In trying economic times, it's critical to keep your business in close contact with customers, so you can capture otherwise elusive revenue opportunities. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as SugarCRM help ensure that your sales stay on track.
Like most CRM apps, SugarCRM tracks your contacts, appointments, and sales opportunities. On top of that, however, it offers better-than-average graphs that let you check your progress in meeting sales quotas. You can easily modify the app's terminology, as well as its look and feel, until it's just right for your business.
Though its CRM capabilities are more robust than those of Microsoft Outlook or Sage's venerable Act contact manager, it doesn't provide all the integrated financial capabilities (such as tie-ins to invoicing) that you get in an online service such as NetSuite.
I looked at the hosted version of SugarCRM, which offers accounts that are reasonably priced for a small business, starting as low as $40 per user, per month. SugarCRM is also available as packaged software--including a free open-source edition--that you can install on your own server.
Using SugarCRM
SugarCRM's flexibility is particularly sweet. You can change the look of the app, making relatively small modifications (such as a font color) or giving it a major overhaul by selecting a theme that revamps both its appearance and navigation. You can decide which components, called "dashlets," you wish to display. You can also change the names of assorted fields to customize them for your business.
The user panel is thoughtfully laid out, with tabs that direct you to a dashboard with charts, a calendar, contacts, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns, sales leads, and more.
The key component in any CRM app is the way it allows you to track customer interest in your company's goods and services. This is where SugarCRM shines, as it lets you monitor progress from the initial lead. You can track the potential sales and likelihood of a deal, with best, likely, and worst-case scenarios that you specify.
SugarCRM Integration
If you're like most businesspeople, you already track your contacts in your PC and have no desire to reenter all that information. SugarCRM can import contact data from popular programs such as Outlook, Act, and the online CRM service Salesforce.com.
Autosync with Outlook is also supported, permitting you to modify your contacts and calendar appointments in either SugarCRM or Outlook and transfer the changes to the other application.
Plug-ins for Microsoft Word and Excel (the latter currently in beta testing) let you use Word templates and Excel spreadsheets to prepare special reports and analyze data to your heart's content.
Which SugarCRM Is Best?
SugarCRM is available in both hosted and on-site options. The hosted editions are Professional On-Demand ($480 per user, per year) and Enterprise On-Demand ($900 per user, per year). Professional includes most of what a small business requires in CRM. Enterprise adds advanced capabilities such as offline client synchronization, more-sophisticated reporting, and support for the Oracle database.
On-site options that you can install on your own server (which I didn't review) include both Enterprise ($449 per user, per year) and Professional ($275 per user, per year), along with the free Community edition. All editions other than Community require a five-user minimum order.
If you're seeking more customer contact tracking capabilities than Microsoft Outlook provides, SugarCRM could deliver what you need. The no-cost Community edition lets you try it out risk-free.
Source:- pcworld.com/
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Sunday, December 7, 2008
SugarCRM Keeps You Closer to Your Customers
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
SugarCRM wants to be the Linux of the CRM world
SugarCRM seems to be doing quite well, at least well enough to rankle its larger competitor Salesforce. John Roberts, the CEO of SugarCRM says Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce wasn’t too pleased when he found out SugarCRM was hosting its user conference at the Marriott, just a few yards from the Salesforce Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.
“When Marc Benioff found out we were at the Marriott he pressured the hotel to move us out. That’s how we ended up here at the St. Regis, and Marriott is paying for it.” The move might have backfired for Salesforce because the St. Regis is a lot nicer than the Marriott and just as close to the Moscone.
The reason SugarCRM might be irking Mr Benioff is that it’s growing very fast. “We now have more than four thousand customers, and more than half-a-million users, in 80 languages. That’s in just four years.”
While Mr Roberts credits Marc Benioff with educating the market about the benefits of software as a service, he says SugarCRM is winning business because there isn’t any customer lock-in as there is with Salesforce and its proprietary behavior. For example, application developers for the Salesforce Force.com platform have to use a programming language called Apex.
“What is the point of Apex? We built SugarCRM in PHP and we use Internet standard technologies. We are open source, our technologies are owned by the Internet. We view ourselves as the Linux of the CRM world.”
