Sugar CRM

548 Market St PMB 59423
San Francisco,  CA  94104-5401

United States
877-842-7276
www.sugarcrm.com

• Booth: S34141

 Press Releases

• SugarCRM Acquires sales-i to Enhance Customer Sales Profitability, Drive Intelligent Account Management (Jul 30, 2024)

  Longstanding Partnership Paves the Way to Reach More Customers as the Combination Unlocks the Value of a Company’s ERP and CRM Data 

  SAN FRANCISCO – May 22, 2024 – SugarCRM, provider of the award-winning intelligence-driven sales automation platform, today announced it has acquired sales-i, a leading provider of a revenue intelligence solution that helps businesses maximize their revenue and profitability. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

  The acquisition comes nearly a year after Sugar announced a partnership with sales-i to improve business-to-business (B2B) sales performance by delivering AI-powered revenue intelligence that leverages the data of a business’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and CRM. This combination provides businesses with actionable insights that improve sales, marketing, service and support, resulting in greater revenue and higher levels of retention.  

  “We are bringing together two great companies with complementary products, a shared vision for customer success, and experience and expertise at using machine learning, AI, and generative AI to unlock the value of front-office and back-office data,” said Craig Charlton, CEO of Sugar. “This combination delivers actionable, intelligent sales strategies that will improve revenue, maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction and produce more efficient sales people.”

  Paul Black, Founder and CEO of sales-i, added, “The partnership of sales-i and SugarCRM has enabled companies to gain unrivaled insights into their customer buying behavior. Together, we’ll expand our capabilities and accelerate development processes that will benefit customers and create a significant market impact.”

  “The current business focus on margin and the increasing adoption of subscription and usage-based pricing models are changing the economics of business,” says Stephen Hurrell, Research Director in the Office of Revenue at ISG’s Ventana Research. “Relying only on CRM data sells account management short. Upselling and cross selling to the same customers is more profitable than finding and selling to new customers, but it requires a fuller understanding of your customer gained from building and sustaining a long-term relationship. This new announcement from SugarCRM seeks to address this need across many types of industries and enterprises.”

  While many businesses have plenty of sales data, the challenge is sifting through large volumes of data to find cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, or simply make sure existing customers meet their buying commitments.

  To address the challenge, the two companies have been working together, with sales-i serving as a sales revenue intelligence tool that captures product, price, quantity, and frequency insights from the customers’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) software system. The tool is able to share data with the SugarCRM solution, and the pair provides customers with specific insights on the trends between the organization and the customer at their fingertips.

  The combination will allow the combined company of more than 550 employees worldwide to help customers unlock the value of their ERP data. Some core benefits include:

  • Allowing customers to see, interpret, and act on their own customer data using the power of artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Serving as an intelligent account management system that will support companies that have large-scale management requirements
  • Letting customers outmaneuver new competitive threats by unlocking the value of their existing data, while reducing churn
  • Delivering actionable insights that increase sales and marketing efficiencies and effectiveness at a lower cost

  There are additional benefits as well. Sales-i customers will benefit from being part of a global company that will enable them to do business anywhere in the world. They will also be able to seamlessly leverage more advanced sales, marketing, and service automation, helping them grow sales even more efficiently. SugarCRM customers will have the opportunity to unlock the rich sales data stored in their ERP systems utilizing the revenue intelligence capabilities of the sales-i solution.

  As a result, both customer bases will benefit from the combined investment SugarCRM and sales-i have made in AI, machine learning and generative AI technologies. This will enable Sugar to deliver innovative intelligent solutions more quickly.

  Customers have lauded the Sugar and sales-i partnership. Beth Freeman, Executive Vice President of FSIoffice, an independent office supply dealer in Charlotte, N.C., said one of the biggest benefits of the Sugar-sales-i integration is increased sales efficiency.

  “Integrating sales-i with SugarCRM has been a game-changer for our team, putting valuable sales insights right at our fingertips,” said Freeman. “I love that we can combine soft data (such as customer interactions) with hard data (such as purchase history) to better serve our customers’ needs. We are also more efficient, targeted, and effective in our outreach since sales-i unlocks insight into buying behavior and, in turn, prompts our sales team in Sugar with specific product placement suggestions.  It saves us so much time, especially as we onboard new salespeople.”

  In February, sales-i was named a winner of a 2024 SugarCRM Partner Award based on partner performance, customer outcomes, and commitment to Sugar’s product and service standards.

  To learn more about the news, register for the webinar on Wednesday, May 29, at 8 a.m. PT/11a.m. ET/4 p.m. BST.

  About SugarCRM

  SugarCRM offers software solutions that help marketing, sales, and service teams reach peak efficiency through better automation, data, and intelligence so they can achieve a real-time, reliable view of each customer. Sugar’s platform provides leading technology in the sales automation, marketing automation, and customer service fields with one goal in mind: to make the hard things easier.

  Thousands of companies in over 120 countries rely on Sugar by letting the platform do the work. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sugar is backed by Accel-KKR.

