Size Does Matter: Two or Two Hundred?
The size of your business affects how you manage your CRM, the features you need from your
CRM, and even the importance of the CRM to your organization. In a smaller business, employees have broader responsibilities—and these narrow as the organization grows. The need for continuity of business process, communication, and documentation becomes greater as the responsibilities get narrower.
A business with fifty employees also has so many more employee-to-employee information
pathways within it, compared to a business with five employees. Because of this, a CRM has even
more to offer the larger firm.
Also, in a larger firm where not everyone knows everyone else's business, staff turnover can create
a real risk that sales leads and opportunities created through work paid for by the business may be
lost when an employee leaves. With a CRM there is an element of the ISO (International
Organization for Standardization) principle that the process should transcend the individual.
The employee may leave but their data lives on in the CRM, and another salesperson hired in his
or her place will have all the account history to work on.
The larger firm also has other issues not likely found in the smaller firm. With a certain scale of
organization, information privacy becomes important. Sales leads will not be entered into the system
if sales people are concerned that another sales team or person may steal their leads. In a smaller
firm, there is a tendency to have everyone know everything. If a lead is stolen, everyone will know
who it really belonged to. But after a point, an organization becomes more compartmentalized and
impersonal, and protecting leads and opportunity data becomes a real and valid concern.
All of this gives rise to a complex requirement for an Access Control model, or a Permissions
Management Infrastructure (PMI), as it is sometimes called. In this sort of system, roles are
defined and the permission to view certain types of data and to perform certain actions is assigned
to these roles. Then employees are assigned one or more roles, and the permissions from multiple
roles just add to one another to give each employee their effective aggregate set of permissions.
In a North American sales organization, for example, accounts might be split into geographical
areas such as the West Coast, East Coast, Central USA, and Canada. Most sales people would
only see leads and opportunities within their region, but sales managers would want to see leads,
opportunities, and sales pipelines for broader geographies.
Lastly, the size of a business determines what a realistic budget figure is for the acquisition and
deployment of a CRM. In a firm of five people, a CRM implementation budget might be 3,000-
5,000 USD. In a firm of fifty people, that budget would more likely be 25,000-50,000 USD. Also,
the smaller firm is less likely to have any internal technical support capability—and running a
CRM server in the office may be beyond its abilities.
You should give some thought to your firm's needs for data security and permission management,
as well as setting an implementation budget for the CRM, and deciding if you have the internal
capacity to manage a CRM server.
International Needs
If your employees live and work in multiple countries, the odds are that your CRM may need to
support more than one language. Language support has many aspects to it, including the language
used for any and all of the following:
Information you enter into your CRM
The user interface of the CRM application
The online help system
The written documentation for the CRM.
You will need to decide on the language to be used for data entry into your CRM, choosing one
that you feel most users can understand, even if it is not their first language.
Many languages need to be able to use a set of characters and accents that do not exist in the
English language, so your CRM will need to be able to enter, display, and print these different sets
of characters if you need international support.
You should find out from your CRM vendor what languages are supported for the user interface of
the application, as well as in what languages the online help system and printable documentation
are published.
SugarCRM has support for nearly 20 different languages (although many languages are supported
only via a non-validated user-created translation) at the user interface, but print-image
documentation exists only in English, and no online help system is currently available.
Another aspect of international support is the format in which dates are displayed. Your CRM
should store dates in its own internal format, but display them to users in whatever format each
user has selected as their preference. Common formats include 12.23.2006, 23.12.2006, and
2006.12.23. SugarCRM handles all these formats just fine.
In addition to dates, different countries have differing formats in which numbers and currency are
presented. The decimal separator in North America is . and the thousands separator is ,—but in
much of Europe (Germany, for example), the decimal separator is , and the thousands separator is
.. Thus what in North America is 12,234,678.90 USD in Germany is 12.345.678,90 . If your
CRM needs to be able to present numbers and currency values to users in the format they are
accustomed to use in their country, then check that your CRM is capable of supporting this
feature. (At the time of writing, SugarCRM did not support the display of multiple international
number and currency formats.)
* Read the rest of this excerpt and download Chapter 2:
One Size Does Not Fit All—CRM Your Way
* Read other excerpts and download more sample chapters from our
CRM and call center bookshelf
* To view a complete Table of Contents, or to purchase this text, please visit Packt Publishing
