On the face of it, you have to wonder why we do it. Why we work all the long hours, often making a less than comfortable income, and dealing with seemingly endless problems in all different areas of the business. Handling internal staffing issues, supplier problems, customer complaints, government paperwork, and technology challenges—some days it never seems to stop!
Of course, we do it because we love it, because being a vital part of a small or mid-size business allows us to accomplish so much and to have such a significant influence on the performance of the business. Helping to realize a vision of a business we believe in gives us so much satisfaction that we are prepared to put up with everything else it entails. But we’re not crazy—if we could find a way to reduce the pressure and workload that comes with being part of a dynamic small or mid‑size business, we would likely embrace it. And if it helps the business grow, and makes our customers happier—that would be quite something.
However—while there are many technologies that profess to deliver these benefits, typically the solutions and systems available are too expensive, too complicated, or too poor a match to the specific requirements of our business for them to deliver salvation.
Well, not to raise your hopes unduly, I believe help is on the way. I too am a small business person, having bought and sold small businesses including an art gallery, a women’s clothing store, a computer retail store, a couple of software development companies, and several computer manufacturing companies. I have created new businesses, and purchased and revived other people’s businesses. I have held management positions in operations, technology, sales, and marketing. I have been the boss, and I have worked for bosses with a wide variety of skill sets. Perhaps like you, along the way I have made money, and sometimes lost it. But it has always been worth it to me—the tradeoff between the burden of responsibility, pressure, and stress for the relative freedom to pursue your own vision of how a business or a department should be operated.
This book is about being a part of a small or mid-size business. The principal constituencies within a Small or Mid-Size Business (SMB) addressed by this book include senior management (an owner, partner, shareholder, or manager), the Information Technology group (the CTO, or an IT manager, specialist, or advisor), the Sales department (Sales Manager or quota-bearing sales executive or representative), as well as the Administration (both, the managers of finance, and administration, as well as the rank and file employees). The objective of this book is to demonstrate and explain how to improve your business processes, business performance, and quality of life using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools created specifically for managing small and mid-size businesses.
benefits, CRM technology” As someone who owned his first micro-computer (a Sol-20 from Processor Technology) in 1977, I have always made a point of using technology to lighten the load of managing a small business and with the recent advances in the field of CRM for small and mid-size businesses, so can you. Until recently, smaller businesses typically could not afford management tools of this type, and even when they could, those tools were more oriented towards larger businesses, and they found them impractical and unwieldy.
Throughout the book I will endeavor as much as possible to deal with CRM from a business, not technical, perspective. However, the later chapters do become quite technical, explaining how to customize your CRM, and link your CRM to external portals and lead capture mechanisms. We (you and I, that is) will be using a leading open-source CRM tool, SugarCRM, a good example of the very capable yet affordable CRM tools that are now available now, and focus on the needs of smaller businesses.
In this book we will not just discover the specifics of installing and implementing SugarCRM although we will cover those issues in detail. We will also explain the business context, and describe a broader business perspective on the generic issues of CRM implementations in smaller businesses. What it can do for your business. How best to implement it. And how should it be customized to maximize your business benefits. By the end of the book, you too will be doing business—better.
Let’s just stop a moment to consider and clarify our definition of a small or mid-size business, as it covers a wide range of organizations. While the Gartner Group may have one definition, and the Meta Group another, for our purposes here a small or mid-size business falls into these categories:
Home-based business with a proprietor: The proprietor may or may not work with other people on a regular basis. If others are involved, they may be outsourced contractors, commissioned salespeople or agents, or one or more partners who also work from their homes. These businesses vary widely—some involving lots of travel, and some requiring very little. This is very relevant, as travel is a frequent cause of lack of good information flow within an organization, and lack of good communication with customers. These businesses tend to have a headcount in the range of 1-10 employees and partners, and annual sales under 2 Million USD.
Small services businesses: These would usually have office premises that deal directly with businesses and retail consumers. Perhaps in the field of financial or legal services, real estate, graphics services, doors and windows replacement, home renovation, carpet cleaning, or catering—a multitude of businesses. Often these businesses have mobile staff making customer site visits in company vehicles. These firms are often in the 5-50 range in terms of employees, with sales in the 0.5 to 10 Million USD range.
