This book will guide you through your 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 in the chapters that follow.

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 are 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/medium-size business with this systematic, practical guide, and SugarCRM is the practical focus of all our CRM examples in the book. However 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 suit 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 shall be explored. Our fictional case study will involve RayDoc Carpets, Doors, and Windows, and its owner Doc Newhart.

As this book progresses through the natural sequence of stages involved in the introduction of a CRM, at each stage, the relationship 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.