Goal setting is an important part of motivating and holding salespeople accountable. The right goals give salespeople something to stretch for, plus the satisfaction of achievement when they do.

All this is great for the individual Salesperson, but what if we want to look at the Sales Team as an entity unto to itself?

Membrain has just introduced Team Based Goals - offering you the flexibility of tracking each Sales Persons personal performance, while separately keeping a close eye on the performance of the Sales Team as a separate reportable unit.

Lets take a look at 2 very different scenarios where this can be beneficial.

1. As a Sales Leader, you want to track Sales Performance of the overall team, not individuals. The main focus is not on who is bringing in the revenue, rather its the group effort that counts. In this case, setting a Team Based goal which all Sales Representatives contribute to will provide you with the information you need to track and forecast overall Sales Performance of the team itself.

2. As an individual, you want to keep track of your own personal sales goals, without skewing overall Team Goal expectations. Individual goals are great for tracking personal revenue goals, for motivation or perhaps keeping on track for commissions. But when combining each individuals goal, the overall Teams Goal can be skewed and reflect a larger than expected outcome.
In this case, creating an additional Team Based goal on top of the individual goals allows you to track the Teams performance as a separate unit, helping you see it from both perspectives. 

Learn all about Setting up Goals in Membrain for both individuals and Teams, and see the benefits goals can bring to your business today!

Here at Membrain, we strive to bring you the best productivity tools possible to help you elevate your game. One of those tools is of course Membrains Sales Calendar. This intuitive calendar allows you to manage appointments and is packed with great additional features like Membrain Meet - Membrains online scheduling service and the Zoom Online Meetings integration.  

One of the hidden gems of the Sales Calendar is the 2 way sync between your Google, Office 365 or Exchange calendar, making it even easier to manage your time efficiently.

A Reliable and Robust Calendar

Improving and developing the Sales Calendars functionality is key to providing a solid platform for you to work from. So with this in mind, we've made some changes to how the Sales Calendar behaves and manages Participant Invite Statuses when a sync is in place between your Google or Office 365 calendar and Membrains Sales Calendar.

- Important Update -

How Membrain manages the status of a participant invites in your appointments has changed. In order for this feature to work reliably, we strongly recommend that your Office 365 email address matches the email address you use to log in to Membrain. The same applies to your Google Calendar, your Gmail email address should match the email address you use to log in to Membrain.

In fact, if you are using a personal Gmail account (the free end-user type) we strongly recommend that you upgrade to a G Suite business account to get the full benefit of this sync between Google and Membrain Calendars

Of course, if you're happy with the sync as it is there's no need to change a thing! Just keep in mind you may miss out on that helpful invite status in the appointment itself, letting you know if a participant can make your meeting or not. But don't worry, you will still get that default email from the client letting you know if they have accepted or rejected your meeting request. And very soon Membrain Guide will be on hand to advise you of meeting accepts or rejects as they happen!

We hope you will see the benefit of these updates with a more reliable and robust Calendar Sync. Read more about this and how to set up the sync in this article Calendar Sync Setup and also of all the benefits of the Sales Calendar. 

If you're working with Prospecting, you'll know that there are often multiple opportunities to pursue in one organisation at any given time. So we've shaken things up a little in the Prospecting Area of Membrain and introduced a new way to help you keep on top of each and every one.

Prospects can now be given a descriptive name, allowing you to highlight what the potential business opportunity itself is all about. Add this to the Company name and the Contact you're dealing with and you get a more rounded overview of the prospect at hand while helping you identify between different prospects effortlessly.

And to complement this change, we've also made some additional improvements:

• Right beside the company name you will see a count of other Sales Projects or Prospects related to this company, giving you the insight you need for effective account management.
• Add a title to the Contact details on the main Prospect View, so you have all the information you need at hand before making that call.

Read this article about Prospecting in Membrain  and learn how Membrain can help you achieve success in your Prospecting efforts.

Subscribe to Membrains Dashboards and receive those colorful, data-rich reports direct to your inbox, right when you need them.

As Dashboards grow in popularity in the Membrain community, the ability to subscribe to a Dashboard has quickly become our #1 feature request. So today we're happy to announce that you can now have your favourite Graphs and Reports delivered right to your inbox, on a schedule that suits you.

But it doesn't stop there, subscriptions can be managed by admins across the whole team and for all Dashboards, so you can subscribe to any Dashboard (permissions granted of course), or sign up a colleague so they don't miss out.

Not using Dashboards yet?  Watch this video and get started!

Who can benefit from subscribing to Dashboards? Here are just a few ideas to get you thinking...

• Team Leaders - Subscribe your team members to a personalised Activity and Pipeline Management Dashboard and help them keep on top of progress, week on week.
• Sales Managers - Subscribe to those important Sales related Dashboards and receive them in your inbox ahead of the Weekly Sales Meeting, or send them to the team so they're prepped in advance.
• Board Members - Receive a monthly Business Review for that insightful Company level overview.

Additional Updates

Exporting to PDF or Excel

Want to get those visual graphs out of Membrain for use somewhere else?

We've added the ability to Export a Dashboard as a PDF file, giving you access to all those visual graphs and reports outside of Membrain. Or if you want to manipulate the numbers in Excel, or perhaps import them into another system, the Export to Excel option is there for you. 

What color are you?

Margot is blue, Alicia is orange, John is pink. You'd be surprised at how helpful this additional tweak to the Dashboard will be once you notice it. Yes, you're right. All Membrain users are now allocated a color in the Dashboard to make visualising data from graph to graph crystal clear. 

