SugarCRM Enhances Collaboration

Making a sale today typically involves multiple teams of people who are a lot more focused on the overall relationship with the customer than they are on any given transaction. To facilitate a more team-centric approach to sales, SugarCRM has announced that the Fall 2017 edition of SugarCRM On-Demand of its customer relationship management (CRM) software includes a shareable dashboard and an email module through which sales teams can view all the emails that have been shared with a specific customer.

In addition, SugarCRM has added a capability that allows end users to drill down through charts to examine underlying assumptions without having to generate a separate report.

Rich Green, chief product officer for SugarCRM, says these capabilities will first manifest themselves in the cloud edition of the company’s namesake CRM software before being added to the on-premises edition in 2018. Green says that while SugarCRM has committed to adding new features to the cloud edition of its software every 90 days, SugarCRM will only be updating the on-premises edition once a year.

“Customers that deploy SugarCRM have made it clear they don’t want to update as frequently,” says Green.

In general, Green says that CRM software is quickly evolving from being a system of record for sales into a suite of applications to manage, as its original moniker implies, relationships with customers. To help drive that transition, Green says SugarCRM is focused on increasing the usability of its applications across all the teams involved in the sales process.

There are still a lot of options when it comes to CRM software. SugarCRM is clearly betting that a focus on collaboration fundamentals will ultimately convince organizations focusing on relationships rather than individual transactions to standardize on its CRM application.