All posts by John Paul Narowski

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Over the past two days, we’ve experienced higher than normal load on our servers and as a result there have been some outages over the past few days. Our sys-admin team is working around the clock to ensure the right changes are made to keep your CRM service fast and consistent, as you’ve come to expect from us.

We’ll be diving into this issue in more detail over the weekend during off peak hours, and appreaciate your patience while we bring this to a close. Either way it doesn’t excuse the downtime and we sincerly apologize for the trouble. Going forward, we’ll be tuning our server configuration to provide better scaling and handling of higer volumes so you can keep on growing your business!

As of now, service is fully restored, and you can get back to business. If you have any further questions don’t hestitate to reach out!

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Sales and Marketing

The Future of Internet Marketing

September 24, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Marketers have to be nimble when it comes to these changing times. Businesses need to adapt their needs to the world around them or face possible failure. The future of internet marketing is just one way of embracing the change you might be looking for.

The future looks like the 70s in space. — As you can see in this graphic, “Torus Interior,” (NASA) the future will look a lot like the 70s.

The information sector is expanding all over the world without much hesitation as the endless possibility of jobs in this sector and many other opportunities that will change the workforce and the education level of that workforce. While there may be novelty coverage over laughable careers, the foreseeable jobs are already within range.

1. Marketing Programmer

Sometimes research into key marketing data requires hands to get dirty with scripts or robots to mine data. The larger the need for this marketing data, the larger the efforts will have to be, and could require assembling a team who is equipped to handle this.

In this job, education would have to be much more expansive than the traditional marketing classes. Languages like CSS and HTML allow marketers to create content or funnels while making the page appealing.

“Intern. Stop taking photos. I’m trying to read” Historical Stock Photos, “Monk in a Library” All Rights Reserved

2. Content Librarian

With the growth of content marketing, content will need to be maintained, procured, and continuously intertwined to be a living and breathing wealth of knowledge. They will be the scribes that give order to the private blogs scattered around the tech industry. It’s anyone’s guess as to how this job will take shape, or even if it will be a major part of the duties played out everyday.

Content librarians are needed when content becomes a massive undertaking. With content that dates back a year or more comes the challenge of tackling broken links, for example. A librarian would have to tend this content to make certain that your content is the best it can be.

3. Graphics Librarian

This is a bit like the content curation, except the duty of the graphics librarian would be to have access to stock photos that are curated, up-to-date, and to maintain the rights of all graphics used. Graphics librarians could also be graphics creators, utilizing everything from JPEG to GIFs.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software

9 Great finds from the karmaCRM archive

August 8, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Perhaps when we colonize the moons of Jupiter, we can rest assure that customer service will be better no matter what market it is. Striving for bar-raising customer service can be another part of a utopia that will one day be indispensable when it comes to small businesses.

Adobe is one example of how a blog can be integrated into the brand. To further utilize content, aiding small businesses with viable information can expand the value that karma’s integrity is built around. Through karma, small businesses are given the opportunity to get information that they need through content we deliver to them about how they can strategize, or what tools they might need to do that.

Starting with the most recent is app reviews found in two parts: part one and part two. These are apps that are applicable to small businesses and come in handy to us. Testimonials are more than just great link builders—they can also help small businesses when it comes to evaluating a purchasing decision. Small businesses can benefit from sharing their own testimonials with each other, especially if there is a common industry between the small businesses.

Question to ponder: How much is enough when it comes to the features you seek out in a small business CRM platform? As a business person, you know you have outgrown the spreadsheet and post-it note faze, but you may realize that now is the time to seek out a CRM platform that can allow the features you seek, but you also don’t need the over riding depth of a major CRM platform…or the cost! Features: A common CRM misconception is a post to give YOU the emerging business owner, author, wellness coach, real estate professional, the boot strapped small business, or even start-up, a look into a mindset as it applies to seeking out a CRM platform that can identify with your unique business needs, as well as isolate and solve a problem set. At karmaCRM there is no misconception about our platform and company culture.

