Salesforce.com vs. Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

Salesforce is so customizable that I can't think of situations where you couldn't configure the tool to do what you need. If Salesforce hasn't developed the capability itself, there is a marketplace where anyone else can develop and upload their solution for others to use as well. Also, due to Salesforce's success and size, almost every other app/software that you can think of has or is working on an integration with Salesforce. So if you need to use a different tool for a certain function, you can more likely than not still integrate it with Salesforce to enhance value.

Incentivized

The way Community Tax uses Sugar from a users point of view is, it can house a lot of information for either a company or individual with the option of adding additional sub cases . The down side is there are licenses issued per user and 1 per user is not enough because most of the time we are multitasking. Therefore a program/software would be more suitable instead of using a URL.

Incentivized

• Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
• Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
• Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

Incentivized

• Great way to keep myself organized. I do not miss appointments with clients since within the system I can input my appointment time and also send out a reminder to my clients.
• It has a nice layout [that] does not seem to be cluttered. I find it to be very user friendly.
• It has customizable dashboards which I find beneficial

Incentivized

• The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
• Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
• Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization

Incentivized

• The back-end programming (logical hooks) for advanced customizations could benefit from a more user-friendly interface
• General layout could be improved by the addition of modern templates to customize the standard look and feel
• Support communities could be further improved with the addition of videos on how to do specific configuration, modules.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.

I'm a Millenial and more tech savvy, so learning this tool is more intuitive and I don't mind learning the ins and outs of the product. It can be cumbersome when permissions or new rules by our admins get enacted, that can cause disruptions in our workflows and annoyances. Overall, the usability is fine, and helps in my day to day more than causes disruptions

Incentivized

There's a learning curve associated with Sugar. Right away, it's not as easy as an out-of-the-box CRM. Once you learn how to use Sugar, the system fits what your needs are. With any other CRM, you'd be trying to figure out how your company can best fit the CRM. You don't want to change your business cycle for your CRM, the CRM should fit your business cycle.

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

SugarCRM has never been down for us.

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

No response time issues ever. Very productive due to its ease of use.

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

The support overall at least for us has been phenomenal. Anytime that the system has any Issues at all IT gets in contact from someone from support to get the system back up and running. Have never gone more than 30 minutes with the system not working. So overall I will be definetely recommending this system in any other company that I may work for in the future.

Incentivized

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

We feel clasroom training is essential to ensure user adoption and buy-in. Video and on-line training courses gave their place but being in a classroom setting enables the Team to make any potential CRM issues visble right up front.

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Study, study, and study. Be prepared to train everyday until all processes are flowing nicely. The CRM is the elephant and figuring out where to take the first bite can be a challenge. But there is only one way to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. Systematic planning is very important.

Incentivized

I've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.

Incentivized

Sugar Sell is the only product we found that met the needs of everyone involved in the evaluation process. It can be customized to accomplish just about anything you need, and trust me....we pushed the limits on that. It is a product that our users actually enjoy using which in itself contributes to productivity. We used other CRM tools in the past, and the discontent from our users resulted in consistently declining use and ultimately dropping those products.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.

Incentivized

Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
• Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
• If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI

Incentivized

• Overall seems to be more expensive than other subscription based CRMs.
• Has positively impact our sales team to make more efficient and accountability among sales teams. Also allows for high level aggregated reporting
• Has been impactful for all teams, not only sales to track individual activity on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis

Incentivized