Building Customer-Centric Solutions for Modern CRM Success | Chip House from Insightly

Ernesto Quezada: Pathmonk is the intelligent tool for website lead generation. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in their buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments with relevant micro-experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more. Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%. Add Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Let the AI do all the work and get access to 50% more qualified leads while you keep doing marketing and sales as usual. Check us on pathmonk.com. Welcome to today’s episode. Let’s talk about today’s guest. We have Chip from Insightly, CMO out there with them. How are you doing today, Chip?

Chip House: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me here, Ernesto.

Ernesto: It’s great to have you on today’s episode. And you know, I’m excited to hear a little bit more because, I mean, everybody who’s in sales and marketing definitely needs a CRM. So let’s give our listeners what they’re tuning in for. Chip, in your own words, can you tell us a little bit more about what Insightly is all about?

Chip: Yeah, so we’ve done a lot of research on this actually. We generally go to market as a CRM for mid-market companies, small and mid-market companies. We surveyed over 500 mid-market companies—generally their salespeople, ops people, CS people, some marketing people as well—and asked them about their usage of CRM and how satisfied they were with their current offering. What we learned is 79% of companies are not satisfied with their current CRM. That’s due to high cost, difficulty adopting it and using it across their team, difficulty scaling with them, an inability to customize it for their business, or managing integrations with other software.

Insightly is very much targeted at solving all of those problems. We’re not a legacy software tool. It’s easy to customize, scales with you as you grow, highly affordable, and very flexible for your unique business needs. That’s why we call it the modern CRM that teams love. It also provides you a single view of your customers, which has been a long-standing challenge in the industry. We do it with a modern system across CRM, marketing, and Insightly Service, which is our help desk tool.

Ernesto: All right, awesome. And so that way our listeners could get a good understanding of Insightly, what key problem would you say you solve for clients?

Chip: Generally, especially if you’re in the B2B space and you are selling to other companies, you need to manage leads, customer data, and a sales pipeline. We’re ideal for that. It’s a highly usable system that you can easily adopt across your team to manage your entire pipeline—market your product, sell your product, convert opportunities to projects, and then manage them with your service team as well. We really work across all areas of the company in a very affordable way.

Ernesto: Definitely. Great to hear that. Now as far as a vertical or ICP, what do you guys focus on?

Chip: We’re really across verticals. We’re attractive for professional service providers. We’re HIPAA compliant, so healthcare and health tech use us. Manufacturing and distribution companies use us because they can leverage our mobile app for their field force or our workflows and automation to help them automate anything on the assembly line. We’re also able to integrate with their current systems, whether it’s proposals, accounting, HR, or finance. So, we’re fairly even across verticals; we don’t have any specialty.

Ernesto: Okay, great to hear that. How does someone typically find out about Insightly? What would you say is the top client acquisition channel for you guys?

Chip: We know from our research data that about 30% of our customers come from former users of our software. They were happy at one company, moved to another company, and brought Insightly along with them. Or they’re referrals from existing happy customers. That takes up about 30%. The other 70% is a combination of SEO, organic traffic, and Google Ads. We also do quite a bit of content. We actually have our own podcast called “Closing Time,” focused on go-to-market leaders, which we promote on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Ernesto: Oh, awesome. Great to hear that. For our listeners, you can check them out as well. Going into your website here—for our listeners, if you’re looking for a CRM, check them out at insightly.com. What role does the website play for client acquisition, Chip?

Chip: Yeah, so we have a free trial, which our customers can use. It’s a 14-day free trial. If you have two or fewer users, you can use Insightly for free forever. If you have more than two users, you need to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $29 per user for the CRM. About a third of our customers come in and fully self-service. They do the trial and then pay for Insightly on their credit card. Some of them go through that entire journey themselves. The rest come in via a demo request and talk to our account executives about fitting Insightly into their organization. Those tend to be organizations with between 50 and 500 employees.

Ernesto: Great to hear. Is there anything you’ve learned about what makes a great converting website? Any tools, tips, or methods you would recommend to our listeners?