Small-to-medium product or services businesses : These usually have shop-front premises that deal with businesses and consumers. This can include almost any retail sales and service activity with an average sale value high enough to merit tracking customers or clients individually. These firms are usually in the 10-100 range in terms of employees, with sales in the 1 to 20 Million USD range.
If your business has more than 100 employees, you are on the verge of becoming, or have already become, a more sophisticated, complex, and (let’s face it) wealthier organization with different needs and budget from those businesses described above. If your business falls under the 100 employee level, this book is definitely for you.
However, while businesses with less than 100 employees are classified as small or mid-size businesses, there is nothing small about the job of administering and managing these businesses! While being your own boss (of the organization, or of a department within it) often means there is no boss around to tell you what to do—it merely means that you have to tell yourself to do far too many things. In a typical small business, the owners and managers wear multiple hats—one minute running finance, the next minute sales, and then on to customer service and support, binding a proposal, arguing with the landlord, and so on.
Running a smaller business also means having to be careful and smart with cash. Administration is almost always understaffed, as the lack of scale in a smaller business makes business infrastructure and administration relatively more expensive. Overworked book-keeping clerks and part time accounting resources are frequently the order of the day. All this unfortunately has also meant that too many businesses have, until now, been effectively disenfranchised from the club of those able to afford the best management tools.
A glance at the income statements for a typical smaller business reveals a need to lower administrative costs. If it doesn’t, that usually means the owner’s quality of life is pretty low, as he or she is likely doing it all by themselves. Or it can indicate that administration is being very poorly executed. Unfortunately, even though administration costs are usually high, the administration resources that exist are typically overworked, and struggling to meet the workload. This usually doesn’t get much better until the 100 employee milestone is passed.
Another key need for those managing smaller businesses is the need to get out of the office more—get out of the office just to get home and spend some time with the family, to win new customers and service existing ones, or just to see different scenery without having the whole house of cards falling apart. But instead, the usual day spent managing a smaller business consists of:
An endless stream of visits from employees with questions
Shouting instructions across the open office
Dropping by the various departments for an update
Spending half the day on the phone
Firing off emails to contacts stored in Microsoft Outlook
Staying late to bring paperwork up to date
Getting out of the office often means traveling some distance on business, and this highlights another need—the need to get business information while traveling, on laptops and handhelds, offline and online. This kind of connectivity and flexibility is what it takes to compete in today’s increasingly demanding and cost-conscious business environment—and most of the smaller businesses just don’t have these tools. What tools they have are typically client-server based—meaning that some software is loaded on a shared server computer, and more software is loaded on the PC of each person allowed to use the system. This can get expensive, with license fees typically being charged on the per-user model, and time consuming and potentially costly maintenance and updates required for each PC quite frequently. It also tends to keep people in the office, where the PCs with this software loaded on them are located.
A web-based CRM, by way of contrast, has no user software to load on each PC—all that is needed is a browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple’s Safari. While the server software is still often licensed on the per user basis, these users can be anywhere (including at home or traveling to see customers) and still have access to the system and all the information it holds. And an open-source CRM like Sugar Open Source is best of all, as it has no licensing fees of any sort.
A web-based small business CRM directly addresses all the needs listed above. It lets you get out of the office, yet stay in touch. It lets you see your family or win more business without dropping you out of the organization’s information loop. It reduces administrative load and costs by ensuring that the company and customer information only needs to be keyed in once, and is well‑organized and easily accessible. And it is accessible not only by home PCs and road-warrior laptops, but even by handheld devices such as the Treo and BlackBerry, as even these smaller devices contain a web browser (see Chapter 6 for details of handheld information access, and wireless synchronization).
If you are going to consider implementing a CRM, it is probably important that we first go over what a CRM really is, and how it compares to some tools you may already be familiar with.
A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management System, is just that—a system that manages information and processes around your relationship with your customers, not only the sales aspect of that relationship but also the ongoing service and support aspects. The system should provide at least basic information about the companies you are doing business with, and the people you work with at those companies. Typically these are referred to as Accounts, and Contacts. Accounts can be your customers, but may also be your suppliers, your partners, or your sub-contractors.
