good? Great! The quote can now be easily shared with Stakeholders already selected in the Sales Project. The email includes a personal link to every selected individual, which they can then use to access the quote. 

Want to give it a try?

If you have the Sales Analytics+ add-on you can get started with this new feature straight away! Reach out to us at support@membrain.com and we'll be happy to help you get started.

If you don't have the Sales Analytics+ add-on, start a trial and see for yourself how Products and Shareable Quotes can transform your quoting workflow. Administrators - go to the Account Details page in Membrain and turn on a free, 14 day trial today!

No one likes a cluttered inbox. So in order to trim down the number of individual emails you receive from Membrain, we have introduced the Membrain Guide Update Email.

The Membrain Guide Update Email essentially provides a snapshot of the Membrain Guide content, bundled in to a summary email, and sent to you periodically throughout the day.

It includes the important contents of Membrain Guide, such as comments & mentions, red & yellow flags on projects, Membrain Meet requests, and lots other interesting notifications like when an email or content has been read, plus more!

Think of it like a summary of all the important information you need to know, without the clutter of less important notifications.

The email is sent only if:

• There is new or updated content in Membrain Guide
• You have not been active in Membrain for the last 30 minutes*
• The current time is during your default to working hours*

Its customizable* to your liking:

You have full control over when you would like to receive a Membrain Guide Update Email. To review or edit your settings, go straight to your Profile in Membrain and set your own preferences. Here you will find Membrain Guide settings, with options to select which days you wish to receive the Guide Update Email, how often, and at what time of the day. 

We hope you're happy with this change, and are enjoying a less cluttered inbox. If you would like to learn more about Membrain Guide and the Membrain Guide Update Email, take a look at this article in our help center.

Back by popular demand - our Fika* with Membrain live webinars are 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.

Last week, we hosted November's "Fika with Membrain". This time around, we took a look at the new Beacon Forms, Content Hub notifications, Timezone improvements, Product "Quotes" and new Integrations. We also gave a sneak peek about the new Content Cards, coming up soon.

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