Hello.
Today we’ve got the CEO of a nonprofit advocacy institution with us.
And I really think this story is fantastic because it demonstrates that no matter
what industry you’re in, Insightly can be easily customized
to fit the needs of your business and help you run more efficiently.
That’s the topic for today’s Closing Time.
Thanks so much for tuning in to Closing time the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Melinda Prescher Insightly’s director of product and customer marketing.
And today I have the pleasure of hosting another special
customer spotlight edition of Closing Time.
Whether you’re a weekly Closing Time listener, an Insightly customer,
or both, you’ll find useful takeaways on how to use Insightly CRM.
So now, without further ado, please welcome Neil Hatton of UK Screen Alliance.
Hi Neil. It’s great to have you here.
Hi Melinda, good to speak to you again from here in
not very sunny London at the moment.
Good to catch up.
I think it’s a couple of years since we last spoke.
We actually did a webinar together a while ago to your point,
and I’m so excited to have you back here and chat with you again
and learn how things are progressing for you and your team.
But first off,
let’s have you talk a little bit about UK. Screen Alliance and what you all do.
Well, we are a membership organization for companies working in the film
and television industry in the UK, and we specialize
particularly in companies
that provide visual effects and animation and post-production services.
So it’s a pretty exciting sector
and we’ve had a very interesting ride over the last five years.
Obviously, the pandemic years were very strange for us.
We had a lot of companies were struggling
to continue working, so that was interesting.
And then when the pandemic finished, we had a huge boom
where there was so much work that we were struggling to find
all of the skilled people we needed to cover the work.
And then in 23, it all stopped again.
And particularly we were quite heavily affected by the Hollywood actors strike,
which stopped all of the business happening.
It’s all coming back now and it’s starting to get going again.
But, you know, as a membership organization that provides advocacy
for its members, talking to government people like that,
it’s really important that we have the contact details
with our members so we can communicate with them effectively.
And also, of course, when they’re struggling,
we can’t put up our membership prices.
So we have to run very lean, very efficient.
And so that is why we have a very
good CRM system right at the heart of our business.
That’s great.
I’d love to
have you tell the audience first about how you got started with Insightly.
Well, when I started in this job,
I found that our contact database was actually based on Excel.
Lots of spreadsheets, lots of contact records
that were out of date or incomplete or incompatible duplicates,
different people having trouble updating spreadsheets.
So we had conflicting information and it was just not efficient at all.
So having a CRM system right at the heart of the business
is really important to us and we chose Insightly
having looked at a couple of other systems and I think we made the right choice
because we’re still here, we’re still using Insightly
and we’re using more and more features every single day.
And once we got to see AppConnect, that was a real game changer
because that allowed us to be much more efficient
in many of our processes because we’ve automated so much,
it allows us to run really lean and efficient
and make sure that we can serve our members to the best
possible degree because we’re not wasting time on administration.
We’re getting on with the relationship with our members and relationship
with legislators and government
and doing all the policy work that is at the core of our business.
So, Neil, because your organization is a nonprofit,
I know that you’re always looking for ways to optimize, like you said, on cost
so that you’re delivering on your promise of value for your membership base.
And I know you’ve got an enterprise license,
which is Insightly’s most robust plan.
I’d love to have you tell the audience more about
why the Enterprise feature set is so important to you,
why it delivers value for you, and how it helps
you deliver great experiences to your membership.
Well, we actually use Insightly for all of our quotes and proforma invoices
and providing invoices to our members, which we’ve automated through AppConnect.
So we’ve used the entire suite to create
all of our membership categories within Insightly.
We’ve used lots of custom objects to create tables
in which we can hold information such as the subscription details
and the history of those subscription details.
So we’ve used a very wide variety of the Insightly features.
And also, of course we get the in-house support
because we don’t want to have much downtime.
So if we’ve got a problem, we can get straight on to the chat
to Insightly and get an answer really quickly.
Neil, you’ve mentioned AppConnect
a couple of times and so I’d love to have you do a deeper dive on it.
Can you please tell us more about all of the applications
that you’ve integrated with Insightly using AppConnect?
Well we use Insightly as the central application
that is our main source of truth, the only source of truth,
because everything else sort of hangs off that.
So the kind of applications that we’ve integrated are primarily
the main one is QuickBooks Online that has been integrated into the system
so in fact we initiate a lot of our invoicing from Insightly
using AppConnect, which then creates the records in our accounting system.
So that’s a really important thing.
Why it’s really useful for me is it saves me an awful lot of time
on the first of the month,
first working day of the month when we send out our invoices.
This year, I remember in January, on
I think the first working day of January was January the fourth in the UK.
So that’s the day we were scheduled to send out our invoices.
Now actually January in the UK is pretty dull dark and rainy
and so I prefer to get away and have a bit of a rest and recuperation.
So I was actually I was actually in the Caribbean at the time.
Woke up in the morning. There’s my phone.
All I can see in my phone is a list of the invoices
that AppConnect has created and sent
using applications like Formstack, which we use as well
that are sent PDF copies of our invoices to our members,
and that’s without me doing anything at all.
So I was very relieved
to just see all of those invoices there and then I could go back to my sun bed.
Neil, that sounds wonderful.
And now you’re really making me want to be on a beach in the Caribbean right now.
What do you think in terms of using AppConnect and Insightly in general?
How have these applications made an impact on your business?
Well, it gives us an overview.
We use the dashboards quite a lot to see our progress
on member retention and member attraction to our organization
and make sure that we’re getting the growth that we expect.
We’ve also, as I said, we’re much more efficient.
So we’ve got my time is given back to doing what I should be doing in
leading the organization rather than doing administrative tasks.
But it also we use it to log the participation of our members
on Zoom calls.
We get them to register through Zoom calls and that attaches
to their contact record inside Insightly.
So we know who’s
been to all the different meetings and who are our most engaged members.
So it really helps us to make sure we target
those members who are perhaps not engaging as often.
I make sure that we ensure that they get the best possible member experience.
So it’s had a huge impact on the way we run the company.
Neil It’s been so great to have you back on.
In closing, I’d love to have you share any final thoughts about,
you know, what makes Insightly great, for anyone considering Insightly, what
should they know about?
I think one of the features that we’ve really made
great use of is customizing Insightly to our needs.
No matter what kind of business you’re in, you’re going to have different needs.
And Insightly is extremely flexible at creating
custom fields, custom objects, and you can work out,
you know, exactly
the structure of the data, which is most important to you in your business,
and then create those objects.
So you’re collecting all the relevant data and reporting on that data as well.
So you’re getting the insights into your customers behavior,
and in our case, our members behavior and I think that’s really important.
Being able to make informed business decisions and move the business forward.
Great.
Thank you so much.. It was so great to see you again.
It’s my pleasure.
You know, hopefully we can do it again in a couple of years
and we’ll have even more progress. Absolutely.
And we’ll still be using Insightly,. I’m sure.
I love it.
And thanks so much to all of you for tuning in.
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We’ll see you next time on Closing Time.
