SugarCRM 101: Here Are All The SugarCRM Features You Need To Know About!

Table of contents:

• Introduction to CRM

• SugarCRM software features:

  • Marketing Automation
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Contact and Support Centre automation
  • Geo-locational technology

• How much will a SugarCRM cost?

  • Sugar Professional Edition
  • Sugar Enterprise Edition
  • Sugar Ultimate Edition

• How will SugarCRM help my business?

  • Conversion tracking
  • Marketing campaign reports
  • E-mail open rate
  • Customer record information
  • Customer Segmentation

• What makes SugarCRM different and unique?

• How to successfully adopt the SugarCRM culture?

  • Help your employees understand the benefits of SugarCRM
  • Optimize SugarCRM culture implementation
  • Keep reinforcing

• Summary and verdict

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Introduction to CRM:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a reference to all the applications, strategies, exercises and methodologies which businesses utilize for superintending and scrutinizing consumer interactions and information. Indispensible business data has to be monitored throughout the customer life cycle with the intention of refining professional relationships with customers, accommodating retention of consumers and augmenting growth of the organization. Almost all CRM arrangements are designed in such a way that they organize customer data across varying routes such as the firm’s primary websites, telephonic conversations, direct e-mails, marketing reserves and platforms of social interaction. A CRM system will also enable access to detailed statistics on customers’ personal data, buying history, purchase preferences / trends and concerns. A tool, which can be used to dilate and streamline business processes.

An eminent CRM like SugarCRM will enable your firm to anchor on your business’s relationships with individual people – it does not matter whether they are consumers, employees, suppliers or teammates. Initially, finer business repercussions are noticed when SugarCRM is deployed as a sales and marketing tool. But the most stupendous achievements in terms of efficiency are attained when SugarCRM is embedded within all domains of the business development cycle; from Human Resources to financial accountancy, customer services and supply chain management.

SugarCRM software features:

SugarCRM software will consolidate all the imperative merchandising data and documents into a primary CRM database. This will authorize users across all the business domains for easy access to invigorating facts about their venture. They will be able to manage and implement professional tactics with much more simplicity. For example, a team of sales professionals usually generates an entire sea of data. While working on the field, all the vital information gets stored in the form of hard copies, excel sheets, or in some cases, even inside the minds of your salespeople. Consumers might be contacting the salespeople via phones, email, social media or various other communication platforms. Remember, details can be lost. After all, err is human.  Now suppose your sales employees are diamonds in the rough and are somehow successful in accumulating and managing all this information. But now you’re faced with the challenge of extracting valuable information from this raw chunk of consumer data. It can be quite cumbersome to extract trends and preferences from raw data. SugarCRM will not only pave the way for easy collection and storage of business data but will also present you with trends and preferences that can potentially evolve your business at an unprecedented rate.

Apart from these, other leading functionalities in SugarCRM include recording various customer interactions over emails, telephonic conversations, social media, and various other channels. Automation of various workflow processes such as tasks, calendar functions and providing production managers the ability to track and analyze performances and productivity based on information logged within the system becomes much less of a headache.

Other widely used features of SugarCRM include:

1) Marketing automation:

With the help of an overrunning SugarCRM, marketing and sales teams can find more customer details with lesser time constraints and almost negligible manual effort. The customers’ data is present in the central dashboard of SugarCRM which makes it easy for the marketing team to access customer insights and target audience. With the simplified data presentation and communication system, it becomes much easier to carry out marketing activities and campaigns.

What does this mean? It means that the SugarCRM will provide important business functionalities such as email marketing, target marketing, social media management, and much more. The Social Media Metrics, such as Sentiment, Influence, and Overall Reach, will allow businesses to determine the level of engagement with the customers.

2) Sales force automation:

Businesses will be able to invigorate their processes by enhancing the power of their SugarCRM system by integrating some really neat and convenient tools with it. Sales teams would be able to access customer information throughout the day which makes sense to centralize them in one place.

