Archives For SugarCRM

SugarCon ’13 Agenda Announced!

mschneidersugar —  March 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

We have just published the agenda and speakers list for SugarCon ’13 - and it is literally PACKED with sessions and keynotes from CRM thought leaders, awesome customer stories, and lots of Sugar tips and tricks.

With seven tracks covering everything from sales, marketing and support excellence – to the tech trends affecting CRM and your business in general – SugarCon 13 offers something for everyone.

Highlights of the agenda include:

  • More than six hours of keynote presentations from leaders in CRM, including Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, Terry Jones, founder and former CEO of Travelocity.com, author of CRM at the Speed of Light Paul Greenberg of The 56 Group, LLC, and partners IBM, Pardot, and VMware.
  • Top research findings and best practices in CRM from industry analysts representing leading research firms. Subject matter experts include Gartner Research Director Patrick Stakenas; Forrester Research Vice President Bill Band; Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar; Brent Leary, partner, CRM Essentials; Jesus Hoyos of Solvis Consulting and JesusHoyos.com, LLC; and Jim Dickie, managing partner, CSO Insights.
  • More than 70 customer and solution innovation breakout sessions highlighting CRM implementation best practices and detailed case studies. Key customers from the United States, Europe, and Latin America include EMIS, uShip, Harper, Inc., Cogburn Law, Bray International, Hillel, the Lindner Group, Tollpost Globe AS, Mitsubishi Brazil, Despegar.com, MacAllister (CAT) Rentals, the Irish Local Gov’t Management Agency, and USAFact.
  • Live solution demonstrations of Sugar Mobile and Sugar 7 – SugarCRM’s next generation CRM platform.
  • Expert-led best practices discussions, innovative platform case studies, and hands-on workshops on the latest SugarCRM platform.
  • App Throwdown, which is an event on April 10th to showcase the most innovative solutions across the Sugar ecosystem live on stage, where the audience can choose their favorite. This year’s contestants include: Nepo Systems, W-Systems Corp., Epicom, Colosa, and Altertus Technologies.
  • Hands-on customer training at a discounted price.
  • More than 30 leading companies will be exhibiting in the SugarCon 2013 Expo Hall. Major sponsors include IBM, Pardot, VMware, Riva, NextPrinciples and DocuSign.
  • Nightly networking events across New York, including the Tuesday, April 9 Evening Gala to be held at the 230 Fifth Ave Rooftop Garden and Penthouse Lounge.
SugarCon’s theme this year is “CRM for Everyone.” Join us to see and hear first-hand how to leverage the latest cloud, social, and mobile technologies so they can make individual users enterprise-wide more effective at engaging 1:1 with customers or prospects.
Register for SugarCon 13 HERE.
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SugarCon standout of the week: Smarter Social Monitoring with SugarCRM

chrisbucholtz —  March 1, 2013 — Leave a comment

With social CRM a well-established concept, increasing numbers of businesses are looking at social media as a source of customer information, a tool for collaboration on new product ideas and a source for sales leads. But getting to those goals means first listening to what is said in social media – and how do you do that?

To get started, we suggest attending the session “Smarter Social Monitoring with SugarCRM” at SugarCon 2013. The presenter is SugarCRM’s own Simon Chapman, who’s been eyeing this space for several years and, at the same time, paying attention to the ways that a good CRM application can help you pay attention to your customers.

Simon promises to share ways to use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to drive greater value from your CRM efforts. We decided to give you a sneak peek at the contents of his session with a few questions:

SugarCRM: LinkedIn is a natural tool for networking – around jobs, around knowledge within groups, etc. But how can salespeople use it in generating or qualifying leads?

Simon: LinkedIn is all about who you know and who they know – that’s the key. By using LinkedIn to effectively mine your network, sales professionals can potentially get introductions or get connected with the key influencers. Qualifying people is even better with LinkedIn in that not only can you put a face to a name, you can also see whether they’re the right person you need to be speaking to or whether someone in their network would be more beneficial to speak with. The average well-connected LinkedIn user has at least 750,000 people in their network, as a first-, second- or third-degree connection. Just think of how many leads could be generated by mining your LinkedIn network better?

SugarCRM: How do you get information from social networks into your CRM customer records – and how does Sugar do this better than other CRM applications?