You are likely to be familiar with one or more simple contact management systems—such as Microsoft Outlook, ACT!, or GoldMine. Let’s talk a bit about Microsoft Outlook as it is the one most people have seen and used. While it is used mostly as an email client, Outlook is also a contact manager. It keeps track of the people you know—often both personal and business contacts in one system. It lists for each person their phone number(s), email address(es), mailing address(es), and personal information such as their birthday, and anniversary. It also records the organization they work for as one of the data fields on their record. If you have a second person you know, who also works at that company, Outlook has functions that let you copy the first person’s information, so as not to have to re-enter all the company-related information.
Unfortunately, if that company moves, or changes its fax number, that information is duplicated on the contact record for everyone you know at that company, and you will have to chase them all individually to correct them.
By contrast, one of the minimum features offered by a CRM is that the company, or account, has information kept on it as an independent entity, and then has people you know, or contacts, linked to it. In this way, the company information only gets changed in one place when it needs updating, and yet each contact record easily brings up the information of the account with which it is associated.
Also, in Microsoft Outlook there is no attempt to automatically link upcoming meetings, telephone calls, or tasks with the contact or account to which these activities relate, or to keep an organized history of past account activity including emails and notes. Essentially any CRM can do this.
These features (maintaining account records separate from contact records, and maintaining account and contact history) are two of the fundamental features you should expect to see in any CRM, but there are many more, including:
Sales-force automation: This includes lead capture and the promotion of leads to Opportunities.
Opportunity tracking: This tracks the sales stage and percentage likelihood.
Sales pipeline tracking: This uses graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it.
Definition of sales teams and territories: This helps in managing information sharing and tracking sales performance by territory.
Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities
Product catalog management: It also takes care of tracking sales inventory, corporate assets, and client products covered by support contracts.
Creating quotations for clients
Flexible reporting: This extracts precisely the information you want to see.
Service case tracking: There are also other service/support capabilities such as tracking software bugs, and managing support contract renewals.
Corporate calendar management: This can be used for arranging meetings.
Corporate directory: This can be used for contacting fellow employees.
Interface consolidation: This brings additional everyday needs into the CRM environment in order to make a company website that employees can live in. This includes news feeds, views of financial metrics, integration of external web links and applications, and integrated web-based email.
Document management and revision control: This helps in managing and retaining reference copies of important corporate documents.
A well-conceived CRM must also have a truly outstanding user interface, as the whole purpose of the system is to make the organization’s information accessible quickly, easily, and naturally. As the CRM software field has matured, many CRM systems have come to adopt similar solutions for navigating through the CRM. Let’s have a look at what it feels like to use a CRM with a state-of‑the-art user interface, by having our first look at SugarCRM.
SugarCRM is both a company, and an Open Source project. SugarCRM the company was created as a commercial Open Source company, and funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firms (three rounds of financing and 25 Million USD to date). Its business model is to not only develop an open-source CRM product, which will benefit from broad adoption and feedback from the user community, but also to develop enhanced versions of it that it can sell. The open-source product is called Sugar Open Source, and the commercial products are called Sugar Pro and Sugar Enterprise. In this book we will deal primarily with Sugar Open Source, because, as William Shatner was once paid to remark on a commercial for a large chain of grocery stores, “By Gosh, the Price is Right!”.
The SugarCRM Open Source project has its official home at http://www.sugarforge.org/. The SugarCRM Open Source project was established on April 23, 2004, and so is of quite recent vintage! But the founders of SugarCRM (both the company and the Open Source project) are veterans of CRM implementations at several other organizations, notably Epiphany (recently purchased by SSA Global), Aurum Software, Baan Software (also purchased by SSA Global), and BroadVision, and were able to turn their experience into a relatively fully functioned CRM system in a remarkably short time span. SugarCRM 1.0 was released on August 4, 2004. SugarCRM 2.0 was released on November 3, 2004; SugarCRM 3.0 came out on April 30, 2005, and SugarCRM 3.5 was introduced on August 15, 2005. SugarCRM 4.0 (the current revision at time of writing) was introduced on December 15, 2005.
It is worth noting that the nature of Open Source is such that if one day (perish the thought), SugarCRM the company was no more, SugarCRM the Open Source project would carry on, with the same or different individuals leading the project. The two are quite separate entities in law. So unlike many products from smaller companies, using SugarCRM should not make you worry about the stability of the vendor.
