According to a March 2012 report from Nucleus Research, social and mobile CRM functionality provides very real benefits to a company’s bottom line.
From the report: “Adding social and mobile access capabilities to CRM increases productivity of sales people by 26.4 percent.”
The sample size of the report was 223 CRM decision makers from the full spectrum of business sizes in the United States and Europe.
To execute a successful mobile and social CRM strategy, your company needs the right tools and systems in place. That means implementing a CRM solution that seamlessly integrates smart devices and social media to source leads, record pertinent information, and ultimately drive sales.
Learn more about how SugarCRM can help your business leverage mobile and social tools.
We at Highland have adopted IBM's collaboration platform Connections. In only 3 months its literally transforming how we communicate and conduct business. We believe there to be a great opportunity in the not so distant future to integrate Connections with Sugar to make a powerful, dare I say Web 3.0 experience for Sales people where documents and resources find you. So I wanted to net out a scenario that we've developed around this integration that gives a real life situation on how the integration of these two systems would work.
Late Sales Stage:
One of your sales reps, from T Shape Aviation Parts, has uncovered a new opportunity for his account: Highland Airlines. After months of reviewing T Shape's capabilities and products, Highland Air has issued a Request for Proposal to purchase several thousand highly complex engine parts called an Aileron, that also requires services to implement as well as post sale maintenance.
After the sales rep moves the opportunity to the next sales stage: Proposal Generation, he accesses Lotus Connections to start forming his team to respond.
The sales rep produces a search within his Sugar/ Connections Profiles module to find a T Shape colleague that possess the skills he needs to help him respond to the RFP. His search for Aileron produces five possible candidates. After doing more research on the five candidates, he soon discovers that one of the SMEs has recently helped win a similar deal at ConAir, so you invite him to be a part of this opportunity.
The sales rep will also need a person skilled in post sale maintenance contracts and he quickly finds several folks who work in this space through a Tag Search of profiles. You invite him to participate in this deal and promptly create a “War Room” where you post all relevant content to start drafting the response.
Lastly the rep needs a pricer involved for this specific solution, and again quickly finds a resource that has worked with Highland Air in the past.
As the team starts developing the response, there are some specific questions relating to the overall companies’ manufacturing process. The sales rep quickly aligns himself to several communities that relate to Manufacturing through his Sugar Community Connection. He now has access to files within the community that deal with the manufacturing process of Ailerons. He now has the resources he needs to respond to these specific areas of the RFP.
The rep also accesses a Community that specifically pertains to fellow sales reps to research RFP responses, similar to the one he is responding to, that were coded as “Wins.” He finds several that are similar to his and he is quickly able to lift some of the responses to the previously won RFP into his. Now he has provided content within his RFP that he can be sure are winning responses.
The RFP is due in a week, and now it’s time to get folks to review the response that has been put together, including giving us final approval on the pricing aspects. The rep posts it to the QA community team for their final approval. After their review is complete and everything is approved, the RFP is finished and stored within the SugarCRM Account record and the appropriate communities awaiting to be sent to the customer.
It’s been a long time coming, but suppliers of IT hardware to businesses are finally making strides toward meeting ever-increasing demands for more speed. The installation process, which could once take up to six months (according a recent New York Times article), will soon be automated to only take a matter of hours.
SugarCRM is an enterprise partner with IBM, because together they offer businesses a combination of hardware and software solutions that are completely scalable. So for SugarCRM customers-to-be, this is fantastic news. Organizations of all sizes will be able to take full advantage of their SugarCRM solution faster than ever before.
The same NYT article quotes Larry Augustin, SugarCRM’s CEO:
“We won’t have to spend as much time getting them up and running.” He added, “This is going in exactly the right direction.”
Learn more about how SugarCRM can benefit your company faster than ever.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept around “building the new generation CRM for the User” as I’ve heard it said several times since SugarCon. (SugarCRM’s Big Pow-Wow) CRM in the past was rolled out, not for the salesperson’s benefit but for management to watchdog their reps and roll up forecasts to their chain of command. There is now a realization that CRM should be built to benefit the very folks using it: The Salesperson. The user first approach with CRM is a system that should provide a salesperson the ability to perform at higher level when working with customers. Tasks are automated, relevant information finds you, social media feeds provide insight, skill sets within in the company are easily found, having data on the road (mobile) all of these “New” functions of CRM are certainly heading in the right direction to help create a more User focused CRM.
I had the unfortunate experience working for one of the largest companies in the world that invested in CRM in the early days. We suffered through inputting our opportunities without really understanding what the value was in it for us. I can’t tell you how many times in a given week I was asked by management the question: “Did you update Siebel.” It got so bad that we were actually assigned an admin to input our data or move an opportunity to the next stage. Management became tethered to their CRM reports and couldn’t get the opportunities loaded fast enough. Needless to say reps where not thrilled to use this system.
Fast forward to today’s CRM such as SugarCRM and Saleforce and you can see signs that the “user focus” is starting to peak through with the new benefits I described above…but it still has a long ways to go in my opinion. So while I think CRM is certainly going in the right direction I still don’t believe building it from the User first perspective is completely the right approach.
