Sage CRM is an SMB-oriented CRM platform offered in both SaaS and on-premise editions. Unlike the Sage SalesLogix product, the SaaS version is a true multi-tenant offering.
The platform offers excellent integration with Sage ERP and accounting products. It is also a good global solution and is available in many languages and is used by over 12,000 customers worldwide, with many customers in Europe.
BL is great is you're going from a manual process to something more sophisticated. I'm not sure what the competitive landscape looks like with regards to Reference Software nowadays, but when we were evaluating a few years ago, BL was ahead of all other vendors in terms of functionality and integrations with SFDC
as it is a very flexible software that can be adapted to any business model, other functions human resource management, manufacturing and supply chain planning, all these functions are housed in a highly technological interface. I liked this system because it made automating accounts payable so much easier.the control of the basic accounting of any type of company
The system provides more visibility into available references and prevents references from being over-used. It allows the client (reference) to choose how often they can be contacted in a given time period and provides a closed-loop feedback mechanism to make sure the client is providing positive responses.
Allows account executives (sales people) to easily request references based on: product Used, customer vertical, location, account size, expertise, etc.
Uses a “Five Star” method to show how relevant the answers are when a results are returned from a search.
When in client profile, it is very intuitive, allowing you to easily transcribe notes in the clients profile.
Sage allows 3rd party plugins, so if you utilize a particular phone services or would like to import something as simple as google drive, its compatible.
It could be cool if there was some automated built in surveys that could be used and attached to the reference. For example very short quick survey to the potential customer about how they felt about the reference, a short one to the sale rep involved to show if it was a good fit to bring the reference and potential customer together. Then show those collective results on the reference record and when searching for a reference.
I would like a better way to build and track points for those at the contact level of a reference and a the account level.
Reliance on Apache Tomcat causes a lot of headaches. There are common issues trying to start up the server, resulting from Apache Tomcat misconfigurations, or Java. Some forum posts on Sage City address common issues, but digging into server logs seems to be an often occurrence.
Support is somewhat lacking, less user install base means error messages are sometimes hard to find quick answers for. Most of the knowledge found on the internet is in the Sage City forum.
Integration with Microsoft 365 causes you to have to turn off some security features. This will result in your 365 tenants running lower security standards than recommended, it may put you at risk for targeted attacks.
There are really no other words to say, it is a very easy to use application that is more straightforward and has provided better results with the bulk of features that appeal to a very broad amount of users. There may be other CRM platforms out there that are more prevalent, but I have found them to be much more clunky and less intuitive than Sage CRM.
Excellent integration with the most important social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to get leads. The mobile app is quite useful for speeding up the tasks at hand and not relying on the computer or being in the office to get them done.
Sage works very quickly based on the network you are using it on. It is internet based so if your network is slow, it will perform slowly. Reports seem to run reasonably fast, if there is too much information it is trying to populate that could slow it down a little. When Sage CRM is integrated with a Sage ERP product it doesn't tend to slow down either system at all
Support team is really slow and they need to work on this really. Sometimes it takes days to resolve a simple query and there is no way to get it expedited. Rest the product is is amazing but the team should look into the costumer support and get it working
The process of asking each reference how often they’d be willing to be contacted was the biggest task. We made assumptions for current clients, and ask each new client once they become a customer. Along with which specific skill-set they’d be willing to be a reference
The implementation and upgrades were rather quick and straight forward. Attempting to link Sage CRM with Sage 100 ERP however was a nightmare and will be avoided by us in the future due to numerous issues.
While I was one of the decision makers in this process, I didn't sit on the demos for the other providers (I was brought in further in the sales process). My understanding from my team was that BL was much more configurable and support more robust integrations that the competitors
Whilst SAGE CRM was selected around 10 years ago and we became a partner, the main contenders would have been at the time Sales Logix and MS CRM 4.0. However, we had extensive experience of the mid-market CRM's and decided on SAGE CRM since it had a clean, easy to understand interface and importantly offered both workflow automation and Self Service capability, all of which across both the Case and Sales and Marketing functionality was seamless and saved time. As it was pure browser based, access was from anywhere we wanted. In my view, SAGE CRM still stacks up well against all the other mid-market CRM systems and offers good value for money, but more importantly, it is an easy to operate and customisable solution which user like. Again, we can teach administration users very quickly to support and customise themselves since the admin. function are clear as well.
Increase time to fill: All references are filled within 2.5 days or less. For a program that isn't managed by one person, full time, we look at this stat as a win for our organization. BL def. helped us in cutting down the time it takes to find a reference.
Increased employee efficiency: The customer marketing team still owns the day to day administration (approvals) of the system, but we've drastically cut down their effort. We no longer need to search for the reference (the sales reps now do this themselves) - and the triggers to the account managers have been a huge help in cutting down the time to approve.
Greater visibility: BL has allowed us to capture denial reasons - which means we know why a references is being denied - which means we can hide them from coming up in future search results.
