Pre Workshop

Once the CRM Health Check was purchased, the first step was to have a call (over Zoom) with the key people in the business, in this case this was the CRM system administrator and the heads of Sales and Marketing. The call was to ascertain at a high level what the business does, what are the main uses of Sugar and what are the key pain points they have already identified.

“It’s important to send a bespoke survey because a generic one will be difficult in uncovering feedback that will assist us in disocovering what changes can make large impacts.”

Following the initial call, we curated a survey to all key users of Sugar. The customer opted for us to send this out, it was deduced that if the responses were sent to us directly being external from the business we’d hope to receive accurate and honest feedback, having this honest feedback is invaluable to ensuring that the key areas of discussion on the upcoming workshop day are not only relevant but that any areas identified for improvement are acknowledged by the users that are actually using Sugar for their day to day work. 

Example snipped of our survey, crafted specifically for our customer:

Upon receiving the questionnaire responses, we compiled the results into a readable data format and with the feedback given from the questionnaire and the original kick-off call we then compiled an agenda for the following Health Check workshop day. This ensures that we cover all relevant points specific to this customer.

The key pain points/areas to improve that we identified for the Agenda for our manufacturing customer were; inventory management, supply chain management, extended customer lifecycle and how to boost customer satisfaction. 

Day of Workshop

Based on the agenda we discussed at length all pain points and areas for improvement and what can be done to improve these, the options range from simple field creations/changes and layout updates to building custom modules, building automated flows to take care of the menial logical tasks/processes and setting reminders for users to ensure items aren’t forgotten to discussing integrating ERP systems. We also detailed plans on how to ensure that Sugar can be the main source of truth the use of custom dashboards per user group which allows each team to plan their days, see their current work, track processes and boost productivity, user adoption and ultimately customer satisfaction.

ERP Integration

We also proposed the exploration of Sales-i as one of the easiest ways to present “what have I sold you?”, “what haven’t I sold you?” and “what can I sell you?” with their ERP to Sugar integration solution. They were impressed with the detailed knowledge that their sales team can get, at-a-glance, when reviewing their accounts.

Post Workshop

All of the information gathered and improvements discussed were then provided to the customer via an Audit Report this will clearly illustrate all key points discussed along with the feedback and include a roadmap to start the journey of improving their CRM.

Is your SugarCRM project meeting expectations?
If you think you would benefit from discovering the untapped possibilities within your SugarCRM system with our tailored SugarCRM Health Check, please follow this link: https://www.sugaroutfitters.com/addons/crm-healthcheck-workshop

The post CRM Healthcheck Workshop – my experience with a recent customer appeared first on Sugabyte.

To provide a high level of customer experience across departments, each department should be empowered with the necessary data and tools specific to making their job easier and more efficient. By providing teams with cross-department data and tools specific to their function, organisations create a better experience throughout the Customer Journey and achieve better ROI on software investment overall.

Strengthening Sales & Support

Due to to the time and attention reps spend building relationships with customers and the many emails, phone calls and visits required to close sales. Reps generally have a better understanding of customers requirements and the specific details of products or services they use in comparison to support/service staff.

During support enquiries, customers expect the same personalised experience and high level of service they receive during the sales process.

Once a rep has built a strong relationship with a customer, the customer can often feel betrayed if support/aftercare are unable to provide the same level of experience.

A positive support experience builds trust and strengthens the relationship with the customer whereas bad support can leave customers feeling like they only receive a good experience during the sales process.

To avoid this issue, it is vital to ensure support staff have the necessary data and software they require to deliver on sales reps promises. This means being able to organise, prioritise and resolve issues as quickly as possible. Resulting in long-lasting customer relationships while ensuring reps are undisrupted and focused on selling.

Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve

In a bid to provide specific functionality to empower support staff and strengthen the communication between sales and support teams, Sugar introduced Sugar Serve as part of ‘The New Sugar’ (as a separate licensing option in 2019.) With Sugar Sell (Sugar’s cloud-based CRM) and Sugar Market (Sugar’s All-in-one Marketing Automation Solution) completing the trio.

