Membrain Meet now enriches your contacts!

Update on March 25, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

When a new contact uses your Membrain Meet calendar to book a meeting with you, Membrain will now search for more information on that contact.

This means that new contacts will go from being a total unknown, to potentially already having some key information populated. Things like a link to their LinkedIn profile, their Twitter account, their title and more is something that you will find is often automatically added by Membrain when you're using Membrain Meet. Whenever possible we even try to add their direct phone number!

We hope this adds just another additional layer of value for sales professionals who are using the already great Membrain Meet capability to easily schedule meetings with clients and prospects.

Membrain Go - 12-hour (am/pm) clock support

Update on March 22, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

For many users around the world, a 24-hour clock is seen as military time and can be quite confusing. In Membrain we've had support for both 12- and 24-hour options for quite some time, but Membrain Go haven't had this until now.

When you log in today though, you will find that if you have set up Membrain to use a 12-hour clock (where you select am/pm) it will now be correctly reflected all throughout the mobile app, both when looking at your calendar, and when creating or moving meetings around. 

This was something that we've gotten quite a lot of requests for, so we're really happy to be able to provide this capability to make the calender even more useful for sales professionals around the globe.

Calendar Update: Private events are now supported in Membrain

Update on March 20, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Being able to sync your Membrain calendar with another calendar is a great way to keep control over your week. Sometimes though, that other calendar also has personal information in it. Things you may not want to share with your team. To help manage this we have now implemented support for "private events" in Membrain!

This new capability will let you see your own information in these meetings, but for everyone else, even including people with full administrative permissions will only see the time the meeting takes up in your calendar and that it is a private event. No content in this meeting will be shared in any way to anybody else but the person who has the meeting. 

Within Membrain you change the status of an event from "public" to "private" by opening the appointment up and clicking on the "more" button at the bottom of the view. There you will find the option to toggle this on or off. You can also right-click on any appointment anywhere in Membrain and easily change it.

We also fully support the sync of this with Google Calendar and Exchange/Office365 to make sure that whatever meetings you have there are correctly handled when synced to or from Membrain.

New: Activity Reporting updates

Update on March 13, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Activities are essential in sales. Without activity, we would never get the outcomes we're looking for. Right? For this reason, we're happy to announce that we now have support for automated activity reports and a new view to filter and see activities in a list format.

Automated Activity Reports

The automated report view is a convenient way to get information from Membrain into the almost universally accepted Excel format. The reasons for wanting to do this is as numerous as there are sales organizations, but often it comes down to things such as information to an operational team, a board meeting and similar. Previously it was possible to do this with sales project and prospect information but now you can also do this for activities.

Using this capability you can subscribe to a more granular and detailed view of the efforts of the sales team. You can even bring with you the higher level picture of the prospect or sales project information (such as stage, sales project value, closing date, and much more) along with the activities, so this can truly give a complete picture of what exactly is happening in your pipeline.

The new Activity view

If you have admin priviliges you can now use the Membrain menu and go to the admin view. On the right-hand side there you will find the automated excel reports. Nestled just above it? The new activity view!

This view is in and of itself not necessarily visually breath-taking, but it does use the many familiar capabilities of the other list views in Membrain. Use the quick selectors to see only specific people, processes, time spans and more. Create filters to drill down even more specifically and select which columns you want to see in this list.

We know that a lot of our clients have been asking for a view like this. It's straight-forward, but it gives a a very easy-to-see list of all the activities that matches what you want to see. This is also a place where you can now export activities beyond what you have been able to do before.

We hope you have a lot of use of this new capability, and do let us know your feedback on what you would like to see added to a view like this.

Automatically enriching new companies & contacts

Update on March 9, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Creating a new company or contact in Membrain? Don't miss this! We've updated these key dialogues with some really helpful capabilities that is sure to make the day of any sales professional easier.

When creating a new company, it can be a bit of a pain to enter all the basic information such as their address, main phone number and trying to find all their various social profile pages. When creating contacts it's also very helpful to further augment this with things like their title and if possible, their much sought after phone number. 

We've made a seemingly small, but really quite big update here in the new company and new contact dialogues. At first the the changes are hard to spot, but we've added a domain field in the new company dialogue, and moved the email field up top in the new contact dialog. Why?

