Why Salesforce.com customers are switching to SugarCRM

Choice, Control, and your Business’s Destiny

Flexibility, Intuitive and Open: How it Equates to Control

Salesforce.com can offer elementary contact management, but for companies that want to control their own destiny, Salesforce.com falls short. SugarCRM gives you the lowest cost that will drive the highest value. For those that want to keep and store all of your information Sugar is the answer. Sugar offers customers the choice to store customer’s information where they believe it is important -not where the vendor believes it is important. In essence, you store your data where you want it, not where the vendor wants it. Why does this matter? Options. Businesses grow, financial standings adjust and what this means is that it gives you options -changes happen, and Sugar helps you remain flexible.

Customizability

Salesforce.com is a closed environment, whereas Sugar has its heritage in open source. Just as this enables a mechanic to open the hood of your car to give you optimal performance, Sugar can be modified in a similar way allowing you to maximize your investment. If you are uncomfortable playing with the internal configurations of your product; the professionals here at RemoteLink can customize SugarCRM to meet your needs. Again, this gives you options with Sugar that Salesforce.com cannot offer. Lastly, if you wish to leave SugarCRM as it is or have a professional customize it for you, you still have a great product that still gives you the option.

If you feel that customizability is not important, you may want to reconsider your position and here’s why.

Every company has a different way in which it sells its product -every company’s sales process is unique. Salesforce’s configuration pretty much forces you to adapt your sales methodology around their product and technology. Sugar’s flexibility enables you to use its technology to fit around your processes; it enables you to reach the firm’s selling goals by being customizable. Something we must face in the business world is that very few people like change. In fact, at RemoteLink we found that companies that select CRM solutions other than SugarCRM are only implemented 30% of the time! By implementing Salesforce.com you are dictating that your sales professionals go through two changes. The first change is the CRM solution itself, adopting any new technology will require some time to learn it. Secondly, because Salesforce.com cannot be customized, you are forcing your sales professionals to learn a completely new sales process. With SugarCRM your only concern is teaching your sales professionals a new CRM solution. At RemoteLink we call the process of learning a new technology ‘the adoption curve’. We have developed a support and training process that helps your early adopters be able to drive and champion the change – promoting better company-wide adaptation. With SugarCRM you have less change, but more customizability. Why change more than necessary?

Configurations

One of the things we especially like about SugarCRM is the ability to customize your view of things. Dashlets allow you to have the most important pieces of information -to you- to be visible first. Unfortunately, Salesforce end users have limited configuration capabilities, in essence they are virtually unable to make simple changes to the configuration of their system to suit their needs. Sugar end users have multiple tabs, dashlets and categories to build dashboard-like home pages, keeping mission critical (according to your processes) information in front of you at all times.

In order for the end user to change the configuration of Salesforce, the end user would need to speak to the account administrator. Once the request has been made, the account administrator then must change the configuration of the end user to suit the end user’s request. This is problematic because it takes two people, and a significant amount of time to get the end-users desired appearance. This is significantly different than that of SugarCRM. With Sugar, the end user can customize the configurations for the layout that they desire. It puts the choice of layout in the hands of the people that need it the most. This is important because the end-user knows what is important to them; they know what the optimum layout is for their success.

Focused on Sales

Salesforce.com is a 10 year old design and seems unnecessarily complex. Additionally their emphasis on Chatter (their internal facebook-like software program), rather than sales feels counter productive. This leaves your sales force unnecessarily distracted; pertinent sales information is now located at the bottom of the screen. Here at RemoteLink we are big fans of the usefulness of social media. Sugar uses connections with Linkedin and Facebook to keep your sales representatives focused on the sales at hand while being able to use social media to its greatest potential.

Cost

As of this publishing, Salesforce.com Enterprise edition costs $125USD/user/month. If you are outside the United States, Salesforce.com will charge you a 45% markup for being outside the United States. SugarCRM charges $30USD/user/month for the Sugar Professional version regardless of where you are located. SugarCRM is the most cost effective solution for being the most flexible solution. Salesforce.com charges 400% premium for a functional equivalent with less flexibility.

Confident in our product

Although we don’t necessarily like to use this as a sales point; you are free to take your information from SugarCRM at anytime. This is not an option for Salesforce.com users, it is practically impossible to get your information from them. This is because Salesforce’s CSV is in an unusable format. In essence, if you currently use Salesforce.com and would want to change to another CRM solution, you would have to start from the beginning; none of your information would be able to transfer. Additionally, Salesforce.com offers no ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) support and charges money for weekly backups! This is in contrast to Sugar CRM which offers free ODBC support and free weekly backups for its Professional and Enterprise editions. Sugar’s CSV is fully transferable and translatable. SugarCRM exemplifies that your data is yours, and you should have control of it anytime, all the time.