SugarCRM - Best Relationship Management Solution

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2021, Click to Enter The 2022 American Business Awards

Company: SugarCRM, Cupertino, CA
Company Description: SugarCRM is how marketing, sales, and service teams finally get a clear picture of each customer to help businesses reach new levels of performance and predictability. Sugar is the CRM platform that makes the hard things easier. Thousands of companies in over 120 countries rely on Sugar to achieve high-definition CX by letting the platform do the work. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Sugar is backed by Accel-KKR. For more information about SugarCRM, visit: www.sugarcrm.com.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Relationship Management Solution

Nomination Title: SugarCRM's Sugar Sell and SugarPredict

Sugar Sell (version 10.3) was released in January 2021 and SugarPredict (launched on January 15, 2021) is a major new capability that is included with Sugar Sell, providing the first data-fueled AI for CRM.

Sugar Sell is a sales automation solution, with features for: lead, opportunity, account and contact management; reporting and dashboards; product catalogue and quote management; sales forecasting; and Sugar BPM for automating lead routing, quote approvals, customer email notifications.

Available with Sugar Sell is SugarPredict, providing data-fueled AI for CRM. SugarPredict is the AI “secret sauce” for CRM and has given birth to a new breed of sales professionals that is data-driven as opposed to working from luck or “gut feel.” SugarPredict is pre-integrated and included as a basic service without the time, cost, and technical expertise typically required to leverage AI.

SugarPredict takes the guesswork out of lead prioritization, lead Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) alignment, and opportunity-to-close-won scoring. SugarPredict analyzes historical account, deal, and company data to accurately predict which leads are most likely to become customers. Lead scoring is based on similarity to historical conversions (converted leads or closed-to-won opportunities), while ICP matching identifies leads that are similar to a company’s historically successful customer segments. A key differentiator is that SugarPredict fuels internal customer data with externally-sourced data covering millions of companies and contacts. This datafueling significantlyimproves the results of AI analysis and enables it to identify patterns and correlations that wouldn’t be possible with the internal data alone.

SugarPredict Key Features:

  • Identifying customers most likely to churn, giving precious runwayto remediate and engage with customers strategically
  • Predicting likelihood to convert from lead scoring models
  • Insight-driven forecasting and prescriptive guidance for higher quota attainment and sale close monitoring
  • Recommending add-on products during the right phase of the customer journey increasing average deal size
  • Ascertaining marketing attribution and contribution to closed business
  • Improving customer engagement models through predictive case routing and contextual data in real time to empower customer service professionals

Sugar Sell enables businesses to create profitable customer relationships by delivering highly relevant, personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. Together with SugarPredict, sales professionals can work smarter not longer, with machine learning and predictive analytics improving the odds of success—no blind spots, less busy work, and fewer roadblocks.

Sugar Sell customer wins and renewals, announced by press release since the 10.3 release include Groupe Qérys, Milsoft and SMC Corporation among others.

Sugar has dramatically expanded the breadth of its portfolio with recent acquisitions, and as noted by analysts, including Nucleus Research, offers a "more functionally complete solution than other CRM vendors that emphasize the mid-market segment." Sugar Sell’s cloud-native architecture through AWS, and strong customer momentum reinforce that Sugar is well-positioned to continue its trend of strong growth and new customer acquisition in 2021.

Further illustrating traction with customers, SugarCRM was named a Champion in the 2021 CRM Emotional Footprint report from SoftwareReviews (a division of Info-Tech Research Group), achieving the highest score of all ranked companies. With a CX score of 8.6, SugarCRM vaulted to first place in the rankings, up from fourth place last year.

The report, based solely on customer reviews, quantifies the value relationship vendors provide to their customers. Sugar scored 94% for ‘Plan to Renew’ as reported by customers and ranked second in satisfaction out of fourteen vendors for both ‘Likeliness to Recommend’ (83%) and ‘Cost that is Fair Relative to Value’ (81%). The company also secured top scores for overall customer service. In addition, Sugar received top scores for capabilities and product features, including ‘Ease of Customization’ and ‘Product Strategy and Rate of Improvement.’

Sugar continues to be ranked a mid-market leader for CRM by G2 for the past 19 consecutive quarters. Customer reviews on G2 point to Sugar as the choice for "flexible, easy-to-use and customizable CRM." With a shorter time to value than other leaders, highly ranked features for Sugar Sell include customization, contact management, and contract management.

Research from SugarCRM reveals a customer relationship crisis, largely fueled by a lack of visibility into customer data. Forty-eight percent of sales professionals believe that their CRM systems are unfit for purpose, while customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5M per year each, according to SugarCRM’s new CRM and Sales Impact Report. Besieged with status quo CRM systems, sales leaders are struggling to ensure their sales teams are spending enough time with customers and can access the data required to build and maintain these vital relationships.

Today, too much wasted effort stems from poor sales targeting and inefficient processes. The research finds that sales representatives are only spending 54% of their time selling and that 58% of sales leaders are fatigued and frustrated with the administrative burden placed on their teams, which is taking them away from customer-oriented activities. SugarCRM wanted to help solve this issue for sales professionals, resulting in the launch of the SugarPredict AI engine for Sugar Sell.

According to the research, 88% said they expect to increase their use of AI to augment more of their existing CRM processes within the next 24 months.Another study by Forrester Analyst Kate Leggett reveals that firms will continue to invest in AI to automate tasks and augment CRM users and states that “hyperpersonalization is another big trend in CRM for 2021. Customers now expect engagement that is based on their history, preferences, context, and intent.”