What do you like best about the product?

Sugar Sell (formerly SugarCRM) has a wealth of features that any organization would want from a customer relationship management system. For starters, it allows users to easily find and organize leads or customers with a wide variety of options. I primarily use Sugar Sell as a recruiting administrator, and once I took the time to learn how the software works, I was able to master its robust search engine. It allows users to take detailed notes on a lead's location and contact information, as well as create unique recruitment profiles for each of them. This feature will enable recruiters in my department to add key details about a lead's employment history, such as the previous year's sales volume or the wound that makes them consider leaving their current employer. Sugar Sell also allows users to easily schedule future calls or emails with any lead within the system. These calls can even be created by one user and assigned to another, which is extremely handy for a department as hectic and with as high of a turnover rate as mine.
Outside of leads, Sugar Sell allows users to create custom email templates that can not only be instantly sent to any lead with an email address on file but are also available to be used by anyone in the department. Sugar Sell also allows users to create customized reports, giving our organization's supervisors access to key data metrics, such as how many new leads my department sourced each quarter. Sugar Sell's report system allows users to create, edit, and run these reports quickly and even allows them to be saved for later use. Overall, Sugar Sell has a generous amount of features that streamline the process of organizing a company's data on its current and prospective customers.

What do you dislike about the product?

Despite the wealth of content it offers, Sugar Sell's user interface can often be unintuitive and frustrating. This is mainly because Sugar Sell was not designed for recruiting, though my organization forced my department to adopt it in the name of internal consistency. Sugar Sell has by far the most unintuitive user interface I have ever encountered in my time utilizing various software for Indoff, Inc.'s recruiting department. The most recurring problem concerns its lack of an automatic save function. It is downright laughable that a piece of professional software sold in 2022 still requires users to manually click a "Save" button every time they want to record their progress on anything within the program. While Sugar Sell does notify users before leaving a tab to click the "Save" button to prevent losing their progress, a far simpler solution would be to enable automatic saving. I understand that the intent is to prevent unintended changes to pre-existing leads, templates, etc. Still, more often than not, users attempting to change anything within Sugar Sell know precisely what they want to edit and do not need the reminder. Thus, the required manual saving is far more often a hindrance than not. The issue is made worse because the "Save" button is right next to the "Cancel" button, often causing users to delete all of the work they were attempting to save. This lack of automatic saving is even more baffling after having switched from my organization's previous CRM, Goldmine, which is an ancient piece of software that still saves a user's work automatically. The lack of other features that have been standard elsewhere for ages now, such as a dark mode, is also a glaring flaw.

Furthermore, the process of migrating all of our organization's information from Goldmine to Sugar Sell was not seamless. Many leads and templates were either lost or changed beyond recognition in the transition between CRMs. They needed to be rebuilt from the ground up by my department, which took considerable time and focus away from other duties. If you are switching from something else to Sugar Sell, your mileage may vary, but do be wary of the possibility of issues like this coming up. Once migrated over, Sugar Sell's method of organizing these leads made it very difficult to simply manage them alphabetically, though we did eventually figure out how to do it. Furthermore, while Sugar Sell's flexible call and email scheduling options are appreciated, its calendars are not. Clicking anywhere on the calendar screen other than the month's numerical dates immediately defaults the calendar from the current year to the year 1900. I have no idea why their calendars go back that far, and it serves absolutely no purpose other than to frustrate users, and this happens to me every single day. Scheduling and assigning calls is often time-consuming in general, with basic functions requiring far more clicks than they ever did with Goldmine. Another questionable UI design is that, when scheduling a call, Sugar Sell sets the default status to "incoming" instead of "outgoing", which we need to manually change every single time. Why on earth scheduling a time for an incoming call is Sugar's default setting is beyond me. Once a call has been scheduled, Sugar Sell does offer a feature to remind users 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time, which can be useful, but for some reason, the feature is on by default when it really should not be. Once Sugar reminds you of an upcoming call, everything else in the browser is immediately frozen until the notification is dismissed, which often interrupts other work. As is tradition with Sugar Sell, this is a smart feature executed terribly, with zero regard for how their user interface interacts with users on a day-to-day basis. Also, once a list of calls or meetings has been made, users are required to manually move each individual call to another date when schedules change. The lack of a blanket "move all" feature for a list of calls or meetings seems like a no-brainer and is yet another feature that we enjoyed with Goldmine Often, users in my department are multitasking, so having to focus so much when simply scheduling a call can be frustrating. Overall, Sugar Sell's generous options are often offset by its baffling and user-unfriendly interface design choices. While I can't speak to its functionality with sales, I can safely say that after over a year of daily use, from a recruiting standpoint, using Sugar Sell has been a disappointing experience. I would advise an organization using Sugar Sell which may be considering expanding its use to other departments to think otherwise. If my department had the option to resume using Goldmine, we would happily return to it and never look back.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sugar Sell did not solve any problems within my department. It is simply a new CRM that essentially serves the same function as our previous software, Goldmine. That being said, Sugar Sell has some benefits unique to it that justify its existence. Its robust options for allowing users to organize, view, and edit information on an organization's customers are commendable. These unique options have proven highly beneficial to my department once we adjusted to the transition. However, Sugar Sell's clunky and archaic user-interface choices have been extremely frustrating. Because of how much of an overall downgrade Sugar Sell has been when compared to Goldmine, one could argue that it has actually created more problems than it has solved.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would consider other CRM options before going with Sugar Sell at all, particularly if you intend to use it for departments outside of sales. If you do adopt it, though, please be aware of the UI elements. In particular, remember to click "Save" as often as possible.

