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3 Reasons You May Not Need a CRM in Your Small Business

CRM companies love to author and proliferate “X Number of Reasons that CRM is Beneficial” type articles to try and demonstrate to hesitant business owners the justification for the expense of CRM. Indeed, I have written a few of my own in support of the valid benefits to businesses of all sizes, and I mean not to down-play those benefits in this article.

However, I also spent a considerable amount of time in the IT trenches executing the duties of the CIO for an organization with 250+ sales people. One of my core initiatives was to try and roll out a CRM solution where there had previously been none. That experience forever changed me because through it I saw with brutal clarity that there is often a huge disconnect between the tech world where every new feature is intrinsically valuable in and of itself, and the sales/business world where features often just equal more headache. After many sleepless nights, frustrating meetings, failed incentive programs, and unattended (mentally anyway) training sessions we failed to get our seasoned and experienced sales people to completely buy-in to using all the cool features of CRM.

It was not long until I discovered that my experience was not the exception, but more the rule. CNET reported that up to 70% of purchased CRM solutions fail to get properly implemented or used at all!

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, I tend to think when it comes to CRM that the cart is often put before the horse by trying to position CRM as the driver of sales rather than allowing sales to drive CRM. I’ll explain what I mean by that later, but below are some reasons I believe a company (especially a small business) may not want or need to roll out a full-featured CRM with all the bells and whistles.

1. CRM is Really Expensive

Some will retort (and trust me they have) that you get what you pay for to which I reply with my budget conscious CIO hat on, yes of course, but who says I need all the quality you are offering? It’s kind of like selling me on buying a dump truck when I don’t really need (or want) to haul a mountain away.

2. CRM Can Be Complicated

An often overlooked hidden cost to all those fancy CRM features is that you need a college education in tech just to operate it. Of course there is nothing wrong with ongoing education, if indeed the benefits of the education have a demonstrable ROI or necessity. However, what often happens is that small businesses just don’t have the time or the resources to properly train, which means people won’t use the tool.

3. CRM Can Limit Your Ability to Quickly Pivot

Buying an 18 wheeler truck when all you really need is a motorcycle has the unfortunate side-effect of hindering the agility you once had using simpler tools. As with all my points, this is not always the case and depends on a great many variables, but I have seen numerous occasions when due to the price and the complexities of training, a company enforced many unnecessary processes into their CRM workflow that had a sizable cumulative negative impact on overall productivity, sales, moral, and agility.

Keep it Simple & Get the Job Done

Of course I am not anti-CRM at all! At Aereus our CRM is the single most used and essential tool we have. But I fear too many companies have and will jump the gun and pay a whole lot for features they don’t need for employees that won’t use them.

Our suggestion for navigating the field of prospective CRMs and deciding just how many features you need is to begin thinking of CRM as a tool that helps you scale your already established relationship management process. Try to find a CRM that will allow you to take your current manual process and automate it so things get easier over time. Then, if you pick the right tool, as your needs grow you can begin to implement new features slowly. Heck, a great starting place is just finding a single place to store all you customer contact information. Start there and grow it out.

The truth of the matter is that a good CRM will not make you a better sales person or organization, any more than a good word processor will make you a better writer. Word Processors and CRMs are just tools and should be viewed as such. Make sure you pick the right tool for the job next time you are looking for a CRM solution.

A Preview of the New Customer Form

Over the past few months we have spent an unbelievable amount of time thinking about how we can make the customer form in our CRM more usable and simple. We really love simple because simple tools are the tools that get used. Few of us have the time to invest in complex tools; we have jobs to do and the tool is NOT the job (for most of us anyway).

After many hours spent thinking, testing, debating, retesting, debating some more and mockups, here is what we came up with for our new simplified customer form:

New Customer Form

As you can see we have streamlined it quite a bit. The most common information and features needed when working with a customer are right on the General profile page for the contact.

Customer Profile Summary

For starters most of the relevant contact information is on a sidebar on the left with a picture of the client. Netric stores a lot of information, and you can expand that by adding as many custom fields as you like, but there’s no reason you need to see all the fields all the time. This summary view displays the most accessed fields and hides fields that are not populated for this record.

New Action Bar

You can add comments and add tasks that can be assigned to you or to someone else. Schedule a new event and place it on your calendar. Enter the details of a phone call right from the general tab of your customer.

Updated Activity Stream

Finally, all the activities, comments, and emails are stored in the customer activity log making it incredibly easy to catch up quickly with what has and is going on with your contact. Having this sort of visibility allows you to quickly see what has happened, who in your organization performed the action, and what is coming up.

A Simple and Life Changing System for Managing Tasks

Ever felt that sinking feeling that you are just one slip-up away from utter catastrophe because new tasks are coming your way faster than you can possibly process them? I have felt that stress far more often than I would like to admit. Some time ago I set out to find a practical solution to this recurring problem; the following is how I ended up addressing it.

Personal productivity is always a subject sure to peak the interest of the masses desperate to find a way to get and stay on top of the ever-growing list of things we all need to do. Fortunately, with a little careful thought and the forming of some new habits, the strain of juggling all those endlessly multiplying TODO’s can be largely alleviated.

Managing work and time can be put into two broad categories: events and tasks.

Calendar events are pretty easy. The key is to just make sure you put any event scheduled at a specific date and time on your calendar. With the rising popularity of smartphones it has become easier than ever to quickly add events to your calendar throughout the day. If you struggle with your schedule, making this one change can dramatically improve your life. Just wait until you experience the mental freedom of not trying to keep track of every minute of every day - let computers do that; they’re better at it anyway.

Tasks, on the other hand, are a bit more complicated. We will define a task as any action that can be completed in a day or less. If the task is large enough to take more than a day then it is what we call a project and should be broken into smaller accomplishable tasks and grouped together. We will discuss projects more in a upcoming post. This post will describe a simple process anyone can implement to stay on top of all those TODO’s imposed on us by work, life, and other people.