The history of the SugarCRM product is that SugarCRM 1.0 established the basic architecture of the product. With SugarCRM 2.0, the strong visual design was introduced. With SugarCRM 2.5, capabilities were introduced that enabled users to customize the CRM to a significant extent—adding new fields, removing unnecessary fields, rearranging screen layouts, changing options on drop-down lists, and so on. These customization capabilities are particularly relevant to a CRM, as CRM systems tend to need more tuning to the business adopting them than many other business applications.
In SugarCRM 3.0, the application added document management, project tracking, marketing campaigns, user roles, and several other new features. In 3.5 the Sugar architecture was strengthened significantly, enabling the addition of the Module Loader and Upgrade Wizard, change logs, and collapsible sub-panels. Numerous navigation enhancements as well as HTML email were also added at this time. SugarCRM 4.0 marked the beginning of an increasing gap between the Open Source and Pro versions of SugarCRM, and saw the introduction of such features as limited inbound email processing, limited access control capabilities, and workflow.
In the figure below, you see the SugarCRM Home screen. It is the first thing you will see (after the login screen) once you start using the system:
SugarCRM Home Screen
Various key elements of the screen layout overleaf have numbered highlights, as follows:
Navigation Tabs: Click to choose desired module
Navigation Shortcuts Box: Specific shortcuts useful within each module
Last Viewed: A remarkably handy trail of recent records you have viewed
Search Box: Search for a text string within all data held by SugarCRM
User Management Links: The Admin link is only available to users marked as administrators
Quick New Item Box: Quick data entry box to create a new item for the current module
Main Screen Body: On the Home tab, this includes My Upcoming Appointments, My Open Tasks, My Open Cases, My Assigned Bugs, and a monthly Calendar. My Top Open Opportunities, My Leads, and a Pipeline graph fill out the main screen body
In this image, the whole SugarCRM browser window is shown, including the Internet Explorer frame, and the SugarCRM copyright information at the bottom of the window. For all the other screen captures in this book, only the necessary portions of each SugarCRM screen will be shown. You should understand that each screen appears in a browser window like the one shown overleaf.
Scan across the navigation tabs, and the User Management Links, to get an idea of all the capabilities packaged together in this system.
SugarCRM is representative of the best CRM systems available in the market for the manner in which the systems are used, or navigated. There are tabs across the top for accessing the different types of information, such as Accounts, Contacts, Documents, Cases, Opportunities, and so on. More important, however, is how related items of information are linked together, and how the user follows those links. The figure opposite shows an Accounts screen within SugarCRM. This is fairly representative of similar screens in other leading commercial web-based CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and SalesLogix:
We see that the top block of information (typically called a panel) displays the core information about the account—address, contact information, website, company email address, number of employees, ownership, industry classification, and so on.
The following blocks of information, or sub-panels, show information that is related to this account, such as ongoing account activities, a history of past account activities, contacts, leads, and opportunities within this account, plus ongoing cases (service issues) and projects within the account. Also shown are documents related to the account and any software bugs reported by the account (should that be relevant to your business).
The power of the system is the manner and speed with which it can be navigated. Once an account has been looked up and displayed, the user can click on a contact in that account to see the information associated with it. That contact record will include a list of related activities to be performed, and the user can click on those to update them. A related meeting may involve other contacts, and their information is listed, and the user can click on them to check current activities related to those contacts. Are there any ongoing cases? When was the last time we met with them? What products have they been buying from us?
Each of these questions is answered with a mouse click. And as more and more of the background information of an account, or contact, or opportunity is revealed, the user may have more and more little questions that come to mind—and each of them can be answered with a mouse click too. Because information can be obtained so quickly and easily, and because that information is related and linked in a manner so similar to the way the user’s mind relates those items of information, employees now perform their tasks with a much higher level of knowledge about their customers.
One particularly handy feature of the SugarCRM user interface is Last Viewed, which is the list of items the user has recently accessed—making it quick and easy to return to an item after following links to information it relates to.
Marshall McLuhan was quite right—the medium is the message. In this case, the medium of web‑based business applications, with many linkages between related items of information, makes that information so easy to obtain that it is as if somehow the overall quality of that information has been improved.
