Blog on Netric

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

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

A Preview of the New Customer Form

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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).

A Simple and Life Changing System for Managing Tasks

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

Changing to netric.com Domain

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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).

Free Software Options for Startups

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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!

Helpful Tips For Successfully Deploying CRM

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

How to Manage a Scrum Project Using Netric

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

Keep the Team Productive and Connected Without Another Meeting

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

New Feature Preview - Generic Reminders

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

Talking About Sharepoint

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

The Intranet Howto for a Small Business with Limited Resources

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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 New Face of Netric

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

What is an Intranet?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

What is Collaboration?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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:

What is CRM - Customer Relationship Management?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.

Why are CRM solutions so expensive?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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?

Why We Moved from Apache Solr to Elastic Search

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:16:38 -0500

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.