Need a Pro's clarification,.. Guru's needed!

[HomeTeam]

Hello Gang,
I am new to Sugar and over the past week have been absolutely impressed with both the product and the community! As I have been going through each module, please bare with me, I don't understand what a couple of the modules purpose is... What is the difference between Leads and Opportunities? And what is 'Mass Update' at the bottom of those pages?

Also, there are a couple modules I'd like to see if they can be removed. For example, since I run a mortgage office, I obviously won't need 'Cases', 'RSS' or 'Bug Tracker',.. is there a way to remove these modules and tabs from Sugar without disturbing the rest of the script? Also, the 'Activities' tab seems a bit redundant as it just redirects you to the appropriate tabs after you select a link within it...

I am very excited to implement SugarCRM into our office workflow, as well as support the community by providing any modifications we have made to SugarCRM available to the public. Any help and/or clarification is greatly appreciated,.. and please go easy, I am truly a rookie, so I sincerely appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

Regards,
Jesse @ Home Team Funding

[lvangool]

Hello Gang,
I am new to Sugar and over the past week have been absolutely impressed with both the product and the community! As I have been going through each module, please bare with me, I don't understand what a couple of the modules purpose is... What is the difference between Leads and Opportunities? And what is 'Mass Update' at the bottom of those pages?

Also, there are a couple modules I'd like to see if they can be removed. For example, since I run a mortgage office, I obviously won't need 'Cases', 'RSS' or 'Bug Tracker',.. is there a way to remove these modules and tabs from Sugar without disturbing the rest of the script? Also, the 'Activities' tab seems a bit redundant as it just redirects you to the appropriate tabs after you select a link within it...

I am very excited to implement SugarCRM into our office workflow, as well as support the community by providing any modifications we have made to SugarCRM available to the public. Any help and/or clarification is greatly appreciated,.. and please go easy, I am truly a rookie, so I sincerely appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

Regards,
Jesse @ Home Team Funding

- Leads and opportunities are sales marketing terms. A Lead is any chance to sell, while an opportunity is a more serious chance.
- Mass update is a way to update a lot of records in one action. For example, changing the sales stage of 5 Leads.
- You can disable modules in the configuration
- Activities is what you say, a modules consisting of other modules, nothing else

[stevec]

Just to further clarify lvangool's info, a lead can be seen as a precursor to a contact or account - you could think of leads like a cold call list. Once worked, they can be promoted to contact/account. An opportunity is an individual sales process and could apply to a contact, an account or even a lead in progress. for example, an opportunity within a mortgage company CRM system would be the attempted sale of a mortgage to a new customer (lead), a remortgage to an existing customer (contact) etc.

Also, even though the activities tab is just a meta-module group of modules for the purpose of grouping them all together in one tab - if you hide the module from users, then there will be access permissions issues for users with calls, meetings etc. So you have to keep if enabled.

[RapidX]

We would be pleased to help you out with SugarCRM. We have many clients that we have set-up as well as helped maintain and host their CRM’s. With over 5000 hours of developing in SugarCRM; we are very good at creating and implementing new features. We can also make changes and add-ons quickly and affordably. Feel free to contact us at 866-539-5536. Our office & staff is located in Hollywood, Florida.

[pterrell]

Jesse,

As the IT manager of a mortgage company that's making the switch from Salesforce to SugarCRM, I've found plenty of very good documentation covering the basics of SugarCRM.

The free Open Source User Guide is a good starting point. PackT publishing has a good book that goes into the basics of CRM as well written by one of the prolific contributers to the board.

You may also want to use a company that hosts a complete package for mortgage companies for about the same price as the hosted service from SugarCRM: GoCRM for Mortgage. They are promising Point integration in the next release, so double data entry will be reduced.

(The mortgage company I support is running in the red after the market turned--I hope to "upgrade" to a more complete package after the recovery.)

[Danielg42]

If you go to the admin panel, under the studio section you can choose what tabs you want to be displayed in your sugar. You can easily hide the tabs "cases", "bug tracker", ect.

[zeropegleg]

I've also been focused quite heavily on helping another mortgage company here in so cal with the same things. only my dilemma seems a bit more extreme. I'm also trying to extend the capabilties a bit in lots of directions that require us to keep sugar as "standard" or "off the shelf" as possible.

i've been developing on sugar for over 2.5 yrs now and i've always found a way to use sugar the way it was originally built. if you're able to do that w/ your workflow, then you can take advantage of all the new releases. if you don't, then you might just get stuck supporting your own "calyx" legacy solution.

my advice is to find a consultant you can work with who can give you some clear direction. the mortgage industry is one of the hardest industries to build crm for but it can be done.