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Sugar is the sweeter CRM
July 22, 2016

Sugar is the sweeter CRM

Marc Prince | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Sugar Professional

Overall Satisfaction with SugarCRM

Sugar is being used by the whole organization. We use it primarily to track all of our interactions with our clients. We can now monitor the entire sales funnel. One of the biggest process failures was in our followup with the client. Know what the conversation and pain points are with each contact has greatly increased our win ratio.
  • Pricing is a major consideration with Sugar. When comparing Sugar with competitors, the cost to value ratio is outstanding.
  • I really like the ability to customize the reporting.
  • I have my dashboard really locked in. I log in, view the dashboard, and drill down into the issue of the day.
  • Sales funnel.... Knowing how much we are promoting, how those promotions are affecting our target, and how we are engaging with those who have responded. Sugar has made this a simple process that we have integrated into every workflow touching the sale.
  • PSA connectors. I have not found a PSA with a great CRM integrated, so I let the PSA do what it does best. Problem is getting the Sugar to more closely integrate with the PSA.
  • Sugar's flexibility is great, but it sometimes seems like I am handing out a lot of nickels and dimes to third party developers for their modules.
  • Desktop and mobile menus could be a bit more homogenous.
  • Sales management is great now. When conducting a sales meeting there is no place to hide. We are no longer fumbling through individual email accounts, spreadsheets, and note cards. The is policy is if it is not in the system, then it is not true.
  • Our follow up has increased tremendously, With a more great followups has come a greater number of contracts awarded to us.
  • If the server is down, we are down. There have been a few glitches and and need to restore backups because the data was just not populating. down time has been minimal, but very impacting.
We saw a lot of the same desirable features in both platforms. Although Salesforce offered a greater level of support, we did not think it was worth the extra spend, at the end of the day. We have had to do a bit more leg work when it comes to social media intelligence, but in the end our spend on Sugar was less than what Salesforce was offering.
We all have Sugar on our computers and mobile devices. Workflows are dedicated to ensuring Sugar is always up to date. Now, when I am in the field, or meeting with a client on their premises, I have all the information on my phone. Many of my closings are done in the moment.

Sugar Sell (SugarCRM) Feature Ratings

8.9
Customer data management / contact management
9
Workflow management
10
Territory management
7
Opportunity management
8
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
9
Contract management
10
Quote & order management
9
Interaction tracking
10
Channel / partner relationship management
8
7.3
Case management
8
Call center management
8
Help desk management
6
8.5
Lead management
10
Email marketing
7
8.3
Task management
7
Billing and invoicing management
8
Reporting
10
9.3
Forecasting
9
Pipeline visualization
9
Customizable reports
10
10.0
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
10
Scripting environment
10
API for custom integration
10
8.5
Role-based user permissions
8
Single sign-on capability
9
4.0
Social data
4
Social engagement
4
8.5
Marketing automation
8
Compensation management
9
10.0
Mobile access
10

Using SugarCRM

10 - Sales and Marketing.
2 - Database administrators. Software support engineers. Programmers for patching between systems. Sales analyst
  • Tracking the effectiveness of Ads to sales.
  • Tracking sales team activity
  • SHowing cash flows from ad spend to client buy.
  • Use cases from other client experiances
  • Root cause analysis as to why we won or lost a sale
  • creating better email and text messages
  • Tighter SMS integration
  • Document management and SIgnature Capture
  • More features on the Voip Integration
We are looking a Sweet CRM an opensource fork of Sugar.

Evaluating SugarCRM and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
Price. We have found that competition drives a certain set of common features in all of the CRM systems. So it came down to how much we where going to pay for those features.
More testing and vetting. Our corporate culture is to do a lot of the evaluating ourselves. As an outsource for IT services, it just makes sense that we test, test, test then find what others have experienced. Because at the end of the day, our clients are looking to us for these answers.

SugarCRM Implementation

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.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - I insisted we use sugar when we opened our doors. The sticking points where centered more around making workflows practical and better hands-on experience with the Sugar product. We had to battle old habits from other company experiences where the team had a favorite feature of another system or they had no system at all.
  • Learning and navigating menus. We started off know that the Sugar system had the answers, we just needed to learn how to ask the system the right questions.
  • Automating our promotion process. Ads here and social media mentions there and getting it all to report back to the CRM without making double entries concerning everything we where doing to attract more clients.
  • Email. Since we don't use Outlook, there was a challenge in getting our email server connected to the CRM. Then came the human element and training our team to use Sugar for all of their client communications.

SugarCRM Support

When we run into a problem is not the garden variety the SUgar support team sees day to day, so it takes some extra effort on their part. We rarely require a scripted, cookie cutter, answer.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Quick Initial Response
Escalation required
No - We have a lot of the same talent in house as the premium support would offer.
Between our ISP and Email server requirements we where getting intermittent blockages in our email generated from Sugar. We worked with the Sugar team for weeks trying to get around the issue and even tried rerouting and spoofing ports. The sugar team finally wrote a patch that fit our needs.