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.

In the first ever CRM and Sales Impact Report, SugarCRM asks 1,000 sales leaders critical questions about their CRM, sales, technology and ability to uncover crucial customers insights. Broken down into four sections, their research reveals a picture of companies struggling with platforms and data practises riddled with blind spots and roadblocks.

The State of CRM

With CRM at the heart of customer experience, this report exposes the issue with CRM systems and the data it contains. A considerable number of those surveyed admitted that their CRM is too complex, unintuitive and not user-friendly costing them potential revenue opportunities.

The Cost of the Status Quo

So if the CRM is holding companies back, how does this affect the day-to-day? SugarCRM shows the cost of wasting valuable time, counter-productivity and poor return on investment when breaking down the problem behind their CRM systems. Asking the most important question, can companies afford to leave their sales people without the tools they need to compete?

Churn Rates

An important finding in their research are the difficulties that arise when companies are unable to extract the full value from their CRM system. The overall consensus here was that the low resolution leads from lack of insightful customer data across their marketing, sales and service systems results in higher churn rates. Do you know how much on average it is costing organisations in churn alone?

Customer Clarity & AI

In order to stay competitive, companies need to significantly improve the accuracy and completeness of their customer data to improve retention, revenue and business outcomes. To find out if artificial intelligence (AI) is the way forward, download the report here.

Download the Report Here

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Part 3: Sugar Market

This post is all about Sugar Market, a Marketing Automation platform that allows its users to take interactions with prospects and their customers to a whole new level. Focusing on what is important to marketers – increased engagement from quality leads using smarter and more precise campaigns, fewer “blanket posts” and instead replacing with highly targeted, thoughtful, and creative content to help drive revenue. 

Sugar Market is an excellent multi-channel marketing solution that really comes to life when it is integrated with SugarCRM, particularly Sugar Sell. This integration creates real-time connections between new and existing records, keeping track of the entire customer lifecycle. 

For the marketing team, they can now leverage the data inside the CRM to create highly targeted ‘lists’ or ‘segments’ of Contacts to market to. For the sales team working in CRM, they now have visibility of interactions with email campaigns, website activity and events to clearly understand intent and behaviour scoring.

What impressed me?

There were a lot of features inside Sugar Market that as a previous Marketing Manager, impressed me. I’m going to begin with the interactive dashboards – a common feature among Sugar’s products but surprisingly not something that is found on most marketing tools. Sugar’s dashboard customisation through its “dashlets” is second-to-none, a user can truly be empowered with the information they may want to analyze in real-time through either “out-of-the-box” information Sugar has pre-calculated or through the detailed reporting system found in every Sugar product. 

Dashboards or homepages that I have seen in the past have offered a somewhat useful but static dashboard, already predicting what the user would like to see first. Not all companies will be focusing their marketing efforts towards the same information and within an active marketing team, strategies will often change and attention will divert to other campaigns which is why Sugar’s presentation-ready dashboard is the perfect solution for a more intuitive visualisation of your data story. 

Secondly, I was impressed with one of the larger features within this platform – Nurture Campaigns. Lead nurturing and automation is an extremely efficient and productive way to interact with potential customers to any marketer and Sugar has clearly recognised this. Their nurture campaigns cover all the basics of tailored marketing in a straight-forward way however, what makes their campaigns superior from competitors? The information gathered on each record is not then isolated in that one system; through the CRM integration, the entire team will have access to each customer journey and by providing actionable lead intelligence particularly to your sales team, you can effectively shorten the sales cycle and win more deals. 

How will this help our new customers?

Sugar Market not only provides a curated toolset to be able to offer custom campaigns to future prospects but recognises a need to be flexible and tailored to the individual marketing user as well. New customers will certainly benefit from its advanced multi-channel marketing solutions including web monitoring, social media management, reporting, SEO audit, campaign creation and lead capture capabilities but I think we know who the real winner is here: CRM integration. 

New customers will want to see which strategies are working and which ones are not and with CRM integration, this process can be done quickly so they know where their resources are best placed in return for maximum return on investment for every penny spent. The implementation of these highly targeted campaigns will reach out to prospects and customers at the optimum time to help convert these superior customer experiences into lifelong relationships. 

I hope you’ll enjoy these insights from my onboarding at Sugabyte. Here are the links to the successive posts in this series which will uncover my thoughts on Sugar Serve, Customer Journey Plugin, Sugar Discover and more:

• Sugar Sell
• Sugar Serve
• SugarCRM SugarLive (Coming Next!)
• Sugar Discover (coming soon)
• Sugar Connect (coming soon)
• Sugar Mobile (coming soon)
• Customer Journey Plugin for Sugar (coming soon)
• Sugar Integrate (coming soon)
• Hint! (coming soon)
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator Plugin (coming soon)

The post New To Sugar Series – Sugar Market appeared first on Sugabyte.

Part 2: Sugar Serve

This post is all about Sugar Serve, a supercharged UI for support professionals to solve customer issues with speed and ease. It is a powerful, process-driven system pre-integrated with Sugar’s core CRM to deliver unified customer satisfaction. It allows for omnichannel entry points for customers to raise issues with you – which can only be good for the customer.

What impressed me?

There are multiple parts to this system that I like that are linked to The Service Console which gives support staff access to complete customer information at their fingertips. Unlike most other systems that will order support tickets based on the order they came in or by priority, the reason I like this Service Console in particular is because it reiterates Sugar’s customer experience ethos by prioritising the list of cases by SLA.

I was listening to David Campbell, VP in Product Marketing at SugarCRM, in a Sugar Serve training video who said: 

Another item I was impressed by is the quick access to the Knowledge Base module which has a series of articles that could be helpful for solving common customer problems. This is an incredible addition that can be found across the entire Sugar product range but I think is particularly useful for support agents to have access to and contribute towards.

