A better way to work
Managing customer relationships is all about recording the activity and interaction with them. It's quotes, orders, emails, meetings, promises, contracts and sometimes projects and support.
eMail is the popular place to do all of that, with the addition of a bunch of spreadsheets. One of the dangers of email is that you don't always know what your sales staff is telling your customer. Even if you get copied on the emails, how can you possibly keep up with the growing volume.
If the information was in one place, preparation for a customer visit would mean reviewing their electronic file. It can even be done via your iPhone while sitting in the customers office lobby. Sugar does that.
Lead capture
Who is responsible for answering the emails coming in from the "contact us" form on your website? Maybe they go to the never monitored "sales@mycompany.com" mailbox?
With Sugar, your leads are entered into the database directly from the website. No email in between. You can even request additional data from the visitor to better evaluate and assign the potential opportunity. Then you can respond to their inquiry, and add them onto your Newsletter mailing list. Click click!
Centralize email communication
Face it, email has just plain gotten out of hand. So many different people communicate with your customers, but what are they saying? It's all locked up in each persons email. If a customer is upset, when do you find out? How can you possibly keep up with everything that goes on?
With Sugar, all emails can be centrally organized and kept with the customer information. See what your team is saying to their customers.
Paying money to email newsletters?
Sugar lets you build newsletter templates and send them out on a schedule. You can send them to customers, prospects and even large lists you might purchase.
Doing this with an outside services costs you money every month, but it's included in Sugar. Using Sugar's workflow, you can trigger automatic emails based upon specific events to timelines.
Customer Service
Suppose you wanted to create a mailbox for customer issues or complaints? Wouldn't it be great if you could see the complaints and also see how your staff was responding to them? Wouldn't you want to know how many complaints come in and what they're about? How long does it take your team to respond? Sugar does that!
Opportunity Management
How many deals are your salespeople chasing right now? What are the biggest? What are the chances of success? Are you really on top of the potential deals your people are working on?
Sugar knows!
How would it work for me?
A lead gets entered on your website - and gets posted directly to Sugar. It is assigned to Tom (one of your salespeople) by Sugar, and an email is automatically sent to Tom letting him know.
Tom contacts the lead and finds real interest, so he creates an opportunity in Sugar, describing what the lead might want to buy and the potential size of the deal.
You review all opportunities over the weekend, and realize that Tom's potential customer might be a great fit for the new product you're coming out with. You add a task in Sugar for Tom, asking him to schedule a meeting for you with the prospect.
All of this occurred in Sugar, and none of the info is buried in someone's mail box.
On Monday you find out that Tom won the lottery on Saturday and isn't coming back to work. All his records are in Sugar, and is visible to you and the new salesperson you'll hire.