Simon: Sugar allows you to automatically search for social network information without the need to keep two or three windows open at once. On an account level, maybe you want to do business with a particular company but don’t know who you potentially know. With Sugar, you can embed this information on the account or opportunity level, and by just knowing what the company name is, drill down into the connections you could potentially make. Because all of these elements can be embedded quickly and easily into all aspects of the system, Sugar’s strength is exactly that – its flexibility.

SugarCRM: Brand reputation is a scary idea for businesses, now that customers own the conversation. What can businesses do to protect themselves – especially when things are going awry?

Simon: Sugar can take information from Twitter, for example, and allow not only lead generation activities from when someone simply sends you a tweet, but also to instantly respond to someone who has an issue – protecting brand reputation. This is important as marketing managers or social media monitors will be keen to make sure that any issue or negative statement isn’t allowed to proliferate. Sugar can put that information directly on the homepage, rolling in the latest Tweets or Facebook posts with the ability to instantly respond.

SugarCRM: Some salespeople – and business leaders, in general – are leery of social media; what do you say to motivate them to go from doubt and fear to results?

Simon: This is a question that’s often asked when we speak to potential customers and existing customers alike. Our view is that it’s better to be informed than not, and embracing social media, developing relationships and managing messaging, good and bad, helps to create brand and company awareness. Developing clear messaging and setting clear targets on what you want to get out of each target social media network, as well changing that messaging to match the types of people that frequent that network, is something that I would personally recommend. Aimless communication may be viewed negatively rather than clearly outlining your social media strategy with carefully-worded messaging.

SugarCRM: Are there sales talents that social media replaces, or is it a case where social media amplifies sales talents?

Simon: Social media can only amplify sales ability. It’s all about communication and managing that communication, that stage presence, well online. Twitter forces you to think in clever ways about how to get your message into a set number of characters and sometimes this can be beneficial – get the most important words in there first. Social media can also provide that reach which you may not get from your existing networks. Maybe someone finds your tweet and thinks that you’re someone they can do business with and decides to follow you.

See Simon’s session at SugarCon 2013 April 9 at 1 p.m. For more details on the SugarCon agenda, visit the event page.

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SugarCRM in the news: Macquarie win, LinkedIn’s Impact and in-time IT

chrisbucholtz —  February 26, 2013 — 1 Comment

The past week has seen SugarCRM grabbing headlines literally all over the world. Here are some of the more unusual, noteworthy and significant stories that SugarCRM has been a part of over the last week or so:

ARN: InsightfulCRM inks $2m contract with Macquarie University

SugarCRM partner InsightfulCRM has been working with Macquarie University in Australia for more than two years; last week, the two organizations signed a four-year, $2 million contract that will see InsightfulCRM extend SugarCRM campus-wide. Since Sugar was built with openness in mind, the system will integrate with Macquarie’s open-source back-end systems.

Business Insider: LinkedIn is a Reason Startups Raise More Money, Angel Investor Says

Julie Bort says the trend toward angel investors sinking money into enterprise startups is driven by LinkedIn’s success – and she’s not asking you to take her word for it. She drew her conclusion based on an interview with SugarCRM Larry Augustin, who said huge rounds of funding are driven by “Social networks like LinkedIn… because it’s become so much easier to find angels or stay in touch with the ones you know.”

Enterprise Efficiency: Building a Digital Company: When IT is Too Late

“Most companies think of bringing in technology at exactly the wrong time,” writes SugarCRM CTO Clint Oram in this commentary on how to make your business vision match up with technology. Of course, you need a strategy and a vision first – but don’t wait too long to make the technology part of the equation, Clint warns. “By building strategies and processes from the ground up around digital technology, companies will outperform those that don’t.”

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Numbers don’t lie: SugarCRM’s momentum continues to build

chrisbucholtz —  February 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

The numbers for 2012 are in, and they revealed that SugarCRM isn’t just maintaining its momentum –it’s picking up steam. Off a remarkable 2011, SugarCRM showed total revenue growth of 60 percent over the previous year, subscriber seats doubled in number and annual recurring revenue in the enterprise space leaped by 250 percent.

That last figure is one of the things that makes Sugar such an interesting CRM platform. Enormous companies find that it scales to suit their needs – in fact, a major multinational technology and consulting corporation went live with the first 7,000 seats of a 69,000-seat company wide deployment in the third quarter. At the same time, SugarCRM continues to gain smaller companies as customers at a blistering rate.

Reaching those smaller customers and enabling them to take advantage of Sugar’s flexibility depends on our 400 reseller partners. In Q4 2012, Sugar welcomed 21 partners, making 130 new partners added in 2012 serving customer of all sizes.