Creating a new contact

Well, if you start by entering the email adress of a new contact, Membrain will actually search for key information on that contact for you. First name, last name, title, social media profiles and (if available!) their phone number, among other pieces of information.

We're also helping you find duplicate contacts in this dialog now. So if you enter an email that already exists, Membrain will highlight this for you. 

Creating a new company

If you're creating a new company, you can choose to start with either the company name or enter the more precise website address if you have it easily accessible. Membrain will then try to complete the soon-to-be created company with more information such as their address, main phone line and more. If you start with the company name, you'll get a few suggestions that matches that name, if you start with the domain you will get more specific results.

We understand that sales people have a lot on their plates, and we hope that this new addition makes your day just a little bit more efficient, and a bit more happily pleasant.

Text filters & filter creation update

Update on March 7, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Many things in Membrain rely on filters to show you exactly the information you want to see. Previously it hasn't been possible to use information found in free text formats such as text fields, street adresses, city names and many more similar cases. Now you can do this, and also more easily see a preview of what the filter will show. Additionally you can now create filters from places like the automated report page itself. 

Text filters

The text filter capability has been added in a very flexible and powerful way, and you have some options here:

  • Starts with - This matches the text you input in the filter with what the information in the field starts with
  • Ends with - Similarly to above, this matches the text you input in the filter with what the information in the field end with
  • Contains - This is the default choice and the easiest one to use. It will try to find any matches that contains the text you put in the filter regardless of it's in the beginning, middle or end.
  • Is - This is what to use when you want to be really specific. The value needs exactly match your input to show up.
  • Has any value - This is a great way to find what companies, contacts or similar has any information added to them in a field. Great to use to find people that "has any value" such as a phone number or email address and such.
  • Has no value - Similar to the one above, it's great for house-cleaning. This can be used to identify things such as contacts that don't have a title, phone number and such.
  • Wildcard - The wildcard allows you to get a bit more creative and use the * character to search for things such as "C*O" as a title and see all contacts that appear. 

Filter Preview

We also took some steps forward in showing you a preview inside the filter setup itself what you are going to see when using the completed filter.

Sometimes when creating filters in a view like the pipeline view or prospect list other things (such as the process selector) can make it more difficult to understand and get a feeling for what exactly the filter itself will show. This is particularly true and useful for automated reports and exports. 

Creating and Editing filters from new places

Another thing that made creating automated reports a little convoluted is that you had to go back and forth between the automated report view and the view you created the filter for (the prospecting list or the sales project list for example). It wasn't possible to create filter right from there.Well, we fixed that as well!

Now you can create and edit filters right from the automated report page which saves a lot of time and eliminates the confusion to work around the view specific settings as mentioned before. Along with the new filter preview we hope this makes it easier than ever to get exactly the information you want in both views and reports. 

So make today the day to test the new filters, and the new automated reports! It's quickly becoming a very powerful way to get the information you want to see in several different ways and we're looking forward to seeing all the creative ways you can use these capabilities.

Please note: We've moved the "user" dropdown selector

Update on February 27, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

As you log in today you will quickly notice that we've moved a small, but central, part of Membrain: The dropdown list where you select who's sales projects, prospects, companies, calendar, etc you want to see.


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Wait, so where is it now?

You can now find this selector in the same place as all the other things you use to control what exactly you want to see. It now fits snugly in with the controls you use to control which process, which status, etc to see in various views.

Why did we move it?

We realize changes like this can be a little disorienting and it can take some time to get used to (muscle memory is a powerful thing). However, we never do them without good reason. The primary goal for us was to collect all the things you use to choose what you want to see in all of the views in Membrain. It just makes sense to have them all in one place. 

For new users who haven't yet gotten familiar with this, we consistently received feedback that it was out of the way, and it visually blended together with the search and freetext filter controls. It got a little messy there. Hopefully this change addresses this.

Hey, there is also a bonus benefit with this!

The dropdown now uses the normal Membrain "multi-select" values in views like the sales pipeline, the sales project list, prospect view and several others. This means that previously you could only see "all", "all for a team" or one single person at a time.

Now you can mix and match to your hearts delight and quickly see exactly the people you want to see. 