Depending on whom you talk to, CRM all started somewhere between the mid 1980’s and the early 1990’s with efforts from companies such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and SAP. But true CRM involving not just the accumulation of static customer databases but a genuine enhancement to business processes began only recently, around the turn of the millennium. This evolution of CRM would not have been possible without the increasing influence of the Internet and the development of web services for connecting multiple business systems together despite their being in different locations and implemented in different technologies.
Originally, CRM systems from the big four companies named above were uniformly expensive, heavily customized, and unwieldy for any but the largest firms. In 2001 Siebel Systems had sales worth 2.1 Billion USD based on their model in which each customer spent millions of dollars. But their market share, and indeed gross sales, slipped in later years as the built‑for‑the‑web generation of mid-size CRM systems came to market from firms such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Upshot, and SalesNet. Now Upshot has been purchased by Siebel Systems, and they seem to be somewhat on the upswing again.
With the introduction of SugarCRM in 2004, history will show that there has been yet another revolution in CRM, as even smaller firms gained cost-effective access to the latest in CRM technologies. For small-to-mid-size firms, NetSuite and some of the other mid-size generation are also becoming a viable option financially.
One trend easily visible above is that since about 2000, the market has been rapidly moving to web-based CRM tools as indeed it has in many other business application areas. The advantages are many—ubiquitous access, making the best use of expensive user licenses, and easier interfacing with other business systems via web services.
Some of the more highly-regarded CRM solutions available for smaller business today include:
NetSuite ( http://www.netsuite.com/): This firm offers both, NetSuite Small Business, a combination of accounting software and CRM, and NetCRM, its successful stand-alone CRM product.
Salesforce.com (http://www.salesforce.com/): This firm is one of the key champions of the software-as-a-service model. While a popular solution, the Salesforce.com CRM is often perceived as one of the more expensive options. Salesforce.com has led the field in innovations such as end-user customization, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for business process integration.
Microsoft CRM (http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/mbs/crm/detail.mspx): In spite of it not being one of the cheapest, or most highly regarded solutions, Microsoft CRM is still one to watch out for. It’s Microsoft—known for never giving up on becoming number one in a market. If you use Microsoft Exchange and Small Business Server, it is a real option, but if you don’t, it may not make sense for your business.
SalesLogix (http://www.saleslogix.com/): Sage Software (formerly Best Software) produces this leading CRM for smaller businesses, as well as ACT!, the leading contact management software.
In today’s CRM market, there is not only a choice of vendors, but also a choice of deployment options. The options are:
On-Demand Model: The On-Demand model (a phrase popularized by IBM advertising), formerly known as the Application Service Provider (ASP) model is the simplest (and often, the most expensive) way to implement and adopt a CRM. The CRM vendor simply hosts the CRM application, and provides the customer with a URL (Universal Resource Locator or a web address) at which to point their browser. No fuss over software installation, no messy application patching and maintenance, but also, no data on your premises—the vendor keeps it all on its system, a fact that makes many customers uneasy. Recent surveys show a full 50% of businesses are not prepared to adopt this model.
Application Pack: The Application Pack option is the one the industry has practiced for years. The vendor licenses you its application software—often on an annual basis. You install the software on your own server, and take responsibility for your own data. You also take responsibility for maintaining the software as it evolves, for maintaining and backing up the server itself, and for the support of the network infrastructure to which it is attached. These are things you are not going to do without access to some fairly knowledgeable computer networking people—either on your staff, or whose services are retained on a regular basis.
Hosted Application Pack: An intermediate version of these two models, which many businesses find attractive, involves licensing the software, but then hiring a hosting firm to provide and maintain the server on which it runs. Of course, the concerns about offsite corporate data remain.
Server Appliance: The Server Appliance option involves purchasing a server pre‑loaded with licensed software. This reduces concerns about installation problems, and the capacity and performance of the server you might use yourself, but leaves the bother of maintaining and updating the server and its software image, as well as backing up your data.
You should be aware that not every vendor supports all deployment options. Some of the best known mid-size vendors only support the On-Demand model, including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and SalesNet. While all their talk (especially from Salesforce.com) of the ‘No Software’ model can sound attractive, you will want to balance that against costs of 65 to 130 USD per user per month, and having someone else holding on to all your customer data.
