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 Channel Futures

Best Practices


CRM for Everyone… Even Me

  • Written by Heather K. Margolis
  • April 5, 2010
Having worked at several enterprise companies and a 60 person start-up I’ve had plenty of experience with CRM systems.

Having worked at several enterprise companies and a 60 person start-up I’ve had plenty of experience with CRM systems. I wouldn’t say any of them have been particularly bad experiences but none have been off the charts fantastic either.  It’s become a necessary evil that if we want to track not just our customers and prospects but activities of those who are not yet in our funnel we need some sort of CRM system.

By “we” I always meant companies with 50+ employees. In talking to a few solution providers who, like me, have fewer than 10 to 20 employees we struggle to find a solution that is within our budget and doesn’t take an enterprise class IT team to implement it.  Enter Sugar CRM.

Sugar offers an enterprise class version for $600/user/year, a Professional version for $360/user/year and my personal favorite Sugar’s Community version which is FREE, you heard me people, FREE!  See the different editions compared. Now with the free version there is some development work to be done, which for me means buying my IT friend a case of beer but for most solution providers is a no-brainer.

So why should you care? Looking at this from a solution provider’s or any small business perspective I was really impressed with the ability to add multiple products, switch around your interface on the fly with a drag and drop, and to send out marketing campaigns.  There are different tabs for Sales, Marketing, Support, Reporting and Administration so while you may only have 5 people working out of their home offices (or a garage) you can operate like a national business. I’m also really excited about Sugar’s take on SocialCRM and think they are on to something.

What other cool SMB tools are folks using?  Have you tried Sugar? I’d  love to hear your thoughts.

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Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Best Practices

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10 comments

  1. Avatar Dan April 5, 2010 @ 8:50 pm
    Reply

    We tried sugar, but the user acceptance was zero. We switched to a hosted CRM called BatchBook, been very happy with it. Only 5 people from our team use it, but it’s cheap and flexible.

  2. Avatar lw9474 April 6, 2010 @ 1:45 am
    Reply

    We were “evaluating” Sugar for several years. On January 1st we made it an integral part of our operating procedure. It isn’t perfect but as Heather points out the price is right. We are not a large firm but the most important thing is that we know the process works. Even if we move on we have once again passed a course at the school of hard knocks. Once you start using a CRM it is a lot like Google. You don’t know how you ever worked without it. We can honestly suggest to clients that they implement a solution, even if they choose a different one.

    We also use asterisk and when we finish up a couple of ongoing projects would like to integrate the two.

  3. Avatar M.O. April 6, 2010 @ 7:33 pm
    Reply

    Don’t get too excited with Sugar’s free version, it is intentionally crippled at the core of today’s communication: e-mail support none the less… it’s webmail is absolutely painful to use and connectors to mail clients are not free (they removed that recently, without warning…).
    Also, forum support is sometimes good, sometimes non-existant; they have an awful attitude when it comes to compare or eve speak abou competing products

    Furthermore, they are not “Open Source” supporters AT ALL, even if they claim so, their interpretation of “Open Source” and “GPL” was always questionable. Actually, in their latest release they silently switched from GPL to Creative Commons (IIRC), haven’t looked into that too much but I suspect it is about restraining forking and/or brand customization.

  4. Avatar The VAR Guy April 7, 2010 @ 12:50 am
    Reply

    M.O. — The VAR Guy appreciates your decision to post a comment, and critical posts are certainly welcome.

    In SugarCRM’s defense, The VAR Guy has heard multiple upbeat statements from a range of partners. Still, our resident blogger concedes he’s not an expert on open source licensing models, etc.
    -TVG

  5. Avatar Joanna Rosenberg April 8, 2010 @ 8:21 pm
    Reply

    We’ve been using Sugar for our focused efforts building pipeline for our SUSE Appliance Program here at Novell and so far it has suited our needs well.

  6. Avatar Christine F. May 10, 2010 @ 12:14 am
    Reply

    Hi! We use intelecrm, a web based CRM, which has helped us tremendously. It’s cheap, with unlimited users. It is built on an open source platform

  7. Avatar The VAR Guy May 10, 2010 @ 10:58 am
    Reply

    Joanna, Christine: Thanks for a peek at your companies’ respective efforts. The VAR Guy hadn’t heard of InteleCRM but will check it out.
    -TVG

  8. Avatar Barbie Adair May 23, 2010 @ 11:44 pm
    Reply

    I have been using web-based CRM http://www.worketc.com and been deeply impressed with the product ever since. It makes time and task tracking and documents handling a breeze and I can easily lump together functions and collaborate with my group. It combines CRM, projects, billing, documents, time sheets, staff and employee’s situations, expenses, calendars, etcetera, all in one glance. Basically, it combines all tools and platforms for managers like me. Efficient, easy.

  9. Avatar Heather K. Margolis May 27, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you all for the great comments…glad to see there are other options out there. Been using Sugar for about a month and a half now. The set-up for a non-technical person was impossible obviously but now that it’s up and running I enjoy using it. In all honesty it may be overkill for me but we’re selling services and a very small firm.

  10. Avatar Andy Myers May 27, 2010 @ 10:38 pm
    Reply

    Zoho CRM has blown us out of the water. Its no salesforce, but literally 10% the price. First 3 users are free, start paying at the 4th. $12/month/user for pro $25 for enterprise.

    The SSO and menu integration with Google Apps is a big plus…

    Andy Myers
    http://www.MyersMathis.com

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