Managing tasks, no matter how many, can be handled with three activities: (1) process, (2) work, (3) review.

Everyone knows about the “work” activity. Whether we ever get to it or not, it’s actually doing the work. In my experience, the primary source of chaos is due to neglect of the other two, equally important activities: processing and reviewing.

1. Process

It is Friday afternoon and it has been a very long day. You are in your last class of the day and it is taking every ounce of energy you have just to keep your eyelids open as the teacher goes on in her annoyingly enthusiastic manner. It is painfully clear to you that she is just trying to get under your skin. Okay, maybe not, maybe you’re just tired. Then it comes, she assigns a task. Everyone is to go online and read an article before class on Monday. How do you go about processing this incoming task?

Many will do nothing in hopes that their already scattered brains will somehow magically remind them at just the right time this weekend. They hope this despite the fact that earlier this morning they realized there was a paper due that they never got around to, and that was right before they bombed a quiz they forgot to study for. Still, somehow making an entirely useless mental note of “gotta remember to do that” seems to bring them comfort and peace of mind long enough to forget the unhappy business of yet-to-be-done work. If this is you, pretty much anything will be improvement over your current system.

Then there are some who are a bit more organized, they have a hodgepodge kinda sorta organization system where they scribble things in some notebook that they will conveniently forget to look at again until after the task is due. These well-intended organizers are usually just a little more effective in getting work done than the previous group, but the system is far from ideal.

What is needed is a repeatable process that is both simple and powerful enough to capture ALL, not some, not most, but ALL of our tasks as they come in. Below is a very simple workflow that can be used for any task, anywhere, at any time.

Every time a task comes in, one of three things should be done.

1. Do

If you can do the task in 2 minutes or less with what you have in front of you, do it right then and there and be done with it. The mental relief of not having this additional work to look forward to is extraordinary. You are done. There’s no need to file or keep track of anything. You can just get on with loving your newly liberated life.

2. Delegate

There are times when either the task needs to be done by someone other than you, or you need additional information from others before you can work on the task. One of the most common ways to delegate a task is through email. The key here is to keep track of delegated tasks. Create a folder in your email called “Delegated” or “Waiting” or whatever will work for you. Then if you defer a task by sending an email to someone, copy the email into your “Delegated” folder so you can quickly see all your deferred tasks without too much work.

3. Defer

Any task that you cannot do right then or delegate to anyone else needs to be filed somehow. In netric, our productivity application, I create a new task to keep track of all deferred work. You can also use any other task management system including a simple piece of paper. The important thing is that you keep all your tasks in ONE place so that you never have to think about where to save tasks when processing or where to find them when reviewing.

There are many ways you can go about organizing and categorizing your tasks, and if you are like me then your process will change and evolve over time. But there are a few key elements that are absolutely necessary to start tracking right from the start.

The first is Due Date if a due date exists. This is where software tools make life much easier. But however you keep your task list, if there is a hard date that the task needs to be done by, record it immediately. All the remaining tasks without a due date go into a “Someday” category where you can prioritize them however you see fit.

That Was Easy

And that’s all there is to processing your incoming tasks. The trick is to create a habit of always either doing, delegating, or deferring (recording on a list) incoming tasks. At first it will take a lot of work and discipline, but with time it will become second nature. Trust me, if you stick with it then your life will be dramatically improved forever!

Work

Now that you have a great task list you can begin working on your important tasks. Because your tasks are classified by those with due dates and those without, it will be easier to quickly look at your list and know what tasks should be worked on first. Obviously, address the time sensitive tasks as needed before the due date. Then work on the rest as you have time. In netric, on the home page all my tasks are categorized automatically into “Due Today”, “Upcoming” and “Later” which makes it even easier to know what should be worked on next.

Review

At least once per week, take time to review your lists. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP because it is what will make sure your system stays organized and well balanced. Fortunately, it does not take too much work. With practice, it should only take a few minutes out of your day once or twice a week. The process looks like this:

1. Go through your list of upcoming tasks for the next few days to remind yourself of what is coming and to see if anything needs to be changed.
2. Review your “Delegated” list to see if you need to follow-up with anyone - like send them a reminder email.
3. Delete items from both lists that are done or no longer relevant to make sure you can trust the information as complete and accurate. This is KEY!

I review every Monday morning and Friday afternoon at the beginning and end of my work-weeks. It takes anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes and the outcome is invaluable. Give it a try yourself for a week. If you’re like me, starting this simple habit can change your life in ways you could never imagine.

Of course, this is not the ONLY way to manage tasks; it is just one that I know for sure works for me in any situation. This system is largely based on David Allen’s fantastic book “Getting Things Done” which I highly recommend if you would like to dig deeper.

How about you? Do you have any systems or simple tricks you use to process your incoming tasks? Feel free to share them below.

Changing to netric.com Domain

Good news, as of this week customers and users can now find us on netric.com rather than netricos.com.

We hope this helps in efforts to create the best possible experience for our users. While the domain name is often overlooked, what users type into their browser to access a site makes a huge difference in initial usage impression.

For current customers, as you know your account is accessed with your account name in the url (as a third level domain in tech talk). For instance, if your account name is ‘goodcompany’ then you used to access your netric account at: http://goodcompany.netricos.com. Now with the recent change, your account is accessed at http://goodcompany.netric.com (notice we dropped the os).

Why the change? In short, because when we first named netric we were unable to get the domain name netric.com so we opted to tag “online solution” to the end of the domain. This served as a temporary placeholder as we created the product and attempted to get netric.com. Now that we have netric.com we are dropping the os (Online Solutions) from the name and we are simply, netric.com.

We hope that having netric found on netric.com will be a good thing for everyone and make remembering it much easier.