A notable mention from Sugar Serve is the thoughtful addition of managing multi-region business centres with their related business hours and holidays to ensure service level agreements are always met:

How will this help our new customers?

When you click on a case in the Service Console, without diverting you away, an intelligence pane opens outlining all the information a support agent would need to understand the customer’s journey including account details, case details, comment log for team collaboration, and interaction history.

A huge challenge in this sector is making sure the agent is fully aware of the customer’s relationship with the product offering in order to offer a rapid response. It is then possible for service agents to cross or upsell in accordance to the accounts’ needs that they can clearly identify in front of them, taking customer service from an expense to a profitable part of the business.

In my opinion, Sugar has expertly found ways of reducing customer service costs without cheapening the provided service but instead, increasing customer satisfaction and likely retention rates. There are a number of self-service options available to customers which helps them find a solution to their problem without the need for an agent, saving both customer and agent time. 

Where Sugar Serve differs the most between the dedicated case management tools (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira) is the integration to the CRM. Sugar Serve functionality is completely baked into the core CRM product, so it could not get any tighter. And this allows for that instant visibility for CRM users and unlimited contextual data to be available for the support team.

I hope you’ll enjoy these insights from my onboarding at Sugabyte. Here are the links to the successive posts in this series which will uncover my thoughts on Sugar Market, Customer Journey Plugin, Sugar Discover, and more:

• Sugar Sell
• Sugar Market (coming next)
• SugarCRM SugarLive (coming soon)
• Sugar Discover (coming soon)
• Sugar Connect (coming soon)
• Sugar Mobile (coming soon)
• Hint! (coming soon)

The post New To Sugar Series – Sugar Serve appeared first on Sugabyte.

Part 1: Sugar Sell

This post is all about Sugar Sell, a low-touch customer relationship management platform that expertly drills into your sales cycle to form a collaborative and customer orientated solution. Using actionable data, Sugar Sell transforms stale, “faceless” customers into lifelong relationships with enhanced profiles.

What impressed me?

In my opinion, two of the main features that sets this CRM apart from the competition is a business process automation function called SugarBPM and an advanced reporting module that gives users a range of quantifiable, customisable and detailed insights into the business activities. 

Starting with SugarBPM, I feel this is an important tool as it directly resolves what most companies may seek initially to use a CRM for – saving time by reducing the amount of manual data entry and increased interaction with customers essentially reducing costs and streamlining the selling process.

By virtually automating any business process such as lead routing, quote approvals, and email notifications, you can successfully reduce manual effort whilst maintaining that all-important regular and personal communication with each customer.

The reporting module gives context and insight into any aspect of your business through “out of the box” reports created by Sugar or by custom reports built by you. There are four varying types of reports so users can display their information in the best way possible. Team members in leadership positions will find this particularly useful when making important business decisions, strategizing, and monitoring success. 

SugarCRM’s goal is to bring organizations together collaboratively so that every user is on the same page and the reporting module is a perfect example. Any report that has been created can be shared with other Sugar users, printed, emailed, exported or used in a “dashlet” on the home dashboard for quick and regular viewing. 

How will this help our new customers?

Sugar Sell is a CRM that works for you and not the other way around bringing important customer data to the forefront. It has been thoughtfully designed to enhance the customer experience by bringing people to work together and revealing the whole picture, strengthening existing customer relationships and helping to create new ones.

New customers will not only have access to past and present data, but sales forecasting is also one of SugarCRM’s impressive functions, bringing time and date sensitive data into a predictable format for you to perfect your sales cycle and bring important visibility to the business.

I hope you’ll enjoy these insights from my onboarding at Sugabyte. Here are the links to the successive posts in this series which will uncover my thoughts on Sugar Serve, Customer Journey Plugin, Sugar Discover and more:

• Sugar Serve (coming next)
• Sugar Market (coming soon)
• SugarCRM SugarLive (coming soon)
• Sugar Discover (coming soon)
• Sugar Connect (coming soon)
• Sugar Mobile (coming soon)
• Hint! (coming soon)

The post New To Sugar Series – Sugar Sell appeared first on Sugabyte.

You may have a CRM and no marketing automation platform or you have an integrated solution but are unhappy with it. In order to make informed decisions on your tech stack, such as if you should adopt or switch platforms or not, it’s essential to understand your requirements and needs out of a solution. That extends to understanding how important it is for a native integration between your marketing automation platform and CRM.

WHY DO SOLUTIONS ON THE MARKET BOAST SEAMLESS INTEGRATION?

Because a seamless integration between your CRM and your marketing automation platform is crucial to

1. Sales and Marketing alignment,
2. More efficient connection with leads and prospects throughout the buyer’s journey
3. The success of your technology adoptions, and
4. Getting the most out of your investment—including ROI.

THIS SIMPLIFIED GUIDE WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND:

1. The difference between CRM and Marketing Automation
2. Why a seamless integration is important
3. What to expect from a seamless integration
4. The value you gain from integration

DOWNLOAD HERE

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When organisations deploy a CRM system that is designed with individuals in mind, both internal users and external customers win. Employees become more productive when they gain access to more insightful business data. In addition, this more personalised approach to CRM can lead to increased customer satisfaction because customers feel like they are being treated as valued individuals with unique requirements. And when the CRM system is priced so that every customer-facing employee can now have access, these benefits are significantly magnified.

In this eBook, you’ll learn about:

• Creating a unified voice to your customers
• The value of CRM to your business
• How Sugar is designed to help the individual user

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