I must be missing something - Opportunity Workflow

[mylesw]

Hi there, we recently started to use SugarCRM for our business (we are a software ISV and sell most of our software via Internet leads from downloads of our products). Our sales guy is having a major challenge with SugarCRM, and I started to go through what he was doing and I'm seeing the same issues. I think either we are missing something elementary in the program, or it just isn't a good fit for us (although I can't see why that would be the case because or work flow process is really simple).

Here's what we are doing, and where we (or it) is failing. I'd just like to get some feedback from others if we are doing something wrong or should be doing something differently.

1. We receive a download request via the Internet. With this, the prospect has the option to provide us some brief information on who they are and their needs (ie. Name, Company, Email, Phone number and their needs). For us, we consider this an opportunity since the prospect may wish to volunteer a level of detail that tells us they are seriously evaluating our software for their business.

2. We review the download request and if we feel that its an opportunity, we create an opportunity record immediately and assign it to our sales guy. In doing this, we have to create an Account and a Contact from the information provided, but we consider the opportunity as the point of focus for this.

3. We measure the overall pipeline by sales stage for all opportunities. We create the opportunity with a 'Prospecting' sales stage initially and then leave it up to our sales guy to progress the opportunity either by dismissing it as not relevant, or to move towards doing a web based demo of our software and proposing it to the prospect.


What I noticed was that our pipelines had more prospecting sales stage entries that never appeared to be progressing. When I queried this with our sales guy, I got back the following response:

"The problem is SugarCRM. I can't easily see what opportunities I should be working on, and I can't log my communications through the opportunity list. What I need to be able to do is to directly email the party to the opportunity without having to navigate through 15 screens to do this, and that a copy of the email is stored against the opportunity. If there is a telephone conversation, then I need to record notes from that conversation against the opportunity, but it takes forever to do this because I have to keep selecting the contact, account, etc. all the time. The Opportunity has all of that but never seems to be the focus of the work I do. Yet it is the work I do".

I walked through this myself and found the same results. If I simply just need a list of what is active so that the list can be worked, its taking hours and hours of time to work a list of 50 or so opportunities, create emails, log phone calls, etc. This is becoming inhibiting for us to do business, so either we are doing this wrong or this isn't a good fit for us.

So my question is how do others do this? I would think getting a list of opportunities and working that list is core of any CRM system. Yet SugarCRM seems to not think that way. Strangely 90% of other CRM products I've tried also don't seem to think that way, so that tells me I'm the common denominator in all of this. But is that right? We clearly don't seem to be asking for much here, but what are we missing?

All comments, suggestions, etc. are greatly appreciated.

Myles

[mapm]

You can have a dashlet with you open oportunities which were assigned to you.
You also can use a plugin for your email client to send your emails to sugar and relate it into a opportunity.
You also can have a web to lead capture from your site directly into sugar

[mylesw]

You can have a dashlet with you open oportunities which were assigned to you.

Yes, I have that setup. That is definitely helping.

You also can use a plugin for your email client to send your emails to sugar and relate it into a opportunity.

Unfortunately that doesn't work for us. The assumption is that ALL email for our staff would go into SugarCRM, but the reality is that only about 50% of the email that we get is sales related. The rest are non-related to SugarCRM, and I know that my sales team don't want to have to use SugarCRM as their email client for everything. Many have smartphones, prefer Thunderbird or Outlook, etc. Sending FROM SugarCRM is fine though.

That's one thing that I tried today and was disappointed with the result. I found the button 'Send Email' in the Activities section under the Opportunity, but when I clicked on it, it didn't carry through the email address associated with the Contact/Account for the Opportunity. This is a perfect example of best intentions, but poor result. The fact is that if I want to email an opportunity, I should be able to without having to drop out of that screen to find their email address. The fact that I don't have the email populated with the email address is poor design IMHO. Maybe this has been fixed in an upcoming version, but it makes sending emails a slow and tedious process, which defeats the purpose of having a CRM in the first place.

You also can have a web to lead capture from your site directly into sugar

Yes, we can do that. But if my sales guys can't email right from the Opportunity screen, then it kinda makes it pointless. Its one thing to capture data - but we want to use it. That's where its breaking down for us.