Free Software Options for Startups

There are a number of good free software solutions available for small business looking to cut or keep their monthly expenses low. Software can be very expensive so unfortunately small businesses, upstarts, and organizations on a budget often struggle to get the tools they need to conduct business. Rather than doing without, try utilizing some of the free alternatives below.

Office Suite

There is no doubt that Microsoft is king when it comes to office applications like Word, Excel, and Power Point. The only problem is Microsoft Office costs $200-$500 per computer to install!

##### Free Alternative: OpenOffice One good alternative is OpenOffice.org which will more than suffice for the majority of your office related tasks and the price of $0 per computer can make a bid difference on your bottom line.

Anti Virus

##### Free Alternative: Microsoft Security Essentials When you are starting out lean even the $40 price tag per computer for AntiVirus can be a problem; but neither can you afford to lose everything on your computer because a virus decided to corrupt all your important documents. Fortunately. Microsoft Security Essentials is a trusted free alternative that you can install through windows update and then just let it do it’s thing.

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

All successful businesses have customers, and your customers are by far the most valuable resource you have. Unfortunately most commercial CRM solutions are incredibly expensive. For instance, Sales Force (the most popular CRM solution) can cost as much as $170 per user per month! Of course, they have scaled down versions, but the price is still prohibitive enough to cause the vast majority of small businesses to keep their customers in Excel or even Microsoft Outlook until they can afford a real contact manager.

##### Free Alternative: Netric CRM The free edition of Netric CRM was created precisely for upstarts and small business looking for a powerful way to start right by managing their most valuable resource with an enterprise class CRM for little or no cost. Start with the free edition and you can stay on it forever, or if you grow and need more collaboration features you can painlessly upgrade without having to worry about moving your data.

Accounting Software

##### Free Alternative: GnuCash GnuCash is a free and open source accounting software application that will allow you to manage your books for free. It may lack all the bells and whistles in the more costly competitors but it will do a great job balancing your accounts until you decide you need a more robust solution.

File & Document Backups

##### Free Alternative: Netric OnlineFs Your hard drive will die. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And when it does, if you don’t have your important documents backed up you are pretty much screwed. There are few feelings worse than realizing you just lost everything you’ve worked on for the past year! Fortunately, the free edition of OnlineFS allows you to install a windows client that will keep your important documents backed up online. Netric OnlineFS also has the added benefit of allowing you to access your documents online from any computer!

Helpful Tips For Successfully Deploying CRM

More and more organizations are realizing the potential benefits of rolling out a CRM solution. It seems like there are new vendors springing up every day and news features are being added to existing solutions at an unprecedented rate. But if CRM is so great, why is it that analysts have discovered that 70% of purchased CRM solutions fail to get properly implemented or used at all? In theory CRM is a no-brainer, but in reality companies are spending thousands, even millions for the promise or “idea” of features that are never implemented or used.

When it comes to technology, often the biggest challenge to any initiative is implementation and user adoption. Having the greatest real-time sales reports are completely useless if your sales staff fails to enter any data. The most powerful tool in the world can be rendered entirely ineffectual if users refuse to adopt it. All too often an inordinate amount of time is spent on picking the “very best” tool, but very little thought is given to making sure the tool gets used.

Here are some practical and proven strategies that can help assure your CRM implementation is a success:

1. Integrate Your CRM Slowly And Strategically

Rather than trying move every function of your entire organization into the software on day one, break the project into bite-sized phases and integrate it more organically. This takes a little more planning up front and may even imply less-than-ideal levels of efficiency for a time; but it will dramatically reduce the level of resistance to change encountered from end-users. Here is an example of a very simplified phase-in strategy.

Phase 1

Establish the CRM as the"global" or “shared” contact database - including contact information for employees (more on this in strategy 2 below).

Phase 2

Migrate your library of sales materials including price lists, inventory, presentation/proposal templates and the like into the software.

Phase 3

Have your sales team start utilizing leads and opportunities to manage the sales process. It is important that management agrees to use data and statistics from the CRM for reviews and to track progress.

Phase 4 - Continue Ongoing Integration

Continue integrating business functions into the software. Over time it will become the foundation for more and more operations.

2. Provide Instant Utility

People generally resist change unless they see a personal immediate benefit. There are a number of simple ways to make a tool instantly useful for individuals; but the keys here is that the utility should be common to everyone and should require minimal training or explanation. One strategy is to make your CRM the source for all employee/team contact data. As it relates to a business or an organization, the most commonly and naturally maintained relationships are between internal contacts or employees. There is certain intrinsic practical value in information concerning internal contacts that will be needed regularly by everyone on the team. If users are directed to your CRM for employee/team data, they will naturally acclimate to using the tool to build and maintain relationships. This is just one example of many, each organization is different, but the point is to try and identify “instant utility” as a key implementation strategy early on in your planning process.

3. Centralize The Flow of Information

Get rid of all printed contact sheets, remove desperate databases/spreadsheet, disable/hide old file-shares and promote peer pressure to support the use of CRM. I have been in a number of sales-related meetings where I agreed to contact a client and when the sales person said “great I’ll send you the contact information” I replied “no need, all the necessary information should be in the CRM.” Then I watched as the sales-person scrambled back to their desk as soon as the meeting was out to make sure they had updated the history and contact information. The more users pull and depend on information from the CRM, the more responsible users will be challenged to push accurate data to it.

4. Encourage Playfulness

If possible, encourage an atmosphere of competition and playfulness through the implementation process. One of the key ways Facebook accomplishes this is by listing how many friends someone has on their profile. It is not uncommon to hear a Facebook user say something like: “I have over 1000 friends!” This technique is very effective and can be utilized to promote the adoption of technology in the workplace. It can be as simple as publicly recognizing and rewarding early adopters. You could build a report of the “Top 10 Most Active Users” and publish it on your Intranet; or even give an incentive for the first 50 people to update their personal profile picture and synchronize their data with Facebook. Whatever the method, promoting healthy playfulness can dramatically improve adoption and can be a boost to moral.

