SugarCRM - Best New Version of a CRM Suite - Midmarket

Company: SugarCRM, Cupertino, CA
Entry Submitted By:Lutz PR & Marketing
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.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: CRM Suite - Midmarket - New Version

Nomination Title: The Sugar Platform Does the Work to Empower Midmarket CRM Success

Up for nomination is the latest release of the SugarCRM Platform (version Q4), which became generally available in October 2021. The new version includes major new capabilities and AI-driven CRM innovations (SugarPredict) which are fully integrated across the platform, including its comprehensive portfolio of solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service teams.

Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (350 words).

SugarCRM is a challenger brand in the multi-billion-dollar CRM sector. Sugar targets high-growth midmarket companies; these companies lack the in-house technical expertise/support of larger companies but know that winning is about mixing a killer product or innovative service with an effortless, high-definition customer experience.

Sugar is a leader in addressing the unique needs of the midmarket by providing out-of-the-box value and making AI accessible to all from Day One. SugarCRM is a modern, robust, AI-driven cloud platform that provides a full customer experience solution that unites marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Sugar recently expanded its portfolio with the acquisition of Node Inc. and integrated its AI technology (SugarPredict) throughout the platform. Unlike other AI-enabled CRM systems, only SugarPredict is pre-integrated and included as a basic service without the traditional time/cost/technical expertise required to leverage AI – a key benefit to midmarket companies.

A key differentiator is that SugarPredict augments internal customer data with externally sourced data covering millions of companies and contacts. This augmented data significantly improves the results of AI analysis and enables it to identify patterns and correlations that wouldn’t be possible with the internal CRM data alone.

SugarPredict Key Features:

Identifying customers most likely to churn, giving precious runway to remediate and engage with customers strategically.
Predicting likelihood to convert from lead scoring models, removing the guesswork of which leads to pursue first.
Recommending add-on products during the right phase of the customer journey, increasing average deal size.
Ascertaining marketing attribution and contribution to closed business to maximize marketing investments.
Improving customer engagement models through predictive case routing and contextual data in real time to empower customer service professionals to focus on the most important issues first.

The Sugar platform enables businesses to create profitable customer relationships by delivering highly relevant and personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. Together with SugarPredict, sales, marketing, and customer service professionals can work smarter, not longer, with machine learning and predictive analytics improving the odds of success.

Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (350 words).

Over its most recent fiscal year (February 2021 to January 2022), Sugar saw a 120 percent uptick in orders for Sugar’s unified platform empowering sales, marketing, and service professionals. The company also recorded 108 percent YoY growth for Sugar Sell, its flagship solution. With a Support NPS of 90+, customer satisfaction for Sugar is far above the industry average for SaaS and CRM solutions. Additional standout performance includes:

Sugar is noted by Nucleus Research for offering a “more functionally complete solution than other CRM vendors that emphasize the mid-market segment.” Sugar’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 2022.

Further illustrating traction with customers, Sugar was named a Champion in the 2021 CRM Emotional Footprint report from SoftwareReviews, achieving the highest score of all ranked companies. With a CX score of 8.6, Sugar vaulted to first place in the rankings.

The report, based on customer reviews, quantifies the value that 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%). Sugar also secured top scores for overall customer service, and 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 midmarket leader for CRM by G2 for the past 22 consecutive quarters, in addition to a “Leader” in the Overall CRM and “High Performer” in the Enterprise CRM grid reports, among other accolades. 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.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (250 words).

Research from Sugar 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 midmarket companies an average of $5.5M per year each. 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 and marketing 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. This may be why 88% said they expect to increase their use of AI to augment more of their existing CRM processes within the next 24 months.

Technology must rescue business professionals from the intense manual labor of entering data in the system and yet make more data readily available to help them make better, faster decisions that result in revenue growth for the organization. Sugar recognized it was time for change and is democratizing AI for companies of all sizes to make the hard things easier for sales, marketing, and customer service teams – no blind spots, no busy work, and no roadblocks.

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