How does Sugar Work???

[Deland02]

Hi,

Could anyone offer me any help, I’ve recently just installed & set up Sugar and have been asked to customise it quite considerably. The problem is I seam to be lacking quite a large chunk of know how especially when it comes to the WHY part.

I can administer Sugar fine & have customised parts ok but after reading the PDF manuals I’ve not yet grasped how it actually works and need to grasp this pretty quickly (so my boss says). As I don’t come from a sales background as such I’ve never had to use any system like this so what I’m looking for is a very simple process model, spider diagram, flow chart, or even text list of how each module integrates with each other.

From this I can then compare it with the way we work and say weather or not it will be possible to change what they want, or even say would it be worth changing things as it might be quicker to get them to learn the “Sugar Way”. If anyone knows of anywhere I can find this I would be mega grateful.

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[bsherman]

Deland02,

Wow, that a loaded question, or two. I don't know that the answer is all that easy to spit out. I have seen that there is a book out there in the community about Sugar, but I don't know enough about it to know if it will address your needs. You may be better suited to find some generic CRM "best practices" books out there as a guide.

Not knowing your experience or background I may say some things that you may or may not already know - so forgive me in advance.

I am on my third CRM implementation - most recent is my first with SugarCRM. Each time previous I had a tremendous amount of success by treating the implementation like any other ERP-like system. I started with meetings with all the department stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations. The thing about Sugar, and the others that I have worked with, is that you can pretty much align the products to fit the processes used in your business. More importantly, you can analyze your company's processes for potential inefficiencies and if improvements can be made you can use the CRM to facilitate those improvements (sorry, didn't mean to imply - I am sure your company is perfect in every way. Like mine).

Depending on the size of your company and the number of departments you are attempting to integrate, you are in for an implementation cycle of anywhere from 1 - 6 months.

I know I am not adding much here but perhaps someone else can chime in to add something more valuable.

Feel free to contact me directly - through my member profile - and I will be happy to expand on my experience. I wouldn't mind taking the time to give you call and chat about it.

[Deland02]

Bruce,

Due to my lack of knowledge in ERP & CRM systems this is why I’m struggling a bit. I was asked to administer Sugar simply from an IT perspective, set new users up, change permissions (roles) etc. Sugar was going to be set up and fully customised for our needs by an external company for me to administer.

Our sales team currently use an application called ACT which they can manage all their clients, prospects & opportunities in. ACT doesn’t work very well as its too slow and falls over more times than it works hence the reason we turned to Sugar.

So I was asked to get involved with the customisation of Sugar for our sales team so sugar looks and reads like ACT. This meant the sales team don’t have to re-learn a different system. They wanted the menus, drop down boxes & layout to be roughly the same. Bear in mind I have no sales experience and no one really was willing to help me out learning the process of how out company sales process works. I then realised the person who was helping me implement all the customisation wasn’t really that bothered and it all got dumped on me.

So I set everything up as per what they wanted. I hit a few bugs along the way & realised I simply couldn’t change everything what they wanted me to. As an example they wanted everything with “Leads” on to be changed to “Opportunities”. I found when re-designing the modules you simply can’t change some bits without editing the pages in Dreamweaver, or editing the PHP script which is not something I have enough time or know how to do. I can do it, but I don’t know if it’s going to mess other thing s up and don’t have the time to test things out.

I’ve since had another meeting with the sales team and demanded I need to know what their sales process is and need a design spec on paper of exactly what they want. I go this and drew up a flow chard of out company sale process from stat to finish and wanted to compare this against how sugar works. If the 2 systems are too radical and simply work in different ways then it will be a case of saying to sales you will have to learn sugar and treat it as a different system from ACT. Maybe even draft up a glossary of terms from ACT into Sugar. So in ACT it would be called this but in sugar it’s called this etc…

So that’s why I wanted a simple overview of sugar, just to see if it actually can be done. One of the main points they made was, in Sugar you add a companies details into the contacts section and then the life cycle of making a sale and following it through starts from there. They wanted the contact section re-naming to “Clients” which I did. But this meant in their view a client is only a client when they have been successful in acquiring their business and this should come at the end of all the other processes and not at the start.

