Views - create and save your own perspective

Update on January 28, 2018 by Brenda McDonald

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.

Some great ways to use views:
  • 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.

 

Sales Analysis - now full screen width

Update on January 23, 2018 by Brenda McDonald

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 content - where and when you need it

Update on December 22, 2017 by Brenda McDonald

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. 

Sales Enablement Content in Membrain

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

 

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!

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