5. Provide Accessible Training

Utilize creative ways to train your users. Too often business get tunnel vision in this area and assume the only way to train people is by hiring professional trainers, pulling employees off the job for house/days/weeks and submit them to learning in a classroom setting. While this is certainly proven to be a valid and effective practice, it is not the only option and probably not the most efficient. Try supplementing or in some cases even replacing classroom style training with other methods like: walk-through videos, email tips, vendor-supplied materials, a Wiki, webcasts, cheat-sheets and online/inline help (write howto documents and put them in the CRM).

Another innovative approach that integrates with the “Playful” strategy is to establish some form of certification or badge system for users. People like to be seen as experts, and if you can promote inter-team training through giving certain users elevated status, then some training will naturally be handled by the “experts” or “power users” in the organization. Users helping users can lead to accelerated adoption and buy-in.
Conclusion

It is far better to have an single imperfect tool in use, than a million theoretically perfect tools that go unused. CRM software can be incredibly useful and powerful, but unless you have a well thought-out strategy for implementing it, you are exposing yourself to a great risk of purchasing a very expensive digital paperweight.

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How to Manage a Scrum Project Using Netric

Scrum is a popular and efficient, agile project management framework that involves an iterative and incremental process. There are many fantastic books and articles written about the theories behind the scrum and agile methodology - which is largely beyond the scope of this article - so if you are new to scrum take a look at these resources. For a quick introduction check out this page at Agile Learning Labs.

This document is a quick primer on how to get started using the netric Project Manager to manage an agile/scrum project. We will cover basic agile terms as needed so anyone reading this can get started regardless of level of experience.

Create a New Project

Get started by clicking on the “Projects” tab in Netric and click the “New Project” button. Enter a “Name” and a short “Description” of the project and click “Save Changes” on the toolbar.

Create a User Story Backlog

In Scrum work is managed with a concept called “User Stories” which are just short descriptions of work that needs to be done told from a user perspective. Each user story should answer (1) who the user is and (2) what they want from the feature. In traditional Scrum these stories are written on 3X5 cards, but in netric we can store them digitally making management and collaboration easier.

An example of a good user story would look something like this:

As a user closing the application, I want to be prompted to save if I have made any change in my data since the last save.

For a more detailed description of user stories read this wikipedia article. Now let’s look at creating one in netric.

1. In your project click on the “Stories” tab right under the toolbar.
2. Click “New Story” and the form above should open.
3. For the “Title” enter a very short title of this story that will make it easy to find in a list. For our example we used “Save on Close”.
4. Set the “Priority” and “Type” fields which are pretty self-explanatory.
5. “Status” is how you manage the workflow of stories. New = freshly entered. In-Progress = stories that are currently being worked on. Awaiting Test = work is done and needs to be tested. Test Passed/Failed = set based on the results of the test. Completed = work is finished and tested. Rejected = work is incomplete and story is closed. For now just enter “New” and the other options will make more sense as you go along.
6. The “Estimated Time” is used to prioritize and plan the work hours cost of a story. So if you estimate this feature will take roughly 40 hours to complete, enter 40 into “Estimated Time”.
7. Now put the actual user stories in the “Description” text field.
8. If this story requires more information like screen mock-ups, technical specifications or other “Artifacts” simply upload them by clicking on “Add Attachment”.
9. Hit “Save & Close”.

Repeat this for all the work you plan on doing on this project.

Create Iterations With Milestones

Now it’s time to start assigning these stories as work. In Scrum you break all the planned work (called the story backlog) into smaller iterations. These iterations are like mini-releases and are often between 2 and 4 weeks apart. Iterations are managed with milestones in netric. To create a new milestone:

1. From within your project click on the “Milestones” tab and click the “New Milestone” button.
2. Give the milestone a name. In our case we call it “Iteration 1” and set the start date for the beginning of the project and the end date for 2 weeks from the beginning.
3. You can optionally enter a description and then hit “Save & Close”.

Repeat this for the next few months for each iteration making milestones every 2 weeks.

Assign Stories to Milestones

Now comes the fun part. In Scrum, before each iteration your team should get together for a “Planning Meeting” where you decide what work will be done for the next iteration. Whether you are doing this as a group or as the project manager, here is the process for assigning stories to a milestone.

1. In the project go the the “Stories” tab.
2. Click on the “All Stories” link just above the list of stories and select “Backlog” which will show you stories that are not completed, not yet assigned to any milestones, and not yet being worked on (by status), all sorted by priority so you can see the high priority work at the top.
3. Select a story you would like to assign to the next iteration to open it.
4. Click on “Edit”.
5. On the Story form on the right there is a field called “Milestone” and if you click “Select” you will be given an option to select any of the milestones you created above. Select your next iteration.
6. Click “Save & Close” in the toolbar and you are finished.

Repeat these steps for each of the stories you think you have the manpower to complete within the next iteration.

Complete Milestone, Review & Repeat

Now that you have split your project into stories and assigned them to an iteration you can view all that needs to be done for the current iteration by clicking on the “Milestones” tab in the project and opening your current or next milestone. The milestone will have its own “Stories” tab which are stories that are assigned to that milestone only, making the current working set more manageable.

As you work through each iteration, mark stories as finished by setting the status to “Complete” and updating the number of hours it took under “Actual Time” to help in the review process.

At the end of the iteration period, review all the stories in the milestone to make sure they are all complete. Discuss any points of interest with your team, and then start the whole process all over again for the next iteration.

Keeping it Simple

This is a very simple process and of course you can get much more sophisticated if desired. At its core Scrum should be as simple as possible so your team members are spending most of their time working on the project rather than the project management.

