More control with Advanced User Rights

Update on December 14, 2017 by Brenda McDonald

As sales teams grow, you may find that you need to control access to information on a more granular level.

Currently, User Permissions enable you to allow/deny access to certain features of Membrain. But what happens when you want to control who’s information is accessible, and by whom? Enter Advanced User Rights.  

Which team members should be able to access which sales projects or prospects? And should everybody be able to see everybody else's activities or calendar items? Break it down into groups and assign those specific access rights just the way you want them.

Here are some examples to get you thinking:

  • Allow individuals access only to their own prospects - i.e. the prospects that they have created/been assigned to.
  • Allow team members from, lets say, the New Business Team access their own and other New Business team members Sales Projects - i.e. their own projects as well as their team members projects
  • Allow all users access All Calendar and Activity items, except those from the Senior Management team.
  • Allow members from, lets say Team Location A only access Companies and Contacts with an account manager who is part of Team Location A.

Using Advanced User Rights in ways like these means you can be quite specific about controlling access as well as helping team members focus on a particular subset of data.

Advanced User Rights are now available on the Excellence Tier of Membrain.

Here's the scoop on how to set up Advanced User Rights in Membrain today.

 

Minimize your emails, appointments, tasks & more to go get more info

Update on November 23, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

One of the great things with the recent Membrain update was that the pop-ups of yesteryear went away. These were used for things like editing activities, composing emails as well as a number of capabilities throughout Membrain.

The problem was that these popups weren't really that reliable. They behaved different on PC or Mac, they could be blocked by the browser and were quite easy to lose track of.

The tricky part with the update was that it locked you in there. So while you were writing an email or creating an agenda for a meeting, you couldn't move around Membrain to retrive any helpful information to complete what you were working on.

Now we've added something that makes this a lot easier!

When you're creating a new appointment, composing an email, editing an activity and several other places in Membrain, you can now minimize that dialog. This transforms the dialog into a small bubble that you can position on the screen, navigate in Membrain and find what you need and then click on the bubble to open it up again.

You can have up to 3 bubbles at any time, but only one of each kind (you can't have multiple bubbles for "composing an email" for example. Do keep in mind that it's not saved yet, it's a great approach to be able to move around freely in Membrain

We hope you find this helpful and that the new Membrain is easier and faster to use than ever before!

Simplified Stakeholder mapping

Update on June 15, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

People buy from people, which is one of the key challenges in b2b sales. Having a robust understanding of how the buyer navigates their own buying journey is really important, and the attitude, influence and stakeholder notes capabilities found i Membrain is powerful to visualize that landscape.

But hey, it really is complicated enough without having to duplicate your efforts of mapping what they think of you, your offer and your understanding of their influence on a buying decision, right?

Previously, when you had the same contact in multiple stakeholder roles each entry would have it's own set of data. If Paul McCartney was a stakeholder in two roles, let's say "initial contact" as well as another role, such as "financial decision maker", updating his information on role wouldn't affect the other one. It would have to be manually replicated.

While theoretically that could be used to map out one person's attitude and influence as related to that role (let's say somebody is really positive from a "project leader" standpoint but have some concerns from a "technical decision maker" standpoint, that could be illustrated.

In reality though, such scenarios are rare enough to simplify this.

From now one, when you update these findings on a contact in a stakeholder role, it would also automatically be updated in their other roles, without that manual duplicate entry. As always, we hope this change makes Membrain easier, more intuitive and faster to use.

Appointment Participants now Sync in Calender integration update

Update on June 5, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Previously, when you've created, or gotten invited to, a meeting in Outlook (Office365) or in your Google Calendar, there was one key thing that weren't brought over. Since that meeting could have participants that weren't contacts in Membrain, these participants weren't brought over with the rest of the meeting information. This left calendar-synced meetings looking like quite isolated affairs.

We're happy to let you know that not only are these participants now sync over, Membrain now also keeps the invitation status in sync between the different systems.

Using this information Membrain now even tries to automatically connect participants in these meetings to any potential sales projects or prospects that are open on contacts that do exist in Membrain. This can in large part automate your activity KPI:s!

This is another important step to make sure that the sales calendar in Membrain:

  • have all the important information you need to easily schedule, plan, prepare and engage with your prospects and clients
  • helps you easily create new contacts as you expand your contact surface with existing and potential clients
  • keeps you on top of everything that happens in a given week
  • does its part to minimize tedious manual activity reporting

We hope you find it really helpful!

Changes in pop-ups in Membrain

Update on May 31, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

You may have noticed something happening with the familiar pop-ups found throughout Membrain. They have started to look, and behave, a bit differently.

This is part of an on-going initiative to streamline and improve the user experience all through Membrain. We will continue to move away from the classic Membrain pop-up that creates an entirely separate browser window, and instead offer a more fluid and natural integration in how you work with the software.

The first category of pop-ups where you have already started to see this would be in the admin interface, moving a sales project from one process to another, when managing your emails and perhaps most prominently (and recently) when creating new tasks and appointments.

