About the Author: Ron Buchanan is a BrainSell Sr. Technical Engineer. He’s a certified Sage SalesLogix master developer and has recently been thrust into the world of SugarCRM. Ron recently attended a SugarCRM code sprint. This is his take on Sugar as a company and platform.
SugarCRM is OPEN!
To me, one of the biggest differentiating factors between SugarCRM or say SalesForce or NetSuite is that it is an OPEN architecture. So OPEN , that the product managers of SugarCRM invite over 50 developers from around the world to participate in what they call the SugarCRM CodeSprint. There are three CodeSprints planned already during the first 6 months of 2012 ( in Belgium, the US and the UK).
In the last session I attended, the theme was “The First 30!” A sprint to improve the perception of SugarCRM in the first 30 minutes a user touches the product and the first 30 days the user tries the product. The goal… to create features than can enhance the user experience.
During the CodeSprint and the opening session, the partner sponsor and developers create lists, lists and more lists. These lists are of the good, the bad and the ugly. Features within the product that are lacking functionality, features that need improvement or features that enhance the product. The numerous list items are boiled down to an actionable project list.
Within TWO DAYS, with the developers working almost 24×7, they immerge from their sessions with fully operational enhancements to be included in the next general release of the product.
So why the excitement? It’s my opinion that no other CRM provider is doing this in a manner that SugarCRM is developing. And because the other CRM systems are not built on Open Architecture, the feature functionality availability will never come at the speed of SugarCRM!
The next SugarCRM CodeSprint session theme is “Spring Cleaning”… I can’t wait to see what develops!!
We have a lot of people coming to us, asking about the differences between Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.
There are TONS of CRM applications out there, and overall, they do the same basic stuff. The devil is in the details. So we’ve made it super easy for those of you comparing Salesforce.com and Sugar. Download the VERY thorough feature checklist below to see how the two popular CRM’s stack up.
You’ll notice that SugarCRM Pro is comparable to Salesforce.com Enterprise. Price is the biggest differnece between the two…
SFDC Enterprise $1500/user/year Sugar Pro $360/user/year
Companies with 50 users would spend $75,000 per year on Salesforce.com. 50 users of Sugar would cost $18,000 per year.
That’s a savings of $57,000 per year. No wonder people are asking about Salesforce vs. SugarCRM!
You be the judge. Get the entire feature comparison below.
BrainSell wrapped up their 2011 webinar year with a BANG today! We reviewed the SugarCRM apps world and also revealed BrainSell’s personal top 5 favorite apps.
So here’s the good stuff… Drum Roll………
BrainSell’s Top 5 Add-On Apps of 2011
InsideView: A great social data mining tool that’s now built into Sugar v6.3. Free and paid versions
Qontext: Defining SocialCRM, and compared to SalesForce.com’s Chatter app. This is a super rich collaboration tool that you can even invite clients to contribute to. Free and paid versions
EchoSign: Get documents signed electronically by clients and logged in Sugar automatically!
Pardot Marketing Automation / Olark Online Chat: Pardot is a marketing powerhouse that has a very rich integration with Sugar. Olark is on here with Pardot because you can link Olark’s online chat service with Pardot’s lead scoring. Then that info goes into Sugar. All of your chat sessions are scored and saved in the all systems! Paid versions only
InBox25: For Sugar users who aren’t ready for marketing automation, InBox is a super easy way to simplify email marketing in Sugar and provide integrated, rich metrics. We love it! Free and paid versions
Today, BrainSell and InsideView ran a webinar, Leveraging Social Media in SugarCRM. Nirav Bisarya, Channel Development Manager at InsideView, started off with a great overview of why sales people should leverage social data in their sales process. Social tools in SugarCRM were also demonstrated.
On Thursday, November 17, BrainSell will be hosting a webinar on importing and exporting in SugarCRM.
There have been some really nice developments in the new release of Sugar, v6.3, including changes to the import/export feature. We’ll go over that in the 45 minute webinar.
Also, basics and best practices on importing and exporting will be covered.
One of the nifty enhancements to Sugar’s import feature is duplication checking. All of the duplicate imports are parsed out and you can decide what to do with them. LOVE this (See pic below)
We just returned from the IBM Innovation center in Waltham, MA. Wow, cool place and a great day.
The topic, The Social Business Roadshow. Sponsored by SugarCRM, BrainSell, and of course, IBM. The purpose of the event was to analyze how social media is changing business. I know, sounds like a well-worn topic, but it turned out to be very productive.
Clint Oram, Sugar co-founder, took the stage next, going over the new rules of Social CRM. He spoke twice and went over tight integrations that Sugar will be releasing, such as a SYNC with LinkedIn contacts. Nice.
Chris Crummey, IBM’s Manager of Collaboration and a Lead Evangelist (his actual title is too long to type out), was a fantastic speaker. Tons of great one liners.
Email – the most selfish, overused tool I’ve ever seen. we need to be nimble! @ccrummey
Email is the idontcarechain. Social media is engaging #ibmsocialbiz
He also made THE case for twitter. Boston College doesn’t give students email addresses anymore, they have students use TWITTER! These students will be coming into the work force soon and will want to communicate with social tools. IBM has some cool solutions to help with that. Lotus Live, pared with IBM Connections, lets companies make their own Facebook-like place for people to collaborate on EVERYTHING. I’m into it.
Think about it, when a person leaves a company, their email is gone. All of the collaboration is GONE.
Now imagine everything that you email is up on Lotus. Documents, message boards, everything. You live on, your work lives on, and everyone can profit from it. I like it!
iTnews, a tech publication out of Australia, recently released their analysis, ‘Which Clouds Play Nice.’ We were please to hear that SugarCRM was named number one on their CRM scorecard, with Salesforce.com a close second.
Things iTnews took into account:
Can I get my data in and out freely?
Does it integrate natively with other systems?
What third-party integrations are available?
Can I write code to integrate with it?”
The ‘Which Clouds Play Nice‘ analysis has a wealth of information and is a must read for any IT decision maker. “We were humbled and pleased to learn that SugarCRM came out on top of the CRM Scorecard, when compared to salesforce, Oracle on Demand, Microsoft Dynamics, RightNow and NetSuite,” wrote Sysmans in a blog article last week.
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