Keep the Team Productive and Connected Without Another Meeting

One of the most frustrating things for any manager, or even a team member, is a fragmented and disconnected team. Unless it is intentionally and tirelessly combated, groups of any size begin to experience the destructive effects of entropy as energy gives way to apathy and disorder. When this happens communication breaks down and managers often turn to weekly meetings to try and keep everyone in line. Holding meeting after meeting can help a little, but the reality is that nothing will get done until right before and in some rare cases, right after the meeting. The rest of the week is floating in a state of disorder as everyone waits for the next big gathering for motivation.

Two major keys to overcoming the once-per-week spike in productivity is regular day-to-day communication and accountability. The weekly helps everyone get on the same page, and if run properly provides enough accountability to combat procrastination. Both of these are good and valid elements of a team’s productivity, but how do you get the benefit day-to-day rather than just once per week?

Infecting your organization with the proverbial “Death by Meetings Syndrome” is certainly not the answer. Though some have fallen to the illusion that meetings can take the place of actual work, the reality is no tasks really get done in a meeting. In fact, while meetings help with communication and accountability they can also be equally or even more detrimental to actual performance because they can be a huge distraction from actual work. So how can you get the benefit without the distraction?

This is where the social side of netric, specifically the status updates, can be very useful. On the home page when you first log in there is a box asking: “What are you working on right now?” Every time you post your work status update, everyone in your team sees what you entered like a status update on Facebook. This opens lines of communication and provides ongoing accountability. Here is how we use it to manage teams sometimes spread out all over the world, working on very complex projects:

Each morning when a user logs in they are to write three things into the status box (taken from the scrum project management callouts):

1. What they did yesterday

2. What they are planning to do today

3. What obstacles they are confronting

This takes all but a few minutes and everyone in the team very quickly gets a snapshot of what everyone else is doing, did (or didn’t do) yesterday, and what the problem areas are (like waiting on Mike to get me that document). As a manager it becomes trivially easy to find those who have failed to check in and apply pressure where needed without wasting the collective time of the entire team in a all-hands meeting.

This is a simple process, but we believe the best solutions are often the most simple. Give it a try on your team and see if you agree.

New Feature Preview - Generic Reminders

We recently added a new Generic Reminders Tool based on great feedback from our users.

The Problem

There are times when it would be handy to be sent a simple reminder of something at a specified future time. Often such reminders do not warrant creating a task with a deadline or due date or cluttering your calender.

For example, let’s say you are speaking with a customer over lunch and he informs you that next week they are conducting an open house. You may or may not be interested in attending, but you would like to be reminded just in case you have an opening.

It is easy to keep track of this kind of data by using reminders.

To Create a Reminder

Lets create a reminder for the above event.

Open The Customer

Navigate to the “CRM” tab and then search for your customer by name. Open the customer by clicking on the name. Then click on the “Create Reminder” action on the customer details tab.

Create the Reminder

The above reminder will send you a text on 5/17/13 at 2:29 PM reminding you of the open house on the off chance that you might be driving by and want to stop in.

This is a very simple tool but if used effectively can have a huge impact on your personal and team productivity. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Talking About Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint might just be one of the best and most useful products they company has ever released. In fact, usability expert Jacob Neilson just discovered in some recent that 70% of the top intranets are now built on SharePoint. What Microsoft did that was so brilliant was design a web application platform that makes it easier for developers to build their own intranets on top of the rich set of features provided in Sharepoint. At its core Sharepoint allows IT professionals to create pages where information can be shared and collaborated on. It’s a simple idea really, but in a world where information is king, the simplicity of the idea is profoundly valuable to businesses both large and small.

When we were building Netric part of our goal was to capture the best parts of Sharepoint and simplify them even further so that anyone who can point and click can create an intranet. Our goal was not to copy Sharepoint but to create a tool that can accomplish much of the same things and in many cases far more with less technical know-how. While both products solve the same problem, we approached it from an entirely different angle.

Sharepoint is designed as a tool for internal developers to use to more rapidly develop complex intranet environment and they are very good at it. Netric was designed as a tool designed to allow anyone to start creating their own organizational intranet immediately without development cost or the need to hire any programmers.

Additionally, we also integrated many applications into our netric WebApp platform that are not included in Sharepoint. With Netric you can create pages (we call apps) and collaborate just like in Sharepoint, but you also have high quality prebuilt fully-featured business and collaboration applications built in including: CRM - Customer Relationship Management, Project Manager, CMS - Content Management, Groupware - Email/Calendaring/Chat, Online File System - cloud file storage, Wiki/Knowledge Base, Reporting Tools and more all for the same low price.

And speaking of price, not only are our licensing fees a fraction of the cost of Sharepoint, because we handle hosting and all support the operating expense is much more affordable for small and medium size organizations.

If you are interested in checking out netric, you can sign up for a free personal account here. All signups get the full enterprise version free for 30 days. Give it a try and see if you like it, otherwise Sharepoint is a very good and capable tool if you are looking for something more developer centric.

The Intranet Howto for a Small Business with Limited Resources

This is a how-to for small or medium sized organizations who know that an intranet would be helpful but don’t think it’s possible in your current circumstances.

As leaders we get it - having a central place (an intranet) where everyone on the team could go for information and collaboration would be a huge benefit! The only problem is that most of us barely have the time, and often the resources, to stay afloat with our current initiatives. The prospect of building and establishing an small business intranet, however helpful it would be, is simply not a reality at this time.

The truth is that rolling out an a brand new intranet that is perfectly polished and has every feature you could ever want can be an expensive and time-consuming project that most smaller organizations would do well to avoid. But that does mean small businesses should avoid the idea of an intranet altogether There is another, more practical and realistic approach, that can work within any organization no matter what the current circumstances may be.

