I have finally settled on a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for my new company, Synchronous Design & Marketing, providing design and marketing solutions for small and medium enterprises in Vancouver, BC. This new system allows me to track clients, projects, new leads, marketing, sales, and task/scheduling online, through my web based CRM solution, Sugar CRM.

I’ve observed many, and tested some, CRMs over the last month or so trying to determine which one to use, and I settled for SugarCRM as my solution. Sugar CRM is a completely open-source commercial-grade CRM, and you can either use it starting at $40/mth on a fully supported/hosted environment, or, if you’re like me, download the software and then install it on your own server. One may ask : “Why would they put a price on it, but allow free downloads anyways?” Well, a complete CRM is not a simple installation – it’s quite a bit more work than installing WordPress, I can tell you that much. Not to mention, to make the rest of the functionality work as well as allow automated upgrades and module installations, there’s a fair bit of server tweaking to do. With the help of solid service from Bluefur Web Hosting (Canada) I managed to get this all up and running, except very few functionalities I have sacrificed due to the fact that I’m not on my dedicated server with root access.

So now you can see why a lot of users would simply opt out to pay the $40/mth (or more, depending on your package) to use their CRM, while the open-source aspect allows over 2,400 developers to collaborate on fixing bugs, as well as creating plug-ins or modules, and also themes. This is the best of two worlds put together. And that business concept is what intrigued me, and got my attention to begin with.

Now, to the smaller details :

• SugarCRM is clean. It’s design, layout, menu options are all so clean and easy to read, dissect, and implement. It’s perfect for a business that cares only about efficiency. It reduced unnecessary clutter and graphics to a minimum while keeping a very professional look.
• SugarCRM uses very advanced AJAX modules to allow for faster performance of the software online, and it also provides ease of use.
• SugarCRM is a completely web-based solution, with no other plugins or software to install on your computer. That means you can be vacationing, and you can still access your CRM from a hotel computer. You can be at a friend’s place, and when an emergency call comes in, you can get on to your friend’s PC and deal with it.
• SugarCRM is quite powerful at importing data from other sources, mainly Salesforce (which is the most dominant CRM in the market, as far as I know), as well as importing contacts and account information from Comma Delimited Files and vCards. It was quite easy getting my data onto my CRM. I don’t have too many clients to import, but the set-up only took a few hours in total – from installation to data loading.

This will be my new platform for the new 2008 year, and I intend to bring lots of productivity and data-accuracy with this new software.