Click here to learn more about ‘The New Sugar’.

Sugar Sell licenses harness advanced opportunity management features such as ()  With Sugar Serve licenses, this functionality is replaced with advanced Service Management functionality such as the Self Service Portal and Intelligent Case Rerouting.

Sugar Sell – The award-winning sales automation solution renowned for its intuitive user interface, extensibility, and customer satisfaction.

Sugar Sell Key Features

• Optimised for Sales professionals
• Advanced Reporting and Customisable Dashboards
• SugarBPM Advanced Workflows
• Accurate Forecasting
• 360-degree Customer View
• Easy Access to Product Catalogues
• Intuitive UI

Sugar Serve – Sugar’s new customer engagement centre solution designed to streamline case management and issue resolution.

Sugar Serve Key Features

• Optimised for Support/Customer Service professionals
• Advanced Reporting and Customisable Dashboards
• Time-aware Case Tracking
• Case Prioritisation
• 360-degree Customer View
• Intelligent Case Management
• Self Service Portal
• Knowledge Management
• Intuitive UI

Both licensing options are built on Sugar’s core CRM user interface, function the same in many ways and integrate seamlessly as a result. Leveraging Sell and Serve licenses results in a constant flow of Data and Insights between Sales and Support teams. Resulting in a complete customer view and stronger customer relationships overall.

As a vendor, Sugar pays close attention to customers requirements with a strong focus on innovation across the platform. Sugar regularly release innovative features independent to Market, Sell and Serve which increases Sugar’s ability to future proof each solution.

Other CRM’s on the market require heavy configuration to deliver a solution optimised for support cases like Sugar Serve, Sugar provides Serve as an out of the box licensing option with reduced pricing for users who require access to both Sell and Serve license types.

Concluding Thoughts

Leveraging Sugar Sell and sugar Serve licenses across your Sales & Support departments helps organisations create better Customer Experience and deliver better ROI on software investment.

Combining Sell and Serve licenses makes it easier than ever to create a bidirectional stream of data between Sales and Support without disrupting each department’s main focus. Allowing reps to focus on selling while empowering support staff with advanced features optimised for case handling results in a high level of customer experience throughout the customer journey. Ultimately resulting in satisfied customers and long-lasting customer relationships.

Key benefits

• Bidirectional Data Streaming between Sales & Support
• Advanced Insights across departments
• Faster Support Case resolutions
• Licence types specific to each department
• Seamless Integration
• Reduced pricing for combined licenses
• Continuous Innovation across the platform

If you would like to take a closer look at Sugar Sell or Sugar Serve please get in contact with one of our SugarCRM Consultants by clicking the link below to arrange a free screen-share demonstration.

Schedule a Free Sugar Sell/Sugar Serve Demonstration

The post Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve – Collaborating for Better Customer Experience appeared first on Sugabyte.

Launch Integrations Quicker

The post Sugar Integrate – SugarCRM’s New Integration Platform (Video Overview) appeared first on Sugabyte.

“If all CRM’s provide basic Contact Management functionality, what makes SugarCRM different?

Traditionally CRM solutions were used for managing contact information, communications history and information relating to Sales Orders or Quotes as Contacts and Leads progress through the pipeline.

Basic Contact Management functionality is provided by a range of CRM’s and is mainly to ensure sales reps provide smooth customer handovers and if changes are made within your organisation, staff have the ability to provide the same level of customer service.

Another traditional principle of CRM is to ensure management have a precise overview of Key Performance Indicators.

Forward-thinking organisations that want to leverage features such as Advanced Reporting, Continuous Innovation and Timely Integration require a solution like SugarCRM that far extends traditional CRM functionality.

Time to Understand Your Data

The first factor that separates Sugar from other CRM’s is Time-Aware Data Management.

