Over the last several years CRM has become a buzzword among small and medium sized business owners. CRM, or customer relationship management, is the method by which your company is able to collect and organize customer data. SugarCRM has quickly become one of the standards of the industry because of their customizable interface and the ability to use modules to tailor Sugar to your specific needs.
On its own Sugar is an exceptionally powerful tool for your sales force, but the addition of sales specific modules add functionality and versatility that will empower your staff to make better sales. These three modules are among the best available for Sugar users.
Intacct Integration
The job of your sales staff is to make sales, not to sit around the office filing paperwork and creating customer information sheets. Any time that a member of your sales staff spends on tasks that do not involve pitching products to customers, you are wasting money. One of the most common complaints that sales team members have is that they have to enter customer data over and over again, even when that data already exists somewhere else in the company.
The Intacct module syncs customer data from multiple sources, and ensures that when your staff talks to a customer, the staff has all of the most up to date information available. New customer data is automatically generated through the module, and any changes to the information are seen as soon as the data is synced. This frees your staff to spend more time with customers, and less time working on paperwork.
OpportunitiesAlerts
The period between first contact by a potential customer and the subsequent follow up contact is the most crucial in the sales timeline. Customers who feel that you are not interested in them will not be interested in you, and so the chance to make the sale fades. Bigger sales require even more contact, with a huge number of them taking at least five conversations to close the deal.
Because of the commitment involved in pursuing these bigger deals, customers can get lost in the shuffle and go weeks or months before someone in your company bothers to talk to them. The OpportunitiesAlert module helps to prevent customers from falling through the cracks by giving your sales team members reminders about which potential customers need attention, and which ones are getting to a point where a deal can be made.
Just by closing more of the potential customers you have already attracted your customer acquisition costs will decrease and your staff will be more successful.
Weblinx
Your website is your most important point of contact with most customers, but sometimes it can be hard to convert traffic to sales. Not every site visitor will provide their contact information, and so you can have a high number of site hits, but very few leads created. Weblinx analyzes your site traffic and provides you with information like the company name and contact information for that company based on your site’s analytics.
That information is then automatically synced with your sales and marketing portals in Sugar, so you are able to get started with the process of making the first sales calls. This increased lead generation will have a significant impact on the number of leads that you close each year.
The right tools for your sales staff can increase revenue and profits, without the need to invest in more staff or more marketing. These modules, available at marketplaces like Sugar Outfitters, add functions to your existing SugarCRM portal to empower your sales team to talk to more customers and make more sales.
I am Larry Davis and I have been using SugarCRM for three years. All of these modules have helped my sales staff to become more effective and we have seen an increase in the number of converted leads since adopting these modules.
