Company: SugarCRM, Cupertino, CA
Nomination 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 SugarCRM Platform Does the Work to Automate Anything, Accelerate Everything, and Predict What’s Next
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated product or service, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
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- Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 347 words used.
SugarCRM is a challenger brand in the multi-billion-dollar CRM sector. Sugar targets high-growth midmarket companies that often lack the in-house technical expertise and support of larger companies but know that winning is about mixing a killer product and innovative service with an effortless customer experience (CX).
Sugar’s focus on reducing CRM complexity to improve the employee (and customer) experience is an innovation priority. Sugar understands that organizations mired in the muck of outdated systems and data silos cannot move at the speed of change, resulting in lackluster experiences that have customers leaving in droves.
Sugar is dedicated to building a new kind of CRM that helps its customers automate anything, accelerate everything, and predict what’s next to help organizations drive memorable experiences and fuel business growth. Sugar is at the forefront of harnessing AI, ML, and predictive analytics, to help organizations deliver superior CX. It starts with a modern, unified CRM platform that connects all constituents with the same data, easily accessible and loaded with insights that help sellers, marketers, and customer service professionals anticipate and provide customers exactly what they want.
Sugar has made significant investments to bring the SugarPredict AI engine to its full platform portfolio – pioneering pre-configured, out-of-the-box AI for all that drives value from Day One. Sugar continues the expansion of SugarPredict AI capabilities with the addition of sentiment analysis designed to supercharge every sales and service interaction with the power of knowing each customer’s/prospect’s emotional state and intent.
The Sugar cloud-based platform offers low-code/no-code capabilities designed to put change in the hands of non-technical business users. To underscore this commitment, Sugar introduced integrated playbook functionality that supports guided selling and CRM process automation stemming from the acquisition of AddOptify. The no-code toolset enables brands to translate their customer engagement best practices into playbooks to optimize both the employee and the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.
In addition, Sugar launched the new SugarOutfitters software marketplace for on-demand access to more than 200 SugarCRM add-on solutions that help its customers enhance and extend the value of their Sugar platform.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
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Sugar’s 2022 CRM Impact Report reveals that customers are leaving at extraordinary rates and most companies are ill-prepared to counter this trend. The average customer turnover rate is nearly one-third worldwide, while in the U.S., businesses are losing nearly one out of every two customers they gain (47%) – according to the survey of 1,600 global sales and marketing professionals. The study underscores the urgency for sales and marketing leaders to act decisively to combat “The Great Customer Resignation.” With CX as the ultimate measure of churn, AI is coming to the rescue, enabling better experiences, more personalized engagement, more accurate predictions, and better decision-making.
While 9 in 10 companies use AI today, the question is whether they can derive real value from its usage, and how many processes can be improved. Use cases for AI solutions with high adoption include automated emails (44%), account intelligence (40%), conversational AI (36%), lead conversion (33%), and opportunity close prediction (33%). Deploying AI takes advantage of existing CRM data by transforming it into useful information that improves decision-making and predicts customer needs.
Sugar investments in AI are advancing customers from looking in the data rear-view mirror to becoming forward-looking by spotting actionable insights earlier. Sugar’s array of AI-driven solutions speaks to a faster path to innovation for companies to deliver high-definition CX: Eliminating the roadblocks included with traditional CRM systems, removing the busywork that technology should do, and getting rid of blind spots created by siloed data across customer-facing teams.
- If you are nominating a brand-new product or service, state the date on which it was released. If you are nominating a new version of an existing product or service, state the date on which the update was released:
The latest release of the SugarCRM Platform (12.3) became generally available in January 2023. Extending [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] AI and ML across its core platform earned Sugar’s recognition and inclusion as one of ten top vendors in the Gartner Emerging Tech: Tech Innovators for Intelligent CRM Applications Report for its SugarPredict offering.
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- 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 (up to 350 words):
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Sugar was recognized as a winner in the prestigious CRM Watchlist, an annual evaluation conducted by noted industry analyst Paul Greenberg, President of The 56 Group, LLC; was named in Nucleus Research’s "Hot Companies to Watch in 2023” and named an Exemplary vendor in the 2023 Customer Experience Management Value Index, from Ventana Research.
Sugar customers are also recognizing the company’s excellence. With a Net Promoter Score of 90+, customer satisfaction for Sugar is far above the industry average for SaaS and CRM solutions. Sugar continues to rank a midmarket leader for CRM by G2. Customer reviews on G2 point to Sugar as the choice for “flexible, easy-to-use and customizable CRM.”
Included in the Gartner Emerging Tech: Tech Innovators for Intelligent CRM Applications report is a Sugar customer story for rfxcel, a leading pharmaceutical supply chain “track and trace” software organization. The company leverages SugarPredict to increase the accuracy of its sales forecasting and has found the deployment of AI and ML to be seamless. Additional benefits noted include:
- Seven times out of 10, SugarPredict accurately predicted that a sales opportunity was “more likely” to be won.
- The algorithms predicted close to 100% of the time when an opportunity looked like a poor selling opportunity, and eventually, the deal was marked as lost, which saved wasted selling cycles.
In addition, Sugar customer Casabaca Toyota won a prestigious 2022 Constellation Research SuperNova Award for driving “Next-Generation Customer Experience” leveraging the Sugar platform to drive digital transformation.
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