Sugar also boosted its technology partnership efforts in 2012. In Q4 2012, SugarCRM expanded its relationship with Box, and announce a new partnership with DocuSign to help users close deals more quickly by automating the signature and contract tracking process. Sugar also announced integrations in Q4 with VMWare, Act-On Software, Next Principles, Alteva, Lucid Imagination, Entrinsik and many more.

Want the entire scoop on SugarCRM’s outstanding year and evolving set of partnerships? Check out the full press release here.

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Business Insider says you can bet your career on SugarCRM

chrisbucholtz —  February 19, 2013 — 1 Comment

Have you ever read something in the newspaper or seen it on the evening news and though, “well, heck! Why is this news? I knew that!”

We kind of felt that way when we read that SugarCRM was among the “25 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On” in Business Insider. But, of course, we here have some inside information.

Not to blow our own horns… Well, okay. We’re going to blow our own horns. With a growing list of partners, an ever expanding galaxy of customers and an engineering team that’s focused on delivering on the idea of CRM for everyone, we’re doing important work in making CRM a tool for the entire business instead of a point solution for sales or support. And, by building a platform that integrates easily with other applications, we’re giving customers the freedom to build their own software ecosystems and the ability to make it work with a minimum of cost and hassle.

The companies on this list is impressive and include Box.net and Good Data – which already integrate with Sugar, giving us another leg up.

Want to join the team? Take a peek at Sugar’s career page  and see how you can place your bet on SugarCRM.

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Paul Greenberg picks SugarCRM as a CRM Watchlist Winner

chrisbucholtz —  February 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Every year, Paul Greenberg compiles his Watch List, which collects the companies Paul thinks will have the biggest impact that year. Paul’s criteria include:

  1. A breakout product
  2. Seizing thought leadership in some related area
  3. Market impact
  4. The company’s sheer size and continued long term existence guarantees them impact pretty much regardless of who they are and how well they do.
  5. A major initiative that will change the way the market works.
  6. Continued really good performance year over year with an expectation that they will be seen and recognized for that in 2012
  7. Fabulous customer achievements but to the level of setting an industry standard
  8. Impact in a particular distinguishable geographic market
  9. Faith that they will do something worthy of public recognition (that’s the subjective part).
  10. All of the above
  11. Other things he didn’t mention

Essentially, Paul has outlined the characteristics of a heavy-hitter or a game-changer in the CRM space (and he’s provided himself with room for a bit of interpretation, too).

Each year, he increases the rigor for selecting the Watchlist; this year he worked to get questionnaire submissions from vendors that would inform his choices, and that questionnaire was not insignificant in size.

Those criteria and that rigor are the reason we at SugarCRM are pleased to report that we’re CRM Watchlist winners (as we were in 2012). It’s not just that Paul likes us as people – Paul likes a lot of people in the CRM industry, and the feeling is largely mutual, but not everyone’s a Watchlist winner. He likes what we’re doing, and he spells out what we need to do in the future.

One of the more incisive observations he makes is that even as SugarCRM takes aim on attracting larger customers, it’s building its messaging around the idea of the user first – or, as Paul phrases it, taking aim on a market of one. “How do you appeal to a company needing thousands of seats when your target is the individual user without being lost in a morass of homogenous faces?” Paul asks.

We have plans for doing this – and our customers are already showing us concrete examples of how helping the individual user get the most from CRM maximizes the value of CRM for the entire organization.

Some of our customers will be sharing those examples at SugarCon in April – and event that will also show how we’re taking the “user-first” concept to new levels in upcoming releases that are more social, more mobile and more powerful in their ability to make front-line users’ jobs easier and more productive.

We couldn’t be more pleased that Paul selected us for the Watchlist – and we’re equally pleased that Paul will deliver the SugarCon keynote address on April 9. He’ll be the first in a long series of important CRM thinkers, analysts and observers who are coming to the show to speak or conduct sessions – a Watchlist of CRM influencers, if you will.

Thanks to Paul for his kind words and his challenge to Sugar for 2013. We’re looking forward to living up to his expectations – and those of our customers – and to making the list again in 2014!