That being said, network technicians are not cheap either, and backing up your data regularly is not something every small business is set up to do well. Different models will appeal to different organizations—no doubt that is why this range of choices exists!
SugarCRM, for its part, offers Sugar Pro in all three deployment options: 239 USD per user per year to license the software as an application pack, US 39 USD per user per month as an On‑Demand service, and a variety of server appliances (Sugar Cubes) at different prices. Sugar Enterprise is also available, at a price of 449 USD per user per year to license the software as an application pack, US 75 USD per user per month as an On‑Demand service, and on server appliances of various capacities.
If you are skimming this book thinking that CRM customization is an advanced topic and not applicable to you, stop right now and listen to some advice for a moment. Customization is a fact of life, and indeed a generally positive one, for most business applications. The negative aspect of it is that is can sometimes be long and involved, and frequently can be quite expensive. The positive side is that it takes an off-the-shelf shrink-wrapped software application, and adapts it to the way your business actually works.
CRM systems are known to need customization more frequently than other business applications. After all, the average Sales, Purchase, and General Ledger accounting system works pretty much the same way for any business—just set up your structure of initial account codes, and away you go. CRM systems are different!
CRM customizations fall into several classes:
Minor cosmetics: Changing color schemes, adding company logo.
Minor user interface changes: Suppressing certain features from being seen by certain or perhaps all users, rearranging screen layouts, adding and deleting fields from screens, changing field names, and editing the set of options presented on drop-down boxes.
Major application changes: Adding whole new modules to the application, or making major changes to the business logic and function of existing modules.
Application integration: Linking the CRM application with other business applications and processes, to more thoroughly automate and integrate your business operations.
Most advanced products make it easy to change minor cosmetics of the system. Historically, user interface changes were fairly difficult and expensive to perform, but all that has changed. With the release of the Customforce tool by Salesforce.com for customizing the user interface of its CRM, the bar was raised to a significant degree in this key area. Salesforce.com deserves recognition as an innovator in this field of technology, and it has caused nothing short of a revolution in CRM. Today, most important CRM vendors (including SugarCRM) offer this extremely important and useful capability.
Major application changes will always require a software consulting and development firm to perform them, unless you happen to have those resources in house. These changes involve tailoring a CRM to manage aspects of a business that are not uniform across the gamut of small businesses.
More recently, Salesforce.com has been at it again, and has introduced the Sforce API, which offers a well-documented and open programming interface to link other business applications to the Salesforce.com programs and data hosted by Salesforce.com for your business. This is creating a similar disruption in the CRM industry, and several firms are responding in kind. SugarCRM, for one, has its own (more limited) SOAP-based web service interface (using the Nusoap PHP library), which supports such handy capabilities as filing leads captured by forms on your public website into your SugarCRM lead database.
A CRM system is to some extent a groupware application for managing your business. Groupware is a term used to describe computer software designed to help a group of people work together cooperatively. As such, a CRM helps everyone in the business (especially all those in direct contact with customers) to know the historical and planned activities of the business that involve a specific customer. This is clearly very useful to avoid miscommunications with the client resulting from lack of communication within the business. Everyone in the business can record all of their interactions with a client, helping all their co-workers understand the current state of any issues, sales opportunities, and so on.
Even more importantly, a CRM records all new business leads, and keeps track of promising qualified leads as specific opportunities. These opportunities are recorded with an expected date on which the business will be closed, the current stage of the sales cycle for this opportunity, and the percentage likelihood of closing the business currently assigned to this opportunity.
This information, aggregated across the business, provides a clear view of the organization’s sales pipeline. Visual charts of this information are typically live-linked, making it easy to drill down to view the individual data items that were aggregated to build the chart. Classification of opportunities by sales person, by lead source, or by expected close date is a simple activity, easily performed and fantastically informative.
A properly implemented CRM used by all customer-facing staff will help you track the sales performance of your business more closely with less work. It will also help you see the future more clearly, and plan more effectively.
Just as the customer is the focus that ties all business activities together, your CRM can be the business tool that ties together all your business information, particularly with custom integration into other business systems such as your public website, and the creation of new customer self‑service websites for building orders, creating and reviewing service cases, and managing their own information profile.
