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n todays world of complex B2B sales, Sales Professionals play the leading role in generating revenue for businesses.

But when we take a closer look, it becomes clear that effective selling really is an inter-departmental affair. Individuals outside of the Sales Team often have a direct impact on the overall success of the sales team, with CRM assistants, technical resources, project managers, and other staff being involved at different milestones in the customer journey.  

So in order to make this collaboration between teams flow smoothly, we've introduced a new type of "light" Membrain account we call a Lite User Account - helping you involve all those key people in your business play their part and contribute to success.

 

These Lite Accounts are a bit more limited than a Full Account but can do all sorts of interesting things!

These accounts can't:

• Manage, win or archive sales projects, change sales project information or progress the sales process
• Create, qualify or disqualify prospects
• Be an admin, account manager, a coach for a sales team or have sales goals
• Have access to analytical tools or receive the weekly pipeline health report email
• Import/export information or do batch changes in the database

However, they absolutely can:

• Have access to all CRM information in companies, contacts, and deal information on prospects and sales projects
• Edit CRM information such as contact details, or company information
• Use Membrain's task management tools, calendar capabilities including sharing and syncing their calendar with the sales team and creating notes
• Send emails using templates and snippets, email tracking, Membrain Meet, and many other productivity boosters
• Use the mobile app Membrain Go
• Use Membrain comments to coordinate and collaborate with the sales team in every single deal and account
• Complete sales process steps needing their expertise that are specifically assigned to them. A huge team-selling win!

Sounds like something that could be interesting for your team?  Reach out to your Customer Success representative or email sales@membrain.com today and we'll go through it together!

 

Focus is what leads to success, right? But with endless computer programs and apps now necessary items in your Sales Toolkit, that focus is often hard to reach.

To help with this all too common problem, Membrain will soon introduce browser notifications, delivering all those Membrain Guide alerts that you can't afford to miss, regardless of where you're working.

Your browser will ask if you would like notifications from Membrain.com - click Allow!

So when you're busy in another tab in your browser, you'll still be alerted to things like:

• Meeting reminders - so you'll never miss the start of a meeting again
• Automated events - keeping you up to date on events in your Sales Projects/Prospects
• Comments and mentions - realtime collaboration with your colleagues
• Emails read/clicked links - instant insight into your communication efforts
• Plus all those other crucial notifications you get from Membrain Guide

So when your browser asks if you would like to Allow/Block notificaitons from Membrain. Click Allow to enjoy this new feature and stay on top of your day, in real time.

Read our Help Center article to find out more and learn how to turn on or off browser notifications for Membrain manually.

 THE SALES CONTENT YOU NEED, RIGHT WHEN YOU NEED IT

Join Henrik Öquist, Membrain's COO for an exciting first glimpse of the much anticipated Content Hub.

Date: November 6th
Time: 5pm Stockholm

• All your sales content in one place!
• Your sales team's training content at their fingertips
• Share the content your prospect wants, when it makes a difference
• Track engagement, so you know what's working
• With all your resources in one place, the entire team speaks with one voice!

Can’t attend live? You should still register!
We’ll send the recording after the webinar to all registrants.

It's a well-known fact that effectively qualifying leads is a crucial first step in the world of complex B2B sales.

But what happens once a prospect enters the pipeline and becomes an Active Sales Project? Situations can change and stakeholders attitudes towards a project can turn sour overnight.
Now is not the time to stop qualifying.

With that in mind, we've given Qualifiers a new lease of life by adding Importance to Qualifiers - highlighting the level of concern associated with a specific step and its Qualifier.

Add Importance to Qualifiers and use colors to indicate the severity of the situation, at a glance.

Steps are highlighted:

Blue - coaching advice
Yellow - needs attention
Red - action required

We hope you like this new update to Qualifiers and are excited to take a step towards a more versatile Sales Process today. Learn about Qualifiers and their new Visualized Importance

Email Templates and Snippets are such great time-savers in Membrain, giving you a powerful platform to communicate with your customer base effectively and professionally, every time.

Find out how Templates and Snippets can help your team communicate effectively

But what if you could get lots of information about who's actually using these great predifined Templates, or which handy Snippets are the most popular amongst the team? Invaluable information like this can help you understand whats really supporting the team while they keep in touch with customers or prospective clients.

Now, with the improved Templates and Snippets management area, you can see this helpful information in a familiar Membrain List format, with all the List configuring options that you've come to expcect.

Spot at a glance:

• Which Templates and Snippets are most popular amongst the team
• When they were last used, if at all - perhaps they need to be improved/deleted
• How many times each Template or Snippet has been used the past 30 days, or since creation
• Who is creating/editing them and which ones are availble to whom/which team

Want to know more?  Read our help centre article which outlines how you can start to Manage your Email Template and Snippet library today, and keep you and your team on top form with the best communication tools possible.

According to latest research, a complex B2B sale - with associated complex buying decision process - now involves an average of 6.8 actively engaged Stakeholders, sometimes more. And of course, we understand the importance of identifying and managing these Stakeholders and how this can ultimately affect the outcome of an opportunity.

To help you with this endeavour, we've updated the functionality in both the Sales Project List view and the Active Pipeline view to allow you to Group Sales Projects By Stakeholder, giving you the insight you need to manage common Stakeholders across a subsection of Sales Projects.  

But it doesn't stop there, you can also Group Sales Projects By Stakeholder Company Name, helping you manage indirect Stakeholders such as:

• Partners who have a stake in Sales Projects
• Internal Team Members who have been allocated a specific role
• 3rd party Companies - example below showing external IT Companies involved

And of course, this new functionality spans across all areas of Membrain including The Dashboard, giving you limitless possibilities for a whole new set of insights into how Stakeholders influence your success.

We're dedicated to giving you the best tools availalbe to help you manage Stakeholders. Check out these other features already available in Membrain like Stakeholders Influence and Attitude and the Decision Team Map.

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!