Small businesses have a good chance of Being Customer centric in a digital world. This means possessing a deep understanding of your customers and paying attention to them and all of their needs. It is a very crucial thing for a company. Understanding your customers will help you provide the service they need in the best way possible. This will not only make your relationships with your customers better but also help you gain respect and boost your company’s reputation.

Small businesses need to know that a CRM is exactly the tool to be utilized, and how it can benefit them. In cases when a CRM implementation is successful, it cannot be stressed enough that this tool must be used. Why Small Business CRM is essential highlights this exact reason. Placing crucial certainty into a CRM opens doors for companies. In exchange, small businesses are given opportunities. With karma’s Knowledge Base, small businesses can take rake in even more benefits by becoming involved with our extensive support center. We choose to do it this way because small businesses can benefit, and when your small business wants to take part in this, check out a 30-day free trial risk free. The archive also goes back to earlier related posts here because giving small businesses the best opportunity for success is what we strive for.

Social Media is a great way for small businesses to build brand awareness and gain customers. Set the stage for a CRM social strategy explains just how this works and some important points to keep in mind while doing it. With social media being so easy, free, and popular it tends to be successful to any business. Check out this article and set the stage for your business today!

Many of our internet-based small businesses enjoyed this blog on using RSS for backlinks. In this article, the reader is given an in-depth look at RSS feeds from the history all the way to further using RSS backlinks. Small businesses trying to integrate their strategy to include SEO tactics were given the chance to implement intricate tactics. Link building and SEO tactics are a topic that can be expanded on from our blog since this is such important information for small businesses.

A company’s culture is one of the unique benefits it can feature to a competitive world. In this blog Customer Centric: Going Beyond the Mission Statement we introduce you to the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Amongst other things when building a mission statement, this piece covers his thoughts on people, policy, and pay among many other facets of building culture in an emerging business model.
How your business appears on the web should be a major strategic thought process for any founder, business owner, or manager. In this article “How to raise your Google rank” you will find out how to check your page score, improve page ranking results, use long tail keywords, and look at quality versus quantity as it relates to your page presence on the web.

Managing time wisely is essential for small businesses. How to Change Your Perception and Master Time Management is a great article to read if you are having time management issues. Every small business should practice the 80/20 rule, as it really does work. Every second counts and this article explains how you can take more control of your time today!

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Sales and Marketing

Does your blog have what it takes?

August 5, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Taking your blog to the next level with Google news just became much easier to do, but getting your content ready for submission may be a cumbersome task.

Fortunately, your interns don’t have to study Associated Press Style to pump out content and boost your SEO. Being great at writing “leads” would be a plus, but the pertinence of your content is crucial. Google discloses they will make this opportunity available to publishers in the U.S, with plans to introduce it to other countries soon. With these ongoing releases, they plan on enhancing the features of the news platform as well. Lowering the bar on news publishing is just one great move that karmaCRM has been reporting on. These are great opportunities for everyone, and learning how to do this can be beneficial. Another great move was recently reported on here, and allows local SMBs to prosper. These opportunities benefit SMBs, which is priority number one. If you expect results with your SMB, click here on this link and see how we at karmaCRM can help.

Valued content is everything

As enthralling and as hilarious as my journalism professor’s classes were, learning the guidelines for online news publication submissions did not come up. This was an introductory class, and as such we learned the reasoning behind all news stories. In other words, the reasons why sometimes you see a story about a cat or an earthquake. It’s almost intuitive knowledge, requiring only a level of common sense behind pertinent news stories. I still remember the mnemonic device though. Defining Journalism Legal challenges to defining journalism has become increasingly troubling since the advent of the Internet. Anyone can report on an event with their own blog, which makes it almost too easy to label yourself as a journalist. If there is any difference, it is based on what can be viewed as “fresh.” It’s like walking into a supermarket for news aggregators such as Google News. The produce section, where most of the fresher items are found, displays the freshest items and there are definite characteristics of these. Google News determines how fresh news is depending on what they’ve accumulated so far. This makes it easy to narrow down a story or to see an angle that has not been considered. Sure, I could easily share the mnemonics device that helped me in my intro level class, but producing for Google News is the difference between being well-read on newsworthy topics and making bad submissions.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Small Business