Traditionally CRM’s are very good at letting you know the status of things as they are happening now. The problem is – CRM’s are not very good at telling you how that data is changing over time. A complete historical understanding of 

data is vital for clarity in what effects your business performance and customer experiences.

How can it benefit your organisation?

Sugars concept of ‘Time-Aware Data Management’ is focused on Advanced Analytics and Reporting functionality that is simply not provided in other CRM’s. Analysing historical trends in data often comes with a hefty price tag for organisations using other CRM’s. Sugar provides this functionality out of the box as standard.

Time-Aware Data Management is not just a standalone feature. The concept is deep rooted in Sugars ethos as a vendor. As a result, Sugar Users constantly receive new feature enhancements to support this initiative. 

One way Sugar delivers this functionality is through Sugar Discover. Sugars advanced analytics tool. Sugar Discover allows organisations to leverage advanced analytics out of the box with pre-built logic that delivers Key Performance Indicators automatically.

Click here for a closer look at Sugar Discover

Continuous Innovation

For modern organisations, business innovation is crucial. The speed of innovation provided by your CRM vendor is a direct correlation to your ability to deliver innovation to your customers.

Organisations need a vendor like Sugar that listens to customers and takes pride in continuing to develop the solution to support future innovation.

How can it benefit your organisation?

Sugar’s strong partnership with Amazon Web Services aids in their ability to quickly implement new features and functionality. Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) world leading infrastructure and data security levels. Sugar have the ability to respond to innovation and implement new initiatives into the platform in real-time.

As a result Sugar release quarterly updates, plugins and enhancements to support organisations current and future business strategies. One great example of Sugars commitment to Continuous Cloud Innovation is Sugar Integrate.

Ease of Integration

Last but definitely not least is Integration. A vital component to your infrastructure is ensuring everything works in unison. This helps ensure your users are able to carry out tasks without navigating between different software while keeping your data up to date and accurate across all systems.

Sugar connects to tools like G-mail and Microsoft Outlook with ease. Making connecting and recording customer communications a breeze. With pre-built plugins like Sugars Outlook Plugin. Allowing you to connect your email in minutes, the power is at your fingertips with how you arm your workforce! 

To further add. Sugar Integrate – Sugars New Integration Platform (IPAAS) allows for deep integration between Sugar and third party tools like no other CRM on the market today!

Sugar Integrate allows Sugar Users to leverage over 200 pre-built connectors, allowing for timely execution of new Integrations. This means Sugar Users don’t rely on lengthy configuration to implement new integrations. With other CRM’s, this relies on building new connectors and bespoke configurations for each and every application. This tends to result in projects being called off, or huge costs if the integration is possible!

Sugar Users can leverage Sugar Integrate to execute vital Integration projects quicker, more cost effective and easier than ever!

With other CRM’s this ease of Integration, allowing you to deliver innovation at speed, is simply not possible! You don’t want to be stuck with a CRM that makes it difficult to introduce other tools into your business. You need a CRM like Sugar that gives you the flexibility to explore ideas and centralise everything without weeks of configuration!

Learn more about Sugar Integrate

Concluding Thoughts

We hope you have a clearer understanding of what makes Sugar stand out from the crowd.

It is a huge myth that all CRM’s offer the same functionality. This could simply not be further from the truth. Organisations using SugarCRM have a competitive advantage over other businesses in their industries. We see this directly with the organisations we support.

Sugar provided Advanced Analytics, Continuous Innovation and Lightning Quick Integration – out of the box, like no other CRM on the market today. That’s 3 important reasons you should take a close look at SugarCRM and there are tonnes more!

Schedule Your FREE SugarCRM Demo Today!

If you are struggling with CRM that doesn’t meet your exceptions and business initiatives – Download our white paper below for 5 ‘Red Flags that signal it’s time to switch CRM!’

Free Download: 5 Red Flags the Signal It’s Time to Switch Your CRM

The post What Makes Sugar Different? – Key Differentiating Factors appeared first on Sugabyte.

Until now, SugarCRM have stuck to season-based naming of their quarterly product releases (winter, Spring, Summer and Fall).