  For more information about SugarCRM, visit: www.sugarcrm.com.

  Media Contacts:
  Erin Lutz
  Lutz Public Relations and Marketing (for SugarCRM)
  erin@lutzpr.com
  949.293.1055

  Sarita Kincaid
  Vice President, Corporate Communications, SugarCRM
  sarita.kincaid@sugarcrm.com
  408.913.2090

• Marketing for Manufacturers: 6 Ways to Make the Most of Your Resources (Jul 30, 2024)

  As the saying goes, “You need to spend money to make money.” But in an industry like manufacturing, where value propositions can get very complicated very quickly, what’s the best way to spend your marketing dollars? 

  That’s certainly a loaded question if we’ve ever heard one, but it’s a question that every manufacturing marketing team must answer nonetheless. 

  Understanding the Evolving Landscape of Marketing for Manufacturers 

  In order to determine the best way to spend your marketing dollars, you first need to understand the evolving marketing landscape, both in general and for manufacturers specifically. 

  Looking at the big picture, marketing is changing. What many people once thought of as more of a “fluffy” role within the organization is now becoming a strategic arm of the business that can be tied to quantitative metrics like revenue.  

  Marketing for manufacturers is changing a lot too. Alongside the changes brewing in the broader marketing spectrum, more and more manufacturers are recognizing the need to get ultra-targeted due to the tight-knit and complicated nature of the manufacturing industry. Additionally, because many manufacturing organizations tend to have smaller marketing teams, it’s important to make the most of limited resources. 

    

  Investing in Marketing for Manufacturers: 6 Ways to Make the Most of Your Resources 

  In order to evolve alongside these changes in both the marketing and manufacturing spaces, your team needs to make very strategic investments. So where exactly should you focus your efforts and your dollars? Here’s our advice: 

  1. Build a Solid Foundation with Marketing Automation (integrated with CRM)

  A marketing automation platform (integrated with your CRM system) is the bedrock of any strong digital marketing program. With the right set up, a marketing automation platform can help eliminate manual processes, make it easy to share data across teams, improve alignment between sales and marketing, better understand and market to buyer personas so that you know the best ways to target different customers, introduce lead scoring to properly nurture leads, run personalized campaigns across channels (e.g. email) to meet the demands of today’s digital buyers, and improve reporting to understand the results of all those efforts. 

  

  2. Invest in Your Digital Front Door (aka your Website)

  Your website and everything that lives on it, most notably your blog, is your company’s digital front door. It’s where people go to learn more about your company throughout their buying journey and it plays a critical role in both attracting and nurturing leads.  

  As a result, it’s important to invest in your website by undertaking SEO efforts and building out a blog that you can use to attract new leads and educate and build trust with prospects and customers alike. 

  

  3. Interact with Customers Directly via Social Media Management

  A solid social media marketing strategy is a great way to interact with customers directly, whether it’s by promoting new content or company news, answering customer questions, or running creative brand awareness campaigns.  

  To get this social media marketing right, you need a social media management platform that can consolidate all of your efforts into a single place. Specifically, a social media management platform that makes it easy to send posts to all of your social networks, engage in social listening so that you can understand what your customers are talking about and how they’re engaging with your company, and manage social interactions with your customers.  

  

  4. Spread the Word with Paid Advertising

  While organic activities like SEO and social media marketing can go a long way, in order to really spread the word, you may need to turn to paid advertising, both digital and print. Paid advertising through display ad networks and Google Ads is always helpful, but in the manufacturing space, trade publications are extremely important too. It pays to invest in ads in both the digital and print versions of these publications given the clout they hold. 

   5. Break Down Complex Topics with Webinars

  Webinars are a valuable marketing tool for breaking down complex topics, and given how complicated the manufacturing space can get, the two are typically a good fit. Invest in hosting webinars (either on your own or with partners or customers) so that you can dive deep into what it is you do and truly demonstrate to your target customers the benefits you can deliver. 

   6. Bolster your Resources with Managed Services

  Finally, invest in managed services to bolster everything your team can do on this list and beyond. Managed services gives your team a boost by bringing on expert resources who can help run the in’s and out’s of your marketing automation program and bring activities like those on this list to life. With the help of an expert partner, you can maximize your investment in your marketing automation platform and see better results faster, all while freeing your team to focus on the bigger picture. 

   

  Greasing the Wheels of Success 

  Marketing for manufacturers has never been easy, and despite all the changes happening in the space today, that’s one thing that will never change. But with the right strategy in place and the right investments to bring that strategy to life, success is possible. It’s simply a matter of knowing where to focus your resources to best reach your customers, achieve your goals and see the highest returns on your investments. 

  Interested in learning more about Manufacturing and how having a fully integration CRM and MAP system can unite your front- and back- office needs? Download out recent guide, “Connecting the Manufacturing Value Chain”.  

• How Modern CRMs Are Removing Tech Challenges in Manufacturing (Jul 30, 2024)

  Over the past few years, employees across all industries have been forced to adapt and learn to use more technically complex solutions. Many enterprises adopt a remote-first workplace, but with a trend towards digitalization, they sometimes overcomplicate their tech stacks and make it more difficult for employees to keep up with each system, application, and integration.