How that Google algorithm update changed the game for local business

July 31, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

googlepigeon

Small businesses and the need for success

For small businesses that are struggling with Google’s ranking but still need local growth, it can be tough to compete with all of the traffic from larger firms. With Google’s new algorithm update, local growth is the focus— and small businesses can benefit greatly.

Google’s New Algorithm

Google has changed the game for local businesses when it comes to finding results for local directories, giving visibility to the SMB community.

In a recent update to their algorithm, Google has changed the way that results of businesses are returned to users. What Search Engine Land is calling the “pigeon update” now fetches local results for businesses.

Google has released this update that fixes an issue that users had found with Yelp searches, but overall changes include:

Using local directories based on location of the user
Increased use of review sites as local directories

Responsive measures within small businesses with a local audience is crucial, but it is likely that many of the beneficial steps have already been taken. One example of this are local directories that Google may now refer to, as the aforementioned Business2Community article states.

Conclusion

The possibilities of this movement toward local growth might turn into greater awareness of the power that Google could play in helping small businesses. If that is the case, then Google could be swayed to favor small businesses and local growth. Regardless of what the future might hold for local and small businesses’ rank on Google, response to these opportunities is absolutely necessary.

Small business growth needs are continually searching for ways that benefit their exposure to their unique business propositions. Managing all their customers requires a CRM that can be an easy tool to implement and use. KarmaCRM is a small business that understands those needs and has the structure in place to help small businesses meet and exceed those management needs.

Your small business will see the results, and KarmaCRM’s platform has multiple price points that allow a business to customize to their budgetary needs. Click here for a free 30-day trial period and see the difference.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software

58% of the US is doing this. Is your company adapting?

July 30, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

In this day in age, it is impossible to stand still while your competitors rush past you. Innovation and evolution are the rules of the game for most businesses. The digital platform that your business uses could be slowing you down, which could lead to a loss of revenue. Though it can be costly, expanding your digital platforms to both smartphones and desktops would be truly beneficial for your business. According to this survey, 58% of your customer base in the US uses multiple digital platforms to access the web. This means that not only are users accessing the web from a desktop or a laptop, but they are also accessing the Internet through their mobile phones and tablets as well. A business that sees value in moving to multiple platforms makes this move because they know their audience. At karmaCRM we know that our customers would benefit from being able to access our site or app from their platform of choice.

One of karmaCRM’s benefits is that we are a cloud based service, thus no need to download software that may not be compatible across multiple operating systems. In an effort to make CRMs work for the customer rather than the other way around, karmaCRM is devoted to working toward mutli-platform usage to make your work easier. There is an ongoing evolution of how businesses interact. When it comes to technology, there’s no static, so why should your CRM hold you back? With karmaCRM, your business will see the benefit of a CRM while being able to use it no matter how you’re connecting to the Internet.
Click here for a free 30-day trial period and see the difference.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

karmaCRM News and Updates

Announcing KarmaCRM

May 21, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Why in the world would we want to create another CRM system?

Simple. Because we are tired of feeling overwhelmed by features we don’t use, while missing the few simple features that we need in CRM Software. We aren’t trying to shoot for the moon, just provide you with a system that just works, leaving all the nitty gritty behind the scenes.

KarmaCRM is a simple yet powerful CRM (Customer Resource Manager) system designed to help you out-perform, out-woo, and out-shine your competition. We are hard at work providing you with robust features, without sacrificing visual ascetics and usability. We want to help you establish and maintain new relationships, while building on the ones you have. We need your feedback to make this the super-spiffy CRM system that solves the worlds problems, so request an Alpha invite if you would like to try KarmaCRM out.

