Let’s just stop a moment to consider and clarify our definition of a small or mid-size business, as it covers a wide range of organizations. While the Gartner Group may have one definition, and the Meta Group another, for our purposes here a small or mid-size business falls into these categories:
Home-based business with a proprietor: The proprietor may or may not work with other people on a regular basis. If others are involved, they may be outsourced contractors, commissioned salespeople or agents, or one or more partners who also work from their homes. These businesses vary widely—some involving lots of travel, and some requiring very little. This is very relevant, as travel is a frequent cause of lack of good information flow within an organization, and lack of good communication with customers. These businesses tend to have a headcount in the range of 1-10 employees and partners, and annual sales under 2 Million USD.
Small services businesses: These would usually have office premises that deal directly with businesses and retail consumers. Perhaps in the field of financial or legal services, real estate, graphics services, doors and windows replacement, home renovation, carpet cleaning, or catering—a multitude of businesses. Often these businesses have mobile staff making customer site visits in company vehicles. These firms are often in the 5-50 range in terms of employees, with sales in the 0.5 to 10 Million USD range.
Small-to-medium product or services businesses : These usually have shop-front premises that deal with businesses and consumers. This can include almost any retail sales and service activity with an average sale value high enough to merit tracking customers or clients individually. These firms are usually in the 10-100 range in terms of employees, with sales in the 1 to 20 Million USD range.
If your business has more than 100 employees, you are on the verge of becoming, or have already become, a more sophisticated, complex, and (let’s face it) wealthier organization with different needs and budget from those businesses described above. If your business falls under the 100 employee level, this book is definitely for you.
However, while businesses with less than 100 employees are classified as small or mid-size businesses, there is nothing small about the job of administering and managing these businesses! While being your own boss (of the organization, or of a department within it) often means there is no boss around to tell you what to do—it merely means that you have to tell yourself to do far too many things. In a typical small business, the owners and managers wear multiple hats—one minute running finance, the next minute sales, and then on to customer service and support, binding a proposal, arguing with the landlord, and so on.
Running a smaller business also means having to be careful and smart with cash. Administration is almost always understaffed, as the lack of scale in a smaller business makes business infrastructure and administration relatively more expensive. Overworked book-keeping clerks and part time accounting resources are frequently the order of the day. All this unfortunately has also meant that too many businesses have, until now, been effectively disenfranchised from the club of those able to afford the best management tools.
A glance at the income statements for a typical smaller business reveals a need to lower administrative costs. If it doesn’t, that usually means the owner’s quality of life is pretty low, as he or she is likely doing it all by themselves. Or it can indicate that administration is being very poorly executed. Unfortunately, even though administration costs are usually high, the administration resources that exist are typically overworked, and struggling to meet the workload. This usually doesn’t get much better until the 100 employee milestone is passed.
Another key need for those managing smaller businesses is the need to get out of the office more—get out of the office just to get home and spend some time with the family, to win new customers and service existing ones, or just to see different scenery without having the whole house of cards falling apart. But instead, the usual day spent managing a smaller business consists of:
An endless stream of visits from employees with questions
Shouting instructions across the open office
Dropping by the various departments for an update
Spending half the day on the phone
Firing off emails to contacts stored in Microsoft Outlook
Staying late to bring paperwork up to date
Getting out of the office often means traveling some distance on business, and this highlights another need—the need to get business information while traveling, on laptops and handhelds, offline and online. This kind of connectivity and flexibility is what it takes to compete in today’s increasingly demanding and cost-conscious business environment—and most of the smaller businesses just don’t have these tools. What tools they have are typically client-server based—meaning that some software is loaded on a shared server computer, and more software is loaded on the PC of each person allowed to use the system. This can get expensive, with license fees typically being charged on the per-user model, and time consuming and potentially costly maintenance and updates required for each PC quite frequently. It also tends to keep people in the office, where the PCs with this software loaded on them are located.
A web-based CRM, by way of contrast, has no user software to load on each PC—all that is needed is a browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple’s Safari. While the server software is still often licensed on the per user basis, these users can be anywhere (including at home or traveling to see customers) and still have access to the system and all the information it holds. And an open-source CRM like Sugar Open Source is best of all, as it has no licensing fees of any sort.
A web-based small business CRM directly addresses all the needs listed above. It lets you get out of the office, yet stay in touch. It lets you see your family or win more business without dropping you out of the organization’s information loop. It reduces administrative load and costs by ensuring that the company and customer information only needs to be keyed in once, and is well‑organized and easily accessible. And it is accessible not only by home PCs and road-warrior laptops, but even by handheld devices such as the Treo and BlackBerry, as even these smaller devices contain a web browser (see Chapter 6 for details of handheld information access, and wireless synchronization).