The goal of any business worldwide is to convert leads and generate revenue. SugarCRM will trace your fresh and existing business leads, convert these leads into opportunities and relate these new opportunities to the accounts, contacts, and employees in charge of selling to those accounts.

This will allow your sales team to follow up with a newly created lead instantly. And since sales teams will have consumer data on their fingertips, the likelihood of closing deals swiftly will be skyrocketed. The entire sales process will now be smooth as silk.

3) Contact and support center automation:

Consumers and buyers are at the heart of your business. It has become almost imperative to adopt a customer-centric strategy for every business everywhere in the world. The integrated multi-channel approach of SugarCRM enables companies to better understand each channel journey, helping them identify what works most effectively and efficiently.

As SugarCRM support teams have access to customer data, they are well-equipped to cater the needs and requirement of the customers. The accessibility of customer data in SugarCRM enables support teams to respond most effectively to customer queries.

With the help of SugarCRM, Customer Feedback measures, such as Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Customer Loyalty, can be used to determine customer satisfaction. Moreover, these customer metrics can help businesses determine the behavior and preferences of their customers with ease.

4) Geo-locational technology or location-based services:

Certain SugarCRM plugins and integrations can track and locate records and leads on Google maps. This visualization and mapping insights of records can improve your performance and productivity all at once. Google’s powerful web browser mapping software is amalgamated right on your local SugarCRM to enable a visual representation of records. Now adding google maps in your SugarCRM is made easier.

This can potentially result in great reactions to your business. For instance, this geo-locational integration can serve as a route planner for your sales team. This GPS service will help you find the best route from the source to the destination, thus optimizing your business operations. These location-based services will provide all possible routes between the given locations.

How much will a SugarCRM cost?

Yes, it is true that a SugarCRM investment will perk up your business venture, but every investment comes at a price. You can analyze what kind of SugarCRM you want without getting into articulate details. SugarCRM has three paid versions; Sugar Professional, Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate. The decision regarding the type of SugarCRM your business venture needs should be taken whilst keeping in mind the defining features of your organization. SugarCRM is designed to have adaptability to various clienteles. The choice of your SugarCRM will depend on factors like; the type, size, and requirements of your business, not forgetting the price that you should be willing to put into this investment.

Before moving on, check out our SugarCRM Pricing details.

1)   SugarCRM Professional Edition:  

Sugar Professional features includes sales automation, marketing lead management, cloud deployment, unlimited Studio customization, unlimited online support and support for MySQL and SQL server along with offline access for mobile integration. The edition comes with 15 GB of memory. Some additional features can be integrated into your SugarCRM Professional for an additional price. For instance, if a corporation wants to integrate IBM notes, Linkedin contacts, or DocuSign with Sugar Professional edition; these features can be easily bought at an affordable price.

Sugar Professional is the perfect CRM if you are a part of a small or medium business. The most basic edition has a price of around $40 per user per month, but customization of choice will drag the figure to something around $55-$60 per user per month.

2)  SugarCRM Enterprise Edition: 

This SugarCRM Enterprise Edition has advanced features like Revenue Line item level tracking and forecasting, product level Quotes, Role-based views, 100 concurrent customer portal users, support for Oracle and DB2, 12 hours email and phone support for 5 days a week and 60GB of storage. It also provides mobile features like Studio editor and Sugar Logic.

This advanced SugarCRM might just be the perfect game changer for your business. It has a basic price of around $65 per user per month; this figure might be stretched to something around $85 dollars per user per month. This additional price is because of the customized features and Dashlets that will be integrated into your Sugars user interface.

3)  SugarCRM Ultimate Edition: 

With SugarCRM Ultimate edition, the user is provided with technical support whenever he/she desires. It is provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also includes an assigned technical account manager that will ease the debugging processes. Also, it includes 250GB of storage space which is enough to hold vast amounts of documents. Other than that, it also allows up to 5 sandbox instances which will help in securing all your data.

It will also let you manage your corporate accounts with much more ease. So, if you desire a SugarCRM that is optimal, adaptable and allows quick integrations, Sugar Ultimate is what you are looking for. With all the customized plugins, the price might go up to something around $200 per user per month.

