Its a small one... but its a biggie. And its a new feature that we believe will make planning your day so much more flexible.

Free/Busy time in Membrains Sales Calendar allows you to add those appointments which previously may have only cluttered your calendar and marked you as unavailable. Now you can add those smaller, perhaps more abstract time blocks to your calendar, but still show yourself as free and available.

A couple of examples:

• Working from home? Mark out your whole day with an appointment, but mark it as Free, so you're still available for potential client meetings coming in via Membrain Meet
• Blocking off some time for research? Pop an appointment in the calendar, but mark it as free so your colleagues see you're still reachable.

And of course, if you're syncing to your Outlook 365/Exchange or Google Calendar, these Free/Busy settings will be reflected there too.

We hope you enjoy this new addition! Learn more about this and the other useful features available to you in Membrains Sales Calendar.

Data is at the heart of any business solution, and in this regard Membrain is no different. But adding real intelligence to how this information is interconnected makes a world of difference.

Relationship fields give an additional layer of flexibility to your data and make it work harder for you. They are a very simple but powerful way to take filtered, cross-sections of information from virtually anywhere in Membrain, and show the results in a new, dynamic list.

The result is a database that not only stores your valuable information, but allows you to create intelligent connections between fields, making account and opportunity management even more insightful.

Some examples of where Relationship fields can be very powerful:

• On the Company page, select a Supplier from a single-select list which is filtered to only show Suppliers from a certain industry
• On a Prospect, highlight relevant Competitors from a multi-select list of Companies that have the Competitor Label applied.
• In the Active Pipeline, link a Sub-Project to a larger Sales Project in a different Sales Process.

• Show related information in a Sales Project or Prospect, and jump to it via the relationship link.
• Add a Relationship Field as a column in any List or View, and then Group By or Sort By this relationship
• Use Relationships in graphs on your Dashboard, and even Show By and Segment By in these graphs

We hope you like this awesome new feature and are excited to learn more about setting up Relationship Fields in Membrain. Have you got an idea where this could work for you? Get started and try one out today!

If you've been using Snippets then you'll already know how super useful they are when composing emails.

In fact, Snippets have been doing so well at helping us become more productive in our communication, that we've decided to give them a promotion! You can now use these much loved Snippets not just when composing emails, but also when creating appointments.

Haven't tried out Snippets yet?  Let me explain... Snippets can be described as little nuggets of text that you tend to use over and over again when communicating with customers, like an introduction or a standard meeting agenda. You can save these perfectly formed one-liners or short paragraphs as Snippets and then insert them into emails or meeting invites when needed. So, they're almost like a template, but shorter, more flexible and incredibly useful.

Not only do Snippets save you time writing, but they also help you keep your communication style consistent, which is always a good thing. Plus, you can share your Snippets with your colleagues so everyone can benefit from a well written email or structured meeting invite.  

Start working smarter and create some Snippets today. You can find Snippets both in the desktop version of Membrain and in our mobile app Membrain Go wherever you see theSnippet icon. 

PieSyncs mission is to synchronize the internet - piece by piece.You can now integrate Membrain with dozens and dozens cloud apps using our PieSync integration. It provides 70+ different integrations, with new apps being added by PieSync every week. Integrations include services like Email Marketing & Automation apps, Customer Support, Accounting, eCommerce and much more. 

The Membrain and PieSync integration offers a two-way sync between Membrain and apps like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Google Contacts, and many more. No more need to import and export contacts to and from Membrain. You can keep contacts synced in real time to always have up-to-date customer information all through your tech stack.

What does it connect to?

A lot. Really. A lot. See below for just some of the tools it connects to!

Excited to get started?

We totally understand. We're excited too! Click here to learn how to get your first sync set up.

As web technologies improve, online meetings are becoming more and more common. And its no wonder! They allow you to connect face-to-face with contacts worldwide, which you may never have been able to meet otherwise. As well as the obvious upside of saving lots of time travelling to and from physical locations.

So to make setting up these meetings more time-efficient, you can now set up a Zoom online meeting and add it to your Membrain appointment with one click. Send out invites to the participants... and you're done!

And whats more... if you're already clever enough to be using Membrain Meet (the shared online version of your Membrain Calendar) you can allow your contacts create the Zoom meeting while they're booking an appointment with you.  

We know. We love it too.

We hope you're as excited about this new feature as much as we are. So set up the Zoom Integration with a few simple clicks and start using this super time-saving feature today!

Pssst... using Skype for Business?  Watch this space for details on our Skype for business Integration coming soon!

Missed our live GDPR Webinar?  Watch the recording below, and catch up on what you need to know as we approach the May 25th deadline.

Henrik Öquist, COO at Membrain breaks down the fundamentals of GDPR and goes through some new features in Membrain, designed to help you become compliant.

If you have specific questions on Membrain & GDPR, please feel free to reach out to your assigned Membrain contact and we'll do our best to answer them.

Do note that we are unable to offer full legal advice. We can share how to use Membrains new capabilities, anecdotes and information on what we are doing internally as well as share best practises learned in our own research.

Modern sales is moving more and more into a collaborative format where no sales professional is an island. With a new capability it's easier than ever to pass the baton on to our colleagues and collaborate seamlessly in our sales process.

