85,000 members strong, ASUG is a great example of an independent user community that came together organically to share information about their common issues and needs. As their founding story suggests, they were “crowd sourcing” and building communities long before the advent of popular social media tools that facilitate the creation of such virtual groups today.

Our primary initiative for ASUG is our SAP CRM free trial environment launched back in May with our partners at Freudenberg IT. Exclusively for ASUG members, the trial system provides role-based views such as sales manager or marketing manager that allow registrants to test a variety of pre-configured business processes including contact management, lead management, opportunity management, and marketing campaigns.

For ASUG members who have never used SAP CRM firsthand, this is a great way to get started. For those who are running on older versions of SAP CRM, a free trial will provide insights into the enhancements available in SAP CRM 7.0.

If you’re an ASUG member and want to get started, all you need to do is register online. You’ll be given access to the trial environment and the training tools to get you up and running.

He knew nothing of formal business plans or sales and marketing strategies.  He certainly didn’t spend his time poring over spreadsheets or worrying about quarter over quarter growth.  Instead, he was content to be his own boss, make his weekly payroll, and build friendly, personal relationships with his customers over a cold glass of beer.

That my father was a small businessman is clear, but what would you call him if he had he built a chain of eateries pulling down $150M a year?  In other words, when is a small business no longer small?

I’m pondering all of this because a blogger on AllBusiness.com recently asked:  Is SAP for Small Business?  I think the short answer is ‘Yes.’  But it also depends on how you define ‘small business’ and the focus of that business.

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) has an exacting measure of ‘small’ that takes into account your industry and number of employees. Their bottom line is that any business bigger than about $30M in annual revenue is no longer a small business.

The blogger noted above, TJ McCue, has a more expansive definition.  He places the upper limit for small business status at $100M.

SAP raises the bar further still. According to McCue’s article, the company defines a small business as one with revenues of $500M or less.  As an SAP channel partner, I would tell you their definition is a little more nuanced—but the figure cited highlights the fact that you can still be a very big business that’s defined as a small business by SAP and others.

The lack of agreement on what constitutes a small business is one reason Scott Shane, a professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western, says the term ‘small business’ is baloney! 

Writing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Shane calls for more stratified small biz classifications that would range from ‘non-employer businesses’ and ‘microbusinesses’ (1 to 9 employees) all the way up to ‘large small businesses’ with 100 to 499 employees.  It’s this last group, he notes, that accounts for most of the job growth commonly attributed to U.S. small business.

So let me again try to answer blogger McCue’s question:  Is SAP a fit for small business?   Again, the answer is yes, but it’s best suited, in my view, for small businesses that meet certain characteristics.

From a CRM perspective, a company will derive the most value from our solution if it has a significant investment in sales, marketing or customer service.  If you have 5 sales people with small, local territories that are easily managed, an SAP product may not make sense.  If you have 50 salespeople spread across the country, however, the ROI begins to look a lot different. 

Relative to revenue, there are $20M companies that run SAP CRM (including some of our customers) and there are $200M and $2B companies.  An important sizing question that we ask is not how big you are today—but how big you hope to become.  We have customers who invest in CRM specifically to become larger companies.  They see themselves doubling in size over the next three to five years and want a software product to help them scale more efficiently and reach aggressive revenue targets.

I like the term that Professor Shane has coined—that of being a ‘large small business.’  His 100-499 employee definition aside, I think you know a large small business when you see it.  It’s one that may have annual revenue close to or in the hundreds of millions of dollars and builds its strategy around becoming even larger.  To me, that type of company—presuming it has sales, marketing, or customer service functions—should have SAP on its short list when doing an enterprise CRM evaluation.

On the other hand, if you’re what Shane would call a microbusiness, with nine employees or less, then there are plenty of inexpensive SaaS-oriented CRMs that are likely a better fit for your needs than SAP.

