Sometimes, you simply need to do a manual import. Despite the clever integrations, bulk-adding and various automations possible in Membrain today, sometimes you just need to add a list of leads, prospects or target accounts easily to a prospecting campaign. For this reason, we've made some nifty updates on importing prospects.

Previously there was a bunch of workarounds needed to easily get those details into Membrain, and getting prospect campaign specific information in was quite tedious. No more!

Now you can easily import prospect specific information easily into Membrain. Want to bring in that third-party list you purchased, the participant list from breakfast seminar or announcement webinar you just held? The applications are naturally many. Just import it directly, along with any specific information you want to be able to see.

Just follow these easy steps:

• Create (if needed) the prospecting campaign you want the prospects to end up in, along with any potential new custom fields needed
• Go to the prospecting view, and select the specific campaign you want to import into
• In the dark gray toolbar at the top of the page, the "import" button should now light up and become available
• Click on "import" and now the import wizard will guide you through the remaining steps

It doesn't get much easier and more streamlined. We hope you'll find this update really helpful!

There can be a big difference between the smaller accounts in your portfolio and the strategic accounts that can - for better or worse - transform your business. Now you can visualize all this company hierarchy information in one single overview!

These accounts are usually a lot more complex. You often need to navigate many different branches, locations and stakeholders that are distributed both politically and geographically. It's difficult to gain an overview. If you're on the Excellence tier of Membrain you already have the company hierarchies and organizational chart as a helpful tool.

For this reason we've added a new company hierarchy visualization capability that makes it even better!

When you are in an account that has subsidaries in the company hierarchy, you can now go to the dark toolbar at the top of that page and toggle on all of the current and historical sales efforts, contacts and activities.

This transforms the page from looking only at the current company information and now shows all of the aforementioned information on a global account level. It's a great way to see absolutely everything that's happened, everyone who is engaged and all of the activities that have been taking place.

Sometimes, a simple number doesn't give you what you need.What do you do then? Well, say hello to a new capability in Membrain: The calculation field!

Capturing vital numbers and key dates are naturally central to managing your prospects, opportunities and pipeline. It can help us produce forecasts, plan our resources, coordinate with other departments and more. It's essential.

But sometimes a simple number or a date doesn't help you all the way. It's at times like this you have to bring data out of Membrain to work some Excel magic into the mix. That can be cumbersome and leave you feeling: Oh, it would be great if I could just do this right inside of Membrain.

If you are on the Excellence tier of Membrain the new Calculation field minimizes, hopefully eliminates, that scenario!

This new capability allows you to create a new custom field that you can use on a company, prospect, sales project or even contact and do Excel-like formulas right inside of Membrain.

What would I use it for?

Here are just some examples that you can use this for, but you can definitely be really imaginative on how to use this great addition:

• Add up a group of scorecard fields to produce a total value, or an average
  Use that aggregate as a qualifiying tollgate in your process to determine if you should invest more time and resources into an opportunity!
  
  
• Calculate a total contract value
  If you are capturing several different things in your process and you want to add it all up to produce a total contract value that takes the numbers of "services" and "widgets" you can get a total
  
  
• Visualize commission for your sales team
  If you have a fairly straight-forward compensation structure you can use calculation fields to take the sales project value and multiply it with another value to show the sales person what kind of commission to expect if they bring a deal in
  
  
• Split revenue by fiscal year
  Using total contract value as your sales project value but have a monthly revenue model? Use a calculation field to see how much of that revenue will be brought in on this fiscal or calendar year. Take the sales project value, divide it by 12, look at how many months are left in the year compared to the estimated closing date of the sales project and voila!
  
  
• Calculate risk in your delivery
  How long will you need to safely deliver something to your client? Is the deal too big and a delivery date custom field is telling you you won't be able to promise delivery on time? Great! Now you are made aware of this and can act accordingly, remember a sales is not the end of the journey, but the beginning of a relationship.

How do I set it up?

This is found in the same place as all the other custom fields such as numbers, lists, dates etc. You can reach it by using the Membrain menu and going to the the main Admin page, right under the custom fields header on that page. You can also find it directly from inside of the prospecting campaign editor or sales process editor where you can also create and edit your custom fields.