Another key area in which a CRM can help greatly is in customer communication. After all, a CRM knows who all your customers are, is connected to the Internet, holds all your key marketing documents in it, and can send (and often receive) email. There are very few tools that are as useful as a CRM when it comes to sending out customer newsletters on a monthly or quarterly basis, selecting only those customers who have purchased specific products, or keeping track of any customers who have indicated they do not want to receive marketing emails.
These powerful capabilities add up to make big changes at most businesses where they are adopted:
Sales are increased: Using the new marketing communications capabilities to increase sales
Costs are reduced:
Typing in information only once
Automatically sharing information with everyone instantly
Everyone in the business knowing right away where to find information without wasting time looking for it
Customers are happier: Dealing with employees who now seem to know more about them and what’s going on in their account is a big plus
Business is managed better:
Sales pipelines are better understood
The most productive lead sources and sales staff are clearly identified
Any business downturn is visible well before it represents a commercial risk to the business
This book is structured and written the way it is, specifically to accompany you on the journey of discovering what Customer Relationship Management is and what it can do for your business. Issues such as identifying the specific CRM needs of your business, implementing and adopting a CRM, and customizing the CRM to optimize its use within your business are all dealt with in detail.
As much as possible, the chapters of this book have been sequenced to mirror your own time sequence through the installation and adoption of SugarCRM. Some of the extended details of installing SugarCRM, and importing your data into it, were located in the appendices, to keep them from slowing down the plotline as you progress through the book.
This book is titled Implementing SugarCRM: Introduce the leading Open Source CRM application into your small/mid-size business with this systematic, practical guide, and SugarCRM is the practical focus of all our CRM examples in the book. But despite that, generic CRM principles and practices are detailed and explained at each stage to help you recognize when and if SugarCRM is ever insufficient for your needs, or requires some customization work to fit your business better.
Throughout this book we will not only refer to a specific tool, SugarCRM, but also to a specific (and mythical) company whose progress through the installation, adoption, and customization of a CRM we shall explore here. Our fictional case study will involve RayDoc Carpets, Doors, and Windows, and their wily fox of a leader Doc Newhart. (In actual fact, there are several real world Docs with whom SugarCRM was implemented throughout the writing of this book, to ensure that their real-world problems, issues, experiences, and comments were mirrored accurately in this volume.)
As this book progresses through the natural sequence of stages involved in the introduction of a CRM, at each stage the relationships between CRM theory and the practical experiences of Doc Newhart will be described and explained. The solution of real everyday business problems, gaps between CRM theory and practical benefits, and unexpected drawbacks and bonuses in live CRM implementations will all be dealt with in detail.
RayDoc Carpets, Doors, and Windows is a fairly average small business. It has slightly rundown commercial premises, with office space in the front, and workshops and carpet cleaning bays in the back. It has annual sales of about 3 Million Canadian dollars each year, and its staff is comprised of Doc, his wife Maureen who does the book-keeping and manages Kay the receptionist, a junior partner Andrew, and a staff of about 22 employees.
The name RayDoc once celebrated the teaming of Ray and Doc to create this business, but Ray is long gone, and Doc now runs things by himself. Well, by himself is not quite true. Maureen actually runs the office, except when Doc is in one of his moods, and between them Maureen and Kay take care of nearly all the paperwork and administration in the company.
Some of the services provided by RayDoc include carpet and upholstery cleaning at customers offices or homes, the provision of rotating supplies of clean carpet runners and boot trays for businesses during the Canadian winter, deep cleaning of large Indian and Persian rugs in the bays behind the offices, the sale and installation of replacement doors and windows, and general contracting and building services. RayDoc owns several vans and mini-vans, which are used by staff to get themselves and their equipment to jobs and to bring large carpets back to the office.
While some of RayDoc’s customers have had only one transaction with RayDoc, much of their business is with existing customers: businesses that have their carpets cleaned on a regular basis, property management firms that always get their doors and windows repaired or replaced by RayDoc, and home owners who have come to count on RayDoc for a broad range of services over the sixteen years it has been in business.
Doc likes to focus on finding new business opportunities, and schmoozing new and existing customers. He also spends much of his time finding new suppliers of interesting new products, and making sure that the bigger jobs they get are always done to the customer’s satisfaction.