So for those graphs that use colors to help you see the data at a glance, Margot is always presented in blue, Alicia is always orange and John is always pink. Specific colors can be assigned to users if you like, although black is not available as an option so there can be no arguing over who gets to be Mr. Black :)

We hope you're excited about these new updates to the Dashboard, go check them out! 

Membrains Sales Inbox and Sales Calendar could be considered the two unsung heroes of Membrain. They bring focus to important emails and help you manage your meetings like a true professional.  

Learn all about the powerful features Membrains Sales Inbox and Sales Calendar

But there's always room for improvement, right? So we've been busy working on the things we know will bring even more productivity to your day. Take a look at these 8 improvements we've made recently, in order of pure awesomeness.

1. Want to keep appointments from your 'other' synced calendar private? No problem! Turn on this feature and appointments which are synced over to your Membrain Calendar will still show, but the details will not be visible.

2. Are you an order geek?  Select the Sent Folder where you would like to store the emails you send via Membrain. This is a handy tip for those who use a localized language version of outlook or gmail. 

3. Need to add images to your emails as quick as a flash? Now you can with improved image functionality for both the individual email composer and email template creator. 

4. Like to let your colleagues know your availability? Use the Free/Busy feature when adding appointments to your calendar and keep your day planned out to perfection.

5. Enjoy enhancing your emails with some fancy HTML code?  Previously only available for Email Templates, you can now toggle between HTML and WYSIWYG mode when creating individual emails from the email editor.

6. Need to know when to update your email sync and calendar sync passwords? We got you covered.  Once Membrain spots that the sync has stopped working (usually because you've changed your email or calendar passwords) you will receive a Membrain Guide notification and an email, both guiding you to where you need to go to get back on track.

7. Can't wait to get started with Email and Calendar sync? Excellent! We've made setting up the sync super simple. For Office 365 and Gmail, all you need is your email address and password to get going. 

8. And coming soon! - Snippet and Template usage tracking for Admins of Membrain. Learn who's using which snippets and templates and make the most of this feature for the team.

We hope you like these new improvements, and are excited to give them a try! 

And if you're not already using these features of Membrain learn how to get up and running in no time with these short articles Email Sync Setup and Calendar Sync Setup

This one is for all you Dashboard fans out there. We've just introduced a powerful new option to Graphs allowing you to see your business critical  data, now with Accumulated Totals. 

As a sales leader, its important to keep track of specific results on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis. And its not unusual to have certain periods which are typically much higher (or lower) in sales revenue than others, so planning on those trends can help to avoid surprises in the pipeline later down the line.

But what about the bigger picture? How does it all add up over time?

Accumulated Totals is a new option available when creating Graphs in The Dashboard, and can be used for all date-driven graphs. With this feature comes the ability to create meaningful graphs which illustrate crucial aspects of your sales department over time, with Accumulated Values that makes your Dashboard worth its weight in gold.

This graph shows the break down of data, showing Total Revenue per month.

The same graph, and the same data but using the new Accumulated Totals option highlighting trends over time.

Any time you want to see how things add up over time, the accumulated graphs are there to help. Want to see how much total revenue you're winning versus losing over time? Want to track total revenue by industry? Want to track how many prospects came from different events in total over time? The accumulated graphs got you covered. We hope you like them.

So go check out The Dashboard and see how you can change up the perspective between normal and accumulated graphs now!

Membrain Guide has become an integral part of how we work, offering timely reminders, guidance and focus to our day.  

Its that little reminder whispered in your ear, ensuring you don't miss the start of your next appointment. Or that subtle tap on your shoulder when a yellow flag appears on one of your Sales Projects, keeping you on top of whats important.

Adding to this functionality, we've included a new feature we call Push to Guide. This allows you to send messages about events in your Sales Projects or Prospects, and have them appear in Membrain Guide - right as they happen so you don't miss a beat.

And whats more, you can tailor these messages and send them to specific people so only the most important things get through, reducing noise and increasing your productivity.

Some examples of how you can use Push to Guide today:

• A new Sales Project has been created? Send a message to the Sales Manager via Guide
  
  
• An important Step has been completed in the Sales Project? Send a message the Sales Team Leader, or an individual via Guide
  
  
• A Prospect has been disqualified? Send a message to the
  Company Account Manager via Guide.

We hope you like this new feature. Why not take a few minutes to read up on the all the other capabilities Membrain Guide has to offer, or learn how to set up Automated Events in your Sales Processes or Prospecting Campaigns.

Lists. We love their insight, their clarity, their simplicity. And now there's another reason to love Lists as we've added a powerful new feature which gives you more analytical information for all your numerical data. 

• Group the Sales Project List by Closing Date to see the Sum of Sales Project Values expected to close per month. 

• Group the Company List by Industry and see Min and Max Number of Widgets sold in each industry.
• Or how about creating a Scorecard to calculate your Customer Fit Score and Grouping by Country to see where your best customers are located.

In a world of web based software, securing confidential information and ensuring data integrity is of utmost importance. 

This is why we have added Two-Factor Authentication to the options available in keeping your Membrain account, and the data stored within it, safe and secure.

Over recent years Two-Factor Authentication has evolved as the single most effective way to protect businesses against remote attacks and can prevent most unauthorised access into your organisation, even if login credentials become compromised.

With Google Authenticator, you can add a second layer of security - along with your secure username and password - when logging in to your Membrain account. So you can rest assured that your information is always safeguarded.

Learn more about how Google Authenticator works with Membrain, along with a simple 2 minute guide on how to make your Membrain Account more secure.