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

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

For April's "Fika with Membrain" we discussed some cool new customizations you can make within your sales projects that will help you:

• Gain more control over streamlining your workflow with new conditions and rules. 
• Increase accountability by helping salespeople and managers keep track of projects that just keep getting moved forward.
• Mitigate problems that might prevent projects from closing on time. 

During this session, we went through the following:

(see recording at the bottom of post)

• Automated Events
  This feature allows you to set conditions and rules to make very specific actions happen when an event is created.
• Closing Date Alerts
  Allows you to see how many times a closing date has been pushed, giving you a more realistic understanding of your pipeline. 
• Date Based Rules
  Spot patterns that will help you understand If your sales cycle Is moving too quickly or too slowly. 

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

For those interested in squeezing all the juice from their Membrain experience, we’ve got a simple yet powerful update for you. 

This bad boy was even requested by one of our power users and we think you’re going to love it! Drum roll please….

We’ve now added the ability to use rules and conditions to sales project closing dates in your pipeline. This allows you to see how many times a closing date has been pushed, giving you a more realistic understanding of your pipeline. Based on the rules you set up, Membrain can:

• Alert you when sales project’s closing dates are slipping
• Trigger internal conversations about how to manage the situation
• Contribute to smarter probability forecasting



  
  

This feature helps salespeople and managers keep track of projects that just keep getting moved forward. Think of it like a checks and balances system that allows you to automatically:

• Trigger Playbooks

• Tighten Rules

• Create Tasks

• Send Alerts

• Trigger Scorecards


This helps increase accountability by not allowing closing dates to get pushed unchecked and is definitely one of our top best practice recommendations.

Adding notes and flags help crucial information stand out so you can make better decisions. There is a lot of flexibility in the rules, allowing this simple update to give a lot of utility for a power user.

In fact, this level of big picture visibility would cost a heck of a lot more in other CRMs, so what are you waiting for? For as little as €19 per month, you can start pulling answers to tough questions out of your holster faster than Annie Oakley.

We’ve added new capabilities to your process that will have a big effect on streamlining your workflow.

In a time when life keeps telling us to “let go” and “stop trying to control everything”, we are here to give you back some peace of mind with more control over the technology you use to be better at your job.

For starters, we’ve added new conditions and rules to automated events that allow users to do more complex things. Now available within all of the modules, the phrase "If this, then that" has now become your new best friend. 

This feature allows you to set conditions and rules to make very specific actions happen when an event is created. Here’s a few examples of how awesomeness could play out:

• When you've won a sales project, an account growth project is only created IF they're in a certain industry  
• You want to send a notification to guide, but only IF the value of that account is above a certain size
• You send an email to the Sales Manager that a Sales Project is won IF the won reason is “Strategic Planning”
• Create a strategic account project and then automatically create an implementation project IF the value is more than x.
• When you lose a deal in the pipeline due to timing being off, but they were a great fit  and we don't want to lose track of them, we can create a prospect using conditions and rules

The world is your oyster when it comes to ways you can use automated events. What would you like to do when a specific event is created? What action do you want to take? Do you want to add a label? Remove a label? Create a task? Create a prospect?

In addition to the amped up conditions and rules, when a sales project is won you can now  get more specific about the information that gets carried over to the next project when you win a deal, convert a prospect or create an account growth project. Anything you deem important to keep track of like technical fit, project delivery date or opportunity score can now follow you to the next phase.

This applies to both projects created from events and also from a step in the process.

Allowing you to:

• Select the process
• Assign an owner
• Copy value and other custom field information
• Copy documents
• Copy contacts and stakeholders
• Copy products
  
  

In a world where friends and even family encourage you to swipe right, we're here to tell you it's OK to be super selective, and now we've just made it even easier. 💥

Check out how to do some other cool stuff on automated events with our help center here.

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.