Why the change?

Sugar have successfully grown into a global offering with customers in 6 continents, 26 languages and 120 countries leveraging Sugar products. Sugars release naming style must adhere to Sugar users worldwide. In order to offer clarity to customers worldwide, Sugar have adopted a new release naming convention moving forward and scrapped their former seasonal naming style all-together.

Product release naming change

Beginning with Sugars upcoming quarterly release due early next week. Customers will notice a new naming convention based on calendar quarters. For example, the release due next week will be named the Sugar Q2 2020 (10.0) Release (Instead of ‘The Sugar Spring ’20 Release’)

In line with Sugars new naming scheme, the next four releases our customers can expect will be named as follows:

• Sugar Q2 2020 (10.0) Release – April 2020
• Sugar Q3 2020 (10.1) Release – July 2020
• Sugar Q4 2020 (10.2) Release – Oct 2020
• Sugar Q1 2021 (10.3) Release – Jan 2021

Has anything else changed?

Other than the change of naming convention. Sugar have kept their release methodology the same as usual. This means customers can still expect the same level of regular innovation and product releases from Sugar. The only change is the name of the product release. All other aspects of Sugars future releases will remain unchanged.

SugarCloud users will still receive their normal quarterly releases and users leveraging on-premise instances of Sugar will still receive their usual annual releases. Nothing will change in terms of feature enhancements or the timeline of Sugars Roadmap of scheduled releases.

Concluding thoughts

We hope this has delivered some clarity to Sugars somewhat long awaited release naming change. This change will make it easier for customers worldwide to track and stay informed on new product releases. Users specifically in the southern hemisphere no longer need to translate seasons around the world to stay up to date with Sugars future product releases.

Keep an eye out for our post on Sugars Q2 2020 (10.0) Release due next week, where we bring you up to speed on all the new features, fixes and enhancements included in the latest version of SugarCRM. 

If you have any questions regarding your version of SugarCRM or anything else for that matter, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us and we will more than happy to help!

Contact Us

The post SugarCRM’s Release Naming Change: Explained appeared first on Sugabyte.

Next-level Customer Relationship Management

Positioned as the most innovative, modern, affordable CRM solution on the market. Sugar Sell enables businesses to create customers for life, drive revenue, increase efficiency and reduce overheads through providing extraordinary customer experience. Sugar Sell consolidates your customer data into one central platform, leveraging your data, automating manual processes and empowering businesses with extensive reporting capabilities and intelligent insights.

Overview

• Improve predictability and oversight of sales
• Spend less time entering and finding data
• Manage activities and interactions
• Drive greater customer loyalty
• Streamline the sales cycle
• Integrate sales and marketing seamlessly
• Provide insight, drive revenue, organise and manage

Improve Your Customer Buying Experience with SugarBPM

Feature Overview

• Update an opportunity when a quote is accepted
• Quote discount approval
• Route leads and create follow-up tasks
• Stagnant opportunity reminder
• Pre-built use cases out of the box
• Intuitive design

Why it matters?

• Enforce lead follow up best practices across your entire sales team
• Improve first touch time rates
• Contact leads faster
• Build structure and governance into your processes
• Ensure nothing falls through the cracks
• Re-assign as needed: If a rep is on holiday, or out of the office, Sugar will re-assign the process to another Sugar user automatically

Gain a New Level of Visibility into your Business

Collaborative Selling = Win more deals!

Create customers for life

Sugar Sell further encourages productive collaboration between teams through integration with Sugar Market, SugarCRM’s powerful, all-in-one marketing automation tool.

Integrating Sugar Sell with Sugar Market allows users to leverage SugarCRM’s continuous Cloud innovation and deliver even more powerful insights.

Sugar Market’s CRM Synchronisation dashboard gives Sugar Sell users the ability to capture information at critical points in the customer journey while giving marketers the necessary tools to identify the most qualified prospects to target their marketing efforts towards.

