Products and services Sugar Articles Saving with open source: Why life is sweeter with Sugar | Saving with open source: Why life is sweeter with Sugar |
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By Steve Rayson, Managing Partner at our sister company, Kineo. Sugar CRM is one of the great ways to save money with open source. In this article, Steve Rayson, managing partner of Kineo and director of Kineo Open Source, explains how life can be sweeter with Sugar. Like many small and medium sized businesses at Kineo we needed a good customer relationship management (CRM) system. We have two offices, Brighton and Sheffield, and a large number of clients and client opportunities to keep track of. Our business is characterised by many opportunities of various sizes and keeping an accurate picture of our sales pipeline for resourcing purposes is essential.When we were small we started with a large Excel spreadsheet which we moved to Google Docs to share online between teams, and then we moved to an online proprietary system. As we grew however, the costs of the proprietary system also grew and we looked at open source alternatives. It didn’t take us long before we found Sugar CRM. Sugar CRM has become world's leading provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM's open source architecture allows customisation and integration of business processes to build, improve and maintain customer relationships. BT have recently starting offering their clients Sugar CRM rather than Siebel. I had used Salesforce.com in my previous organisation and was surprised at how similar Sugar CRM was. If you have used Salesforce you will find moving to Sugar CRM a very easy transition. Sugar itself is easy to use with a slick interface. It is also great if you have multiple people adding and updating sales opportunities. As a salesperson the home page brings together everything you need setting out in one page:
As a manager you can look at overall opportunities, view the pipeline, drill down by sales person/client or see the results of specific campaigns. The free version of Sugar is a fully fledged CRM system with more features than you are likely to need. You can track multiple projects with clients, track opportunities and build useful pipeline data. You can also manage newsletter campaigns through Sugar. The reporting is limited on the free version and this was probably the most disappointing aspect of Sugar. However, my colleagues at Kineo Open Source have created some great reporting features using various components. They can also help install these for you so you get the full benefits of Sugar. We can’t recommend Sugar CRM highly enough for both small and large businesses. |