We call it the “Iterative Business Model” and it has the power to take companies places they never thought imaginable. The basic idea is that you take a big goal and you split it into a bunch of smaller goals that cumulatively build up to the eventual goal. This is not a new idea but there is one stipulation that makes it different: each change can be executed and put into practice immediately - go live in weeks rather than years.

For example, lets walk through an Iterative Business Model for implementing an intranet in a small organization without disrupting too much time or incurring substantial expense. Our eventual goal is a full-fledged intranet where collaboration takes place, customers are tracked, files are managed, reports are generated and anything else you can imagine. Our task is to split this eventual goal into a number of doable tasks that can be implemented right away. Start this process by listing out the top three things you would like to be able to do with your intranet. This list may be different for each team, but for the purpose of this article we will focus on the following three:

1. We need one place to store all of our shared files that would be accessible from any computer.
2. We need one place where everyone in the company goes to get news, memos and announcements.
3. We need one shared customer database to update and get information.

So let’s walk through a hypothetical implementation plan for the above three items beginning with the first initiative of establishing a central place to store files and documents that will give everyone the ability to share files and access to them from any computer.

The first step is to select a service that will meet your needs. Of course, netric fs does cloud file sharing very well, but so do other services like Google Drive, Dropbox or even Box.com.

Once you select a service and sign up then the trick is to pick one subset of your data to point everyone in your team to. If you try moving all your files at once it could create too big of a disruption. A more gentle approach would plan a slow migration of your files in one month (or you can shorten it if you want) increments that would look something like this:

Month 1

Move all document templates to the cloud and get your team used to finding the templates online as they create new documents. These templates could be letter-heads, proposals, invoices or whatever you have set up for document templates.

Month 2

Get users to start uploading new documents to the cloud but leave the current documents were they are so people can still quickly access past information if needed.

Month 3

By now people should have adopted your new file storage solution so you can move all existing data into the new solution and turn off your local file share.

Then Repeat

Follow the above process adapting to each of your initiatives. The key is to make sure you create small incremental targets or deadlines so you are always moving towards your eventual goal. It may feel like it’s too painfully slow sometimes but it’s far better than not doing anything at all. Some would even argue that it is far superior to doing big changes all at once because with each iteration you have the opportunity to learn from the last one and make quick adjustments with minimal investment.

For instance, say you picked the wrong tool. The marketing for the tool made it sound like heaven but your users hate it. If this was one gigantic roll-out where developers worked on the solution for months or even years before it ever hit prime-time then you would be deeply invested in a tool that nobody likes. At that point changing would not be a viable option.

By contrast, using the process highlighted above, you would discover in the first month, when only a small subset of your data was online, that your tool would not work allowing you to quickly “pivot” or change course.

So give it a try, pick an initiative and start slowly implementing it within the team, making sure that the changes hit prime-time with every iteration. We recommend clearly communicating this whole process with your entire team so everybody understands what is going on and gives their buy-in.

So how about you? Do you have any stories to share of successful large initiatives you implemented with an iterative model? If so, please leave a comment below. I always enjoy hearing how different people approach common implementation road-blocks.

The New Face of Netric

What is an Intranet?

An intranet is a website used to share information within an organization. A good intranet helps to provide the following benefits for organizations of any size:

1. It Improves Communication

Having a central location to communicate with everyone in the team goes a long way in keeping everyone on the same page.

2. It Promotes Collaboration

A well designed intranet will have well designed tools that allow members of a team to easily collaborate on things. For instance, if you are working on a project you should be able to ask a question about a task or a document for the project and others will be notified of the question and given the opportunity to respond. All responses will be sent to interested members thereby fostering an interactive collaborative process. This is just one example of many, but the idea is always the same: a good intranet should have tools that make collaborating on anything and everything effortless.

3. It Shares Information

Having one central location for your valuable data will make it easy to build and share knowledge with the whole team. Store policies and procedures, streamline processes, document solutions and more - then share these documents with all or part of your team.

And That’s Just The Beginning

As companies have discovered the incredible benefits mentioned above, development has continued for more sophisticated and powerful intranets including HR resources, project and customer management and other tools.

Sounds Expensive! What About Small Business?

The only problem is that all of these cool tools are pretty expensive which has made the amazing benefits of such a solution far outside the reach of smaller organizations. That is precisely the reason we built netric - to provide the incredible benefits of a full-scale intranet solution for a fraction of the cost. Aside from netric, which is all-inclusive, you can also sign up for a few different tools to provide some of the same benefits like basecamp (for projects), salesforce (for customer relationship management) and dropbox (for files and documents).

If you are not convinced yet whether or not an intranet is worth looking into, then I suggest just giving it a try. You can sign up for a free trial on www.netricos.com without any obligation and give it a month to see if your team benefits from the tools an intranet can bring to the table. There’s really nothing to lose and potentially much to gain.

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what exactly are we talking about when we use it in the context of the workplace?

In its most basic form, to collaborate is to work with others on something. Any time you include anyone else when doing work you are collaborating.

While working together is a nice concept, sometimes doing so with conventional tools can become cumbersome. For example, let’s say you are creating a new graphic for a webpage and you would like to get feedback from others on your team. Conventionally you have a couple options:

1. You could email the image to everyone.

The issue here is that email can get out of hand when coming in from multiple sources, about many different subjects, over an extended period of time. Not only that but unless you create a folder or group for every single image, it is difficult to keep all the team feedback with the image for future reference. Either you end up with thousands of folders, or you read the comments once then potentially lose them forever.

2. You could bring people into your office.

Sometimes this is useful and necessary, but it can be highly disruptive of the team’s overall productivity - not to mention the challenges of remote / offsite coworkers.