Perhaps its just another way to look at it but in my mind the whole intent of CRM is to systemize a rep so they can respond to their customer’s needs period. Yes there is the added benefit of reporting and such which is still a necessary evil but the system should provide a rep an ability to please the customer and provide value every time they interact. So in my opinion a CRM should be built around a customer first. It’s a fact that Customers buy from people they trust. Trust is earned and granted when a sales person demonstrates knowledge of their customer’s business, follows through on what they say they will do and being held accountable when things don’t go as planned. Those that can carry the deal from identification to closure are far more successful when they can win over a customer’s heart and mind. CRM should help companies and their sales people build this trust by providing tools that enable the salesperson to enable the customer to make a decision on whether to buy or not.
In conclusion, I do think this User first approach is a solid foundation that will eventually pave the path to a system that is built around Customer’s needs first. Perhaps its difficult to comprehend given that every customer is different and has different needs but thinking of CRM benefiting the Customer first by creating a super charged sales rep that uses CRM for his customer’s benefit in my opinion is the ultimate goal of a CRM.
Erin Fetsko, a Technical Product Evangelist at SugarCRM, has posted another informative video to YouTube. It’s entitled “From Spreadsheets to Sugar – A SugarCRM Buyer’s Journey.”
In the video, Erin demonstrates how valuable it is for business processes to be shifted from spreadsheets to a centralized CRM solution. The goal is to harness the power of all of the information your company has, and SugarCRM enables your company to do so.
Learn more about the benefits of SugarCRM.
Since its founding in 2004, SugarCRM has been gaining momentum as more and more businesses adopt the open source platform to enhance their customer relationships. SugarCRM’s popularity has grown exponentially as word of its compatibility, scalability, and ease of use spreads.
The rapid success of SugarCRM has the CRM establishment shaking in their boots. After only eight years, SugarCRM is now the third-largest CRM provider in the world. As explained in this recent article from BusinessInsider.com, the key to SugarCRM’s rise is simple: From its inception, it has done one thing and done it very, very well.
For corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP, customer relationship management is but one small part of their businesses. They’re concerned with companies buying their other software products and adopting their hosting solutions too. But SugarCRM is all about providing the best possible CRM solution, no matter how it’s hosted. It’s all about the customer.
Learn more about what makes SugarCRM the best CRM solution for your business.
SugarCRM was designed with their customers in mind. Rather than decide which functions they’ll need, SugarCRM leaves it up to them. That’s why it’s open and designed for the cloud; it allows maximum flexibility and unlimited potential for functionality.
SugarCRM knows that every customer deployment is unique, so they are free to:
- Move their data between different clouds;
- Choose where they want to deploy their CRM;
- Integrate with any open social platform;
- Access their CRM from any mobile platform;
- Change their CRM when they run legacy limitations.
Learn more about how SugarCRM can empower you and your organization.
March Madness has come and gone. Leading up to the tournament and continuing still, sports writers and fans have been discussing every college basketball topic from every angle.
But there was also another tournament underway.
CRM Madness debuted this year, in which the 64 best CRM systems were pitted against one another until a champion of customer relationship management emerged. To win each matchup, a CRM company needed more votes from their fans than the other.
After all was said and done, only one CRM system remained: SugarCRM.
The winning strategy was an active use of social media to get supporters of SugarCRM in the know. It’s a business technique that SugarCRM open architecture supports, and their success proves that it works. It should be no surprise that SugarCRM is the 2012 CRM Champion, as it continues to be the fastest growing CRM solution in the world.
Learn why SugarCRM is gaining loyal supporters and enthusiasts by the day.
Every year, CRN lists the most influential and powerful leaders in the IT channel.
This year, CRN has named two SugarCRM executives 2012 Channel Chiefs: Jeff Campbell, vice president of worldwide sales and customer advocacy, and Del Ross, vice president of channel sales for North America and Latin America.
CRN’s prestigious list recognizes executives directly responsible for driving growth within their organization, and Campbell and Ross fit the bill.
During Campbell's and Ross's tenure with SugarCRM, channel sales and partnerships have grown exponentially. Over the past year, SugarCRM welcomed 150 new partners, bringing the worldwide number of total partners to 370.
See for yourself why SugarCRM is world’s fastest growing CRM company.
Mobile CRM has become the new frontier in changing the way companies do business. Having quick access to the data in your Customer Relationship Management system is not only imperative to closing business; it’s imperative to keeping the customer relationship.
In a recent Networks Asia article titled “8 CRM Trends You Need to Watch,” Clint Oram, co-founder, CTO, and vice president of Product Strategy for SugarCRM, said, "In 2012, CRM systems will be bought in terms of the strength of the mobile component. Vendors with strong mobile components will gain a significant advantage over those that lack it, and many vendors will play catch-up around native clients and security."
Because mobile CRM helps companies gain and retain customers on the go, the demand for mobile CRM solutions like SugarCRM will only increase in 2012.
Learn more about the mobile capabilities of SugarCRM.