In my view it would be easier and a lot less messy if they just learnt the sugar way and this view is backed up by other sugar users in our company but the sales team really don’t want to change and to say they are digging their heels in would be an understatement. One of the main reasons for this is the company who were installing Sugar & supposed to be customising it said everything they wanted could be done so they are adamant on making all the changes.

So based on this info what are your thoughts?


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[susiewilliams]

Deland02,

As Bruce said, this is a very large topic to address and I could be sitting here for days explaining everything... I'll focus on a few ideas that hopefully will help you out.

First, you were absolutely correct in your approach- get the business requirements figured out, and the software will follow. SugarCRM can be modified to fit just about whatever business processes you throw at it. Your first focus should be to understand what the sales process is (and in some companies, even that fundamental process isn't well-defined!). Determine what's working for the sales people today and what's not working, and more importantly, where their pain points are. For example, in addition to Act's sluggishness, you might determine that the sales reps are frustrated at having to do "double entry" by typing in leads that are given to them by the marketing department. If you could build in a mechanism that automatically loads their leads they would see more value in the system. Another idea is to makes sure there are reports built specifically for what they need to see, right from the start. Put lots of nuggets in their hands and they'll see value and will invest the (small) time it takes to learn the tool.

People in general (and sales people in particular!) are going to pitch a fit about anything new; your task is to show them that what they're getting will be so much better than what they had that they'll wonder why they didn't switch sooner. Building in items to address their pain points is key to adoption of the tool.

Finally, remind them that having an "Act-like" system isn't going to help them in the long run...there's a reason they are throwing out Act!

Hope this helps,

-Susie

[Deland02]

Susie,

Thanks for your comments they are greatly appreciated. I guess I didn’t realise how flexible Sugar really is as I’ve never used it until a few weeks ago but you’ve both given me an arsenal of information to take with me to out next Sugar Implementation meeting. The only reason I’m a bit hesitant in pushing sugar all the way is my own lack of knowledge in the system and what it can actually do for us. But from what you and Bruce have said I certainly feel a bit more confident. My cut on Sugar so far is it can do what the current ACT system can do and more but things are just in different places.

Anyway thanks again for taking time out to get back to me.

[susiewilliams]

Any time! We're here to help.

Your timing is quite good, by the way. We're starting to roll out our new Sugar Adoption Program for our commercial customers. Much of the Program content will also be available to our Sugar Open Source users as well. You'll be seeing some announcements about this program in the upcoming days, but in a nutshell it's a program we have designed to help our customers get up and running on SugarCRM so they can be successful. We've woven in CRM best practices and a proven methodology to help our customers implement the product and see immediate benefit from it.

Look for the announcements coming soon, and if you want to know more about this right now, send a private email to me.

-Susie

[tbivans]

DeLand,

I just thought that I would chime in, given that I've just about completed customization of Sugar to the requriements of our Sales team here. I was in much the same place as you, except that I had just joined this company, as a web programmer, and within the first week I was thown into Sugar. Prior to this I had never heard of CRM before!

So I took to the task of learning what Sugar was and what it could, and could not do. I had a meeting with the top salesmen and they let me know what they were looking for, and I told them that I would see what was possible and do all that I could.
There are a few things that I haven't been able to achieve.

You should know though, that much of the customization that your business might require, will take some PHP programming knowledge, as well as some JavaScript, AJAX, and others.

Some things can be done through the Studio module, but it is kind of limited at this point.

Your situation does sound similar in that we dropped the opportunities altogether, leaving, Leads, Accounts, and Contacts.
This was pretty easy. Except that I had to move some of the functionality from Opportunities that they did want into the Leads module.

All in all it has taken me three full months to come even close to fulfilling their requirements. But I have learned a great deal in the process.

Let me know if you need any pointers. I am not yet a Sugar Master, but I have made it a little way up Sugar Mountain.

Good luck.

Tim