3. You could call a meeting.

Meetings are a drag and extremely expensive from a resource standpoint. Unless the graphic is really really important, few images are worth the aggregate cost of everyone doing nothing but helping you with your image for any amount of time.

A"non-disruptive" Collaboration Tool

We created netric to enable team communication in a non-disruptive way. For example, any file you upload in netric allows for comments by anyone on your team. Meaning this - you can upload a graphic, then send out a comment notifying anyone in your organization. When they have time, they can log in and comment on the file. You will be notified of each comment via email, but the comment will forever be linked to the file so you can simply delete the email from your inbox and forget it forever because the full conversation is attached to your file online. Not only that but everyone gets to take part in the conversation because they see what everyone else added as well, all this while sitting at the comfort of their desk.

Of course, file comments just barely begin to scratch the surface of the vast array of powerful collaboration tools now available. No matter what you end up using, keeping it simple and non-disruptive is a proven way to allow people to work together without negatively impacting personal productivity.

What is CRM - Customer Relationship Management?

The terms “Customer Relationship Management” and its associated, and slightly more popular acronym “CRM”, are hot buzzwords in the marketplace as of late. Google trends reveal that new references to “CRM” have more than doubled in the last three years. So why all the buzz? What exactly does “Customer Relationship Management” mean in relation to people and technology? What exactly is CRM?

The truth is that CRM is not new by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, if you have customers and interact with them in some way, chances are good you are already using some sort of CRM solution. Even rudimentary tools such as a Rolodex, a file cabinet, or an excel spreadsheet - however unsophisticated - qualify as CRM tools. At its core, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is just a tool set designed to help people organize information about, and interact with customers.

However, recent advances in technology, relentless innovation, and healthy competition between countless vendors has dramatically improved the effectiveness of newer software offerings. Below are some standard features that are usually found in most full-featured CRM solutions.

Sales Force Automation (SFA)

Sales Force Automation allows you to break the sales-process into stages and manage it through standardized processes and procedures. The core of SFA is the contact database. Opportunities, lead management, automated workflow, reports and various other tools are aids in the process.

Reporting and Analytics

The ability to extract data from your CRM in a usable format is of utmost value. These reports can be as basic and simple as a pie chart revealing the most productive sales teams, or complex business intelligence analytics. Be sure to look for a product that allows you to customize reports so you can adapt the way you analyze data as your needs evolve.

Customer Service

The customer service features of CRM allow you to create cases/tickets for service and support. Some organizations log every single phone call, others just track “trouble” tickets. The choice is yours, but the key is to find a system with the ability to organize support/service issues and reduce the risk of important matters slipping through the cracks.

Marketing

Unless money and success are of no concern to you, being able to track the effectiveness of and having the ability to execute new marketing campaigns, is of utmost value. Use marketing modules to send/manage surveys, send out promotional emails/newsletters, mailings, build and analyze campaigns, record customer objections and more.

Workflow

Often this functionality is lumped into the SFA description, but automated workflow can and should be used throughout all tools to streamline processes. Managing large amounts of data gets very complex (and messy) quickly. Automated workflow allows you to automate certain tasks based on rules and conditions. For example, if someone inquires about a product that is only available in a specific region, a workflow could be created to automatically route the lead to a qualified sales person in the target region. Or you could create a workflow that will check all new leads 7 days after they were created and email the manager if nobody has opened or responded to the lead. In well designed systems, the automation possibilities are almost limitless. Send happy birthday emails to your customers, establish complex follow-up plans, distribute surveys and so much more.

Those are the core features of any good CRM solution. Of course, the process different tools utilize to accomplish each task varies dramatically. It is a good idea to spend time deciding what your goals are, what you are willing to spend, and then try out as many solutions as you can before making any decisions.

Below are a few common CRM vendors to help get you get started in your search. They all offer a free trial period which should give you ample time to determine if the tool is a good fit for you.

1. Netric CRM
   www.netricos.com/crm
   The CRM our company has created is designed specifically for small-medium sized businesses that are looking for better ways to manage customers, but are not ready to invest the substantial amounts of money required to get started, that other offerings require. Netric also includes well-designed Groupware (shared calendars, email, personal contacts), project management, knowledge base, online file system/backups and much more.
2. Salesforce.com
   www.salesforce.com
   Very popular web-based CRM. It’s popularity and feature-rich architecture make it particularly attractive for many customers. One major draw-back, like most systems, is it that is it pretty expensive if you get the version that includes the workflow feature, which is one of the most important components of a good CRM. At the time this article was written, you can expect to pay $125/per/user/per month.
3. Microsoft CRM
   crm.dynamics.com
   Built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform, Microsoft CRM is a very customizable solution. It is a bit more complex to implement than Salesforce, but its native integration into Microsoft Outlook makes up for the complexity in training because most are already familiar with using Outlook. Cost is still a major hurdle as prices are similar to but slightly more competitive than Salesforce for the hosted edition.
4. ACT!
   www.act.com
   Act is a very popular contact database. It is easy to use and a little easier on the pocket book than most products. Unless you go with the hosted version be aware of hidden costs required for setting up local servers/networks to make the package work in your organization.

Why are CRM solutions so expensive?

The price of CRM software can be surprisingly daunting, especially if you are new to the marketplace. We have come a long way from buying Act! at Costco for $39.95 and paying a geeky high school kid $8 an hour to spend a day getting it setup on one or two computers. Many of the more popular CRM solutions charge up towards $125/per/user per month to manage customer data. That means if you run a small-business of 25 people you can expect to pay around $3,125 per month or $37,500 per year to manage your customers! But why? Technology is supposed to get cheaper with time, not more expensive. What happened?