Feature Overview

• Website tracking – trigger automation from customer web activity
• Align marketing and sales effortlessly
• Track potential customer errors or issues
• Complete and current prospect/lead data

‘No Touch’ Information Management

No-touch (also known as ‘low-touch’) information management gives Sugar Sell users a competitive advantage against other CRM’s on the market. Put simply, SugarCRM’s No-touch information management guarantees your users are presented with the most up to date, crucial customer information without having to spend time fact-finding and updating entries manually.

Sounds like magic, right? It is – all you need to enter is a customer name and email and Sugar Sell ‘fact finds’ for you in the background, seamlessly.

Typical CRM software has only been as powerful as the user inputting the data. This out-dated philosophy causes confusion, time wasted researching and a lack of precise data.

With this out-dated approach, it is almost inevitable that data will be lost, fragmented or difficult to find, leading to staff spending valuable time researching customer information amongst a pile of different data points.

No-Touch Information Management eliminates these data organisation issues by gathering and entering accurate customer data for you in the background, allowing your staff to focus on marketing, selling and customer service experiences.

Feature Overview

• Spend less time entering and finding data and more time on high-value work
• Captures content automatically
• Processes and analyses data to provide the next best action guidance
• Presents information in-context with users’ daily activities

Continuous Cloud Innovation 

SugarCRM continuous cloud innovation means users receive regular updates and feature enhancements with Sugar Sell operating on a quarterly release cycle (every three months). This modern, innovative approach to software development ensures your business is a step ahead of your competition, allowing for speedy updates and seamless compatibility with third-party applications.

Continuous innovation is a key element to any CRM implementation, giving you the security that your software will always be a step ahead of the curve. SugarCRM offers great security in leveraging Amazon Web services (AWS) as their cloud partner. Partnering with Amazon aids in the swift delivery of new functions, leveraging a market leader in cloud hosting, offering users a secure, scalable solution aligning security and performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Global leader
• Flexibility
• Security
• Scaleability
• Ease of integration
• Continuous cloud innovation

Sugar Sell Core Functionality

• Lead, opportunity, account and contact management
• A complete overview of each customer interaction
• Reporting and live dashboards
• Advanced reports out of the box
• Product catalogue and quote management
• Sales Forecasting
• Outlook Plug-in

Added Functionality

To add to the core functionality of Sugar Sell, users benefit from a number of innovative add-ons to further fine-tune sales initiatives and increase efficiency. These add-ons are by no means basic tools, many have been acquired and developed from industry-leading software companies such as Salesfusion and Collabspot. These feature full add-ons provide no-touch information management, business intelligence, machine learning, intelligent insights, advanced analytics and more.

In Conclusion

We hope you have a better understanding of Sugar Sell and where this licensing option fits into SugarCRM’s cloud lineup. No matter where you are in your CRM journey, the best way to realise your challenges and pain points is with a free consultation call with one of our expert consultants. We ensure you get the most out of your CRM project through our requirements workshops, analysing your business processes and goals – resulting in the most effective CRM solution possible, benefiting your whole organisation.

We work closely with SugarCRM and have implemented 250+ successful SugarCRM instances across the UK.

The post Sugar Sell Explained: SugarCRM’s Award-winning Sales Force Automation Solution appeared first on Sugabyte.

With so many new features and products being introduced to Sugars portfolio and as with any traditionally on-premise solution rolling out a new cloud infrastructure, things can get confusing. In this post we give you a brief update overview, without losing you in the technical details.

For a more detailed post on the full features of ‘The New Sugar’ check out the link below which includes a Q and A’s section. We have also sprinkled links throughout this post for readers who wish to delve deeper into each topic.

The New Sugar – Q&A

SugarCRM Cloud Licensing Options

Fundamentally, SugarCRM’s recent rebrand comes in the form of three main cloud based products. Sugar Market (Sugars all in one marketing automation product), Sugar Sell (Sugars new flagship CRM element) and Sugar Serve (Sugars purpose built customer service product).

Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve are effectively different flavours of the same core CRM, both built on the same platform as Sugar Enterprise. Both licensing options include the Sugar CRM Developer Tools, Reporting and Dashboard functionality and of course the ability to record Tasks, Activities, Calls, Meetings etc. One difference between the two licensing options is that Sugar Serve replaces Sugar Sells Opportunities module with advanced ticket management features and Sugars powerful knowledge-based Self Service Portal.

Sugars new product structure allows customers to make more informed licensing decisions based on which elements best suit the different departments that make up their business. Choosing Sugar Serve licenses for your service/support users means they will benefit from specific functionality designed to make their job quicker and easier while also retaining the core CRM elements of Sugar.

Each element offers a range of specific functionality and can be interlinked depending on your requirements. We are not going to delve into too much detail about the individual product features in this post but keep your eyes peeled for more detailed information on Market, Sell and Serve as we reveal all over the coming weeks!

All three of Sugars new products are cloud based solutions and not available for on-site deployment. Users that opt for Sugars cloud offering leverage Sugars partnership with (AWS) Amazon Web Services, one of the most secure and powerful hosting environments in the world.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Global leader
• Flexibility
• Security
• Scaleability
• Ease of integration
• Continuous cloud innovation

A quick note on updates…

Sugars continuous cloud innovation means Market, Sell and Serve users can expect  regular updates. Sugar Market operates on a continuous update cycle, with releases approximately every two weeks whereas Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve operate on a quarterly release cycle (every three months).

More products?

To further increase the functionality of Sell, Market and Serve, Sugar have begun to roll out a number of tools to boost productivity, reporting and connectivity capabilities across the platform. These offerings come in the form of no touch information management, business intelligence, machine learning, intelligent insights, advanced analytics and more. These additional tools leverage innovative features from some of Sugars recent product acquisitions giving Sugar the competitive advantage against other CRM providers.

Two recent additions are Sugar Connect and Sugar Discover which you can read more about in our post below.

Sugar Connect & Sugar Discover

The end of on-premise?

Existing customers on Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise will have no forced upgrades to Sell and Serve and Sugar have made it very clear that they have no plans to bring Sugar Professional or Sugar Enterprise to End of Life, Sugar will continue to support these products and existing customers are still able to purchase additional licenses. The only change is that for new customers, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise are available only as on-premise solutions moving forward.

Exciting things to come…

We cannot reveal too much, but Sugar have emphasised their plans to introduce a range of new features to both their on-premise and on-demand solutions, existing Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise users will continue to receive bug fixes and annual version updates with Version 10.0 being the next in line due for release in Spring 2020 which will include a multitude of feature enhancements over Version 9.0.

Fur any further information on SugarCRM get in touch!

We’re always happy to help…

The post SugarCRM’s New Cloud Products: In Layman’s Terms… appeared first on Sugabyte.

“Enabling SugarCRM with G suite and Office 365..”

Sugar Connect, enables users to have a complete overview of all email communications they have had with a lead or contact without ever having to leave their email inbox.

“Boost productivity with Sugar Connect!”

Using Sugars unique email application sidebar view, Sugar users can easily specify which contact or opportunity they wish to assign emails to and effortlessly draw email templates from SugarCRM, within their inbox, promoting consistency throughout company communications and boosting productivity.

• Access & edit SugarCRM records directly inside your email application
• Seamlessly draw email templates from SugarCRM without leaving your email inbox
• Enhance outbound customer communications
• Server Side integration with Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite
• Client Side integration with Windows and Mac OS Outlook

Simplified Data Entry

While Sugar Connect gives users more control over email communications and archiving, Connect also allows users to access and update events, tasks and contact/lead information all within the new email sidebar view, at the touch of a button without having to switch back and fourth between applications.

SugarCRM CPO & CTO Rich Green mentions in the overview video below, Sugar Connect will greatly benefit but not be limited to; users in front-line customer facing, sales and service roles.

We have listed some of our favourite features & benefits of Sugar Connect below!