One focal thing to jot down as far as pricing is concerned is that Sugar is very professional when it comes to customer experience. And do not forget that the price and costing of a product is the most vital part of the customer experience. Sugar understands this. SugarCRM prices include sales, service and other core CRM capabilities for one cost with absolutely no hidden fees. SugarCRM does not charge exorbitant premiums for object storage and presents a flexible pricing model with a much lower sticker price. Sugar is not only profound and cultured about pricing themselves but urges all their partners to practice the same ideology.

How will SugarCRM help my business?

There is no doubt in the fact that after the implementation of SugarCRM within your business processes; most of the hassle will be weeded out. Various applications for tracking sales forecasts and marketing campaigns would be the ones who would receive applause for these accomplishments. To summarize, SugarCRM features can help you do any business in the way it should be done – efficient and quick. Because of SugarCRM, you can create a two-way loop between sales and marketing. This would not only streamline the flow of information between different teams within your organization but it will also spearhead your business towards much more efficient management of the customer base. With Sugar, businesses can do the following:

1)   Conversion tracking:

SugarCRM will provide a quick way to monitor your sales leads and opportunities along with related sales activities such as campaigns, targets, and history.  This will enable you to target specific leads that seem to have a much higher potential to metamorphose into business opportunities. How does one judge the monetary potential of a lead? SugarCRM has the answer. The history of a client can be used to extract this information. You can take a look at the lead’s procurement antecedents, recent developments and purchasing power to get a better insight into the prospective economic slot and solemnity that they can offer.

2)   Marketing campaign reports:

Achieve a finer and higher caliber of visibility into the effectiveness of marketing expenditures by staying on top with return on investors (ROI) reports using SugarCRM. These insights are crucial for the business development of any venture across the globe. Marketing your product is as pivotal as producing a top-notch commodity. Marketing campaign reports will provide you with insights that are otherwise hard to get by. Analytics and complex research algorithms will judge the quality of your marketing and calculate financial figures like ROI for you. These figures can be used to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and allow you to make structural and procedural changes into your marketing campaign that will eventually boost your ROI and optimize your overall product development cycles.

3)   E-mail open rate:

This information of metrics is more than just numbers and charts. It is valuable insight into the behavior and interests of your customers. Using this information, you can analyze your customer retention probability and the probability of maturing leads. SugarCRM users will be able to comprehend the extent to which their customers are interested in their products and this will eventually lead to better allocation of company resources in the right direction. If used correctly, this tool can lead to far-fetched headways and expansion.

4)   Customer record information:

SugarCRM will empower you to deliver a high-quality experience for your consumers by tracking a record of customer service tickets and close rates. It is common knowledge that customer success and satisfaction is the cardinal element for every business that aims to broaden itself. But when records and important data regarding customers are not streamlined with service providers, the firm’s performance is bound to deteriorate. SugarCRM will safe keep all important customer record information and dates in a single primary platform which will spare employees the hassle of finding lost information. This will not only optimize your business process but also pave the way for superb customer experience.

5)   Customer Segmentation:

Owing to the advanced and highly technical integrations within you SugarCRM, you will be able to segment your customers according to their geographic arrangement, type of industry, size of the company and other attributes. This will allow you to determine the division of labor and monetary resources on certain consumers that appear to be more profitable than others. For instance, if a company works in a domain where an eminent boom appears to be pending; you can focus more on all consumers with that certain business type. This segmentation will also streamline your sales cycle because more energy can be incorporated into consumers with a larger potential. Department division and hierarchy can be established within your organization with much more ease using this feature.

What makes SugarCRM different and unique?

Let’s get right to the point. First and foremost, SugarCRM is compatible with all renowned operating systems like Apple OSX, Windows and Linux. So, redundancy is totally eliminated within the organization and data migration towards SugarCRM would be swift and totally accordant.

