SugarCRM Overview

Thanks to The Sugar Refinery for this post!

Key Concepts - What is SugarCRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term given to the process of managing your relationship with your customers...better.

But what does that mean in practical terms? How does it improve your business? How does it add value and increase your bottom line?

This article will walk you through how a CRM solution, such as SugarCRM, fits within your organisation and how it benefits you, your staff, your customers and ultimately your profitability.

It covers:

• Managing Leads
• Qualifying and Converting Leads
• Managing Opportunities
• Keeping track of Activities
• Management Reporting and Forecasting
• Summary of the Benefits

Managing Leads

Consider the various ways new customers interact with your business:

These are broad categories, but your first contact with a customer, will likely be through one of these methods. Further more, the contact may be initiated by you, or simply by the customer. For example:

• Phone: You may cold-call a prospective list of customers or alternately, you may receive enquiries from customers who have simply seen your web site or an ad in the yellow pages.
• eMail: You may receive email enquiries or people may reply in repsonse to email based marketing initiatives such as newsletters.
• Web: You may receive enquiries from a web based "contact us" form. In addition, you may promote your web site through various marketing initiatives such as Google Adwords.

Your business may have additional lead sources not covered here depending on your specific marketing methods. Perhaps you have door-to-door salesmen, or run campaigns via SMS text messaging. The point is, there are many sources from which you may receive contact from potential customers.

A CRM system will first of all provide you a unified way of managing those leads. So for example, with SugarCRM, inquiries through a web based contact form can automatically create leads in your system. Similarly, the email integration allows one click lead creation once you've received an email. Cold call lists can be imported into the system and integrated with your telephony system so that staff can work systematically through a of leads.

Furthermore, by tracking the lead source of each and every lead, you can report on the success of marketing campaigns and measure the return on investment of those campaigns.

Key point: What is the difference between a lead and a customer?

A lead is someone who may, one day, become a customer but you're not yet sure if they will. For example, let's say you arrive at the office at 9am, and there is a message on the answer machine, "Hi my name is John Smith. I'm calling about your ABC product. Can you call me back on...." This lead may well become a customer. But it does need qualifying. Perhaps the caller isn't interested in buying ABC product at all. Perhaps, they're actually a supplier offering you a better price than your existing supplier. In short, until you talk to them, you can't decide.

Qualifying & Converting Leads

This is the process of deciding whether your lead is really a potential customer. It involves assigning someone to manage the lead, gathering additional information from the customer, and then deciding whether the lead is suitable to be converted into an opportunity.

Assigning the lead

Your first task may simply be to decide who deals with the enquiry. Perhaps in your organisation different people manage different types of enquiry? Or perhaps you organise work based on the customer's geographic location? Or perhaps, as with many small businesses, you simply do everything yourself. A CRM system allows flexibility. Leads may be assigned to specific individuals if required. If so, they will then pop into a queue for the relevant staff member to qualify. This process may even be automated through the implementation of defined work flow process.

SugarCRM showing leads assigned to an individual" title="My Leads SugarCRM Screenshot" border="0">

Methods of Qualification

Just as you receive enquiries through a variety of channels, so you may also qualify leads in different ways. You might, for example, reply to an email with further information. You may phone the lead up and talk to them. You might schedule a meeting to discuss in person. A CRM system allows you to manage these basic activities, schedule calls, send emails, arrange meetings etc.

During all of these activities, however, the purpose is to gather more information about the potential customer, and decide whether they really might be interested in buying something. The initial requirements are to gather:

• The customers contact details
• Determine where they heard of you (the lead source and potentially marketing campaign source)
• Determine if they have ever been a customer (IE. already have an account)
• And finally determine what product or service they are interested in buying

Once you have this information you are ready to convert your lead into an Opportunity.

SugarCRM work flow process of converting a lead to an opportunity" title="SugarCRM Lead to Opportunity process" border="0">

Typically, this will involve setting up a new Account for the customer, ensuring the contact details from the Lead are transformed into a full Contact record and recording details of the Opportunity.

Fortunately, a CRM system such as SugarCRM makes this process very simple - it's a one-click process.

So what sort of information makes up an Opportunity? Generally, this will be information about the potential sale. So, it may include the potential size of any deal, the probability of winning the deal, an estimated close date, and the stage the Opportunity is at. Such stages may include:

• Qualifying and analysing
• Proposal
• Negotiation and Review
• Closed Won
• Closed Lost

Managing Opportunities

A flexible system such as SugarCRM will allow assignment of the opportunity to various members of your team at various stages of the process. This allows for effective management, ownership and tracking of each and every opportunity within your organisation.

SugarCRM showing an individuals Top Ten Opportunities" title="Top Ten Opportunities SugarCRM screen shot" border="0">

Furthermore, as the Opportunities contain potential financial information, along with sales status and expected close dates, it's possible to report on this information in a very useful way (more on that later).

SugarCRM of a dashlet sales pipeline" title="Sales Pipeline" border="0">

Managing Activities

The above sections have covered the basics of making and tracking a sale. But there is often a lot of activity that goes on around this process. Here are just some of those activities:

Depending upon the individual characteristics of your business, there may be a good deal of correspondence between you and your customer - either by email or phone. You may produce quotes, send fact sheets and receive purchase orders and produce invoices. You might regularly meet with your client, either alone or with other members of your organisation. An intense negotiation stage may take place. You may need to collaborate with other members of your organisation and chase them up on where they are on tasks you've assigned them.

Wouldn't it be great to have a system that helped track, organise and manage all of that in one place? That's exactly what a CRM system does. It allows you to not only manage all of your activities but also to relate those to particular Accounts or Opportunities. This makes finding information a breeze. Want to know when the quote for a client is due? It's in your diary. Want to know what fact sheets your colleague has already sent them? It's recorded against the customer. Want to review all the emails that have been sent to your client? It's all there.

A CRM system turns your office into a well oiled machine. It makes your work more efficient and gives you a complete view of your history with the customer.

It allows you to manage that relationship better, and allows you to profile customers for future marketing.

Management Reporting and Forecasting

One of the great advantages of having a centralised repository holding so much information about your customers and your sales is the ability to produce useful and effective reports. Here are a few examples of the types of information that can easily be extracted:

• Sales information - broken down by sales staff, or month, or sales status, or marketing campaign
• Return on Investment for marketing strategies
• Customer extracts - for example, all customers with opportunities in a particular status
• Workloads - who is dealing with the bulk of your work
• Project management - what stage is your project at? What tasks are complete or overdue?

A CRM system such as SugarCRM can provide many different types of report. Information can be presented in either text form (such as customer lists) or in graphical form. Alternately, information can be filtered, sorted, and then exported to popular products such as Microsoft Word or Excel.

In summary, a CRM system places management information at your fingertips, equipping you to take informed decisions for your business.

SugarCRM showing Sales Outcome by Month" title="SugarCRM Sales Outcome by Month screen shot" border="0">

Summary of the Benefits

CRM is about managing your relationship with the customer...better.

A CRM system, such as SugarCRM, archives this by:

• Effectively managing your sales process, ensuring every lead counts, from every potential source
• Organising and distributing the workload around your organisation
• Managing and tracking every activity
• Providing a holistic view of each and every customer
• Effective management reporting and forecasting

The result is that you server your customers better, that you understand your customers better and that you can react faster to customer demands.