One of the first differentiators in CRM needs pertains to your customers. Are you a B2B (Business-to-Business) or B2C (Business-to-Consumer) business model? Meaning, do you sell to other businesses or individuals?

In a firm with a B2B business model, the typical CRM data model of accounts and contacts is usually a good fit. In extremes, some firms will prefer to remove menu access to contacts and focus on the accounts—leaving contacts only as names associated with accounts. CRM systems, whose design focus gravitates around this concept, are sometimes referred to as account-centric systems.

But in a B2C business model, many firms prefer to remove the navigation access to accounts, leaving a focus on the contacts—the individuals with whom the firm does business. CRM systems that focus on individuals are commonly referred to as contact-centric systems.

SugarCRM is a bit of a hybrid, in that it offers functionality that favors an account-centric approach, but, with some customization and creative repurposing of functionality, it is also effective for contact-centric needs.

What is the nature of your business? Do you make or re-sell products, anything ranging from ceramics to washing machines? Do you sell services, such as house painting, landscaping, or window cleaning, or do you do both on a regular basis, like the car mechanic who charges for his labor by the hour, but also sells the replacement parts he uses when making repairs? If you only sell products, does a sale also include product support or warranty services? Does the product regularly wear out or need service on a predictable timeline, representing a recurring revenue opportunity? For instance, a car that needs regular oil changes.

If you have an element of product warranty or support in your business, you will want to be able to track the duration of support on specific products for each customer. If your product needs regular service, such as a car, you may also want to record a good time to contact each of your customers for a service.

In a CRM system, products and services are dealt with rather differently. Products are usually listed in a catalog and are very standardized. When they are sold, they generate a one-time income event.

If your products have significant value and accompanying support services (such as computer equipment—a PC or a printer), your CRM will need to capture the make and model (ideally, the serial number as well) of the product and link it to the customer record to track entitlement to contracted support services. As a result, your CRM will need to understand the concept of an asset and a service contract.

If your business delivers services to its customers, and those services are delivered over a significant period of time, your CRM will need to be able to model a sale that is not a one-time income event, but rather a stream of income (and potentially costs) over time. Kelly Girl, for example, delivers a service—the services of temporary office staff. If a Kelly Girl temporary worker was placed on an assignment for three months from June to August, then the sale should be modeled as an income stream of X USD in June, Y USD in July, and Z USD in August. There will also be a corresponding cost stream over the three months of the actual salary paid by Kelly Girl to the worker involved.

These sorts of sales are often modeled as a project that delivers over time and if your business sells these kinds of services, your CRM will need to be able to track these 'income stream' opportunities, as well as the regular 'income event' opportunities.

If your business has a reasonably high average transaction value—say over US$1,000—then it generally makes financial sense to track your customers and your opportunities to sell to them—especially if you have a sales cycle of a couple of weeks or more in which to track the opportunity. This is the classic CRM application—tracking accounts and contacts and the sales opportunities associated with them, and then rolling it all up into a sales pipeline. This gives you a good feel for how sales will go over the next couple of months.

However, what if your usual sales cycle is less than an hour? Or your average transaction value is closer to US$20 than US$1,000?

If you have a business, such as a CD music store, a video rental store, or a specialty frozen meats store, then you have lots of smaller transactions, each of them bordering on impulse purchases by the customer. In this case, your real reason for implementing a CRM is to enhance your recurring business model. If you typically get these same customers coming back again and again, you will get great benefit from tracking those customers in your CRM for marketing purposes. Opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns, membership in a discount club as a loyalty mechanism—these are going to be some of your key activities. You will need a CRM that can provide the kind of e-marketing and loyalty marketing capabilities that will propel your business to success.

In this case, you will still keep track of accounts and contacts, but leads and opportunities have much less significance. Your sales pipeline is also bordering on irrelevance. If yours is this type of business, recognize this fact and understand the type of changes your CRM will need in order to help you and your staff focus on what is important for your business—not what would be important in another sort of business.

Where do you sell? Do you sell from your shop? From your office? At your client's premises? Over the Internet?

Where is your staff? Are they in the office? Out servicing and selling to customers? Do they work from a single central office or are they spread across multiple regional offices?

These are some of the most important variables in your CRM equation. After all, if we are trying to manage customer relationships, we need to know where those relationships are happening! That means, we need to know the whereabouts of your customers and your staff.

If your business only generates sales within a single location—your store or office—then clearly your communication challenges are not as great as a business with a dozen outbound international sales representatives working out of their homes.

