Salesforce Starter vs. Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions. Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.

Incentivized

Sugar CRM is a good tool, but it's complex to customize. It often requires expensive 3rd partners to implement more complex scenarios that SugarCRM struggles to support; coming back with explanations was usually time-consuming and unsupported. The back end is overly complex in terms of what it needs to be, with many redundant database tables and columns.

Incentivized

• Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details.
• SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually.
• SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business.

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

• Table views can be sorted by column. Filters can be applied, but only to one column. Multi-column filtering like Excel allows would be extremely useful and a big improvement.
• The ability to quick copy data in a table view would also be helpful, like (ctrl ') in excel.

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

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.

The system is very user-friendly on a desktop but lacks mobile friendliness. The Customer relationship manager disappears after the deal is signed. We struggled to get the system in a usable format, which was not cost-effective. The CRM system on desktop was great but way more complicated than it should be.

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.

SugarCRM has never been down for us.

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

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

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.

Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.

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

more expensive but as an industry leader and go, the learning curve pays for itself in ROI in lost time in onboarding

Incentivized

SugarCRM is a lot better in many ways then LogicsCRM which I started using when I started as a sales rep at Community Tax. Yet there is still room for a lot of improvements to accommodate a steady workflow. They integration of old CRM files seems to have worked great from Logics to Sugar.

Incentivized

Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.

• It made the job more efficient for staff so they can spend time doing other tasks rather than configuring and maintaining Salesforce Starter.

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