May 20, 2015

Announcing Contactually's Newest Feature: Insights

Instantly assess your team's Contactually usage.

Contactually helps you and your team stay top-of-mind with key business contacts, leads, and opportunities. But until recently, it was hard to tell if you were reaching people as often as you needed to. That is, until we introduced the RPA -- our new and improved metric for determining how you're engaging with your network. With the RPA, you can see how many of your relationships are strong, fading, or weak at a glance.

For the first time, you can quantitatively answer: "Do I know who my most important contacts are? Have I contacted them recently enough?" For us, the next step was to answer "How's the rest of my team doing?" and "Are they getting better over time?"

Say hello to Contactually Insights

We've packaged these answers to these questions into a brand new module we call Insights. With Insights, you're never more than a few clicks away from seeing the size, health, and composition of the networks on your team. Even better, we kept the interface extremely simple, so outliers and trends are immediately visible, and you don't have to run a bunch of complicated reports to figure out what's going on.

Here's what a small team looks like on the Insights screen.



No fuss, no muss, just immediate visibility into how everyone is doing with Contactually. You've got top performers, people who may need to reach out more, and even people who are tracking too many contacts and may need to focus on a smaller group. Want to see who's improving the fastest? Sort by RPA increase!



If you see something interesting, you can drill down into any team member's historical data to see how their own performance (as well as the health and size of their network) has improved or dropped over time.

As you can see, Jordan has a pretty good grasp of his important relationships. The large green area represents the people in his network he's staying in contact with, while the smaller yellow and red areas show fading connections and some people he's really started to fall out of touch with. Finally, that white line shows how his RPA has changed over time, as he's added new relationships to buckets, removed ones that are no longer relevant, and followed up with people.

What's the takeaway?

One of the reasons this new feature is called Insights is because we really want to make information in Contactually actionable. So we're also working to help you understand the best way to react to different scenarios you'll see in Insights, like :

• If you have only a few relationships, whether you're new to Contactually or just haven't bucketed many contacts, your goal should be to add your most important contacts to buckets with reminders so that we can prompt you to stay in touch.

• If you have too many weak relationships... take heart, because you are not alone. When many people get started with Contactually, they're so excited to start building up their network that they bucket everyone, add short, 7-day reminders to all their buckets, and are quickly overwhelmed. The best way to fix this is to use longer reminder times (or none at all) until you've reorganized your buckets to your liking. Unless you're running regular email campaigns, you should probably limit yourself to fewer than 250 relationships when you start out.

• If your RPA has dropped rapidly, consider doing more to make following up a daily habit. Set a calendar reminder to spend 30 minutes in Contactually completing all your follow-ups, and once you've righted the ship, keep going!

We feel confident that there are plenty of other, actionable Insights out there like these, and Contactually is going to start helping you find them for your team.

A whole new way to think about network building

We're really excited about Insights because for the first time, you're really able to understand how Contactually is making a difference over time -- and that's a huge deal to anyone trying to build a more effective team for the long haul.

As with many of our recent overhauls to Contactually, this initial release of Insights -- while already very cool, and quite useful -- is only the beginning. We're going to continue to expand our ability to show you what's going on, and most importantly, what you can do to drive better results from it.

So take a few minutes to check out Insights. What else about you or your team's Contactually experience would be useful to track over time?