Moving on, mobile compatibility features of SugarCRM are a huge plus as well. Mobile SugarCRM is congruous with Android, IOS and Windows. In a fictitious field circumstance, now it won’t matter which phone your salespeople and employees use. All popular mobile operating systems are SugarCRM compatible and you will never miss out on any lead because of installation and compatibility issues.

One of the most distinctive features of SugarCRM is the deployment options it provides. SugarCRM supports both on-premise and cloud deployment. On-premise deployment allows systems that are hosted in the user’s facility to be a part of SugarCRM. Users will be allowed to remotely access the system. Cloud deployment, on the other hand, allows the SugarCRM software to be delivered as a service (SaaS).  SaaS or Web-based software is hosted on the vendor’s or service provider’s servers. Users access the software through any device that is compatible with the system and has an internet connection.

Moving on, SugarCRM provides excellent support. Online case submission with swift support is one of the most widely acclaimed features of SugarCRM. Unlimited online case submission is free of cost if the subscription fee has been paid. Response times vary depending on the package and priority level of the case but are still very quick nonetheless. Sugar Professional response time is usually around four to six hours; Sugar Enterprise ranges from two hours to three hours; Sugar Ultimate ranges from one to two hours. Other than toll-free phone support is available 12 hours a day, five days a week and all of this is included in the subscription fee for Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate users. It can be purchased by Sugar Professional users. 24/7 phone support for high-priority cases can also be purchased by Sugar Ultimate users.

How to successfully adopt the SugarCRM culture?

It doesn’t really matter if you own a small business or an established firm. Once in a while, an opportunity will come knocking at your door which will revamp your business indefinitely. Implementing SugarCRM will rectify your business in the same way; however, it is only natural that the process of initiation into the SugarCRM culture can be a bit overwhelming. After all, things weren’t all that bad before you decided to give SugarCRM a try. To boost your confidence in SugarCRM and its merit, here are some tips to successfully adopt the SugarCRM culture:

1)  Help your employees understand the benefits of SugarCRM:

Make your entire team understand the SugarCRM protocols. Explain the entire procedure and product to them, relate to their troubles, make them understand how SugarCRM will eviscerate their problems and also reveal to them how the adoption of this software will evolve them; not only personally but professionally as well.

2)  Optimize SugarCRM Culture Implementation:

If you have decided to alter the mindset and thinking of your employees, you’ll need to have an integrated management approach that ensures that every process, behavior or activity is a one step closer to achieving overall organizational change. In short, you need to give them the impression that they’re doing meaningful work which is contributing to overall positive change at the organizational level.

3)  Keep Reinforcing:

Your SugarCRM culture will be a mix of adoption of the CRM centric values, investment of time and energy in SugarCRM related solutions and also the traditions which support your company procedures. These are the things you need in order to reinforce your new culture. Your higher management will continue to lead by example and show appreciation for the employees working towards a higher goal. New traditions will help make the process easier. For instance, you can stimulate healthy competition, award the winners, encourage the runner-ups and celebrate major accomplishments. This will serve as a great confidence booster and help towards an easy transition towards the adoption of SugarCRM.

Summary and verdict:

Every business is built upon certain values and procedures. Your business too rests on the standard work mechanism that was built initially, before the adoption of SugarCRM. After the provision of a genuine support mechanism, the SugarCRM software fixes most of the complexities in the organizational and hierarchical structures and helps you manage your sales channels, projects, deals, tickets, support, and the general workflow by showcasing the reports and statistics on a single interface. With a CRM software you no longer have to bother your teammates and employees and have to remind them about their tasks or search through the entire history of your company’s data, logs and invoices using a magnifying glass to find out the history and importance of a monetary or financial dealings with an old client since the whole information is readily available only a click away in the SugarCRM. That covers SugarCRM in a nutshell, but if you really want to be fully equipped with all things SugarCRM, then go ahead and check out our extensive SugarCRM guide.

Rolustech is a SugarCRM Certified Developer & Partner Firm. We have helped more than 600 firms with various SugarCRM integrations and customization. Get in touch today for your FREE Business Analysis. We will be happy to assist you!