Myles

[Thorsten Vieten]

1. Your process in general is a bit clumsy, but okay. What might be easier still is to capture the data in a lead and use the convert function to create account, contact and opportunity in one go. Even without using a web lead capture form that might save you some steps.

2. Email functionality is being debugged and improved a lot in version 5.5.1 - so maybe have a look at the patch notes and see if some of your problems will be improved with the coming release. Personally, I think sending emails from a program like Outlook is more convenient as in any CRM system and a plugin the way to go - but I also understand that it's a question of business requirements and personal taste to a certain degree.

3. I don't understand why you seem to have so much trouble getting a simple list out of Sugar with the opportunities to work on. You can easily configure the basic or advanced search to suit your needs or - if you are running the Professional version - work off a custom report. Also, with that you can fully customize your dashlets. From the list view, editing an opportunity is one click away - or two if you want to change data on a subpanel maybe. Far away from 15.

4. Actually, for your described use case - I would never actually touch a contact or account record per se. I would have created those automatically from a lead coversion and then work from within the Opportunity list view and the detail view to capture activities related to the deal. As mentioned above, unless 5.5.1 improves email handling for you, I would revert to my email program and archive selected emails to Sugar (related to the Opportunity) manually. Alternatively you could question the process and ask yourself if you really need to capture the emails as a whole, or if a simple note wouldn't be sufficient and more effective. But that's you to decide, I can't make any prescriptions here :-)

Kind regards!

[mylesw]

1. Your process in general is a bit clumsy, but okay. What might be easier still is to capture the data in a lead and use the convert function to create account, contact and opportunity in one go. Even without using a web lead capture form that might save you some steps.

Agreed. We can do that. Since I'm the one manually transferring the data from our web form to SugarCRM, I'd normally be the one complaining. But the manual process isn't too hard to deal with. Its more about the overall effectiveness of our sales staff that I'm concerned about.

2. Email functionality is being debugged and improved a lot in version 5.5.1 - so maybe have a look at the patch notes and see if some of your problems will be improved with the coming release. Personally, I think sending emails from a program like Outlook is more convenient as in any CRM system and a plugin the way to go - but I also understand that it's a question of business requirements and personal taste to a certain degree.

I agree that integrating SugarCRM data with our email client (we use Thunderbird, not Outlook) would help a lot. But the use case here is that the sales guy logs into SugarCRM to view the Opportunties. He works from that list. So when he sees a new one come in, he wants to email the Opportunity to introduce himself to them. That's where it breaks down. He can find and open the opportunity, but when he clicks on 'Send Email' in the Activities area, it doesn't populate the email form with the Lead/Contact's email address, although its been loaded/entered into SugarCRM. He's dealing with 50+ open opportunities at anytime and has limited time to spend, so its in my businesses interest to simplify this so I see a more aggressive progression through the pipeline.

3. I don't understand why you seem to have so much trouble getting a simple list out of Sugar with the opportunities to work on. You can easily configure the basic or advanced search to suit your needs or - if you are running the Professional version - work off a custom report. Also, with that you can fully customize your dashlets. From the list view, editing an opportunity is one click away - or two if you want to change data on a subpanel maybe. Far away from 15.

The problem isn't that he can't get a list of Opportunities to work. Its the time it takes to enter activities into SugarCRM for things he does with the Opportunity that's the problem. And also that the email, if entered in SugarCRM (which we're fine doing) doesn't get stored in the Note history for the Opportunity. If he can't see the communications log as it pertained to the opportunity, we have a problem. Often I have multiple sales people working the same opportunity. They need to be able to see all history that occurred to that opportunity - not spend hours digging through related table data to view it.

This is where our time is being wasted. It would seem rudimentary to me that if you create data from an Opportunity (ie. enter History, create an email, etc.) then that data would be linked by foreign key to that Opportunity in some way.

I have already mentioned email. But also he wants to note phone calls that he makes to them. I've found this myself also. You click to add history of a phone conversation on an Opportunity that has one account and one contact. But you have to manually select the Contact even if there is only one associated with the Opportunity. What it should do is recognize that the Opportunity is associated with one Account and one Contact, and therefore default the selection to those individual records. By not doing that, its multiple added steps to enter history, which means that they are not adding that data because its too cumbersome and the end result is a database that is lacking information detail and therefore not realizing its potential to the business.