Much of the demand for SugarCRM comes from word of mouth, says Mr Roberts. “I don’t have to have a big sales force that needs to travel all over the place.” Daily downloads average 5,000 per day and recently exceeded 5 million total. Site licenses are $449 per user or customers can choose to the on-demand version for just $40 per month.
“The Internet has totally changed the software industry. We allow our customers to try before they buy.”
SugarCRM is home grown and developed in Cupertino from scratch. “We don’t off-shore development. I don’t believe that you can build innovative software that way,” Mr Roberts says.
The company has strong growth and money in the bank. “We raised $20m last year but we haven’t had to touch it. We were planning an IPO in 2008 and we needed to show we had $20m in cash.”
Mr Roberts says the company might have to wait until 2010 before it can IPO. SugarCRM was hoping that MySQL would be the first commercial open source company to have a successful IPO. But MySQL abandoned its IPO plans and agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1bn at the beginning of this year. Now SugarCRM could become the first commercial open source public company.
Until the IPO market reopens, Mr Roberts isn’t twiddling his thumbs. “There are five million businesses in the US, and only 10 per cent of them have CRM, the rest are using spreadsheets. That’s a huge opportunity for us.”
Source:- blogs.zdnet.com/
Monday, November 3, 2008
Taking Open Source to the Limit: Geeks On The Way Case Study
Geeks On The Way provides computer services and technical support to customers across western Canada, and it was named as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada by Profit magazine.
The Challenge:
Geeks On The Way handles hundreds of client calls per day. So, when the company looked to meet its growing demand for its services with a CRM system, not just any system would do. With such strong technology expertise, the company knew it wanted a system that it could customize to fit its unique business process as well as grow with the system.
Additionally, the CRM system would need to fully automate its existing business process from end-to-end.
"We had already outgrown two previous customer management systems," says Geeks On The Way CEO John Leishman. "So, we needed a flexible system that could grow with our business and really scale."
The Solution:
Geeks On The Way was attracted to SugarCRM for various reasons. Since the company had already built out a telephony system on top of an open source phone system, called Asterisk, Geeks On The Way figured that it should look toward open source CRM for its client management needs. "SugarCRM simply had the largest following, the most downloads and provided the most security from a longevity of product development standpoint," Leishman notes, adding that his company felt that the standards-based design and open architecture of SugarCRM would complement the Asterisk implementation well.
The first task for Geeks On The Way after deploying SugarCRM was to integrate it with its Asterisk system, the popular open source telephony package.
Geeks On The Way also integrated Sugar with some back end databases to create efficiencies inside its service delivery model and customized the Meetings module to integrate a system that analyzes the service calls slated for the day.
The Results:
SugarCRM allowed Geeks On The Way to perform deep integrations at the data and application level, according to Leishman. With the integrated system, callers are recognized by their phone number or other identifiers. If a new client is calling, a "new contact screen" pops up to the agent and a tight integration with an external database of address and postal information populates most of the new contact record. This allows agents to process existing customers quickly, and also spend less time adding new customers in to the system. And since customers are well tracked using unique identification numbers, there is less duplication of customer records.
A deep integration to the accounting system also provided strong returns for Geeks On The Way. Since so much activity and data is tracked and captured in Sugar, Geeks On The Way can simply run that data into its accounting system and more efficiently compensate its employees, which range from phone agents to contractors to field technicians. "Accounting used to take us a full 24 hours every pay period," Leishman notes, "But now it takes five minutes with our Sugar integration to our accounting system."
Since it deployed Sugar, the company says it has seen lower marketing costs and improved customer support times. "With SugarCRM, we have reduced call handling times from two to three minutes down to as little as 20 seconds," says Leishman. And the company says simply knowing who an agent is talking to through its integrated system fosters closer relationships with customers and increases satisfaction levels.
Source:- salesandmarketing.com/
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature
All it took was one new feature to see that SugerCRM has a handle on the future of enterprise business applications.
The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.
It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.
If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.
Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.
This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.
We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.
source:- blogs.itworldcanada.com/
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature
The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.
It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.
If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.
Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.
This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.
We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.
source:- blogs.itworldcanada.com/
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
SugarCRM launches project-planning application
Which integrates project planning into core customer relationship management applications. A key feature is Sugar Projects, which gives users a 360-degree view of a project along with shared files, notes and benchmarks, and allows collaboration between Internet users and customers. Also included is the ability to produce grids, templates and charts of projects.