• Reduced manual data entry
• Improved email archiving
• Improved email, calendar and contact syncing
• Promotes consistent communication
• Fully automated meeting scheduling between multiple attendees

Sugar Discover – Next Generation Analytics at your fingertips

Due for release mid October, Sugar Discover is designed for users at all levels, offering the ability to leverage data previously extremely difficult to analyse and report on. 100’s of preloaded insight reports out of the box, allowing non-technical users to benefit from advanced business analytics immediately!

“Powerful analysis previously unavailable in any CRM reporting tool on the market!” – Rich Green SugarCRM CTO & CPO

The ever expanding SugarCRM Discover team led by Corvana Founder and CEO Richard Daley continue to develop Sugar and introduce innovative ways to improve the customer journey through actionable insights and intelligent automation.

Analytics tools can be difficult to grasp for users with little experience, this is where Sugar Discover comes into play. Sugar Discover equips users with advanced business analytics by constantly analysing your data in the background and alerting you of any important changes without the need of long winded manual processes.

This provides Sugar users information that has never been accessible through CRM without the use of advanced BI software or SQL knowledge.

Currently, Sugar Discover is only available for Sugar Sell users using sugarCRM’s Cloud solution, we will keep you updated with any changes that are made moving forward!

We have listed the main benefits of Sugar Discover below!

• 100’s of preloaded metrics and KPI’s
• Continuous automated insights into what impacts your business processes
• Alerts & daily digests
• Discover actionable insights effortlessly
• Explore revenue data easily
• Target tracking
• Advanced forecasting analysis
• Historical & cohort analysis

Check back here for more information on how SugarCRM can benefit your business or contact us for any further information, we’re always happy to help!

The post Sugar Connect & Sugar Discover appeared first on Sugabyte.

First off, what’s going on?
New investors of SugarCRM, a new CEO, new product line-up, and a new direction which will fundamentally change the way customers use CRM.

The new business model
Three pillars outline SugarCRM’s core principles upon which they are building our value proposition and differentiation:

1. Intelligent Customer Experience – Harness customer data and discover actionable insights and next best actions.

Intelligent Customer Experience aims to aggregate information from a wide variety of internal sources and unify data into a single container. Augmented by external and third-party sources, AI, and machine learning, you can use this repository to gain predictive insights and next best action guidance. It also blends dimensions to customer data so to allow for better analysis.

2. No-Touch Information Management – Spend less time entering and finding data and more time on high-value work.

The No-Touch Information Management design philosophy allows you to automate the collection, processing, and presentation of customer information as a byproduct of the user activity (i.e. engaging with customers, using other tools and systems, etc.). This design delivers customer data directly to users in real-time context of what they’re doing, what tools they’re using, and what key insights they need.

3. Continuous Cloud Innovation – Trust in the most modern, durable, and future-proof CX platform on the market.

Delivered as a native AWS application, Sugar’s cloud products leverage more capabilities than any other CX offering. AWS supports the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace that owns nearly half of the entire US market, has five times more cloud infrastructure than their next 14 competitors combined, and complies with 34 different security and compliance standards. This means that Sugar and their customers always have access to the most advanced, secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure technology available.

Three new products added to our CX lineup:

• Sugar Market – The all-you-need marketing automation solution designed to supercharge marketing efficiency and productivity (formerly Salesfusion)
• Sugar Sell – The award-winning sales automation solution renowned for its intuitive user interface, extensibility, and formerly Sugar Enterprise
• Sugar Serve – An all-new customer engagement centre solution designed to streamline case management and issue resolution

Q&A: Prospective customers of Sugar:

We’re looking for a CRM tool which can help manage unique business processes, but marketing, opportunity management and ticket/case management is not required. Which product should I be considering?

Sugar Sell is now SugarCRM’s core CRM offering.  Despite the name, it’s SugarCRM’s most fully packed CRM tool which includes tools such as Sugar BPM (advanced workflow and automation tool). This is the product you should be considering even if you’re not planning on managing sales efforts or need a helpdesk/agent solution.