Chip: Yeah, actually, we’re in the midst of doing a lot of A/B testing on our website now. We just tested our demo request page, made some updates to it, and our current demo request page is converting 22% higher than the last one. We optimized it and highlighted our user interface, which is converting super well. We also know that customer stories work well for us because social proof is very important as buyers do more of their research. We’re able to highlight a lot of customer research on our website through videos, case studies, and more. It’s also important to ensure customers can self-serve and get the information they need. That’s why we have an on-demand demo on our website, so if customers don’t want to talk to a salesperson, they can watch a demo of our marketing tool, CRM, or Insightly Service help desk tool.

Ernesto: Awesome. Great to hear that. Now let’s switch it up a little bit, Chip, and talk about you as the leader. You being the CMO there for Insightly, what are some key tasks you focus on in your day-to-day work?

Chip: I’ve been in SaaS for 25 years now, so I’ve been doing this for a long time. Across that time period, I’ve had the chance to be exposed to many different areas: demand gen, customer marketing, product marketing, event marketing, and more. I run strategy for the company, so I’m deeply involved in demand generation, the content we produce, the website, and the events we do. I’m regularly engaging with a member of my team on one of those initiatives—whether it’s content, demand gen, or adding a product to our martech stack.

Ernesto: Sounds like you’ve got a full plate. With so much experience, it’s all getting put into place. Definitely great to have that from you.

Chip: It just proves that I’m old.

Ernesto: Experience is what matters, right? The more experience you have, the easier it is to make decisions and come up with strategies. Kudos to you.

Chip: Thank you.

Ernesto: Let’s jump into our next section, Chip. It’s a rapid-fire question round. Are you ready?

Chip: Yeah.

Ernesto: Awesome. First off, Chip, what is the last book that you read?

Chip: Currently, I’m reading “Pitch” by April Dunford, which is about optimizing your sales pitch. April wrote a great book on positioning a few years back. I also just read Bono’s book “Surrender.” It’s an excellent book. I’m a music fan, a U2 fan, and Bono talks about his whole life. It’s fascinating.

Ernesto: Awesome. Great read there. Next up, what is one single thing that your company is focused on at the moment the most?

Chip: We just launched our partner program in November, so we’re getting that off the ground. We have partners across the globe now who are referring Insightly to their customers, helping them integrate it, and optimizing their CRM, marketing automation, or email design. We’re focused on building those relationships and ensuring our partners are trained up on our platform.

Ernesto: Great stuff. If there were no boundaries in technology, what would be one thing you’d want to have fixed for your role as a marketer today?

Chip: Outbound sales. Marketing is doing a heavy lift, and outbound sales are becoming tougher for go-to-market teams because people’s inboxes are overwhelmed. If I could press the easy button, it would be to make outbound sales easier.

Ernesto: Definitely. Now, if there is one repetitive task you could automate, what would that be?

Chip: Content creation. We’re already leveraging AI for some of our writing, especially in a competitive space like CRM. If we’re not producing pages all the time, we’re reducing traffic. If I could consistently produce high-quality content faster, it would be a game changer.

Ernesto: Perfect. Lastly, Chip, with more than 25 years in the marketing world and SaaS business, what is one piece of advice you’d give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today?

Chip: I’ve had a very successful career, but if I could go back, I’d tell my 22-year-old self to think about going into business for myself. Once you feel comfortable with your skill set, consider starting your own agency.

Ernesto: That’s great advice for our listeners. Thanks so much for that, Chip. Thanks a lot for being on the show with us today. I do want to give you the last word. If someone forgets everything about the interview today, what is one thing they should remember about Insightly?

Chip: Insightly is like the un-CRM. We’re the modern CRM. Whereas most companies leave their CRM within three years, they tend to stay with Insightly because it’s affordable, flexible, and scales with them as they grow.

Ernesto: Definitely. For our listeners, you can check them out at insightly.com. Grow faster with the modern CRM teams love. Chip, thanks so much for being with us today. Looking forward to our next episode at Pathmonk Presents. Thanks a lot, Chip.

Chip: I appreciate it so much. Thanks, Ernesto.