The news follows the recent announcement that the company was opening an office in Ireland, its first office outside the U.S.
SugarCRM did not release details of exact pricing, but--as with all SugarCRM applications--a free version of the software is also available. Advanced editions of the software are available, and the company offers these with an on-site license as an application server or as an on-demand service.
A key advantage for users, said SugarCRM Chief Executive John Roberts, is that SugarCRM does not have "the extreme sales and marketing of the other CRM vendors." As a result, "R&D is a very large proportion of our budget," he said.
Roberts added that, though the software is not open-source, it carries all the advantages for the user of open source. "There is no lock-in," he said. "For the other suppliers, it's all about how can I lock you in to a proprietary on-demand or proprietary software sale."
So far, the company has 200 customers in Europe, and has provided 1.5 million downloads of its core software worldwide. Most of the downloads have been the free version of the software, Roberts said, but a growing number of companies are now taking the subscription version.
SugarCRM Expands European Reach With Dublin Office
SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, is expanding its reach to Europe -- an essential step for any small, high growth software company more than a few years old.
The company is opening its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Company cofounder Clint Oram will be the general manager of Sugar Europe.
Europe's Importance
"The establishment of Sugar Europe signifies the importance of Europe as a key driver in the success of our commercial open source model," Oram stated.
"Our strong partner base throughout Europe, the advanced multilingual capabilities of our application, and the embrace of open source by European governments and businesses has pulled us quickly into the European markets," he added.
Besides establishing a local presence in Europe, SugarCRM is also localizing support materials for the French and German markets, expanding its on-demand infrastructure there and launching a campaign to raise awareness of the platform in Europe.
Growth Opportunities
Pushing into Europe is a smart move for the company, Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, told CRM Buyer.
"There's still a lot of opportunity in the CRM market in Europe, particularly for low-cost flexible solutions that can be easily integrated with other applications."
"Given Sugar's open source model and delivery as both a hosted and on-premise solution, they should be able to attract new partners that can help them identify key growth opportunities in the European customer base," Wettemann added.
Already Making Headway
SugarCRM has already made significant headway into these markets, the firm reported.
Its open source product set has been widely adopted across Europe, particularly in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, according to company statistics. Also, about one-quarter of its commercial customers are located in Europe, and more than 30 percent of Sugar Open Source downloads take place in Europe.
As in the United States, SugarCRM is claiming wins in Europe against competing on-demand firms such as Salesforce.com
Dublin-based customer Fineos, a provider of componentized software applications for the insurance, government social insurance and banking industries, chose SugarCRM over Salesforce.com, according to Jarlath Dooley, director of business operations for Fineos.
"For our demanding sales management process conditions, Sugar was just plain better," he said.
A Peaked Business Model?
However, the intrigue of CRM open source may have had its moment, when it was first introduced a few years ago with much fanfare.
"I don't see them on a short list of deals in which Salesforce.com, [Oracle's] Siebel and SAP are competing," Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone told CRM Buyer.
Firms most inclined to adopt open source CRM are those that want to support the technology and business model or those that don't want to put a lot of money in CRM in the first place. Open source CRM has less than one percent of the overall CRM model, she estimated.
Ongoing Development
In spite of these trends, SugarCRM has continued to develop its application with the higher end users as a target base.
At the beginning of the year, it added multichannel marketing and business analytics functionality to its Sugar Open Source, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines.
New features included a campaign wizard to set up and execute a campaign; a campaign manager to track the opportunities generated and closed by the campaign; automated lead capture, which integrates Web leads into SugarCRM and better management of e-mail marketing, online advertising, newsletters, search engine marketing, list rentals, telesales programs, webcasts and traditional advertising.
The new functionality also allows users to generate ad-hoc, multi-module reporting to analyze marketing, sales and customer support. These reports can be displayed in multiple formats such as pie charts or line graphs.
SugarCRM is built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It was one of the first open source CRM companies to come to market.
source:- ecommercetimes.com/
Friday, August 29, 2008
SugarCRM Announces Sugar 5.1 General Availability
The world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the general availability of Sugar 5.1, which includes new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM. The new reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior. Revamped wireless capabilities deliver the feature-rich SugarCRM user experience on mobile phones, including support for the popular BlackBerry® and iPhone™ smartphones.
