How SugarCRM Adapts to Your Business Growth without Coding
Discover why SugarCRM is the ideal choice for companies seeking a customizable, code-free solution that evolves alongside your business. Learn how Sugar’s easy-to-use customization features and flexibility make it an excellent tool for growing businesses at every stage.
What we'll Cover:
Configuring Sugar with Drag-and-Drop
When it comes to customizing a CRM, not all solutions are created equal. SugarCRM sets itself apart by providing a platform that allows you to make customizations without the need for coding skills or a developer.
With Sugar, you can easily modify fields, dashboards, and workflows using simple drag-and-drop. This makes it perfect for businesses that want a CRM that adapts to their needs without the expense or time typically associated with IT-heavy customization. The intuitive configuration features of Sugar mean that you can easily and quickly adjust the CRM to suit your business processes.
For instance, if your sales team needs to track specific customer details, you can create and add custom fields to the CRM with just a few clicks. Want to adjust workflows to streamline lead assignments? You can easily do that too – all through a user-friendly interface. SugarCRM’s adaptability means your business processes are fully supported without requiring technical intervention.
Configurations in SugarCRM vs. Salesforce
While Salesforce is highly changeable, this often comes with hidden consultant costs and drawn-out implementations. This is one of the reasons why Nucleus Research found that Sugar has a 32% lower total cost of ownership compared to Salesforce, with 42% lower implementation costs.
This affordability makes Sugar particularly appealing to growing businesses that need both power and budget-conscious options. Unlike Salesforce, Sugar focuses on enabling users to implement configurations themselves. With Sugar, businesses can shape the CRM to their needs, not the other way around.
How Sugar Supports Businesses at Different Stages
Regardless of where you are in your CRM implementation journey, you can do the work yourself. You don’t need to pay expensive consultants for every change; Sugar adapts to your processes – not the other way around, allowing businesses to effortlessly scale. Here’s how:
Scenario 1: Getting Started
When you’re just starting out with Sugar, the platform makes it easy to organize and streamline your processes with essential customizations. You can set up the CRM to automatically capture relevant customer data like email addresses and company names and create automated lead assignments to ensure no opportunity falls through the cracks.
Scenario 2: Expanding Operations
As your business grows, Sugar scales with you by offering deeper configuration options. You can configure processes for specific business functions or build workflows that span multiple departments, helping improve cross-functional efficiency. For instance, you can automatically transfer closed sales to customer support for enhanced after-sales care.
Scenario 3: Managing Global Operations
When your business reaches a global scale, Sugar’s advanced configuration capabilities make it easier to manage teams across countries, handle different currencies, and ensure compliance with various regulations like GDPR. Sugar allows you to automate complex workflows and provides powerful customization for user roles to maintain proper access and security.
Customer Success Story: RHINO Steel Building Systems
RHINO Steel Building Systems, a leading provider of pre-manufactured steel building kits, faced challenges with outdated business practices and manual workflows. They needed a CRM solution that could automate processes and enhance the efficiency of their operations. After evaluating several CRM options, including Salesforce and Zoho, RHINO chose Sugar due to its customization capabilities and affordability.
Sugar’s flexibility allowed RHINO to adapt the system to fit the specific needs of their team, making user adoption easier, especially for employees who were accustomed to older systems.
“What we liked about Sugar is the way you can customize it. We have a lot of older employees here that were accustomed to the old system. It would have been tough to start with something like Salesforce where you can’t change anything you want.”
—MATT B., Vice President, RHINO Steel Building Systems
RHINO used Sugar to create custom features like web-to-lead forms, click-to-call functionality, and a custom notes dashboard. These features automated several key processes, such as lead entry and follow-ups, which previously required manual effort.
“We never really had a workflow before we came to SugarCRM. Our salesmen have all been in the industry before, so they all had their own process for how to work a lead. Now with the web-to-lead form, a lead gets automatically entered, round-robined to a salesperson immediately, and a sales call is scheduled for them automatically. That salesperson makes a call and enters notes into Sugar, and a brochure is automatically sent out to the lead.”
—MATT B., Vice President, RHINO Steel Building Systems
With Sugar, RHINO was also able to create detailed reporting and metrics that helped them track their marketing ROI and streamline their lead management processes. Sugar’s customization capabilities allowed RHINO to transform their operations, enabling them to modernize and enhance overall efficiency, leading to better customer satisfaction and business growth.
4 Key Customizations That Boost Sales with Sugar
Companies have several options to keep Sugar fully aligned with organizational processes and workflows and ensure proper scalability: role configurations, workflow and pipe management, and lead management. This way, every employee, regardless of their function, has a detailed and relevant view of their daily activities and data of interest straight from Sugar’s main view. Here’s how:
1. Role-Based Dashboards and Views
Sugar allows you to set up tailored dashboards based on user roles. This means sales reps get insights that are relevant to their daily tasks, such as customer lifetime value, while managers get access to metrics like sales cycle length.
2. Automated Lead Management
Sugar’s drag-and-drop workflow builder makes it easy to customize lead assignments. Leads can be automatically assigned based on criteria like geography or industry, ensuring a balanced workload for your sales team and precise lead conversion efforts.
3. Pipeline and Forecast Customization
Sugar provides options to customize pipeline views and sales forecasting dashboards, helping your team stay laser-focused on high-value opportunities. By configuring these insights, you ensure that everyone is aligned and working toward common sales goals.
4. Sales Process Automation
Sugar enables you to automate repetitive processes like sending follow-up emails or creating call reminders. With the drag-and-drop workflow tools, these automations save time and keep your sales activities consistent, allowing your team to focus more on nurturing customer relationships.
Capabilities That Make Customization Easy in Sugar
Sugar offers a suite of powerful capabilities designed to make customization easy:
Sugar Studio: Allows you to easily customize modules, fields, and layouts. With a drag-and-drop interface, you can create new fields, modify page layouts, and manage relationships between modules – all without writing any code.
Workflow Automation: Sugar’s workflow automation capabilities let you automate business processes using an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. You can create complex workflows that trigger based on specific conditions, ensuring that repetitive tasks are streamlined, and human errors are minimized.
Dashboards and Reports: Sugar’s configurable dashboards and reporting can be customized to fit the needs of different teams. Users can add or remove dashboard elements with ease, tailoring their view to show the metrics that matter most to their role.
Role Management: The role management capability helps you create custom user roles and permissions, ensuring that the right people have access to the right information. This capability not only enhances security but also keeps team members focused on the data most relevant to their tasks.
Module Builder: This offers a set of related fields and functions designed to manage a particular business aspect, like leads or accounts. You can also create entirely new modules to track custom business processes that don’t fit into the standard modules. This capability is particularly useful for companies with unique workflows that need to be reflected in the CRM.
Theme Customization: Sugar also provides options to customize the look and feel of the platform. You can modify themes to align with your company’s branding, making the user experience more consistent and engaging.
Ready to Customize Your Growth?
See how Sugar can transform your business with its easy configuration capabilities. Request a demo today and take the first step toward a CRM that grows with you.