We hope you appreciate our on-going efforts to minimize (or even eliminate) confusion and friction when working in Membrain. Our ambition is that these changes gives you a more fluid and seamless flow, helping you build and maintain effective momentum in your sales efforts. 

Send email to the sales coach using "automated events"

Update on April 21, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Automated events in Membrain can be used for a number of reasons. Send a celebratory email to the team when you win, send a heads-up to operations when you've reached a key milestone in your process, notify somebody that a lead has been assigned to you, and so on.

You now also have the ability to send an email to the designated coach of the owner of a prospect and sales project. This can be used in a variety of ways:

  • Keep the sales coach aware of risks or issues that appear in opportunities that they can help adress
  • Alert the sales coach that a prospect or sales project haven't had any activity or progress in quite a while
  • Notify the coach that a prospect has been disqualified, or a deal has been lost. This helps keep everyone in the loop and makes it easier to review what happened, and how the approach can be improved going forward

There are many ways to use automated events, and adding the possibility to notify the sales coach via email in both prospecting and sales projects is a very practical addition to help keep the coach on top of everything that happens for the team.

New timezone options for Membrain Meet

Update on April 18, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Being able to allow your clients and prospects to select their own timezone in Membrain Meet is a great way of making sure the meeting is aligned in the calendars for everyone involved. But, if you are working specifically within one timezone, it can instead become a source of confusion and frustration.

For this reason, we've added a handy little option for the Membrain Meet calendar, you can now enable or disable the option for the people visiting your public calendar to select a timezone. This is how you turn it on:

  • Use the Membrain menu, to go to your personal settings. It's the cog wheels in the bottom middle part of the menu.
  • Click on the Membrain Meet segment that will expand the relevant options.
  • Close to the bottom of that page (just above where you can set up the different ways to meet, and if you want to block out holidays) you will now find the option "Allow visitor to select time zone".
  • Uncheck this checkbox and save the change to disable the timezone selector, and to ensure all meetings will happen in your specific timezone.

By default this option is enabled, so if you want to turn this off, be sure to follow the step by step mentioned above. We hope this helps make this useful capability even better for you!

Heads-up! Sales Analytics moved & improved

Update on April 10, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

A big update on sales analytics just went live in Membrain. The overview page is renamed to Performance, we've moved the Win/Loss analytics from the Membrain menu and into a tab of its own among the other sales analytics. In the Performance view you will find several improvements and changes!

So, what exactly are all these changes we've made to this view?

  • We've added helpful explanations of key concepts in the categorization Membrain use for metrics and goals
  • The Win/Loss analytics has moved into a tab of its own among, snugly fitting in among the other Sales Analysis views in Membrain 
  • The Pipeline/Prospecting tabs have been removed. All key metrics can be tracked in the Performance views (as goals), the Win/Loss view, or the upcoming customizable Dashboard that is in the final stages of beta. More on that (very exciting) final view in a later update!
  • The smaller graphs have a "zoom" mode you can click into to make the graph bigger and see more granular detail
  • We've added more options in the time selector, including choices like "this month", "last quarter" and more, including a very flexible custom option.
  • Another change to graphs is how forecasting works. Previously looking backwards was completely separate from looking into the future. It was even separated in two different time pickers. Now Membrain will seamlessly merge historical actual outcomes, with future forecasts at the current date and time, regardless of your view settings. (So now you you'll be able to check daily or monthly to track progress without even changing the view)
  • You can now decide if you want to show the graphs weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Very handy to get just the perspective for the occasion
  • The Win/Loss view has a new conversion graph that shows how sales projects move from stage to stage, more in-depth than what was previously found in the pipeline tab

Video Guide: The Pipeline in Membrain

Update on March 31, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

The Pipeline is your starting point in Membrain, both as a sales professional and as a sales leader. The sales pipeline is the lifeblood of any sales organization, and several key metrics for consistent sales effectiveness comes from best practise pipeline management. We've put together a quick video that shows you some helpful tips on how to make the most out of this capability. We hope you get some new ideas on how to use it.

 
 
 
 
 
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Wistia video thumbnail - Using the Pipeline view
 

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Advanced Activity filtering

Update on March 27, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

When you log in today you can find a powerful new capability, available to create even deeper and more intricate activity insight than ever before. In the new activity view (found on right-hand side of the Admin page, called "Activities") you can now create new filters using any information you've captured in a prospect or sales project.

This is incredibly powerful and can open up for entirely new forms of reporting and analytics. If you are keen to really "dig into it", this is your feature!

Some examples? Sure! If you want to know:

  • How much time your sales people in spending on poorly qualified sales projects with a scorecard value or opportunity size under a certain threshold
  • How much activity your team is doing segmented by industry, product line or anything really.
  • How much activity are you seeing on sales project that have a near-term closing date vs long-term opportunities that are not going to close shortly?
  • Create an automated report that gives you detailed insight into the activities that are being done with sales project that are at risk (for example red flags and warnings), including the sales project information itself
  • Keep other departments updated on the activities being done on marketing generated leads, or the final steps leading up to handing it over to a bidding or operational team
You can get really creative and see exactly only what you want to see! This capability is available on all tiers of Membrain and we hope you find it really helpful!

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