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Who wants to Throwdown? Announcing SugarCon 2013′s App Throwdown

chrisbucholtz —  December 20, 2012 — 1 Comment

Back Camera

If you were at SugarCon 2012 last spring, you’ll remember one of the exciting new events we added to the schedule, the inaugural Sugar App Throwdown. It pitted six of the most interesting and innovative applications in the Sugar ecosystem today against each other in front of the SugarCon audience of customers, partners, and prospects. All of the participants – participants, judges and hosts – are pictured above. It was a huge success and a crowd favorite, so we’re bringing it back with us to the 2013 event in New York in April as well, and we are looking for a new group of apps to be a part of it.

Last year, six partners shared their apps – Alertus, Contactually, Epicom, EasyAsk, NextPrinciples and ActivePrime. They presented their applications in a fast, freewheeling session.

We are looking for that killer application, that beautiful mix of the Sugar platform with an emerging business tool, or even how you took Sugar to the next level to showcase the flexibility of the platform. We want the best of the best again here, all for the chance to get your application in front of the largest CRM-focused conference crowd in history. If you think you have what it takes, submit your idea to us today.

–John Mertic

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Sugar ranked among 2013′s most successful open source projects

chrisbucholtz —  December 18, 2012 — 1 Comment

NetworkWorld’s Alan Shimel recently published his list of the 10 most successful open source projects of 2012, and SugarCRM is there on the list. Sugar earned kudos for its integrations with Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook, but beyond that, Shimel writes, SugarCRM has“emerged from Salesforce’s shadow and become a CRM power in its own right. With lots of ways to consume Sugar, there is a model and a price point for just about everyone. While continuing to innovate, Sugar has found its place.”

Of course, in order to find that place, SugarCRM’s had to focus on more than just being an open-source alternative. SugarCRM had to focus on addressing the top problem of its users better than the competition: enabling the entire organization to effectively engage with customers, and making every connection and call drive value for each customer. Recognizing the need for an organization-wide customer engagement platformgives Sugar’s internal team and those of its resellers partners direction to use the flexibility that the application’s open source heritage provides.

The others on the NetworkWorld list – Hadoop, MongoDB, OpenStack, Pentaho, PostgreSQL, Joomla, WordPress, DotNetNuke and Audacity – have also been keen observers of the business needs of their customers. To see the full list, visit Shimel’s slideshare deck outlining his 10 open source success stories.

 

 

 

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SugarCRM in the news: exposing the importance of service

chrisbucholtz —  December 7, 2012 — Leave a comment

Business News Daily’s Ned Smith wrote about a Harris Poll sponsored by SugarCRM that confirmed a lot of what people have come to believe about customer service: all too often it’s infuriating, frustrating, hard to navigate and a killer to customer loyalty. More than half the respondents said that poor service experiences have caused then to avoid buying from a company, and four out of five who used social media channels for service were frustrated by a lack of knowledge about them, indicative of disconnections between service processes and CRM.

These problems are the kinds of things that a well-structured CRM system – and the right technology – can avoid. Read the whole story and get a feel for how frustrated customers are – and realize that assuaging those frustrations can give you an edge over your competitors.

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Sugar On-Demand: Enhanced Self-Service Portal

chrisbucholtz —  November 16, 2012 — 4 Comments

Starting in late November, qualifying Sugar On-Demand instances will be treated to a set of enhancements that makes Sugar even more effective and easier to use.

Chief among these is an enhanced, next-generation Customer Self-Service Portal. A new user experience makes the portal easier to use and more efficient for customers seeking answers rapidly and managing inquiries across the enterprise. Notes and attachments can be appended to support cases, and Sugar has added configuration options for a more tailored portal experience.Syncing is no longer necessary thanks to faster updates with support for real-time changes. The new Customer Self-Service Portal is available exclusively in Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate editions.

Other enhancements will make it easier for customer-facing to do their jobs. Instead of manually transferring information from Sugar to a separate document, the new PDF Manager gives you the ability to create printable business documents directly from any Sugar module. You can download or email that document from within Sugar, and templates allow you to quickly put that data into a clear and coherent format. The manager includes templates for quotes and invoices, and an HTML editor allows custom templates to be created quickly and easily.

When it comes to scheduling, Sugar never stops trying to enhance this key aspect of CRM. Now, you can schedule recurring meetings and calls from the Calls, Meetings, and Calendar modules, and it’s now possible to search by accounts for contacts and leads.

These features will be made available to Sugar On-Site customers in a comprehensive release currently planned for mid-2013.

To learn more about the updates, see the release notes available from the Sugar Documentation page. A list of issues and requests addressed by these enhancements can be found in the Bug Tracker.

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