Company Close Up: It’s A CRM SugarRush
Laser-focused on high definition CX, SugarCRM is working on out-of-the-box solutions “Fifty-two per cent of sales leaders say their traditional CRM costs them revenue – that’s a frightening statistic. We believe firmly that it’s time to work smarter, not harder. It’s time for a change,” said Craig Charlton, CEO, SugarCRM. The last two years have […]
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Laser-focused on high definition CX, SugarCRM is working on out-of-the-box solutions
“Fifty-two per cent of sales leaders say their traditional CRM costs them revenue – that’s a frightening statistic. We believe firmly that it’s time to work smarter, not harder. It’s time for a change,” said Craig Charlton, CEO, SugarCRM. The last two years have been phenomenal for SugarCRM.
Following the principle “let the platform do your work”, the idea was that technology would work for businesses and not the other way around. With intuitive customer experience (CX) tools that pull detailed customer data from several touchpoints within reach, SugarCRM allows organisations to make data-driven decisions and provide a high definition customer experience (HD-CX).
All About HD-CX
An HD-CX provides companies with the ability to have a customer view with precise fidelity. Its time-aware nature allows organisations to reflect on the past, have situational awareness, and make bankable predictions.
Understanding the urgent need for a complete picture of each customer by surfacing competitive insights, SugarPredict AI engine was launched in 2021 to make a marketer’s life easier. It could strengthen predictability across all processes, reinvent lead scoring and prioritisation based on measured contribution, conversion and engagement.
From SugarPredict, Sugar Sell (sales automation) to Sugar Market (marketing automation), in the last few years, the CRM platform has transformed its offerings for an HD-CX with several AI and predictive analytics-based products and services.
What’s more? While SugarPredict could overcome the limitations of poor-quality internal CRM data, its integration with Sugar Sell and Sugar Market allows one to capture data and present it in a user-friendly and accessible manner to all employees to make easy, informed decisions.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the platform can help automate complex business processes such as routing leads, approving quotes, or streamlining data collection.
The Sentiment Angle
How often do brands understand the true sentiments of their customers? Surveys and feedback forms are usually ignored, and gauging customer satisfaction could be an impossible task.
Addressing this issue, SugarCRM added a sentiment analysis tool, a much-needed update to its Sugar Live tool, expanding capabilities in SugarPredict AI. Using natural language processing and AI, the tool allows sales personnel to gather information about a customer’s emotional state of mind and intent. With a goal to provide high-level empathetic engagement to sales and service teams, SugarCRM wants to empower brands to command greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Let’s Rewind
Clint Oram, John Roberts, and Jacob Taylor began Sugar Open source, a development repository for open-source software. The project’s success initiated the launch of SugarCRM with $2 million in venture capital. A month later, Sugar Open Source version 1.0 was released, and soon over 25,000 people downloaded the software. This was 2004, during a time when customer experience and customer-centric businesses were not considered to be top priorities.
During the next decade, the company moved from an open-source project to a popular CRM global vendor with 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and an 80 per cent year-to-year growth. Even Goldman Sachs chose to invest $40 million in SugarCRM, with which the company set out on its global expansion journey.
Some of its early clients included uShip, a marketplace featured in a then-popular television show Shipping Wards. The company also provided its services to Loomis, a secured transport service, and Hillel, a foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Even Men’s Wearhouse, a big-time supplier of rental tuxedos used SugarCRM to track and manage its rentals, customer leads, and fitting appointments.
By 2016, SugarCRM had about 1.5 million customers in over 120 countries, and had over seven million downloads. Today, over 15 years since its inception, backed by a private equity firm Accel-KKR, SugarCRM has over two million customers.
By 2020, Charlton had bigger plans for his company. For instance, Sugar acquired a customer intelligence startup, Node, to add a customer prediction element to the platform. Additionally, it acquired W-Systems, a CRM and marketing automation solutions and services provider. With this acquisition, Sugar was able to expand its ability to meet implementation service demand for its time-aware, AI-powered sales, marketing and service software that help companies deliver HD-CX.
W-Systems provided Sugar with document management and calendar enhancements, along with integrations for common mapping, file storage and messaging service. This was a necessary acquisition as the increase in remote workforce during the pandemic required the reliance of digital channels. Also, customer-facing teams needed an easy-to-deploy cloud-based CRM and marketing automation solutions.
In 2022, Sugar launched an integrated playbook functionality to support guided selling and advanced CRM process automation for HD-CX. The no-code tool allows customers to easily design, visualise, and automate sales, services, and marketing processes such as lead processing. Apart from eliminating the need for 90 per cent of clicks with automation, embedded analytics enables users to monitor business outcomes and progress in real-time.
“This empowers sales, marketing and customer success teams to boost buyer engagement, drive greater customer trust and satisfaction, improve win rates and increase revenues. It also reflects Sugar’s commitment to offer more no-code/low-code capabilities designed to put change in the hands of non-technical business users,” said Rich Green, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer.
For instance, the Engenco Group wanted a CRM platform that could seamlessly integrate with its ERP data for an instant view into the sales performance metrics for better decision-making. The company decided to integrate SugarCRM services and consolidate its customer data, improve customer insights and enhance customer experience. Around 78 per cent of the company’s team now access the platform regularly.
Laser-focused on HD-CX and with an updated user interface, Sugar plans to add more out-of-the-box playbooks and templates for several processes such as lead qualification, customer on-boarding, case management, troubleshooting and other human-in-the-loop customer interactions.
SugarCRM has created some intelligent services that puts the company in more direct competition with the likes of Salesforce and Adobe.
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