App Awareness Month – Insightly

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week, we’re focusing on applications specifically geared to end-users and those that help streamline sales processes. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Insightly – Simple CRM and Project Management

Insightly’s CRM has truly been a titan of the Google Apps Marketplace from the very early days. The product’s 600 reviews and top spot in the Customer Management category are testaments to Insightly’s many happy customers around the world. And as one of the pioneers of the Marketplace, Insightly was a logical choice to be a founding member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps.

Insightly’s CRM provides a number of features built around tracking both sales pipelines and projects. The product can truly be a one-stop-shop for many small businesses, and believe it or not, it’s actually free for companies with 3 users or less. With the near prohibitive cost of many CRM solutions, it’s amazing that Insightly can provide such a top-notch experience for free or very minimal cost (if you’re over 3 users).

Integration with Google Apps

Insightly has very strong integrations with all applications in the Google Apps suite. If you’re collaborating on a project with a team member, or working a sales opportunity, you can easily attach relevant Google Docs (like a project plan or product quote) to that object from within the application. You can schedule tasks, like a project deadline or follow-up date for a sale, to be completed by certain dates and then have those task deadlines sync to your team’s shared Google Calendar, or individual calendars.

Many administrators are in disbelief when they move to Google Apps and realize there is no concept of shared contacts across a domain. And while some people will need to push a list of shared contacts out to all users (using Google Apps APIs or a third-party application), if you live inside your CRM, Insightly can house your corporate contacts list very effectively.

But perhaps the most impressive integration is Insightly’s connection with Gmail. Saving email to Insightly from within Gmail is actually much easier than it is in more sophisticated CRMs. With one click you can save emails, including their attachments, to the relevant contact, account, opportunity, or project in Insightly.

Why We Like It

Insightly’s complete devotion to the Google Apps platform is something we really admire, as we are 100% focused on Google Apps as well. Insightly has gone to great lengths to integrate with all the major applications inside of Google Apps, which is no minor task from a development perspective. And most of all, we know there are thousands of very satisfied Insightly customers out there.

You can find Insightly in the Google Apps Marketplace, and the app is free for anyone to try. For organizations with more than 3 users, there are paid plans available, all with monthly fees of less than $100.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: it’s owned by another large CRM company

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These Google Apps extensions not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.