It is true that technology is always getting cheaper, but while the cost of existing technology is falling, the number of new features and demands continue to rise. This is true in nearly all technological markets. Last week I found myself helping a friend select a new cell phone. His current phone was more than 6 years old and he was ready to try something new and more powerful. He had heard a lot of good things about the smart phones and decided to get one this time around. The only problem was when we got to the store he was shocked to discover that they wanted him to pay $299 for the new phone, in addition to signing a new 2 year contract. He said with confusion in his voice “But they gave me my last phone! Why is it so expensive?”

The truth is that he could still select the free phone, but it would be nowhere near the phone he wanted or needed. What had changed was not the prices of phones, but the requirements and expectations of the user. The rising cost of CRM is a similar story.

In the past if a company wanted to automate workflows, share a customized customer database, or build complex reports they would have to purchase an extremely high priced (tens of millions of dollars) customized solution and pay Oracle, IBM or Siebel millions of dollars more just to get it up and running. Then they would have to staff highly-paid professionals to operate the expensive hardware and update the expensive software in the expensive datacenters. Naturally, small and medium sized organizations could only dream of being able to afford such extravagant luxuries so they settled on simplistic email/communication systems and basic contact management, while leaving the more advanced tools to the proverbial “big boys.”

But what transpired over time is that the features of those extremely costly high-end tools were refined, standardized, and found their way into more commodity CRM packages. Additionally, many vendors opted to manage all the hosting in-house, so that customers could have the benefit of the big IT staff and massive data centers at a fraction of the cost. The result has been that hundreds of CRM vendors have emerged which offer pre-packaged CRM solutions, that include the features of the multi-million dollar systems, for just a few thousand dollars.

The reason the price can seem so high is a matter of perspective. Feature-for-feature, $125/per/user per month is ludicrously low when compared to what it used to cost for the same tools. You can still purchase a basic single-user or even shared contact management system for $39.95. But rest assured, chances are very slim that it will be able to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the marketplace. CRM is no longer just a contact management system, but has transformed into a full-fledged business platform, that if used correctly, will be the foundational piece for the way your organization operates.

But lets face it, even if it is a matter of perspective and $125/user/month is a relative steal; for most of us $3,125 per month for an organization of 25 people is still cost prohibitive. If you are in that group then you are certainly not in the minority. The “CRM Report” has documented that only one out of six small businesses use any sort of CRM system. And Analyst Sheryl Kingston of the “Yankee Group” concluded that “It (CRM) is too expensive and too complex for them (small businesses). That is why they are still using Excel spreadsheets.”

Fortunately, the cost of CRM solutions is being addressed by a few organizations, including the netric and others. Netric CRM was strategically designed to implement the most important features for small-business while it is priced 70%-80% cheaper than most other systems. Other lower-cost alternatives include SugarCRM , Act! by Sage Software and vtiger CRM.

Why We Moved from Apache Solr to Elastic Search

Netric is an Enterprise Productivity and Collaboration suite that includes advanced tools like CRM, CMS, Project Management and more in a single unified platform. We store a lot of data that is growing exponentially every day. Only 3 months after our beta release our dataset for object records had exceeded 100M records. It did not take long before we started bumping up against major scale limitations with relational databases.

Initially our biggest stress points were all centered around full text search. So long as our SQL queries were using carefully designed and partitioned (mostly numeric) indexes our main database, PostgreSQL 9.1 (which we absolutely love by the way) worked fine; but it began to choke hard as our full text indexes grew beyond the amount of resident memory on the servers. Searches against a large index with 10M+ documents were causing severe lag, and updates and deletions became an even greater bottleneck. We optimized, partitioned tables, sharded datasets and more in an attempt to preserve our target sub-second response time but with each step we found it helped for a period and then we were back at the drawing board only days later.

We decided it was time to integrate a separate service that was specifically designed to index and search on millions of documents in split second time. The solution had to be very flexible because our schema can be user-defined, ridiculously fast, and highly scale-able to billions or even trillions of documents. We researched and evaluated many solutions including Sphinx (what Craigslist uses) and Apache Solr (what pretty much everyone else uses). After much testing we deployed an update that routed full-text queries to Apache Solr. This solution worked really well except for one major limitation - the index updates were nowhere near real-time. We thought we could fix this by forcing a commit with every document update but that pretty much killed the Solr instance as it choked to the point of being almost non-respondent. This presented a major problem because the document needed to be searchable immediately as users updated objects.

We dropped back to PostgreSQL for a while as we searched and tested further. Then we found ElasticSearch and immediately fell in love with the design. The way it partitioned indices was perfect for our multi-tenant application. With Solr it was a pain to handle our incredibly dynamic schema and multi-tenant architecture Initially we were weary of trying ElasticSearc in a production environment because it was a newer product, but with a few tests we quickly discovered that while search performance was on par with Solr, the near-real time indexing was vastly superior. Our stress test was able to index over 10M documents on my local development machine without even breaking a sweat. More importantly, the document were immediately (or close enough for our needs) available after commit without a major performance hit to the index.

Just to demonstrate the kinds of results we got, here are the results of our test. We inserted 10M documents, then ran a series of full text searches while simultaneously inserting 1 document per second. We felt this test would more accurately represent our use case.

The reason for Solr’s poor performance is entirely due to the simultaneous inserts. If we stopped the insert service solr beat both ES and PGSQL hands down.

We are not the only ones who came to the conclusion that solr is not desinged for real time indexing. Our friends over at socialcast.com reported almost exactly the same thing.

In Conclusion

Of all the innovation taking place in the “big data” world right now, I believe ElasticSearch is by far one of the most useful and most impressive tools. We are even considering extending its use far beyond a full-text index and using it as the index for our entire application including all lists and queries. We have also started testing possible uses in our Business Intelligence module to render complex analytics on massive amounts of data.

Thanks to the simplicity of deployment and configuration (why can’t more products work like that?), we high recommend giving ElasticSearch a try no matter how big or small your project might be. We’ve even considered using it as a replacement for all persistent storage.