All those who have handled sales will know; There is a big difference between a prospective customer, a customer and a loyal customer. One has to travel a long long long way to first convert a prospective customer into a customer and then into a loyal customer.

Customer Relations Management is “NOT” something that can be completely automated. It needs a more personal approach. But when you have the apt tools in hand, this work will be much easier than you could have ever dreamed of. We’ve got plenty of CRM solutions in the market today, but there is one that is definitely sweeter than the others. Yep, Today lets talk about SugarCRM.

SugarCRM, among many other features, excel in tracking the sales process, recording appointments, clearing the communication channel, and producing exhaustive, yet sensible reports.

Now lets take a look at some of its major features, they are:

1)Sales Force Automation

• Shares data among various teams and make the communication channel smooth.
• Can keep track of the business performance and progress.

2)Marketing Automation

• Can create and manage effective marketing campaigns.
• Monitor and keep track of the campaigns.

3)Customer Support

The primary concern of any firm is to retain their existing customer base. Keeping an existing customer happy is much more easy and less painful than gaining the trust of a new customer.

• One central management system to monitor the support.
• Any incident will be monitored to improve product quality.

4)Reporting

Reporting is not just about collecting data. It is about presentation. The most crucial factor is to present the right data, in the right proportions, at the right place.

• Create sensible and easily readable charts.
• Restrict access to key personnel.
• Give crucial data like sales trends, case reports etc.

The application is used by many and is well supported, as this is an open source venture. Also, SugarCRM is written in very simple PHP code which can be customized or modified without much of a hassle. Due to its open source nature there is a large community with thousands members devoted to developing, testing and supporting the product. So go ahead and have a taste of SugarCRM, I’m sure you’ll love it 🙂

About the Author

Jeevan Joseph has been with Bobcares for a year, and is now heading the Public Relations wing of the company. He has worked as a developer as well as a technical support in the past for startups to Datacenters.

Jeevan, after graduating in Electronics and Communications Engineering, turned into the web-hosting domain out of the passion for open source. As an eloquent orator, he spends his spare time with the Toastmasters, and have given sessions to over 2500 people in the past 4 years.