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Falling in Love With Sugar's Free Open Source CRM

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TMCnews Featured Article


April 15, 2010

Falling in Love With Sugar's Free Open Source CRM

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


Some people are just demanding. Picky, even. Definitely hard to please. And that can be a good thing.

"Having worked at several enterprise companies and a 60 person start-up I've had plenty of experience with CRM systems," says Heather Margolis. Okay, she knows what she's talking about. But who does she really love?


"I wouldn't say any of them have been particularly bad experiences but none have been off the charts fantastic either," she says, reminding us of our pre-marriage dating days. CRM, for Margolis, has "become a necessary evil that if we want to track not just our customers and prospects but activities of those who are not yet in our funnel we need some sort of CRM system."

Um, well, yes, they do have their uses.

By "we," Margolis clarifies, "I always meant companies with 50+ employees. In talking to a few solution providers who, like me, have fewer than 10 to 20 employees we struggle to find a solution that is within our budget and doesn't take an enterprise class IT team to implement it."

As do many others. But Margolis found an answer: SugarCRM's open source CRM system.

She's duly impressed with Sugar's enterprise class version for $600 per user per year, and there's also the Professional version for $360 per seat per year, but to really warm her heart, to stand out from the crowd, you have to speak her language: "My personal favorite Sugar's Community version which is FREE, you heard me people, FREE!"

Not that anything in this fallen world is perfect, even free CRM: "Now with the free version there is some development work to be done, which for me means buying my IT friend a case of beer, but for most solution providers is a no-brainer," she notes.

So if you can twiddle bytes or are handy with a motherboard, you might get off easy.

Now free's free, we get that, but what do you get for your, uh, non-money? After all there is work to be done. "I was really impressed with the ability to add multiple products, switch around your interface on the fly with a drag and drop, and to send out marketing campaigns," Margolis says.

She writes approvingly that there are different tabs for Sales, Marketing, Support, Reporting and Administration, "so while you may only have five people working out of their home offices (or a garage), you can operate like a national business."

As long as you keep the IT geek in beer.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Kelly McGuire







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