See this article in the Membrain Help Center to help you get started and give more practical instructions.

There is naturally a lot more you can do here, but we hope these examples can spark your imagination and get you started. This capability is available today, for all Membrain clients on the Excellence tier.

The Membrain Meet calendar feature is a a great way to minimize the effort needed for everyone involved in setting up meetings. Simply sharing a link along with a courteous invite can eliminate a lot of frustrating both for seller and buyer. We've now added another piece of the puzzle to make this even easier.

When inviting somebody to pick the time that works best for them, directly out of your calendar, the next thing everybody needs to know is naturally how to connect on that time and date.

Should you call them up? Do you want to use an online meeting service? Do they want to come to your office or have you come to theirs?

Now you can add "ways to meet" to your Membrain Meet calendar. Ask them to input their phone number, request an online meeting or input a visiting address to easily find their offices. You can configure these options easily and customize this to present any options you ca

Visit the Membrain Help Center for an helpful article on how to set this helpful feature up easily. This is something both you and your clients are going to appreciate a lot every time it's time to find that elusive meeting time. We hope you'll really like it!

As sales professionals it's hard to find something more central to our day than our phone, our email and... our calendar. The calendar is where we coordinate with our colleagues, where we plant the flag in our prospects calendars for our next steps together and where we plan how we can best spend our time to reach our goals. Well, Membrains sales calendar just got a whole lot more robust! 

We have definitely heard the feedback. Many of you who were using Membrain and loving the sales process support, the analytics, the visual tools, felt the sales calendar didn't quite hit the mark. 

In some ways Membrain's calendar didn't behave the way sales people were used to. Invites looked differently, you couldn't accept or reject meetings using the Sales Inbox. It didn't handle external meeting invite rejections or cancellations.

We listened. And we acted!

We have now over the last several weeks, stretching into a few months even, invested heavily in the calender functionality, and we hope you're gonna like the results.

Among the updates and additions:

• There is a new, more stream-lined dialog for creating appointments in most places, and we'll continue to implement this new sleaker dialog throughout the product
• The calendar sync is improved with Google Calendar and Office365 (including Exchange) sync having seen a major overhaul and is now a lot more reliable where we previously had some fringe cases where it didn't behave as desired
• Accepting invites, reschedules and cancellations in the Sales Inbox has been greatly improved and made a lot more robust.
• Accept, reject or send invites of your own through Membrain Go, the mobile app! It's never been easier to schedule that new meeting with the client right there on the spot.
• The entire flow around sending your own invites, updates and cancellation notices has received a huge overhaul and now behaves in a way that is more similar to what you have learned to expect from other calendaring software
• The software now even handles meeting participants that are not currently contacts in your Membrain a lot better, and makes it easier to create these so you can more efficiently grow your contact surface with your clients and prospects

We will endeavour to continually improve the calendar to make sure that you have the best possible conditions to manage your time, nail down those hard-won appointments and continue unhindered towards absolute sales excellence.

Raise your hand if you love reporting. Hey, you in the back, lower that hand. Nobody "loves" reporting. But, now at least there is a way to make it a lot easier.

There are many people affected by the work that we do in sales, and the outcomes we produce (and even worse, when we fail to produce). The need to know what's happening on the sales side comes all the way from the board room down to the warehouse or construction site

So reporting is naturally important. This is how we communicate how we are progressing towards our expected results. Annual revenue. The forecast for Q2. How many widgets we expect to be prepared to ship next month. And so on.

Previously, it's been a little bit too complicated to get these reports out of Membrain. For example, while you could create a filter and export the sales project list. The data fields you chose to bring out of Membrain remained the same until next time. Great if you only export one specific report, but cumbersome if you have a few different setups. The fact that you manually needed to do this also affected how accessible this information was in reality.

For these reasons we implemented the capability to set up automated excel reports to make this whole thing a LOT easier.

For more information on automated reports and how to get started, please read this helpful article in the Membrain Help Center.