SugarCRM

Once you've sorted through your business needs, rolled up your sleeves to spend quality time under the hood, Sugar reveals its mesmerizing malleability and definitely gets under your skin.

It is with a certain sense of nostalgia that I remember the "before" and "after" snapshots of what was intended to be a Change Request summary for a much dreaded Sugar CRM makeover and data migration.

I was commissioned to perform this last ditch effort of face lifting of our conspicuously underused CRM system, to make it more palatable and finally win over all ten members of our Sales Team to commit to using it as their primary resource.

And it worked.

From five most heavily used Modules in our on-demand Sugar Professional - we were down to just three. A few out of the box modules i.e. "Tasks","Calls" and "Meetings" needed to be merged into a single "Activities" super-module, with the intent of saving novice users much grief in orchestrating their tight schedules.

Trust me, this kind of stunt is easier said then done. And if you are doing it in-house make sure to thoroughly get all the questions answered by Sugar Support Engineers.

However, what once seemed as a complex intervention in our case, after careful analyses of field mappings, relationships and dependencies - turned out to be a breeze to implement, and a recipe I am delighted to now share with all Sugar aficionados.

All alterations were done from the Admin panel in Studio. A brand new host module was created from scratch, as a common denominator of features found in the three modules about to be absorbed in it - after a meticulous study of necessary field mappings and data structures.

All the steps of building it and subsequent tweaks were done in easy to use Studio utilizing Sugar's robust but intuitive Logic; some custom fields and relationships needed to be introduced, old module templates restructured to align with the new one, and finally all raw data were exported, restructured and re-imported into our new custom super-module, making sure every single field of every single record landed where it should.

Before going live, we've had a chance to work all the steps out on a clone environment which was made available for us by Sugar Support, and once we thoroughly tested and confirmed that all the desired new functionalities were implemented flawlessly, and data migration has preserved all the historical usage, we went into our production environment and replicated the whole process.

So, six months and three minor Sugar releases later - we rolled out our pride and joy just before a new major version - Sugar 7 was announced.

I breathed a sigh of relief once the greatest test of the feasibility of customization efforts - user acceptance trial - was over:
the epilogue - all ten members of our Sales Team have cheerfully transfered all of their externally kept data into Sugar and are loving it.

This will be definitely an episode to remember and cherish in the coming year, as I am preparing to win over a few more partners and associates into considering switching to Sugar.

For me this CRM customization project (I later on summarized in 'A Guide through Sugar Makeover' whitepaper) became a litmus test of
how this kind of collaborative tool would weather the change and stay relevant with evolving business needs of those who depend on it.

In my view, Sugar has definitely passed The Test with flying colors, effecting a transformation in me from an unsung hero of Sugar Administration - into a full blown ranting and raving Sugar Advocate.
Can you tell I OD'd a bit? :)

To say that our company was lost without Sugar would be an understatement. Our failures to keep a database up to date was very apparent during Christmas mailings in which we would receive at least 50% of our mailing back because of incorrect information. Sugar makes it easy for our sales team to keep customer information up to date. It is easy to learn and the availability of the internet CRM keeps us on track.
Sugar is a great tool to simply use as a database but that is not the extent of this tool. We currently use the sales pipeline and tracking in which we were able to customize since Sugar is an open source application. We have spent hours making our CRM completely custom to fit our needs and it has really made a world of difference.
We know that Sugar has a lot more to offer that we aren't even taking advantage of at this time including Outlook and Cloud capabilities. We look forward to learning more and growing our business using Sugar.

We are a plastics rotational molder and we use Sugar in addition to E2 Shoptech ERP. This is because E2 lacks a CRM of any kind and we needed one for customer contact tracking and marketing/sales/customer service purposes. We initially chose the system because it could be SaaS through a browser and was much less expensive than competitors such as Salesforce. The software accels in customizability. As the admin, there was a bit of a learning curve, but not much. If you're familiar with coding or systems at all, you'll understand the module layout very easily. But even a non-coder or system expert can easily review the online support documents and work out what needs to be done. We actually run 3 different companies on site and were able to differentiate contacts and accounts through different means. Because we do so much custom work, it was nice having the ability to add custom fields and drop downs. My faviorite part about the software is the dynamic linking of fields. For instance, if you are in a contact or lead record which is associated with a company's account, in the field "Account Name", not only can you see that company name, but you can click it and go straight to that record. And nearly all items are this way making it very easy to jump through data. Reporting is another feature we use extensively and there is a lot of customization available here.

Now for some of the cons. It's not perfect. For isntance, if you opt to have your database hosted on Sugar's server, make sure you have a strong internet (and network) connection or editing/entering records can be a long process to say the least. In business, nobody likes to wait. Fortunately, we haven't been too bad off, but we do get slow days. Also, there are some frustrating points of the software. For instance, when enter a record (let's say, a phone call) there's a field labeled "Related To". You can adjust this field to be a Lead, Account, Contact, anything. If you set it to Lead, you can then start immediately typing the lead in and it will strat to autopopulate based on current system entries (another awesome feature). But if you can't find what you want or your slow connection doesn't allow for fast enough updating, you have to manually search the database. Unfortunately, if the record doesn't exist, you have to open up a completely new Sugar window and enter the OTHER record first before finishing the first one. This is just one example as these types of small frustrations exist through the system.

Fortunately they are few and far between. The only other problems we've come across are reports that access lots of different data types are difficult to work into a single report. Also, email integration is very limited in functionality, both within the system and using the Outlook plugin.

But for small businesses (especially non-manufacturing) this system would be exceptional for the price. I've had a very easy time working with our account reps at the company in customizing our package. And they are constantly updating the system to make it better. Anytime I've submitted a support ticket, response has been quick and very helpful. I would recommend Sugar CRM to small to medium businesses.

I switched to SugarCRM 7 years ago from being an ACT fanatic. Hands down best CRM for business and non-profits. It does everything any orginization needs to build relations with contacts and increase sales. Recently we switched from Pro to CE and invested in building out the missing parts of from the PRO versions, great ROI. The only downside is the CE version doesn't have the really nice UI as the Pro or other paid versions, but the cost savings are worth it. Also has tons of add-ons that integrate with other apps.
I highly recommend SugarCRM to any size business. It is a must have for growth.

SugarCRM is the most flexible CRM out there, easily scaling to meet the requirements of your business. With the intuitive Sugar UX, and the clear simple Sugar PurePrice, there's no hidden costs, strings attached, or anything else getting in the way of making your business more productive.

SugarCRM is my preferred CRM system. I've used Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP in the past but Sugar is by far the most customizable and affordable. I started off using CE - community edition, their free CRM edition and was hooked. I'm pretty techy so I loved that I could customize it and integrated it with all my other business tools. I definitely recommend Sugar over Salesforce (it's biggest competitor) because it's more affordable and intuitive.

SugarCRM is a complete CRM covering the whole sales cycle from lead acquistion to customer support.

It is easy to learn and use and completely flexible from mobile to desktop and and cloud to on-premise.