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:
What do they mean?
We’ve added three key metrics:
- 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.
- 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!
- 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!
August 19th, 2009 by Scott Annan
We’ve just added the capability in Network Hippo to manage deals in multiple currencies!
This has been a request from members with international clients (AIM Group, Wistia, Global Racing Schools) – (btw: I love that small businesses can work globally!) and from some of our power users in the UK (Coherence Design) and Asia.
Now you can manage deals in multi-currency, fixed bid, monthly contract, or hourly rate, and add multiple contacts to deals.
We’ve also made some improvements to email importing (with much more to come) and fixed a number of issues that have been reported.
We’ve got a lot more improvements and some integration surprises that you’re going to love.
Now that we’ve launched Network Hippo we’re working even harder than before at building a leading relationship management tool that can provide professional and business transformation!
Stay tuned… we’re only getting started!
September 9th, 2008 by Scott Annan
I had breakfast this morning with Nick Desbarats of Choicebot and we were discussing the Newton – Apple’s first version of the iphone – and Nick mentioned that the product had several “fatal flaws” – a term they use often at Choicebot to describe something that is not “ok”, or “I can live with”, but is a feature that actually eliminates the product from consideration.
It’s an important consideration.
In fact very few things are on a linear curve from “bad” to “great”. Most things that I don’t engage with are because of one very specific fatal flaw – it is too expensive, it doesn’t integrate with my email, I can’t do x with it… I can pinpoint a specific issue that deterred me from the product.
Oddly, I assume that the opposite is not true. It is not one single feature that leads me to purchase or engage. It has to be a couple of features – brand association, reliability, and a killer feature.
As we get closer to completion of Dex, I have been working hard on making sure our killer features are going to really impress people. Now I’m going to be spending more time looking for fatal flaws that will turn people away.
Thanks Nick.
(PS – for more information on fatal flaws and great product selection, check out choicebot.com)
September 4th, 2008 by Scott Lake
September 3rd, 2008 by Scott Annan
One of the core goals of dex is to create a dependable and complete source of information about the people in your professional network.
To keep contact information dependable we reach out to your contacts and ask them to confirm or update their contact information to keep it updated.
To make information more “complete”, we encourage you to write regular notes about your contacts, automatically collect email and calendar events related to this contact (more about this feature to come!), and collect relevant content about this person from popular “networking” and news websites. We try to gather as much relevant information as we can about the person so that they aren’t just a name in a database, but a three-dimensional person based on your relationship with them.
Through dex people will finally transcend the sterile address book view and take on a much more complete, relevant, and useful profile that will help you interact with them in a much more meaningful way.
Why it matters:
- An undependable or “dirty” contact database won’t be used
- Strong businesses rely on strong relationships with customers and partners
- Your knowledge of a person is limited. By gathering external information, you can learn more about people which can help strengthen your relationships.
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This is a series about killer features and common sense approaches to professional network management (and what used to be called CRM). If you have any specific things that vex you about CRM or professional networking, please comment and I’ll blog about how we are addressing it through dex.