A few features of KarmaCRM

1. Send KarmaCRM your email correspondence with your contacts and it will automatically attach it to your contact.

2. Use our KarmaPoints to tell which salesperson is using the system best

3. Upload files and documents for each contact

4. Create Deals and Track their Progress

5. Assign Todos and Receive a Daily Email Summary

We will have screenshots, and the ability for you to request an invite coming in the next few weeks, so check back frequently, or signup for our newsletter. We look forward to helping you sell more, and have a great time doing it!

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

karmaCRM News and Updates

New Feature – Inline Help & Wizards

May 18, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

We understand that navigating CRM can be challenging, so we’ve been working on ways to put the help you need right at your fingertips. We’ve added a few self help tools to keep you focused on growing your business instead of trying to figure out how to use CRM.

New Inline Help Menu

When you click the Help button in the top right of the header menu, a new Help Menu will now slide into place. This contains all the help options you should be used to, but also now syncs with our knoweldge base to include all of our support articles as well.

inline-help-1

You can find help by using the top search bar, or browse by category.

inline-help-2

Quickly access the 10 most recently viewed articles

Screen Shot 2014-05-18 at 9.28.04 AM

Interactive Wizards

We’ve also added interactive wizards that will help you navigate the most important parts of our system. We’re going to be adding, and making role specific wizards as well, so keep checking back! You can access these wizards by pressing the black arrow located in the bottom right of your screen.

wizard-1

These features are in the beta phase and considerd an experiment. Their success greatly depend on your feedback! Let us know what you think, and how we can make them better.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Sales and Marketing

5 Sales Tips to Go from Good to Great

May 14, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Outside of the sales industry, there are many jobs that require some type of sales – whether you’re a doctor who wants new patients or you own a pool cleaning service that needs more customers. Many people are capable of basic sales skills, but what really pushes business forward is taking your sales abilities from good to great. So how exactly do you go about doing that without being pushy?

Believe in What You’re Selling

If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, how do you expect anyone else to? The energy coming from you will automatically turn many off just based on your genuine lack of enthusiasm. Even if you’re selling something as seemingly simple as a pen, find a reason to convince yourself that it’s the best one ever until you believe it so much that others will as well.

Read Your Customer

Being able to read people is an asset in the sales industry, so that you know when it’s time to back off a bit and when you should be applying a little more pressure. The more you mix up the two, the fewer sales you’ll make. Start paying attention to your sales prospects’ body language, tone of voice, and their facial expressions – and before long, you’ll be an expert at your approach for each person.

Get to the Point

Do you like your time being wasted? Neither does anyone else. No one wants to sit through an hour-long presentation for you to finally make your point in the last five minutes. Have an opening line if you need to get your foot in the door, and if you have some time, come up with a brief presentation about why your business and product are fantastic; give people reasons to want your product, then answer some questions (if necessary) and wrap it up.

Consider Your Presentation

If you walked into a doctor’s office and there were wires hanging from the ceiling, the doctor had blood stains on his coat, and the chairs in the waiting room had ripped leather, you’d probably hightail it out of there before even making it to the sign-in sheet. In sales, it’s not only all about how you look, but also about what’s around you. Look presentable, wear a smile, dress neatly, and in conjunction with that, showcase the product beautifully – whether it’s a conference room or a high-end dinner entree.

Know Your Product

Did you ever go into a restaurant and the server was absolutely clueless about the menu? There’s a big difference between not knowing if a particular item is cooked in peanut oil and having no idea what sides are available to come with an entrée. It’s an absolute must to know the product you’re selling. The more you know about your product, the more likely your audience is going to be convinced to purchase it based on all of the reasons you’re giving them for why they should.

