Sugar Sell (formerly SugarCRM) has a wealth of features that any organization would want from a customer relationship management system. For starters, it allows users to easily find and organize leads or customers with a wide variety of options. I primarily use Sugar Sell as a recruiting administrator, and once I took the time to learn how the software works, I was able to master its robust search engine. It allows users to take detailed notes on a lead's location and contact information, as well as create unique recruitment profiles for each of them. This feature will enable recruiters in my department to add key details about a lead's employment history, such as the previous year's sales volume or the wound that makes them consider leaving their current employer. Sugar Sell also allows users to easily schedule future calls or emails with any lead within the system. These calls can even be created by one user and assigned to another, which is extremely handy for a department as hectic and with as high of a turnover rate as mine.
Outside of leads, Sugar Sell allows users to create custom email templates that can not only be instantly sent to any lead with an email address on file but are also available to be used by anyone in the department. Sugar Sell also allows users to create customized reports, giving our organization's supervisors access to key data metrics, such as how many new leads my department sourced each quarter. Sugar Sell's report system allows users to create, edit, and run these reports quickly and even allows them to be saved for later use. Overall, Sugar Sell has a generous amount of features that streamline the process of organizing a company's data on its current and prospective customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Despite the wealth of content it offers, Sugar Sell's user interface can often be unintuitive and frustrating. This is mainly because Sugar Sell was not designed for recruiting, though my organization forced my department to adopt it in the name of internal consistency. Sugar Sell has by far the most unintuitive user interface I have ever encountered in my time utilizing various software for Indoff, Inc.'s recruiting department. The most recurring problem concerns its lack of an automatic save function. It is downright laughable that a piece of professional software sold in 2022 still requires users to manually click a "Save" button every time they want to record their progress on anything within the program. While Sugar Sell does notify users before leaving a tab to click the "Save" button to prevent losing their progress, a far simpler solution would be to enable automatic saving. I understand that the intent is to prevent unintended changes to pre-existing leads, templates, etc. Still, more often than not, users attempting to change anything within Sugar Sell know precisely what they want to edit and do not need the reminder. Thus, the required manual saving is far more often a hindrance than not. The issue is made worse because the "Save" button is right next to the "Cancel" button, often causing users to delete all of the work they were attempting to save. This lack of automatic saving is even more baffling after having switched from my organization's previous CRM, Goldmine, which is an ancient piece of software that still saves a user's work automatically. The lack of other features that have been standard elsewhere for ages now, such as a dark mode, is also a glaring flaw.
Furthermore, the process of migrating all of our organization's information from Goldmine to Sugar Sell was not seamless. Many leads and templates were either lost or changed beyond recognition in the transition between CRMs. They needed to be rebuilt from the ground up by my department, which took considerable time and focus away from other duties. If you are switching from something else to Sugar Sell, your mileage may vary, but do be wary of the possibility of issues like this coming up. Once migrated over, Sugar Sell's method of organizing these leads made it very difficult to simply manage them alphabetically, though we did eventually figure out how to do it. Furthermore, while Sugar Sell's flexible call and email scheduling options are appreciated, its calendars are not. Clicking anywhere on the calendar screen other than the month's numerical dates immediately defaults the calendar from the current year to the year 1900. I have no idea why their calendars go back that far, and it serves absolutely no purpose other than to frustrate users, and this happens to me every single day. Scheduling and assigning calls is often time-consuming in general, with basic functions requiring far more clicks than they ever did with Goldmine. Another questionable UI design is that, when scheduling a call, Sugar Sell sets the default status to "incoming" instead of "outgoing", which we need to manually change every single time. Why on earth scheduling a time for an incoming call is Sugar's default setting is beyond me. Once a call has been scheduled, Sugar Sell does offer a feature to remind users 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time, which can be useful, but for some reason, the feature is on by default when it really should not be. Once Sugar reminds you of an upcoming call, everything else in the browser is immediately frozen until the notification is dismissed, which often interrupts other work. As is tradition with Sugar Sell, this is a smart feature executed terribly, with zero regard for how their user interface interacts with users on a day-to-day basis. Also, once a list of calls or meetings has been made, users are required to manually move each individual call to another date when schedules change. The lack of a blanket "move all" feature for a list of calls or meetings seems like a no-brainer and is yet another feature that we enjoyed with Goldmine Often, users in my department are multitasking, so having to focus so much when simply scheduling a call can be frustrating. Overall, Sugar Sell's generous options are often offset by its baffling and user-unfriendly interface design choices. While I can't speak to its functionality with sales, I can safely say that after over a year of daily use, from a recruiting standpoint, using Sugar Sell has been a disappointing experience. I would advise an organization using Sugar Sell which may be considering expanding its use to other departments to think otherwise. If my department had the option to resume using Goldmine, we would happily return to it and never look back. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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Great tool for my job
Easy to configure, works on Mobile
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SugarCRM allows a very good management of your sales and distribution processes but also of further processes like invoice processes due to the high flexibility respective the ability to customization. Hereby it is possible for an admin to provide lots of changes and adjustments so that there is no need for an IT-consultant for every single change in the system.