4. Actually, for your described use case - I would never actually touch a contact or account record per se. I would have created those automatically from a lead coversion and then work from within the Opportunity list view and the detail view to capture activities related to the deal. As mentioned above, unless 5.5.1 improves email handling for you, I would revert to my email program and archive selected emails to Sugar (related to the Opportunity) manually. Alternatively you could question the process and ask yourself if you really need to capture the emails as a whole, or if a simple note wouldn't be sufficient and more effective. But that's you to decide, I can't make any prescriptions here :-)

I agree that our use of SugarCRM should be Opportunity centric. But the functionality of using it that way has issues (per my previous statements). The details for any communication are important, since we work in a complex field and its the details that tends to kill off a deal, or if not correctly communicated between sales people it makes us look disjointed to the customer. But I'd be fine even if a simple history entry could be done without having to redundantly re-select the Contact associated with the Opportunity, even if the Opportunity already has that data defined when it was created.

Myles

[mylesw]

Just to add to this, I found the 5.51 Release Candidate available to test here. A couple of things have been improved, particularly with Email. The addition of a 'To' button in the Email creation has solved my problem for bringing forward the email address when creating an email from the Opportunity. I believe that would solve all of our email issues.

However when creating a Note against the Opportunity, it is clearly deficient in this area. I'll post this as a bug/feature request. The problem is that when you create a note to the Opportunity, its not carrying over the Contact associated with the Opportunity. But to make it worse, when you click to find the Contact it doesn't automatically filter the list down to contacts associated with the account that the opportunity is for. Hence you now have to find the contact's name out of a list of potentially thousands of contacts just to write a simple note against the opportunity. I guess you don't have to reference the contact here. But if, at a later time, I want to find out all notes that associated with a Contact as they call up 1 year later to ask a question, I'll never get that global view.

But I must say that the 5.51 release does solve my email issues, so we'll go ahead and upgrade to that. If there are ways to solve the Note issues, however, I'm all ears. I don't want to hack the code and make it difficult to upgrade later if I can avoid it.

Myles

[Thorsten Vieten]

Okay, thanks for explaining a little more. I think I better understand where you are coming from now. Glad that 5.5.1 works fine for you - at least for that issue.

As far as your point about notes is concerned - I can understand that it is annoying for your use case. But it would maybe negatively effect other use cases where you have opportunities you work on with multiple partners, since you wouldn't only want contacts assigned to the opportunity account, but maybe from thrid parties or end users, etc...

But on the other hand - since you would have to search in those cases anyway, it wouldn't probably hurt if it defaulted to the account assigned to the opportunity, the majority of notes would potentially go there anyway - also in the cases described above.

Alternatively, I think a good compromise would be to default to all contacts assigned to the opportunity. You would automatically get your contact assigned when converting from a lead and multiple partner opportunities would probably have the relevant contacts linked anyway.

Alternatively 2, a button right next to the contacts on the subpanel to create a note with that contact referenced.

Well, could probably go on forever, but I think I am boring people to death :-)

Cheers!

[mylesw]

As far as your point about notes is concerned - I can understand that it is annoying for your use case. But it would maybe negatively effect other use cases where you have opportunities you work on with multiple partners, since you wouldn't only want contacts assigned to the opportunity account, but maybe from thrid parties or end users, etc...

Alternatively, I think a good compromise would be to default to all contacts assigned to the opportunity. You would automatically get your contact assigned when converting from a lead and multiple partner opportunities would probably have the relevant contacts linked anyway.
!

This would be perfect for us. I don't mind selecting the contact, but I just need the filter to limit (by default) the selection of contacts only associated with the account for the Opportunity. Since an Opportunity can have one and only one account, but that any account can have zero, one or many contacts, all I need it to do is to provide a list of the contacts associated with the account for the opportunity so that one can be selected. And it would be a perfect world if the software was smart enough to realize that if only one contact is associated with the Account, then assume that contact without having to select anything. But if I want to associate it with some other party (which is a rare occurrence), sure - give me the whole list. But since in our use case that's a very rare scenario, it would be great if the software weighed the use case in favor of defaulting contacts rather than handing only the minority of situations when you wanted to select any contact for that history entry.

Anyway I've posted as a Patch request, so fingers crossed.

Myles