You may have heard recently that there have been some exciting changes occurring at SugarCRM. We’ve put together some answers to the most common questions we’re getting from prospects and customers.
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:
- 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: [email protected]. 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.
