In the first chapter, you learned about the history of how CRM software developed, how its affordability and accessibility for smaller businesses has been improving in recent years, and how important it is that a CRM be easily customizable to suit your business.

You were also introduced to RayDoc Carpets, Doors, and Windows and met Doc, its proprietor. In this chapter, we will begin the process of analyzing the CRM needs of your specific business, and continue using our RayDoc case study as an example of how to match CRM capabilities to the needs of a business.

Throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout this book to the extent possible, we shall focus primarily on the business objectives and benefits sought from the implementation of a CRM system, not simply on the mechanics of installing and using the SugarCRM system.

To help us attain this goal, several extensive sections of this book are devoted to the business analysis process that you will need to go through in order to determine how your business can best benefit from a CRM system. This exercise will enable you to identify the customizations you may need to make to an off-the-shelf CRM product, such as SugarCRM, to tailor it to the manner in which you conduct business. As the book progresses, the business analysis sections will deal with successively more ambitious and advanced business functions, helping you identify your needs in these areas, as well as guiding you through the process of implementing those customizations, introducing the CRM system into your business, and other tasks important to a successful implementation.

This chapter contains the first such business analysis section. The goal of this section is to provide a broad overview of the ways in which businesses differ, helping you to position and identify your own business within the multi-dimensional space of all smaller businesses. Do the CRM needs of a three-person firm, in a single office that sells to other businesses through the Internet differ from those of a fifty-person firm, with ten regional offices that sells to consumers by making house calls? They certainly do, and those differences are an example of the type of issues that we will be dealing with shortly.

It is not that difficult to change your business using a CRM system, but first you have to understand the CRM needs of your business and who to involve in identifying them, so that you make the right changes. Involving other stakeholders from your business will help ensure that the new system gains acceptance when it is introduced and is an important part of the identification process.

A CRM solution cannot succeed without user acceptance. One of the most effective ways of obtaining user acceptance is ensuring users are getting value from the CRM system. Without that sense of value, the challenge of user acceptance will be difficult to overcome. This is the primary reason why it is important to include individuals who represent differing facets of your organization when working through the process of identifying the business issues that the system should address. The most successful CRM implementations are those where the culture of the business and the use of its CRM system are seamlessly intertwined with each other.

Once we have studied the varying CRM needs of different businesses, we will see how Doc Newhart needs to apply CRM to improve the way RayDoc operates. We will also use a CRM Requirements Worksheet to identify the specific CRM needs of your business.

Lastly, we will address the practical issues of how to get your CRM system customized, what sorts of partners to look for to help you in that process, how to document your customization requirements, and how to manage a customization contract.