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Sugar CRM. Ever heard of it? It’s like candy for your customers…thus the name entails. It’s a great way to boost sales for your business, retain customers, and actually save money while doing so.

Here are the top 5 features that might make you consider using Sugar:

1. It’s affordable. Their most popular plan – the ‘professional version’ is only $540 per year per user. That’s equivalent to only $45 per month. It has a lower cost of entry and its open platform is cloud-based allowing for it to be cheaper than most on-premise solutions. Needless to say, it’s a cost-effective way to stay engaged with your customers and give them what they love – a little sugar.
2. Options and flexibility. SugarCRM offers customizations galore! It integrates fluidly with many of the current CRM products you may be using. Sugar uses common language, utilizes SOAP and REST API and there’s no hidden fees or limitations which gives you greater control. There’s also a myriad of add-ons that can be used with Sugar. Not to mention…SugarCRM also works in an open environment, giving you more control of your company’s future and saving you money while doing so.
3. It’s social! There’s an Activity Streams dashlet that allows you to see Facebook friends’/fans’ news feeds, see who you should get connected with on LinkedIn, and read tweets of all the people you follow in the dashlet. The platform also lets you add a Twitter handle to a contact or lead and read their tweets directly in the contact or lead record. Lastly, Sugar also has great e-mail integration, letting you sync contacts, calendars and tasks from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Lotus Notes and pretty much any IMAP mail server.
4. Collaboration and Project Management. Sugar delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation, and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities. These capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases. Since project management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.
5. It’s Mobile! Sales teams surely love this feature as they’re often on-the-go. Sugar allows you to access client information from your tablet or Smartphone and also lets you add info in real time. This means that if you’re at an event and encounter a lead, you can seamlessly add their information to Sugar mobile and your sales team can have an e-mail to them in minutes!

For further business improvement ideas please contact Roger Brown from nuOrder Limited, a leading business consultancy working with many award winning clients.
See www.nuOrder.co.uk

Business doesn’t happen, you make it!

The amount of profit you make is due to either your success or failure and ultimately fuels the growth of your business, generates a financial support for the owners and provides for the well being of the staff.

To increase your profits you need to determine factors contributing to your gross profit and your overheads. Gross profit requires you to either expand your sales income while controlling your direct costs, or reduce direct costs to increase gross profit.

WH Smith the high street retailer has pleased the financial markets by delivering lower revenue but with a higher margin %. As they say ‘revenue is for vanity, profit is for sanity, and cash is reality’.

To do this you need to ensure the following:

• You know and understand your market/s and your competitors
• You have full product and/or service knowledge and you are technically capable in managing all aspects of the business
• Your service and/or products are of the highest quality, delivered on time and run in accordance with any legislation or other specifications.
• You apply marketing campaigns that are cost-effective but increase your sales. These include in-house promotions, leaflets, press releases and adverts.

Your business overheads also need to be kept under control and requires you to monitor, review and strategise for the following:

• Business Expenses – keep to an absolute minimum, and ensure that any additional overheads you assume result in increased profitability and/or efficiency.
• Increase Overheads – ensure that you have reviewed the market and established where the best place is to purchase your stock. Reliability and costs need to be justified.
• Assets acquired on finance – Review and check your finance options to see if you can getter a better deal elsewhere or reduce your general loan costs
• Reviews – Many businesses could benefit from a regular review of their telephone and insurance costs. Even bank charges can often be reduced through negotiation or review.
• Credit – Regularly monitor your credit account customers to avoid bad debts occurring and find the best credit card deal relating to your business.

Roger T Brown
Consultant
http://www.nuOrder.co.uk