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.

As sales professionals we do have to make the absolute most out of every email we send, and we send a ton of them. They have to be relevant, we have to be efficient in writing them and we have to be consistent across the team in our messaging. Being able to do all this when mobile is key! So. Enter Email Snippets for your mobile!

These handy things are just like an email template, but smaller, and more agile. You can insert them wherever you like in your emails and they can be used to augment your emails in a variety of ways:

• Answer common questions on product or service specifics, pricing queries, technical details...
• Easily provide information, documentation and links to prospects
• Weave together follow-ups that seamlessly blend tailored information to an individual with carefully crafted pitches, explanations, etc

And now you can used them right in your phone to quickly respond and compose emails that align with the company message while keeping you efficient!

We hope you find this helpful in making sure you can stay on top of the productivity game. For more information on how you get started using snippets, visit our help center!

It's one of the more requested features in recent Membrain history, and it has arrived! You will now be able to see your recurring and all-day events created in Google Calendar and Office365 right inside of Membrain.

While Membrain has had full two-way sync between these two dominant calendars for quite some time now, these specific types of events have been more elusive. All three of these calendars have their own strengths, weaknesses and quirks. That makes it gosh darn tricky to sync the more complicated setup of a recurring event.

What you will now find is that even though these events may not be possible to fully sync in a two-way fashion so you would be able to edit them in Membrain, you can still see them directly within the Membrain Sales Calendar, easily distinguishable from all other activities.

This helps make sure that you don't miss any other meetings (weekly company meetings, private events synced from another calendar and so on) as well as making sure that this timeslot is still seen as booked for both colleagues as well as clients wanting to book a meeting time with you using your Membrain Meet Calendar!

Email. You can hate it or love it, but it's not going anywhere. It's an absolutely essential part of a sales professionals toolbox. In fact, it's so commonly used that many of us (including your clients) have not just one but multiple email adresses. Let's take a look at how this recent update in Membrain helps you manage that better. 

In Membrain the email address is used for several things, among other:

• Prioritizing your inbox using the Sales Inbox
• Searching after a specific contact's email
• Keeping check of meeting invite accepts and rejects
• Helping to recognize a duplicate contact on imports
• And of course, actually emailing people 

Previously in Membrain, if a contact had multiple email adress, the only way to handle this was really to have multiple contacts. So if George Brontén existed in your contact list you had to have two separate contacts to manage george@membrain.com separately from george.bronten@membrain.com. With this change you can follow the email thread easier even if this contact is switching back and forth between these email addresses. You can find this capability by editing a contact's email address like shown below, or by merging two contacts that should really be one person with two email addresses.

After this merge, the sales inbox will recognize email from this person correctly, regardless of which email address being used, Membrain Meet will do the same, and you can search, show and filter on secondary email addresses. All email sent will focus on the primary email address which is the one that will be shown in most places in Membrain.

We hope you like it!

A view is a whole new concept in Membrain which allows you to personalise what information you want to see, and how you would like to see it. It then takes these settings you have configured for viewing your Sales Projects, Prospects, CRM and Activity lists, and lets you save them as a View

These views, including all your filtering, sorting, grouping and even visual settings, are then ready for you to jump back to, when needed, with just a click of a mouse.

• Create different views of your Active Pipeline and switch between these views showing your opportunities from different perspectives.
• Set up a Company list that shows specific information and share it for everyone to see.
• Get more specific and use filters to highlight certain Prospects that you want a particular team to focus on, and share the view for that specific team.
• And for all of these views you create and share, you can also manage who can edit your view, ensuring you stay in control.

We hope you like this new feature and are excited to start using Views today! Get the scoop on how to set one up in our Working with Views help center article.

We love Sales Analysis. In fact, we love it so much we thought we’d give the Sales Analysis area of Membrain some extra love and attention and expand each view right across the full with of the screen, making it even more beautiful than before.

In this newest Membrain update, we've optimized the layout of all the Sales Analysis views - Dashboards, Performance, Win/Loss and Weekly Reports - so they take advantage of the full screen width and are viewable in all their colourful, visual glory, right across the screen.

So whether you choose to use The Dashboard to kick off a Sales Team Meeting, or want to keep an eye on the pipeline in the Performance view, this improvement will surely give you a clearer picture and help you focus on the trends that are important to your business.

Follow these links learn more about The Dashboard and The Performance views in Membrain.

Sales enablement has always held a special place in Membrain’s heart - so much so that we’ve been named the Top Sales Enablement Technology the past two years straight.

So it’s no wonder that we’ve pushed the boundaries even further to bring you more Sales Enablement Content capabilities, helping sales managers provide all the resources their sales team needs to engage the buyer throughout the buying process, sell smart and reach their targets. 

Previously, sales enablement content in Membrain was limited to simple text descriptions. But with this recent update, this helpful content can come in the form of files (documentation, templates), links (external websites or online tools) and possibly most exciting: videos (embedded video files from Wistia or YouTube). And whats even better, is that these new content types can all be accessed right across all custom fields in Membrain.

This ability to add content to individual steps in your sales process. and now custom fields and other key areas in Membrain allows sales representatives find helpful resources specific to what they're working on, right when they need it. 

There is a world of opportunity opening up, and we are just at the beginning of our journey in adding Sales Enablement Content capabilities in Membrain, so look out for more exciting features in the future!

To learn more about how the Sales Enablement Content features in Membrain can support your sales team, read this article Add Sales Enablement Content