What do you like best about the product?

Everything is easy to access and it is easy to train new employees how to use and access data

What do you dislike about the product?

There are occasional glitches when editing or adding information

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Quick access to customer notes that we can add into the crm without having to search through files.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use, familiar. Outlook friendly. Just used for contact data and scheduling. Kept history.

What do you dislike about the product?

No customer service contact. Website hosting company made changes to control panel and made program useless.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

none

What do you like best about the product?

We love the Accounts and Opportunites module!

What do you dislike about the product?

The optic is something you need to get used to at first, but it is not bad.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Storing data and writing contracts

Recommendations to others considering the product:

The best part is that once you decide to work with Sugar Sell, you can adjust everything to your likelihood and personalize the layout of your CRM to your needs. The Sugar Support Team is super helpful and you always get someone on the phone when calling in for help. If you look for a CRM that brings you one step forward and works great - Sugar Sell is your new friend.

What do you like best about the product?

The standard (unaltered) product provides tools (Studio and Business Process Manager) that allows customization to match the company's business instead of needing to modify the business process to match the product.

What do you dislike about the product?

I'd like to be able to use the Studio Tool with the Email Module, and have the Teams available in the Business Process Manager.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Automated Business Processes and event follow-up has reduced the time needed for some business activities and has reduced process errors. Transition of sales territories is easier and we have captured all of the telephone and email activities for customers so the history is available to those with the authority to view it. The built-in functions of Roles and Teams establishes which people have access to each data element and what authority they have for that data item (view, edit, delete) . The data element relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many) provides connections between all of the relevant data items.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Start small and grow. I recommend just adding Accounts and Contacts as the first step and doing just Call logging and Email archiving. Sugar is powerful, and additional functions can be added as desired. Look at the "standard" set-up and flow in the "off the shelf" product and adapt Sugar to meet your company needs.

What do you like best about the product?

We appreciate Sugar Sell's flexibility and the ease with which it can adapt to our needs. We have been able to cobfugyre e a lot of modules and fields to better adapt to our daily business. We have been using Sugar for 10+ years and it has kept improving constantly. Version 13 in particular, with it's new look and feel, has brought a tremendous improvement in user-friendliness. We are looking forward to trying AI-powered features, in particular for predictive analytics

What do you dislike about the product?

There is very little to complain about. Since reporting is key to our daily activity, we would welcome more advanced reporting capabilities, such as the possibility to add more than just 1 data series to charts.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sugar Sell helps us have a 360 view of our business activity. We have 17 subsidiaries around the world and thanks to the CRM, we have been able to implement aligned sales processes everywhere. We have gained better visibility on our business pipeline, our forecasts and above all we have greatly improved the quality of our customer database. Sugar Sell has become an invaluable daily tool for all our sales and marketing teams around the world.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Not all benefits are visible at once. Adoption from users is key. Train them well and give them time to learn how to make the best out of it, and you will be rewarded.

What do you like best about the product?

One of Sugar's strengths is in its segmenting of Leads, Accounts, Contacts. This is most helpful in knowing what stage a customer (or potential one) is at. By having this type of grouping, and the subsequent information that is attached to it, it makes it easy to manage the accounts and people who do business with your company.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think the element that needs the most improvement would be finding individuals or accounts in the CRM. If you simply know the name of a company or an individual then the process will go smoothly. If you don't, having to scroll the database and wait as each page slowly loads after about 30-50 contacts can be daunting. I would like to see a more updated system that allows to you access all information more rapidly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sugar Sell allows us to easily manage the information of everyone who does business with us. Without it, we'd be second guessing a lot of our internal processes and record keeping. Sugar Sell helps companies bring their businesses processes into the modern age.

What do you like best about the product?

Sugar does have a lot of add ons that make the platform a lot more worth while to use. But you have to be willing to upgrade and put a lot of time into getting the CRM the way you want it.

What do you dislike about the product?

If you start with just basic or even a few of the add ons, the platform is slow, constantly needs to reload, often crashes if you are trying to do a lot at once. Compared to other CRM platforms, this just doesn't have the capacity to do what others can. Also the mobile app is trash.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used Sugar to keep notes, create quotes and track order patterns.

What do you like best about the product?

It allows me to add large amounts of targets. For mass email campaigns. Its my favorite prospecting tool. I can track the progress of a prospect thru my sales funnel. I can se accurate revenue forecasts.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some features are unnecessary. Some times it gives fields that I don't need.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Its my favorite prospecting tool. I can track the progress of a prospect thru my sales funnel. I can se accurate revenue forecasts.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Get it. Be sure to buy the Enterprise or business version. Its a very good CRM, over all very user friendly.

What do you like best about the product?

Ability to create individual customers' account, manage the relationship end-to-end and develop one's brand in an organic manner

What do you dislike about the product?

Updating calendar details with a 3rd party app such as Google or Outlook is a bit tricky and can be improved.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Working with my peer im meeting the monthly and quarterly targets