A question that we often come across often from our clients is this: Do we use Salesforce.com as our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool or use Sugar CRM (which is an open source tool with similar functions).  While many have heard about Salesforce, less have heard about Sugar CRM. Many may even ask why use a CRM?

The benefits of using a CRM solution are – enhanced productivity, reduced costs, increased revenue, improved customer acquisition, service, satisfaction and retention.

I spent two months reviewing all the options about running a CRM tool internally or using a hosted solution, that can handle the needs of a small growing business operation.  Here is a list of products in the market I reviewed:

• Sugar CRM
• Vtiger (used by zoho CRM)
• Salesforce.com

I understand Microsoft is also a player in the hosted CRM space. Part of my new year’s resolution is to wean of all Microsoft products, and for that reason I didn’t review Microsoft CRM. Yes, this is coming from a former Microsoft employee.  

The needs for most businesses are rather straight forward, what I was looking for were –

• Lead Management
• Contact Management
• Opportunity Management
• Account Management
• Activity Management
• Sales Forecast/Quotes
• Marketing Automation

I spent a month with Sugar CRM (v 5.0), where some much sought out features are getting finally coming together -  forecasting, lead assignment rules, alerting,  etc. Overall I found Sugar CRM installation, configuration and documentation weak, with many bugs and missing features.  5.0 is a big step from the older 4.x version.

At Drupal, there isn’t a flag ship Content Management System version and a free open source version. Dries as a PhD student made his CMS best in class and absolutely free and built on a good foundation. Management at Sugar, choose open source as a mechanism to get the word out and more people to use Sugar, rather than improve their package. Sugar is an imitation product of Salesforce.com (most of it being free, while a customer has to pay 50-150$/month).

Salesforce Appexchange is the equivalent of open source community at Drupal, with developers from around the world contributing with add on modules to run your entire small business from inside Salesforce. Sugar’s community is growing and perhaps over time this community will grow to the likes of Salesforce, this has yet to be seen.

Yet another reason for selecting Salesforce was this. When working at Dell, I spent many years part of a team developing an internal CRM system, then implementing and customizing Siebel CRM. When I left Dell, the sales & support teams were adamant that Dell’s business model is unique and no standard software would work at Dell. Well, what do you know? Dell now uses Salesforce.com, and from what I have gathered, it is working well.  

The costs involved in using a hosted CRM solution are fairly low. The benefits to your business comes form leveraging best practices and implementing these processes to your business, example – the call scripting automation, Google analytics integration, lead follow up and more.  Increase your business with good CRM processes and tools this year!

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