  Especially in industries like manufacturing, where sales cycles are long, and operations can get complex, front and back offices operate on separate systems and tools, the lack of tech-savvy salespeople can leave marks on each interaction’s success. However, digitalization doesn’t have to be complicated, and with the adoption of a robust yet user-friendly CRM solution, your salespeople can achieve success without turning into tech wizards. Here’s how.

  WHAT WE'LL COVER:

  • Pick A User-Friendly CRM
  • Process Automation Is Critical
  • Analytics and Reporting On a Whim
  • Integration Capabilities: Manufacturers’ Best Friend
  • SugarCRM: Helping Manufacturing Businesses Overcome Tech Challenges

  Pick A User-Friendly CRM

  CRM adoption and implementation can become complicated, especially when implementation managers and other stakeholders can’t bring end-users on board. Sometimes, this happens because learning how to operate a new solution is seen as additional work on top of their regular workload.

  However, robust CRMs nowadays have simplified a lot of processes, and on top of that, they focus on providing a simple, practical experience to end-users. User-friendly interfaces have become a tell-tale sign of a robust CRM with higher adoption rates post-implementation. Such applications make it easier for less tech-savvy salespeople to navigate and utilize the system without extensive training, helping manufacturers overcome one of their biggest challenges, finding technically qualified salespeople.

  Process Automation Is Critical

  While ease of use is critical in overcoming manufacturers’ challenge of finding tech-savvy salespeople, finding a tool where you can offload the tasks that demand a more technical background is also vital. Business Process Automation is one key indicator of a modern CRM that can take over some reoccurring sales processes without human assistance.

  CRMs with sturdy BPM protocols in place can help you streamline modern business processes in a variety of industries, such as:

  • Approval management
  • Call triaging
  • Sales processes
  • Case escalation
  • Etc.

  

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  Apart from eliminating human labor in specific scenarios, CRMs with precise BPM capabilities in place also offer a series of advantages:

  • Optimize customer-facing processes
  • Implement best practices across all departments
  • Boost effectiveness by automating work-intensive repetitive tasks

  Sugar customer Rtcr, was one of many customers who were able to streamline customer support and optimize their customer service processes:

  

  Your Single Source of Truth

  Modern CRMs not only reduce the burden of having to find tech-savvy people, but they also offer your teams, regardless of the department, a full view of customers and prospects. CRMs today can centralize customer information, making it easily accessible to all team members. With more details, customer-facing teams can improve interactions with simplified technical knowledge.

  Having a single source of truth will simplify customer-facing interactions and accelerate internal operations. With cohesive and consistent data sets, companies can improve their timely response to customer and prospect inquiries, boosting closing rates, internal transparency, and accountability.

  Customers Super General and GECO were able to improve their sales and marketing efforts by combing the two platforms together for all Go-to-Market (GTM) teams:

  

  Analytics and Reporting On a Whim

  Having powerful analytics and reporting capabilities eliminates the need for salespeople to generate these independently. Without CRM solutions, forecasting, analytics, and reporting can be subject to human error, data inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or a lack of complete data.

  For example, Sugar dashboards and reports are built to automate these tasks, offering teams accurate and up-to-date insights into leads, opportunities, sales, support cases, and more. Without requiring salespeople to be highly technical, these capabilities allow them to:

  • Extract and monitor valuable KPIs across the sales funnel and monitor changes in the funnel in real-time.
  • Make data-backed decisions, thanks to easy customization capabilities. Salespeople don’t need advanced technical knowledge. They just have to predefine the settings they need, what views interest them the most, and filter their reports and dashboards according to their needs.
  • Generate reports and dashboards that fit your needs at any time without turning into a tech wizard of a data analyst.

  

  GUIDE

  2024 CRM Buyer's Guide

  Learn how choosing the right CRM can lead sales leadership to create greater visibility.

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  Customer Alto-Shaam was able to benefit from Sugar Sell and Sugar Market’s combined dashboard to not only optimize the customer journey but also save countless hours, leading to an increase in deals closed:

  

  Integration Capabilities: Manufacturers’ Best Friend

  Modern manufacturers thrive on cross-departmental integrations. Such capabilities allow them to enjoy their whole tech stack from a central hub without switching views or applications. Besides, in enterprises where CRM and ERP tools are seamlessly integrated, salespeople gain a full view of their front and back-office operations, allowing them to thoroughly plan sales interactions while keeping customer expectations realistic.

  The power of SugarCRM and sales-i together was able to help customer FSIoffice drastically increase sales efficiency:

  

  SugarCRM: Helping Manufacturing Businesses Overcome Tech Challenges

  SugarCRM and our partners are working on simplifying complex processes for our customers, streamlining their operations, and boosting revenue. To learn how, watch our Unlocking Manufacturing Growth webinar our read SugarCRM’s and The Manufacturer’s Unlocking Manufacturing Growth whitepaper.

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