Complete Salesforce Automation with SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a complete CRM and comprises of the three components of a CRM. They are
1. Sales CRM or Sales Force Automation CRM.
2. Support CRM or Service CRM for Customer Support Automation.
3. Marketing CRM for Marketing Automation.
Sales Force Automation (SFA) CRM
SugarCRM provides SFA modules that help sales team to streamline their sales process. SugarCRM SFA modules helps management with rich reports on the sales team’s daily activities and quotations and their pipeline.
Sales Force Automation Features
SugarCRM SFA features include
1. Lead Management
2. Contact Management
3. Account Management / Customer Management
4. Opportunity Management
5. Activities Management like Calls, Meetings, Notes and Calendar Management.
6. Forecasting and Pipeline Management
7. Product Catalogue and Price List Management
8. Quote Management
9. Contract Management
The standard out of the box modules provided by SugarCRM can be customised to get the right fields and reports in this area. Whatever may be the industry a company is in, SugarCRM can be configured easily for Sales Force Automation
Lead Management
Sugar Lead Management capabilities help companies capture and track leads from capture to close. Once you capture all the leads from multiple channels, they can be assigned to individual sales people or teams based on the criteria and tracked for success. A well defined lead life cycle can be enforced on the team to ensure lead interaction is standard across the sales team. By capturing and handling all the leads at one place, the marketing team can get right feedback to figure out and improve their campaign effectiveness.
Account Management
Sugar Account Management capabilities provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, account, and status. In one single page, users see not only account information, but all associated sales opportunities, contacts, activities, history, cases and quotes. Account management gives your organisation the ability to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account.
Impact
- Understand account status and relationships.
- Improve up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
- Ensure consistent interactions with customers.
- Share account information across marketing, sales and support departments.
Contact Management
Sugar Contact Management consolidates contacts into a single location and associates accounts with sales opportunities, account information and customer case information. Proven import and de-duplication technology ensures that companies have a clean, consistent view of customers and relationships.
Contact Imports
Import contacts from a variety of data sources in a few simple steps. Sugar supports data transfer formats for Salesforce.com, Act, Microsoft Outlook, Excel and CSV formats.
De-Duplicatoin
Automatically ensure good data quality through de-duplication checks which scan for similar contact records upon import.
Record Merge
Merge similar records in a few simple steps. With record merge, companies can combine information from multiple records to create a single master, reducing duplicate contacts while increasing data cleanliness.
Opportunity Management
Sugar Opportunity Management allows your team to close deals faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording deal-related interactions. Customise Sugar to fit how your opportunity management process works, including sales methodologies, account details, and opportunity handling.
Impact
- Share opportunity information across individuals and teams.
- Increase sales productivity through standardised sales processes.
- Ensure effective opportunity handling through collaboration and workflow.
- Tailor sales methodologies to meet your business needs.
Sales Pipeline Management and Forecast
One of the key element of Sales Force Automation is sales pipeline management and forecasting. Sugar Opportunity management includes building the pipeline for individual sales team members as well as the management.
The standard forecast module can be enabled sales targets can be set to track the team. Each sales team member can include or exclude the opportunities on a monthly basis or quarterly basis thus management getting a good view of the pipeline.
More detailed information on how SugarCRM can be used for pipeline management is available at Using SugarCRM for Sales Pipeline Management and Forecasting.
Activity Tracking and History of Communications
Sugar Activity Tracking gives sales representatives and managers the ability to track their calls, meetings, tasks, emails and notes. Sales executives and managers can create, assign and edit calls and meetings records and this can be shared across individuals and teams. This also helps in effectively tracking the productivity of the sales team.
More than anything else, Sugar Activity Tracking module creates a comprehensive history of communication with the customers and among the team members.
Impact
- Maintain a team wide calendar of calls, meetings and tasks.
- Manage account level / contact level / opportunity level history of communication.
- Gain a clearer picture of customer engagement.
Quotes Management or Quotation Management
With Sugar Quotes functionality, sales reps can generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies and tax codes. Quotes can be delivered to customers via email, in PDF format or can be printed and delivered. Strong version control functionality ensures reps can more easily manage multiple versions of quotes.
The new Quotes dashlet helps sales reps to choose the complex hierarchy based product line with ease by just navigating and clicking on them. There is significant productivity improvement to the sales team as well as management because of Quotation Management through SugarCRM.
Get more information from our blog Using SugarCRM for Quotes Management
Reports and Dashboards
Sugar Reports module helps with comprehensive Reporting ecosystem for using the data collected by the teams over a period of time. Sugar provides more than 100 out of the box reports that can be used to see visually the data captured in Leads, Activities, Opportunities and other modules.
Each sales representative can keep his home page dashboard by adding the report’s visual summary as a dashlet. Management can configure their reports. Reports scheduler helps the team to configure regular reports to send automatic daily , weekly and monthly.
All these reports are drill-able and sales team can go to individual records directly by clicking on the report.
Detailed Information is available on SugarCRM reports and dashboards at SugarCRM Reports and Dashboards – An Overview.
Mobile CRM
SugarCRM Mobile app for Apple and Android makes SugarCRM as Mobile CRM. All the Sales Force Automation features that are available on desktop CRM are available on Sugar Mobile App. These include all the modules and report dashboards.
A user can easily do most of the work that he can do on desktop CRM on Mobile also.
- Create, Edit, Search, Filter on all the modules that are available for view for the user.
- Native application integrations like click to call, click to text, click to mail and map access are available out of the box with the mobile CRM.
- Offline sync capability helps sales team to work on the Mobile CRM if the network is not available and the system automatically synchronises as and when network is restored.
Sugar Mobile app helps significantly improve sales team’s productivity.
Sugar Plugin for GSuite
Collabspot Integration with GSuite Email Ecosystem
Sugar plugin for GSuite helps in making Gmail interface facilitates most of the CRM functionality. From the Gmail interface you can create leads, contacts and accounts. If the email is already available in Sugar database, it brings the information about the Contact and his interaction to the right hand side Sugar panel on Gmail interface.
Archiving important emails is simple and easy with Collabspot Plugin for GSuite.
More information about SugarCRM integration with GSuite is available at Collabspot for SugarCRM.
Plug In for Microsoft Office
Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office integrates your CRM data with the Microsoft’s leading productivity tools. With a few simple clicks, Sugar users can sync email, contacts and calendar information into Sugar modules, export data into Microsoft Excel and present CRM data in Microsoft Word.
A review of SugarCRM Plugin for Microsoft Office is available at SugarCRM Outlook Plugin.
Impact
- Capture important customers communications within Sugar.
- Export CRM data into Microsoft Word.
- Integrate data between Sugar and Microsoft Excel.
SugarBPM – Sugar Business Process Management Engine
SugarBPM is available only with Enterprise Edition.
SugarBPM enables Enterprise customers the ability to automate complex business processes using a CRM workflow automation engine based on BPMN Standards. These automated processes help customers increase productivity and reuse the best practices.
SugarBPM provides the answer for the automation in Sales Force Automation. Some of the standard automations enabled with SugarBPM are auto allocation of leads and discount approvals.
SugarBPM is explained briefly at What is SugarBPM – An Introduction.
Access our detailed blog to know more about SugarCRM for Sales Force Automation.
