Opportunities, Sales & Workflow

[pobox90210]

What happens to an opportunity once it becomes a sale? I was hoping it would get automatically put somewhere against the account as a sale rather than an opportunity.

Once the opportunity becomes a sale, I require that other people get involved and "do their bit"
EG, accounts dept send contract.
Once contract signed,
Graphic artist create/reuse design and add to product
Printers to get product
Distribution....
and so on.

Is there any workflow in this that's auto set or does one have to manually go and reassign to others in the process once done?

[tallinn]

You can simply use Opportunity dropdown "Sales Stage" for indicating sales and work progress. Also has Sugar filter for sales stage watching in Opportunity list. Dropdown can be customized in Admin --> Studio --> Dropdown Editor.

[sugarcane]

Hello,

For Sugar 4.0 PRO/ENT, you can create a workflow object to trigger on sales stage = closed won. This trigger can create a project with project tasks for each of your tasks. You can either create all the tasks at once or use workflow to make the tasks sequentially based on when the previous task is complete.

[pobox90210]

Ah, so Workflow is only on the Pro & Ent versions?
At that price I think I'd be looking elsewhere for my CRM (Microsoft)
Cheers.

[pobox90210]

You can simply use Opportunity dropdown "Sales Stage" for indicating sales and work progress. Also has Sugar filter for sales stage watching in Opportunity list. Dropdown can be customized in Admin --> Studio --> Dropdown Editor.

A good idea but possibly too manual for the sales team here. Yes really. They're that interested in computers.
However I will look into it. Thanks.

[longreach]

At that price? Say Peter - this is from a recent Microsoft Press Release:

The product is available through Microsoft Volume Licensing programs; the price will depend on the license program being used. The full-suite Professional Edition is priced between $622 and $880 (U.S.)* per user and $1,244 and $1,761 (U.S.)* per server. Full-suite Small Business Edition is priced between $440 and $499 (U.S.)* per user and between $528 and $599 (U.S.)* per server. All prices include one year of Software Assurance.

At that price - Sugar looks pretty good to me!

[pobox90210]

Yes. Whilst the initial outlay of MS CRM seems steep, there's other things to consider. Training. Whilst the crew would have to train in both, they are, as are many companies and people, MS oriented and it is my belief that training would be simpler for their product. MS CRM also integrats better with their own applications, as indeed it should do. There is also more .Net programmers here than php programmers. That means any new development or enhancements to the product away from it's vanilla state would be cheaper.
Whether that's actually cheaper monitarily in the long run would be an interesting qquestion. One of the major influences in gettng the right product for the company, in my view, would be "are the team going to use it"? Without data going into the system, the project would be lost from the start. One has to get the team on board with the right CRM.
I like SugarCRM. I think it's great and would do almost all of what the teams require of it. And for completely free if we go open source, one cannot fault it for what one gets. However, getting the teams to use it is another issue entirely. I have also seen the Microsoft product and whilst it was at a demonstration and they obviously have slick sales guys showing you the best bits, it is not up to me what is chosen.

[peteunderwood]

My 2 cents:

My background: been exposed to SalesLogic
Installed and maintained the following: Goldmine, Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com & (obviously) SugarCRM.

Workflow:

• SalesLogic seems to have the slickest (but I have never installed it).
• SalesForce has none.
• Goldmine Tracks are actually not too bad.
• Not exposed to SugarCRM professional version yet, but it seems fairly simple.
• MicrosoftCRM- could never get it to work, after cases and 30 hours of effort.

I would not be so quick to go to MS. Beware the following:

• Massive install (Reporting Services, SQL Server, etc.).
• Strange Mail Integration (Only automated for Exchange Server)
• Obese Outlook plug-in (installs another version of SQL Server on workstation... brutal and memory hog when running.).
• Frustrating history view (always have to click and loose page).
• Workflow looks promising out of the box but very cryptic.
• Poor documentation (despite a 300 page installation doc and another 200 page user guide).

Just my experience....