When working with complex b2b sales we have everything from the demand-generation efforts of a business development representative (BDR) to teams managing complex bidding scenarios. We may need to ask a technical resource for their input or guidance on a offer or setting up a proof-of-concept environment. Or it might be that we have to manage our sales costs and our VP's needs to sign off before we move into costly pilot project with a potential customer.

All of these require a smooth and efficient hand-over between various resources in our sales teams to make sure we are effective and professional. It needs to be streamlined so we don't drop the ball that could cost us the customer, hurt our chances of profitability or to simply minimize frustration and friction between different departments in our organization.

Available in the Excellence tier of Membrain you will now see a new tool start rolling out to gradually, the ability to "Assign Steps" in your sales process.

When you edit your sales process and add "more" content or tools to a step in that process, you will now start to see this new capability. You can choose who will be able to complete this step in a variety of ways. Only the sales project owner? A specific person, such as your sales manager? The coach of an individual? Or another department? As long as they have access to Membrain, you can assign steps to them.

This means that this particular step can only be completed by these specific people or roles. It will automatically notify these people in your organization when it's set as the next step, and alert the sales project owner once completed. Read more about how to create an Assigned Step here.

Very easy. Very handy. Very powerful. 

We hope you'll benefit from this new capability!

By now you are hopefully acutely aware of the four-letter word, GDPR. This stands for the General Data Protection Regulation and will come into effect on May 25.

The aim is to strengthen the privacy rights of EU individuals, place higher demands on how companies manage and protect personal information used in their businesses. This has massive implications for all organizations that do business with EU individuals. See below for our quick run-through!

What is GDPR?

There is a lot to take in. We've created a page on our website for this, where we try to explain the fundamentals of what this means. Click here to view that page! The over-simplified version of it is:

• Carefully consider the balance between people having given consent to save their information and legitimate need for your business to hold that information.
• Only save the information that you absolutely need to manage your business.
• Only save it for as long as you absolutely must have it.
• Information categorized as “sensitive information” is incredibly hard to defend against the GDPR and should be avoided by internal policies and audits.

There are many other aspects to it, so please read through the full page and the reference links. Additionally, if you haven't already, reach out to someone who can help you build out your internal policies and routines to ensure you are fully GDPR-compliant ahead of the deadline.

What does it mean for you as a customer of Membrain?

We are adding some new capabilities to make it easy for you to manage all these requirements as a customer of Membrain. In our Help Center article around GDPR you will find more information, which will be continually updated and added upon. We also have a few item that stand out enough to warrant specific articles, see below:

• The right to be forgotten
  Upon request you will be able to easily anonymize information recognizing the persons right to be forgotten.
  
  
• The right to access
  Individuals have the right to access their personal data and supplementary information. When somebody requests to see all information you have saved on their person in Membrain, you will be able to do that at the click of a button.

We're also changing our own internal routines on how we can access your data to better help troubleshoot issues, offer hands-on support and improving our services. This includes adding the capability for you as a customer to completely block off our access to your data if desired.

Questions?

If you have specific questions on Membrain & GDPR, please feel free to reach out to your assigned Membrain contact and we'll do our best to answer them.

Do note that we are unable to offer full legal advice. We can share how to use these new capabilities, anecdotes and information on what we are doing internally as well as share best practises learned in our own research.

With a bigger sales organization comes many challenges. How do you manage the filters the different teams are using to make sure everyone is operating under the same conditions? How do you share dashbords that help the team track their efforts? Or how about when a sales manager leaves and you need to access these things that may have been set up by this person?

Now on the System Setup page in Membrain, you can find all the filters and dashboards the team is using, even the individual ones. This makes it easier to manage these things and share the best approaches across the team, and to handle when somebody has set up something really useful or clever and leaves.

It's one of those small changes that we hope just make it a little bit easier to make the most of Membrain.

The dashboard capability available in the Excellence tier of Membrain is an incredibly powerful analytical tool. The things you can visualize and track range from the operational (activities, leaderboards and similar) to the strategic (breaking into new markets, process adoption or more sophisticated metrics you want to keep track of).

Over the last few months we've quietly been adding a number of refinements and new abilities to this view. Let's dive in!

• When wanting to represent your bar graphs by stage, we now sort them chronologically, the first stage first, all through to the final. Previously this was alphabetically, which is significantly less helpful.
• Color logic is now applied when visualizing things like pipeline health, deal status and so on. So a "red flag" sales project should now clearly be marked red in a graph instead of purple, blue, green or whichever color it happened to receive. 
• With the new "Stakeholders Mapped" you can track how well you identify key stakeholders, and what impact that has on things like deal size, win rate and more.
• Track sales project, pipeline and outcomes of these efforts of channel partners (for example) using the new capability to "show by" all the stakeholder roles you identify in your process
• When editing a graph you can turn on and off "legends" that explains the in any graph in line, pie and bar graphs
• We've also made minor improvements like when looking at a table graph and you need to scroll, the row and column headers are "sticky" and stays in place, making it a lot easier to understand the numbers you're looking at.

These are just the main things we've added as we continue to make sure you have powerful BI-level analytical capabilities while being very easy to setup and customize. Learn more about the dashboard in the Membrain Help Center.