Network Hippo Blog | Relationship Matters

Network Hippo Update: Better professional networking

September 9th, 2010 by Scott Annan

When we started working on Network Hippo we had a core vision: to help people build stronger professional relationships.

Over the last year we’ve experimented with different designs, new features, building a platform, CRM tools, and various other “add-ons” to increase the value to our users.  We’ve had a lot of positive feedback with each change we’ve implemented, but I think we’ve continued to miss the mark and may have wandered too much from our core vision.

Over the summer we’ve been going through a very cathartic exercise of stripping down everything we’ve done and rebuilding it with the sole focus of helping people build stronger professional relationships.  It’s been a long process, but we learned a lot, and I think are emerging much stronger.

Next week will mark an important new chapter in the evolution of Network Hippo. We are making some major changes to the application that will dramatically improve the usability and the value of the service.  More importantly, it will significantly increase the power and effectiveness of your professional network.

We know that some users will not be happy with some of the features that we’ve removed from the application.  We’re really sorry.  Your support – many of you from the beginning – has been our main source of motivation in continuing to work on and develop Network Hippo.  But ultimately we felt our product lacked a clear vision and purpose, and the need for a better professional networking application became more evident as we engaged more users.

We’re hopeful that many of you – and future users – will benefit from a more focused, more powerful service.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about the experience we’ve gone through, why we made the decisions we did, and our vision for the future of Network Hippo.

Below is a preview of the new Network Hippo homepage.

Network Hippo Homepage

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New [smarter, easier] Sales Management

May 17th, 2010 by Scott Annan

If you’re using Network Hippo and are in a small business or an entrepreneur, and you HAVEN’T been using sales management, you really need to check it out.  Effective sales management is very valuable to your business, and a great compliment to your Network Hippo account (oh, and its FREE)!

Tonight we’re launching a revamp of the sales management application (called DEALS) in Network Hippo to make it smarter and easier to use for small businesses.  I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about graphs and reports in CRM systems (more to come next week as we update the homepage!) as I am concerned that too much focus is placed on statistics and not enough on relationships.  HOWEVER, I do think that these new sexy graphs in the sales management section will help give people immediate feedback on their sales progress on a monthly basis.

So what’s changed?

Well, as I mentioned above, we’ve added some awesome new graphs on the DEALS homepage:

New Network Hippo sales management

What do they mean?

We’ve added three key metrics:

  1. Monthly Objective
    Set your monthly sales objective and Network Hippo will tell you how much more you need to sell this month to hit your target.  The area graph below will show you how well you are doing over the last three months.
  2. Pipeline Health
    A pipeline represents the number of deals you have in each stage of the sales process.  Ideally you want to have a lot of deals at the top of the pipeline and as each prospective deal moves through the sales process, you have fewer until you get to close.  Too few “in the pipeline” and you may be scrambling in a few months.  Too few at the end of the pipeline and you may be scrambling now!
  3. Active vs Stale deals
    This chart shows you how many of the deals in your pipeline have been active (there has been some kind of activity with the deal or the people involved) and how many are growing stale (that you should either follow-up on or kill).

Each of the metrics / graphs updates if you select other members in your team, so they are truly personal metrics (a major focus for us!) – but you can also see across the whole company.

We’ve also made the page easier to segment deals by sales stage and see rollup amounts for each of the stages.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on how to improve the sales management features.  We still have more features to add (like smart search), and we’re committed to making it a simple powerful sales management app.

Next up: Homepage and a secret (but super powerful) new app!

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Christmas in a Casino? Dad: No thanks!

November 18th, 2009 by Scott Annan

We are about to release a major new version of Network Hippo and we’ve been spending the last week in intense testing.

Just today I was testing the new (and dramatically improved) contact importer.  Although much smarter than the current contact importer, it imported my father as “dad” (maybe a little too smart) instead of by his real name.

I thought I would see how smart our web search was to see if it could find relevant information, even though the contact name was mislabeled.  Although it did pull up some relevant information, it really missed the mark on the twitter search and instead returned this tweet from @s**tmydadsays:

dad

Although the search may not have been accurate, it’s good to see that Network Hippo has a sense of humor!

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Cool new features

June 11th, 2009 by Scott Annan

We’re still putting some finishing touches on launching Dex v2, including an amazing new design that will blow you away (more to come).

But I thought I would share with you some of the neat contact features that we’ve implemented to make it easier to find relevant information about people in your network.

Check out the video here.

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Dex hits hard times: Delays and Legal Troubles…

November 18th, 2008 by Scott Annan

So the song goes “I don’t like Mondays”® (credit: Bob Geldof)….

After a weekend of development and code improvements, we were unable to get Dex through our internal tests to release it into beta – as planned for this week.  We ran into several roadblocks, and we held a long team meeting to discuss the opportunity vs. risk of launching the product to our beta users without some of the key, mind-blowing features.  In the end, we agreed that it was more important to get it done right than to get it done fast (this is me eating my words!).  This means disappointing all of the people who signed up for our beta program (our most interested audience).  And it also means a very disappointed and disheartened development team.  When everyone’s pulling all-nighters and working through weekends to hit a date, and you realize that the product just isn’t where it needs to be, its a real blow to morale and enthusiasm.

So Monday morning and the decision is made to push back the launch of our Beta program (emails to everyone who signed up to follow shortly).