A street-smart individual, Doc is somewhat bored by the rather mundane nature of much of his business after all the years he has been doing it, and he consciously ducks a lot of the everyday administrative work, searching for more interesting business opportunities, or just customers to talk to. Doc comes from a fairly rough blue-collar background, and just as well, as a lot of the young men doing the carpet cleaning are pretty rough themselves.
Doc prides himself on his business sense and to some degree on his marketing abilities. His main advertising expense is running an advert on the local cable TV Guide channel. As a boy, Doc didn’t much care for academics, as he was too impatient to get on with living his life. Skilled with his hands, he has mastered many trades. But at 45, he knows he is doing a lot of things the hard way at RayDoc, and wants to get the company working smarter. Not in the least because he has hopes of taking more and more of a back seat in the business before too long, and he needs to put more business systems and processes in place before that can happen.
Doc has been hearing about CRM systems from some of his friends and customers for a few years now. Recently he had a long chat in a local bar with an old friend who owns another small business, who was extolling the virtues of being able to get at all his business information from home, while out of town, and even from his fancy Treo cell phone, all because of the new CRM he had purchased. That was it. Doc wasn’t going to have his old friend be able to say he knew more about running a business than Doc did. He needed to find out about this CRM stuff, and quickly!
RayDoc has been holding its own for several years now, neither growing nor shrinking. Making reasonable, but not exciting incomes for Doc and Maureen, and showing just enough promise for Andrew to stick around, hoping for Doc’s retirement. Part of a younger generation of well‑educated tradesmen, Andrew has often tried to encourage Doc and Maureen to adopt newer business management tools, but it has been difficult, as Doc resisted change, and Andrew’s responsibilities kept him out of the office, supervising on-site employees nearly all the time. But he will be a willing and supportive ally for Doc in his CRM initiative.
An automated system that documents all of RayDoc’s customers and their history with RayDoc is just as essential for Andrew’s succession plan as it is for Doc’s early retirement.
In this chapter we introduced the topic of Customer Relationship Management, and touched upon a number of important points:
CRM applications have been evolving rapidly since the late 1990’s, and are now delivering on their promise of enhancing business profitability, improving customer satisfaction and levels of service, and streamlining business processes.
CRM applications, once highly priced, are now affordable even for smaller businesses.
Smaller businesses typically have an administrative staff that is overloaded with work, and yet there is constant pressure to cut administrative costs.
Most small businesses employ business systems that are not accessible outside the office, acting as a force that limits business communication with outbound workers, and tends to keep business managers in the office.
Web-based CRM systems can lower administrative workloads and costs, and are accessible from PCs, laptops, and handheld PDA/mobile phones—anywhere, anytime.
Contact management systems such as Outlook, ACT! and Goldmine are not CRMs, and lack many fundamental features of leading CRMs.
SugarCRM is a web-based CRM introduced in 2004, available as a free Open Source version, or as a commercial Pro- or Enterprise-level version.
Like many top CRMs, SugarCRM is quick and easy to use, making access to customer information a natural and even pleasant experience.
For the smaller business, there are many valid CRM choices: NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, and SalesLogix among them. We have chosen SugarCRM Open Source as our example CRM for this book as it is free, and contains most of the latest features that make CRM adoption so compelling for small and medium businesses.
CRMs may be deployed as On-Demand web-based services, as application software to be installed on your own servers, or as server appliances delivered pre‑loaded and ready to run. The choice is yours, and involves some tradeoffs between cost and convenience.
To truly deliver on their promises, CRM systems typically must be customized to suit your business. There are several levels of complexity to this customization, and the most recent CRMs help you do quite a bit of it yourself, rather than paying for expensive computer services staff to do it for you.
CRMs can help you track the sales performance of your business more closely with less work, see the future more clearly, and plan more effectively.
This book will take you through the entire process of determining your CRM needs, implementing and installing a CRM, getting your data into the CRM, rolling it out to your business and training staff, and customizing the CRM to maximize your business benefits.
Throughout this book, we will follow the experiences of Doc Newhart, and his fictional business, RayDoc. The tales of his experiences here are taken from the real-life experiences of multiple CRM installations within smaller businesses.
In the next chapter, we will use the knowledge you have gained about CRM systems to begin to analyze your own business, identify its CRM needs, and understand what to look for in a CRM and its customization and configuration capabilities.