I guess that means we’d turn away my father were he evaluating our product for any of his ventures.   But somehow, I don’t think he’d mind.  To him, good CRM was as simple as keeping everyone’s glass full.

Mobility.  Smart phone apps that enable the mobile workforce were always going to be a key feature of the conference.  Then SAP announced its plans to acquire Sybase—further amping the conversation about mobile computing.  Sybase is regarded by many as a database company, but its mobile technology is a centerpiece of the SAP deal.  As SAP SAP CTO Vishal Sikka commented, the mobile Internet is “10 times larger than the desktop Internet,” and SAP sees “upcoming generations of business workers who are completely connected and entirely mobile.”

Integration.  The discussion around mobile Internet, in a way, reinforces one of the core value propositions of SAP software, and that is, the integrated suite of solutions the company offers to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of customer activity.  Many businesses are learning that the silo’ed SaaS solutions that they rent to save on expense, don’t always easily integrate with other parts of their business very cost-effectively.  SAP solutions and partners that help companies solve their integration woes have a big advantage in today’s marketplace.

Immediacy of ROI.  At RunE2E, our focus from day one has been on rapid, non-complex deployment that speeds time to value. Especially in the CRM space, business owners are focused on lean projects that minimize upfront cost and deliver quick results.  During Sapphire, we’ll be involved in several case studies that showcase our approach, and in particular, our hosted, private cloud deployments that save customers time and money.

SAP resurgence.   As always, the health and well-being of the host will be widely discussed, and this year, SAP can point to a number of positive developments that bode well for the world leader in business software. After a down year in 2009, the company’s financial outlook is decidedly strong (SAP Returns to Growth and Profits in the First Quarter) and its aforementioned acquisition of Sybase is forward thinking.  Partners and customers alike should come away from SAPPHIRE Now with renewed confidence about SAP and their own investment in SAP solutions.

Two sessions at the conference will highlight the rapid deployment of our recent CRM project at Sterling Planet, an innovative supplier of renewable energy  and low-carbon solutions. These discussions bring into focus a key component of our value for SAP customers—the speed with which we can have them operating on our CRM solution.

We’ll also participate in a third session with hosting partner Freudenberg IT to discuss CRM in the private cloud.  Our client, Cryo-Cell International, Inc. will describe their success utilizing our hosted, private cloud services to power their growing global healthcare business.

If you’re attending SAPPHIRE, we hope you’ll seek out our team at these and other events.  We look forward to meeting you in Orlando.

• End users have no compelling reason to use the system
• End users fear CRM and the transparency it provides management
• End users lack buy in and reject business process change
• Key stakeholders lose interest in or support for a CRM project

So how do we as a software/solution delivery company address these issues?  For starters, we work closely with our customers to acknowledge and assess these challenges up front. Encouraging and improving user adoption, we feel, is a shared responsibility.  We have a role to play along with our customers.

We suggest that companies set explicit CRM use goals at the outset of each project.   From there, we support these goals by:

• Aligning CRM project expectations appropriately from day one
• Supporting and empowering key stakeholders
• Delivering an easy-to-use software product that helps the company meet clearly defined objectives
• Training and supporting end users to minimize resistance and create buy-in

On the project side, we work aggressively to get our customers up and running as quickly as possible because we know project delays can erode confidence and support.   We also scope and implement your solution in alignment with your corporate goals to help you achieve quick wins. These simple steps build momentum for CRM initiatives and thus encourage system use.

To build internal support, we try to integrate a variety of end users into the CRM project team.  Bringing business owners into the project at an early stage helps turn them into enthusiastic CRM champions.

Giving our clients an easy to use and fully-optimized end product, of course, is key.  SAP CRM is just that and has a variety of personalization features that give end users more control over their user experience.  The dashboards and reporting available in the system are also features that encourage adoption.

As far as training and support are concerned, both are an ongoing need to ensure CRM success.  At RunE2E, we implement a “train the trainer” approach that leaves an onsite resource available at your company to help end users at all times.