Is Sugar Market the best Marketing Automation tool for SugarCRM?

Since SugarCRM’s acquisition of Salesfusion this summer, a dedicated team of developers have been working on expanding it’s functionality, improving UI/UX and deepening it’s integration Sugar our CRM. Our opinion is that it’s probably not the best solution, but it certainly has a great future. SugarCRM is staying true to it’s ‘open architecture’ background and customers have the flexibility to choose which Marketing Automation tool is best for them.

I need Opportunity Management, Sales Automation and ticket/case management. Do I need to buy Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve?

Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve are two flavours of the same core CRM tool.  Sugar Sell offers 90% of the core CRM functionality, with the 10% being focused around opportunity management.  Sugar Serve is the same: 90% CRM functionality with 10% focused on the features that matter most to service agents. From a licensing perspective, you’ll need some Sugar users who have ‘Sell’ subscription licenses, and others with ‘Serve’ licenses.  Some users may want to have both, and Sugar has discounted pricing for those users.

Q&A: Existing customers of Sugar?

When will I be upgraded to Sugar Sell?

Existing customers on Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise will have no forced upgrades to Sell and Serve. Customers wishing to upgrade to leverage the new functionality these products will offer can upgrade their system to Sell and Serve. Sell and Serve is only available for customers whose system is hosted with SugarCRM’s On-Demand Cloud environment (with AWS). Customers who host with a partner or host on their own infrastructure will have t migrate to SugarCRM’s Cloud if they want to upgrade to Sell and/or Serve.

Is my subscription cost going to increase in cost?

The last price increase for Professional and Enterprise was 2015. At this stage, there is no planned increase in the software license costs of Professional and Enterprise.

How can I find out more about Market, Sell and Serve?

For an individual demonstration, reach out to James: james@sugabyte.com. SugarCRM.com also has some great information available today on these products.  We’ll soon be adding more content and videos to sugabyte.com.

What else is in the pipeline for the product roadmap?

Some really interesting things that will launch SugarCRM to a higher altitude and be able to strongly compete in new areas. Without breaking NDA, some exciting news around Business Intelligence and reporting tools are coming soon.  Sugar will also be leveraging machine learning services from AWS to help identify anomalies in your CRM data to help you identify problems with customers, prospects and more so you can anticipate actions for better success.

Any questions: Just reach out!

The post The New Sugar – Q&A appeared first on Sugabyte.

So when SugarCRM announces new inbound investment, new leadership and executive team, and a new direction for the main product: catching our attention is a big understatement!

A couple of weeks ago SugarCRM hosted a ‘Partner Day’ event in Lyon, France. The agenda was to announce ‘The New Sugar’.

Most of what we learned that day was so fresh-out-of-the-box that many SugarCRM employees were not yet aware. A new and exciting portfolio of products which complement SugarCRM’s core CRM offering, a new brand, a new website, new customer conferences, and a new story.

SugarCRM is also making the effort to listen and take action from partner feedback. It’s evident that customer and partner feedback really is shaping things. It’s a real partnership.

An important step in leap-frogging SugarCRM’s competitive advantage over other vendors is their investment/partnership with AWS. This is going to be expanding in a really exciting way. For those who don’t know – Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and forward-thinking cloud platform with over 165 fully featured services from AI and machine learning to predictive analysis.  (1h YouTube video on their story here)

Leveraging these technologies from AWS means that we can take advantages of continuous innovation and tremendous economies of scale and SugarCRM’s development investments are allocated to the solutions – not the hosting infrastructure. As you’ll learn in the coming weeks and months, Sugar won’t just be running on AWS – it will be deeply integrated.

There is so much I wish I could share here about new tools and products, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy until SugarCRM’s announcement.

What does this mean for us? (and you?)  I’ve never come away from a SugarCRM event feeling more confident and excited about the future of our partnership and direction. I’m even more excited to use and offer great solutions coming soon to you.

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