When you’re in sales, you already know you have to be nice, smile often, and be well-organized, but the aforementioned tips can help you go from good to great much sooner than you may think. Before long, sub-par sales figures can be a thing of the past!

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

karmaCRM News and Updates

Lessons Learned from Our Recent Server Migration

April 8, 2014 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

What We Accomplished, What Went Wrong, and How We Learned from the Experience

Hello, my name is John-Paul Narowski and I am the founder of karmaCRM. I wanted to first and foremost thank you for using our product, and for continually helping us to make it better and better.

As many or most of you know, our company recently migrated its servers to a platform that would ultimately provide you with increased security, improved scalability, and reduced downtime during updates (among other benefits). For the last few months, we were very eager to make the transition to our new servers, and as the date and time approached, the excitement was truly palpable.

But now that we’re on the other side of the server migration, with service and data fully restored after a snafu in both of these areas, we owe you a sincere, official apology – along with a clear explanation of what went wrong.

Bottom line is: we messed up. We delivered a less than optimal experience to you, our customers, and that simply isn’t acceptable. The server migration this past weekend was far from smooth, and it caused varying degrees of inconvenience to some of you. I consider this downtime a personal failure, and as the owner of this company, I accept full responsibility for this mishap. Although I sincerely wish we could, we cannot give you your time back; however, we can and do vow to deeply resolve to learn everything we can from it. And we have already begun in earnest to do so.

The downtime you experienced goes against several of our company’s core values – most importantly, delivering bar-raising customer service. Your time is valuable and not something we ever, ever take lightly. As a team, we’ll be extensively discussing how to better manage future migrations in order to diminish, if not completely eliminate, any disruptions to your business.

What Went Wrong?

Index Refreshing Downtime

KarmaCRM relies on a searching/indexing system, to allow your data to load quickly and be searchable. While making the migration to the new servers, the process of re-indexing all of the data took far longer than we had anticipated and planned for, causing your data to appear “missing” while the import scripts ran.

Bugs

There were some overlooked bugs in our import script, which caused the indexes to not import all of the data they needed. In our testing, this issue did not present itself with the accounts that were tested; therefore, this was not on our radar and took us by surprise. In the future, we’ll be testing from a multitude of accounts in addition to creating a concrete, thorough, and comprehensive QA checklist for everyone on our team to inspect.

Keeping You in the Loop

There were large periods of time in which we were all heads down working on solving the problems. Because of this, we failed to provide you with frequent updates about where things stood. I certainly understand how this can be quite unsettling when the data you rely on appears to be missing.

How Can We Fix It

Now that we’ve moved over to much more powerful servers, we have a LOT of room to grow, and we don’t expect a migration as major as this one to happen for a long time. Our new servers will allow us to comfortably grow for years to come. That being said, we’re going to be making a number of changes to ensure that planned downtime goes smoothly. Also, If ever we have unplanned downtime, you’ll know exactly what’s happening, while it’s happening, and when it’s resolved. Building timely customer communication in our testing design will be paramount.

Staging Environment Upgrade

We will be creating a 1-to-1 identical clone of our production environment. Up until now, our staging/testing app was somewhat different than our production app, leading to inconsistencies in behavior between the two. In plain English, having an identical environment means that we can much more effectively test system upgrades on our staging system before applying them to production.

Launching a System Status Site

We’ve also just set up a status page, where you can check on our systems at any time. This will also be the primary way we syndicate information about outages, planned downtime, etc. Check it out at status.karmacrm.com.

Conclusion

While we’re very happy to now be on the other side of the migration, and while we certainly do appreciate everyone being so understanding throughout the process, it was, nonetheless, a rocky and extremely uncomfortable path for all of us – company and customer alike. For that, my company and I are truly sorry. We’re happy to let you know that we’re now full speed ahead on our new infrastructure and hope that you enjoy this faster, more stable, and more productive karmaCRM experience for years to come.

Thank you for taking this journey and walking with us.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com