Of course, I’m just scratching the surface with these quick notes.  I’ll explore the topic in greater depth at CRM 2010 in Orlando.  Hope to see you there.

But it’s also true that many others within the enterprise may not share the champion’s enthusiasm. The end users—sales people, marketers, the folks in the call center—are not always part of the purchase decision and they may be reluctant about (or openly skeptical of) the company’s CRM initiative. Winning over these users is a challenge for many organizations.

Promoting user adoption across the enterprise is at top of mind for me these days for a couple of reasons. One is simply that I’m developing a presentation on the topic for an upcoming conference, CRM 2010. But aside from that bit of shameless self promotion, I’m also thinking about user adoption in the real-world context of several new customers that we’re working with.

It is true, especially in these days of cloud computing, that CRM software requires less setup time and can be put to work by the customer more quickly than ever. But what can fall by the wayside in that rush to run the software is the requisite training, support and reinforcement of best practices for users—all of which are key elements that drive user adoption for the long-term.

Here at RunE2E, we pride ourselves on a rapid delivery process. But I also think it’s important for our company to infuse that process with tools and support to help our customers promote ongoing and widespread user adoption.  In essence, we should strive to create teams of CRM champions throughout the enterprise. Because that’s how our success will ultimately be measured, and how our customers will derive the greatest value from their investment.

Those are my thoughts for now. In a future post, I’ll share some simple tips from my presentation that companies can use to encourage CRM adoption.

Our focus is clearly CRM, so we’ll join our SAP counterparts at the SAP CRM booth where we’ll be conducting live demos and showcasing our mobile solution.  But other partners and SAP experts, as well as customers, will be there, too. 

Think about your current challenges.  Are you trying to:  streamline execution, improve customer service, reduce risk, improve compliance, increase loyalty?  Software solutions for all of these common issues will be on display–and more. 

Some of these events are fast approaching so take note of the cities and dates below.  Click on each for more information.  Hope to see you on tour!

9/16/07 – SAP World Tour – Chicago, Ill.

9/17/09 – SAP World Tour – San Jose, Calif.

10/21/09 – SAP World Tour – New York, N.Y.

We recently put our vision statement on paper as an internal exercise, and after doing so, it seemed logical that we share it with our customers and prospective customers.  So without further embellishment, here it is:

RunE2E helps companies effectively find, efficiently acquire and consistently retain customers through the development and management of simple, logical and affordable business solutions powered by SAP software.

First and foremost, we want to help our clients create stronger businesses.  We help them do that with a powerful CRM solution that enhances their relationship with their customers.

Simple and affordable?   RunCRM is really easy to use, it’s affordably priced for the mid-market, and it’s pre-built to address probably 80% or more of an organization’s requirements out of the box.  This aggressively drives down total cost of ownership.  And oh, by the way:   our solution can be deployed as hosted, remote hosted or as a service to our Customer, meaning they don’t have to worry about the dreaded deployment choice and can simply focus on their business.

The last part of the vision is important, too.  This is SAP software.  They are, afterall, the global leader in business software solutions.  For our customers,  it means that our organization is complimented and supported by SAP, which serves 50,000 customers and employs 15,000 professionals worldwide.

That’s the vision.  I welcome your feedback and thoughts.

Among the more practical enhancements are changes to the search function to allow for cross-object searching and performance improvements to enable faster searches.

New features have been added in all of the major functional areas–sales, service and marketing.  As one example, new opportunity management tools allow sales managers to more easily simulate opportunity changes and ‘what-if’ scenarios for closing pipeline gaps.

For more visual, graphically-rich reporting, RunCRM now integrates with Business Objects Xcelsius.  Xcelsius lets customers transform complex data into comprehensive, interactive charts and dashboards that can be embedded in RunCRM and shared with others, as shown below in the demo chart below from SAP.  Click on different regions to see different views of the data in motion:

To preregister for this RunE2E event, sign up here.