 CRM for Small Business Jim Ockers, P.E., P.Eng. April

Book: The E-Myth Revisited  For small business success you need to be have BOTH:  Operational Excellence - the "system" for how you do whatever you do  Aggressive, well organized Sales & Marketing Strategy  Someone has to have clear duties and responsibilities for sales & marketing: VP of Sales & Marketing  Set things up as if you have an org chart with a large team. That way when you DO have a large team, there are minimal growing pains.

CRM: the blurb  CRM == Customer Relationship Management  Those of you with business degrees/MBAs already know this stuff.  “Every great business starts with a great relationship. Every great relationship starts with You. The strategy you take in establishing, developing and maintaining these relationships is your CRM strategy. The system that support this strategy is your CRM software.”

Why CRM  How do sales people know what to do? How to do it? Or how I'm doing at it? I'm not a sales person or any kind of sales expert!  Use a CRM system developed by experts to help you know what to do and to organize all your information  Salesforce.com is a complete CRM hosted by them on their servers. SaaS - no software to buy.  Warning: Salesforce.com use their own CRM, so if you sign up for a demo (free 30 day trial) or to view any of their videos, expect lots of calls from someone following up on your lead.  SugarCRM is an app you can download and use for free. It is also a commercial CRM.

 “In the cloud” - no admin or IT  Collaborate with others in your business in real time  Access to everything to run your business from anywhere  Individual/group calendar for scheduling  ”Chatter" "sales cloud" for collaboration between sales people & groups - sort of private facebook or linkedin.

Salesforce.com Sales Workflow  Capture/initiate the next steps for each customer, even right after a meeting  Access to reports and upates about each customer & deal progress; Leaderboard  Integrated & PRIORITIZED leads from , website, events/marketing campaigns, inside sales, social media  Lead scoring  Dashboard with tasks, profile, etc.  lead -> opportunity -> deal -> order

Salesforce.com Sales Management  Sales forecasting - an accurate sales forecast is important for managing orders, cash flow, etc.  Analytics - get feedback what worked or not  From e-myth: successful businesses try a bunch of different approaches, and keep trying new things, and TRACK what worked and how well it works.  Google adwords? Facebook? Twitter? How can you tell what is the most effective for leads/deals?  Automate business processes & find out the business processes work  e.g. get approval for a 20% discount for a customer/deal.  You have to define the business processes, then you can automate them.  They have “wizards” - Next, next, next, finish.

Salesforce.com Information Management  All customer information available online including social profiles  All communication with customer is captured & indexed & easy to access  is great again  ”Social accounts & contacts”  Who else do we know at that company?  Anything shared on social media about the company or people  Any mutual friends who could introduce us?

 SugarCRM - an IBM global alliance business partner  Open Source Software (community edition)  "With SugarCRM software, your company will gain insights across marketing, sales and support so everyone is working toward common goals. SugarCRM offers companies unrivaled flexibility to design CRM applications and processes that expose the right information, making more successful partners and happier customers."

SugarCRM vs. Salesforce.com People who switch to SugarCRM want:  Easily customizable CRM that can accommodate their business processes  Make their field sales force more productive with full mobile access (salesforce.com has that?)  Control their data and have more than one deployment option (you have & own all your own data)  No costly upgrades that deliver little extra functionality (obviously salesforce.com is $commercial)  Reduce CRM expenses by using SugarCRM (If you have IT skills or access to IT consulting, which are also not free)

I tried SugarCRM  The installer was pretty easy for me. It checked for gotchas on my server and walked me through how to fix them.  Phones: Integrates with Skype, Cisco CallManager, and Fonality. The latter two are small business VoIP/digital phone systems.  Skype is interesting for small business because you can make & receive PSTN calls with your business number, integrated with web app  In Sugar just click on the contact & Skype calls them.  Sugar Mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry. Not sure if these are free.