 

Video Guide: How create a Playbook in Membrain

Update on February 21, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

The Playbooks found in the Excellence tier of Membrain are incredibly powerful. They can enable you to dynamically change your approach to any given opportunity. It's a great way to make it easy for everyone on the team execute your process and ensure thatsaid process is relevant and helpful in every single deal. That said, getting started can be a bit daunting. So, here is a short How To-video on how to set up Playbooks in Membrain. We hope it's helpful!

 
 
 
 
 
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Wistia video thumbnail - Creating a Playbook
 

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Hubspot integration update: Assign prospects to your team

Update on February 17, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Using marketing automation software has made it easier than ever to generate and nurture marketing-qualified leads. These need to be passed on to your sales team at the right time to follow-up, qualify and move into your pipeline.When it comes to assigning these leads to the right sales person, things can get complicated. It often becomes a manual exercise to assign each lead to each sales person. Not anymore!

Using the Hubspot integration you can now assign newly created prospects to exactly the right person in your team. You will find this update by going to the Membrain and into the admin view, clicking on the integrations tab and going into the page where you configure your Hubspot integration.

When you go into the "contact sync" and click on one of the list with the "create prospect"-action there is now a new field that let's you select how you want to handle the leads that come into this prospecting campaign through the integration. The choices available are:

  • Unassigned - This leaves the prospect unassigned, to allow for a "first come first serve" approach, or having somebody manually assigning the prospects.
  • Hubspot Owner - This looks at the contact "Hubspot Owner" inside of Hubspot and tries to match this up to any Membrain user based on name or email address.
  • Teams - This allows you to select a team to get the leads that enter this campaign. This will create a "round-robin" distribution of leads as they come into Membrain. Four leads in a 3 person team would then be assigned like this: The first goes to person A, the second to Person B, the third to person C and then back to Person A for the fourth lead, and so on.
  • Users - This options quite simply let's you assign all prospect in a campaign to a specific person in your team.
  • Hubspot Properties - Finally you can use a text field in Hubspot to map to who you want to assign the prospect to. Our recommended approach here is to create a text field in Hubspot and use Hubspot Workflows. This allows you to set the value in that field based on whatever properties you want to use to drive lead assignment. If that field is manually populated inside of Hubspot we recommend using the email to map it out as people tend to be more accurate when entering email addresses than people's names.

Something to keep in mind:

  • The property you want to use to assign prospects with needs to be set in Hubspot before(!) the prospect is created in Membrain.
  • This is not a two-way sync of this property, so if the field is blank when the prospect is created it will be blank in Membrain.
  • If the property is changed in Membrain after the prospect is created, it's not going to be synced back to the field in Hubspot.

We're excited to have this update to this integration in place and hope that it will make your life a lot easier, and create a more accurate and controllable approach to assigning new marketing-generated prospects to your team. If you have any questions at all on this, please reach out to support@membrain.com and we will respondly as quickly as possible to help in any way we can.

New: Act-On integration!

Update on February 2, 2017 by Henrik Öquist

Act-On is one of the fastest growing marketing automation platforms in the world today. That sales and marketing alignment has been a challenge for many organizations is no secret. That's what makes this integration so exciting!

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Act-On’s integrated approach to marketing automation provides all the functionality you want in an accessible, simple-to-use workspace. Their user-friendly platform puts powerful marketing tools at your fingertips, making campaigns and programs easier and faster. Combining this with the award-winning capabilities of Membrain opens up a world of possibilities.

This new integration will allow you to execute and coordinate sophisticated marketing efforts with your sales team. Formalize an agreement between marketing and sales on what a good lead looks like, and how sales should follow up on it. Then put the integration in place to visualize this and seamlessly automate all those areas where things can fall between the cracks.

  • Producing marketing qualified leads to your sales team, and want all the relevant information already populated in Membrain? No problem! 
  • Was that prospect or opportunity a really great fit, but not yet ready? Let sales pass it back to marketing for additional nurturing. 
  • Want to be able segment your marketing database using insight provided by the sales team? Sure!
  • Would you like to be able to tailor your marketing based on where they are in their decision process? Well, you see where we are going with this. There are so many tantalizing possibilities with this new capability.

We're currently rolling this integration out to all of our clients, but if you want to ensure access as early as possible, just send us a line at support@membrain.com and we'll fast-track you in this rollout!

More updates to Membrain