One of the key questions you need to answer is: when you or anyone in your business with a customer-facing role is in contact with customers, are they sitting at their computer and online? If not, you may need special CRM facilities so that they can access customer history when they need it, so that they can enter updated information as it develops.

Let's study two of the more common scenarios as follows:

If you recognize that your business has the need to service outbound sales people using one or more of the above techniques, you should ensure that the CRM solution you plan to adopt can meet your requirements.

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, when compared to a business with five employees. As a result of this, a CRM system is of even greater value to a larger firm.

Larger firms must deal with the fact that due to narrower responsibilities, individual employees only know a part of a customer's story. Also staff turnover creates a real risk as sales leads, opportunities, and other information created through work by the business may be lost when an employee leaves. If this information is instead stored in a CRM system, not only does your staff have a broader view of a customer, but, perhaps more importantly, the related information transcends any given employee. The employee may leave, but their data lives on in the CRM system, from where another salesperson, hired to replace them may easily pick up the work.

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 to whom it really belonged. However, after a certain point, an organization becomes more compartmentalized and impersonal. 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, or to perform certain actions is assigned to these roles. Then employees are assigned one or more roles and prevented from viewing certain records, deleting data, or accessing certain features altogether.

In a North American sales organization, for example, the management of accounts is commonly split into geographical areas, such as the West Coast, East Coast, Central USA, and Canada. Most sales people would only see leads and opportunities corresponding to the region they manage. However, sales managers would want to see leads, opportunities, and sales pipelines for broader geographies. Roles permit this level of control.

Lastly, the size of a business determines the realistic budget allocated for the acquisition and deployment of a CRM tool. In a firm of five people, a CRM implementation budget might be US$3,000 to US$5,000. In a firm of fifty people, that budget would more likely be US$25,000 to US$50,000. It is also important to note that a smaller firm is less likely to have any internal technical support capability, that factors into the overall costs of using a CRM system. In those environments, running a CRM server in the office may be beyond the financial means of the business.

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 implementation. Your budget should factor in licensing costs, if any, as well as ancillary services for customization work and the training of your staff. Finally, do not forget to consider the costs involved in managing your own server versus using an on-demand provider.

If your employees live and work in multiple countries, 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:

You will need to determine the language to be used for data entry into your CRM, making sure that you select one that you feel most users can understand, even if it is not their first language.

Many languages use characters and accents that do not exist in the English language. If this is a common need for your business, your CRM tool will need to accommodate such input by allowing users to enter, display, and print this data without hassles.

You CRM vendor should be able to inform you about the supported languages for the user interface, as well as the application's inline help system and printable documentation. An interface and help system that matches the user's predominant language will help user adoption, even if the data being input is not itself in the same language.

SugarCRM has support for numerous languages at the user interface, but printable documentation and the inline help system currently exists only in English. Another aspect of international support is the format in which dates are displayed. The manner in which such values are stored in the database by your CRM system is far less important than the system providing a mechanism that allows its users to select their preferred display format. Common formats include, 12/23/2006, 23/12/2006, and 2006/12/23. SugarCRM handles all of these formats without difficulty.

In addition to dates, different countries have different formats in which numbers and currency are presented. The decimal separator in North America is a period (.), while the thousands separator is a comma (,). In much of Europe, for example, the decimal separator is a comma (,) and the thousands separator is a period (.). Thus, a value represented as 12,234,678.90 in North America, would instead be represented as 12.345.678,90 in Europe, or even Latin America. If your staff will need to be able to present numbers and currency values in varying formats, you will want to check that your CRM is capable of supporting this feature. SugarCRM allows individual users to define these parameters as a part of their individual preferences.

A related topic concerns numeric values representing monetary entries, for example, the expected revenue of an opportunity. Businesses with staff in various countries and using differing currencies face a unique challenge with regards to the handling of these monetary values. Assuming the values all represent a specific currency has the potential to cause a number of problems. If a salesperson in Brazil enters a value in Reais, but the sales manager in Canada reads it as Canadian Dollars, the value would be incorrect.

An alternate solution would be for the business to standardize on a single currency and for everyone to input data under that assumption. The problem with the said approach is that it relies on users to accurately perform conversions between currencies. In addition, the extra step that the user has to take to perform the calculation before entering the data is an inconvenience to the user, and inconveniences lead to abandonment of the system.

Many CRM systems, including SugarCRM, address this problem by allowing the use of multiple currencies and definition of a base currency. Once configured, users are then able to enter values in the currency they are familiar with, and SugarCRM will handle the calculations when the data is displayed.