Sugar Community Edition 5.1 is available at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/downloads/. To sign-up for a free trial of Sugar Professional 5.1, please visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ondemand_eval.html.
Community Support
SugarCRM’s commercial open source model invites the download and inspection of source code by users, developers, customers and partners, producing a higher quality product than possible in proprietary development models. During the beta process, Sugar 5.1 was installed over 10,000 times and tested by over 25,000 users.
Sugar 5.1 builds on a product legacy that has made SugarCRM one of the most popular open source projects and CRM products in the world. Since its founding four years ago, Sugar Community Edition and its related components have been downloaded over 5 million times. Over 80,000 registered community members, including 14,000 developers, have created over 500 extensions and 75 language translations of SugarCRM at www.sugarforge.org, SugarCRM’s community web site. SugarCRM’s user base consists of over 400,000 users on 50,000 installations in 195 countries.
“Software is transitioning from lock-in based proprietary systems to an open, standards-based world,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “As the mass adoption of SugarCRM proves, users want freedom and choice in their software, not artificial constraints and dictates from software providers.”
Sugar 5.1 Features
Sugar 5.1 offers new features and improvements across end-user and administrative functions, including:
- Advanced Reporting and Analytics provide support for complex reporting sets, matrix reports, run-time filters and integration with Microsoft Excel.
- New Wireless HTML Client delivers an improved user interface, new search capabilities, and support for BlackBerry® and iPhone™ smartphones.
- Tracker Reports provide a snapshot into system usage in order to increase user adoption and visibility into CRM utilization.
- Data Import Enhancements have been strengthened, making it easier than ever to move data from applications such as Excel, Act!, Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce.com into SugarCRM.
- Module Builder Enhancements support new relationships and templates, auditing and support for creating end-user dashlets.
The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited.
The iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.
About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
SugarCRM Named Best Open Source Technology by CRM Magazine
SugarCRM Recognized for Providing a Sophisticated Alternative to Proprietary Software
Source:- marketwatch.com/
Thursday, July 24, 2008
New SugarCRM Solution Pack from SnapLogic
In a bid to make it easier for enterprises to integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and create mash-ups and rich Internet applications, integration company SnapLogic has announced the release of aSugarCRM ( News - Alert) Solutions Pack.
“SnapLogic uniquely provides enterprises the ability to seamlessly integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and the flexibility to run their integrations and data transformations behind the firewall or in the cloud,” said Chris Marino, chief executive officer, SnapLogic in a statement to the press.
“The SugarCRM Solution Pack provides SugarCRM and SugarCRM On Demand customers all the building blocks they need to easily, securely, and rapidly harness, transform, mash up, and deliver their enterprise data.”
With the SugarCRM Solution Pack, users receive a complete set of SnapLogic Resources for reading, writing, and updating every SugarCRM module, including Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, and Campaigns. The solution is perfect for situations like migrating customer records from an internal CRM system to SugarCRM on Demand or for creating custom data feeds so authorized users can import SugarCRM data into applications like Excel, as well as a host of other uses.
"SnapLogic allows users to interact and access SugarCRM data without ever having to understand complex APIs. This means small and medium size businesses can access the data using simple Web technologies and don’t have to know anything about the complicated tool chain usually used by big enterprise application development teams," Marino told TMCnet.
Back in April, SnapLogic introduced their "Really Simple Integration" approach aimed at proving business IT groups with agile data integration solutions" so they can quickly and easily make data from databases,SaaS ( News - Alert) applications, SOA Web services and other data sources available for use.
"With Really Simple Integration were really trying to achieve just that. People know how to use Web-based apps, were taking some of that success and applying it to the problem of data integration by providing a simple solution," Marino said.
SnapLogic also announced that it joined SugarCRM’s SugarExchange program.
After receiving a lot of interest from people needing to integrate their CRM applications, Marino explained that SugarCRM was a perfect fit.
"It was a natural choice for us to join SugarExchange and we are anxious to do joint marketing and other promotions to help customers solve their integration problems."
source:- www.tmcnet.com
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