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.