But Monday gets worse…

Later in the evening I receive an email from a lawyer representing Dex Media (not to be confused with MediaDex) – who run Dex Knows, an online yellow pages site.  They believe that our use of the name dex “is likely to cause confusion and is an infringement of the DEX® mark”, and that we should change our product name immediately “before further and substantial damage results from [our] continued infringement of the DEX® mark”.

Apparently Dex Media feels that our relationship management product resembles their online yellow pages website and magazine publishing business enough that we risk causing confusion and could benefit from the goodwill they have accumulated with their customers.

Dex insurance: ok.
Dex skateboard: ok.
Dex software (software?): ok.
Dex supply chain logistics (software again?!?): ok.
Dex multimedia (media?): yup.
Medical equipment, clothing line, Imaging, Concrete work…

OK, so maybe we’re not so original, but I think its pretty unreasonable to say our product is anything like a yellow pages company.

So now we have a choice to make.  Do we try to make our case ($$$) or do we throw away all of our goodwill and time invested in an unoriginal but strong brand position?

At the very least, at least Monday’s over.

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Dex goes live: New Logo, New website

November 3rd, 2008 by Scott Annan

The new website, dexapp.com, launched over the weekend.

We plan on posting a new video within the next couple of days, but we wanted to get the new design up on the web for everyone to see (and provide feedback!).

We’re getting really close to launch now…

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Dex feature sneak peak

September 4th, 2008 by Scott Lake

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Beyond CRM: Introducing NRM

August 7th, 2008 by Scott Annan

We’ve been working on a “mightier” way to manage customer information and interaction, but we’ve been struggling trying to figure out how we can build a system that does more than just feed back information that you “already know” about your customers.

We’ve come to two conclusions:

  1. We need to build a system that is “smart” to help you improve your relationships, not just “track” them
  2. The term CRM is too narrow in scope and delivery and carries too much negative baggage

And so, we have been working for the last few weeks on a better term to describe what we’re building and have come up with:  Network Relationship Management (NRM)

NRM is a new business discipline that describes the processes used to measure the influence and contact points of a person’s or company’s professional network.

To put it in context:

  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management) focuses on the processes and tools that a company uses to manage customer information.
  • NRM recognizes the influence of a company’s professional network and helps leverage strong connections, improve weaker connections, and actively manage the overall health of the network.

A healthy network delivers increased customer loyalty, higher quality leads, and a better reputation — a major success factor, given today’s popularity of “word of mouth” marketing.

As we look at the popularity of online social and professional networking tools, they have been linking people together -  but soon the internet will connect us all!  It’s actually pretty obvious – it’s not who you know that matters, it’s the quality and relevance of the connections that matter.

Here’s an example.

I have exchanged emails (twice) with Seth Godin, author of several good pop-marketing books.  He responded quickly both times, and is listed in my “network” and my apple contacts.  But I don’t “know” Seth Godin, anymore than I “know” Wayne Gretzky (although I have an autographed hockey card).  The same goes for the 10 people I met once at a conference that are now in my LinkedIn network.

Network Relationship Management allows you to recognize the quality of relationships, and their relevance to business.

Which is why we need a powerful Network Relationship Management tool.

We are witnessing an increasingly blurry line between private and professional networks (doesn’t everyone check facebook profiles before hiring now?) and smart companies are beginning to recognize the much more complex business relationships between contract employees, consultants, suppliers, customers, media, and company “friends”.  If companies can strengthen their relationships by analyzing their total network, they can increase sales with existing customers, improve relationships with new leads, and improve overall word of mouth marketing – which all contribute to the bottom line.

In this new “networked world”, CRM starts to look like a dinosaur.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about how our products are going to fundamentally change how companies – and people – will be able to manage their networks.

Stay tuned.

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Great Brainstorming / Working Session

July 16th, 2008 by Scott Annan

I just got back from an intensive two-day brainstorm / working retreat with the team up near Mount Tremblant in Quebec.

It’s difficult trying to make the best use of such a short period with everyone in the same physical location – it’s only happened one other time – at the beginning of this project – and it’s unlikely to happen again.

The highlights of the meetings:

  • A lot of progress was made on how we integrate the customer management, customer portal, and team collaboration modules.  We discussed where they overlap, and how we can ensure smooth transitions for all of the different roles of the people who will use the software.
  • Huge progress in design.  I think we have an excellent, innovative navigation and data structure model that will make it easy to find information quickly without feeling overwhelmed by the screens.
  • Some killer features.  Like a combo twitter-like IM / mobile notification and communication platform that is extended across the apps.  Or a scrollable, graphical timeline view of all information about an account in the company section.  I am really excited about some of the concepts that are playing out.

However, for me the biggest challenge and opportunity that came out of the last two days is how we are going to “name” the software.  We came to a conclusion that we are not doing traditional CRM or support management – and that our software really “humanizes” the relationship that companies have with their customers.  So we’re looking for a name that will reflect this.

Any ideas?

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Development Update – Charts

July 10th, 2008 by creighton

For reporting, we started out using XML/SWF charts. I was familiar with the library and it seemed to be easy to integrate with rails (and it was). But the type of charts Scott wanted to see weren’t possible with XML/SWF charts.

After a few days of hacking, we scrapped that charting library for amCharts (http://www.amcharts.com/)

This library works great, but you need to get comfortable with configuration. Lots of configuration options, but really easy to get working with rails. Basically you just use repond_to and write the xml needed using builder and the javascript in html.

Here is a chart that is on the dashboard of CRM. The rollover effects are nice, and the message inside is easily customizable.

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