sugar crm, salesforce and sage

[brianwg07sugarcrm]

Hi,

I am new to sugar crm. I am considering sugar crm professional. However, given there are other options like salesforce, sage, and goldmine, can any one share your experineces and views on why I should choose sugar crm professional rather than others/

All I need is a good crm system to work well and help us run a business.

Thanks

Brian

[longreach]

There is a great deal that could be written in response to your post - but just a few highlights perhaps:

1 - Salesforce.com is a quality product with good support and happy clients. Only available as a subscription or SaaS, we typically hear real costs from clients of about $130 US per user per month - not the advertised $65 or so. People only seem to leave sf.com for two reasons - A - they are tired of paying every month and never owning anything, and B - they want more than a CRM - they want more business integration. sf.com by itself is a narrowly featured classic CRM - and adding on a lot of wider integration via 3rd party AppForce type products can make the total solution prohibitively expensive.

2 - Goldmine - quite possibly a bad idea to go this way - the bulk of the market appears to be moving away from this older application - we see more clients wanting to migrate to our product from goldmine than almost any other competitive product. Usually as they are tired of an old, anachronistic, proprietary solution.

3 - NetSuite - Similarly to sf.com, only available as SaaS - in this case with typical costs of perhaps $100 per user per month. Unlike sf.com, it has integrated Accounting and financials, and also a skeleton of an eCommerce solution. Somewhat known for poor service and rapidly escalating costs of service renewals, NetSuite can be a good option for clients seeking more of a business management solution integrated with their CRM.

4 - Sugar Pro - Largely open source code, and lower annual or monthly licensing fees can make this an attractive option for both budget, and flexibility of integration. Support for the commercial versions seems to be quite good these days. Largely a narrowly featured classic CRM - but many integration options are available at much more competitive pricing than the sf.com marketplace.

[Angel]

One point I would add regarding GoldMine is that GoldMine is a contact centric application.

Meaning, the vast majority of its functionality is designed around the idea that you are working with individuals the vast majority of the time. This is ideal for B2C business models, but if you mostly do business with other businesses, i.e. B2B, it can become a bit of a challenge to adapt the software to your needs.

Sugar, Salesforce and Sage all are all strongly suited for B2B environments, but can be used in B2C worlds as well. Although, Sugar has some challenges with the latter in some areas (the inverse of GoldMine I suppose).

[enrashid]

Hi,

I am new to sugar crm. I am considering sugar crm professional. However, given there are other options like salesforce, sage, and goldmine, can any one share your experineces and views on why I should choose sugar crm professional rather than others/

All I need is a good crm system to work well and help us run a business.

Thanks

Brian

Brian,

My strong recommendation is to come up with a checklist of criteria or features that are necessary for your org.

For example, is a web client important? Do you need to generate quotes, believe it when I say that many small organiziation just want to maintain contacts and activities and let something like quickbooks handle the quotes and accounting piece. How many users - will this grow over time since many CRMs costs are based on annual user subscriptions vs onetime license and then the custmary support? Are you interested in customization (adding new screens vs new fields). What about reporting? Do you need to have the CRM inhouse to integrate strongly with other applications or do you want to be free from the burden of taking care of upgrades, backing up your data, maintaining your hardware box?

Sometimes you don't know what you want until you actually see something and say hey that would be useful in my org.

Advice: So, having said that, download a demo of any product just to get a feel and start forming your checklist of requirements and maintain this list as you evaluate other products. Or for Sugar Pro for example, just use the online demo to get you started.