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.

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!

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!

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.