You can not also build up your own customer relationship managementsystem in a sandbox environment but also your own controlling tools and forecast reports (e.g. about upcoming sale opportunities) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
SugarCRM has no option that allows you to restore deleted data in an easy way in the standard version (e.g. in the SugarCRM Cloud Edition without any plugins).
The "programming language" which is used in the SugarCRM Backend respective in the so called "Studio" is quite difficult to learn when you are not into programming at all. The given examples in the studio to generate calculated fields and to provided logics to your customized frontend are not always helpful. However, there is a good internet community that provides helpful solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like Sell's user-friendly interface, powerful automation features, and centralised customer data that make it easier to manage accounts and track customer health. The customisable dashboards and robust reporting tools help you make data-driven decisions, while automation saves time and ensures no client is overlooked. Plus, its integration capabilities streamline workflows, making your team more efficient in driving customer success and satisfaction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Advanced Reporting & Analytics: Although the reporting tools are powerful, more advanced analytics features like predictive modeling or deeper insights into customer behavior could be beneficial for teams focused on long-term success and strategy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Optimising new account processes and client management functionality allowed us to be more efficient, automated, and capable of collecting valuable data and customer information to create a high-definition customer experience.
The BPM is so flexible and allowed us to set up any combination of automated processes, and this alone has been vital in helping us make so many time-saving changes to how we are working.
Action buttons! When these were introduced this again was a game changer for some repetitive tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
When you have lots of dashboards it's difficult to find the correct one, so the ability to create your own logical groups would be very useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We started using SugarCRM when it was the (no longer available) open-source community version. It was free and customizable but soon, we needed more features which ultimately brought us to using Sugar Sell. I like that (as an Admin), I can fully customize the modules, fields, layouts, etc, without needing any developer knowledge. Sugar Support is also excellent at helping with any issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sugar Sell uses a workflow/process manager that is super particular. I like that it has more capabilities, but it also is such a pain to build for what used to be a simple workflow in the older versions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We appreciate Sugar Sell's flexibility and the ease with which it can adapt to our needs. We have been able to cobfugyre e a lot of modules and fields to better adapt to our daily business. We have been using Sugar for 10+ years and it has kept improving constantly. Version 13 in particular, with it's new look and feel, has brought a tremendous improvement in user-friendliness. We are looking forward to trying AI-powered features, in particular for predictive analytics Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There is very little to complain about. Since reporting is key to our daily activity, we would welcome more advanced reporting capabilities, such as the possibility to add more than just 1 data series to charts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Love the flexibility of being able to make changes on the fly. I can update teh application and see the changes right away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Product itself - some of the naming conventions are questionable. Like in the Calls module, instead of a call status being set to Answered (which doesn't exist), it's set to HELD. Who uses this nomenclature?
But it was easy to change the description we see from HELD to Answered without it affecting the background application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like how easy it is to enter leads, nourish them and track everything that happens with them and then the ease of converting them into contacts and later on Opportunities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Currently we find the notifications / process definitions a bit limiting. You can only easily send out emails to the assigned user / users manager but no way of using other custom fields tied to the user module. In stead you need to created a bunch of different flows for the custom user fields in order for them to also get a notification email. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sugar Sell has recently become our CRM and what can I say !
The SugarCRM team has been really helpful in making the data migration process smooth and efficient.
The platform itself is very user-friendly, provides a great number of features from automations to integration with other softwares such as financial software or HRIS.
Most of the features are fairly easy to use and understand even for non technical staff which is always enjoyable, I also particularly appreciate how easy it is to create insightful and precise reports and dashboards for the teams.
So far so good ! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We are still very early in our Sugar Sell adventure but one thing that I wish was a little more optimized is the fact that on each module/record there's a lot of data displayed and most of the time you have to scroll and/or open multiple tabs to find information.
But I know that the SugarCRM team is working on these issues for future releases, which is why I am not too bothered by this at the moment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My two favorite capabilites of sugar is the flexible configuration to our business needs and the ease of data extraction. We have made custom modules and process definitions that have helped streamline flows in our business. The best part is as admin I had the full power of creating these myself without having to look for a seperate product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The hardest part is troubleshooting. There are a couple bugs in the system that will break your logical thinking of how something may work. Luckily, since Sugar Sell is such a flexible tool there is usually a workaround. And sometimes when trying to find a fix online, there's not a lot of information or depth in how to solve. For most of these issues, we can either post in our Support Portal or in online forums for support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like most is the customer customer support. They never failed me whenever I have issues or something I don't know about Sugar. I should say, I am their number fan. I also like the Admin side where the interface is easy to use. We are using frequently, like everyday because this is our data base, sales process and lead process are taking place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's difficult to find Integartion that matches our needs. We always have to rely on Codes if ever we want fancy customizations. I hope there would an improvement on drag and drop feature and it will be a lot of help for an admin like me. I think, that's what most of the CRM nowadays. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
