Most businesses may want to opt for an Open Source CRM. However, there is only one open source CRM that competes with more expensive options. SugarCRM is hands down the best option for almost any company looking to grow! It is backed by a large community of developers. It comes with a vast library of SugarCRM themes and SugarCRM plugins. And thanks to SkySilk’s use of Turnkey Linux, you can get SugarCRM hosting!
What Is A CRM?
A CRM, or Customer Relationship Manager, is a type of software that businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions while keeping track of data throughout the customer life cycle. The goal is to improve business relationships with customers in order to drive conversions more effectively. CRMs are a powerful tool for any business to use. Combined with business cloud computing, using a CRM is a MUST for businesses seeking rapid growth.
Why An Open Source CRM?
Open source software is powerful, moderated, community-driven applications and code built to bring the best possible products to people completely free. They are customizable, flexible, adaptable, and extremely powerful when integrated into an existing business model.
Additionally, a powerful feature of any open source CRM is the vast amount of community support. There is a wealth of knowledge openly available to all users. Because an open source community comes together, they create, shape, customize, and configure the tool. Consequently, they leave behind a public listing of how they changed it and what worked best for them.
Why SugarCRM?
SugarCRM is the most popular open source CRM available to date. It is completely free and comes with a large community of backers and supporters that use it themselves. It allows businesses to build customer relationships with an empowering and adaptable open source CRM. Additionally, they are the industry’s leading company, with a focus exclusively on customer relationship management. Sugar helps build a unique customer experience through great customer relationships and deep analytic data.
It provides an easy-to-use CRM interface focused on features that matter and nothing more. Sugar currently receives the highest Net Promoter Score across all major CRM vendors (NPS of 25 in 2017). It easily integrates with your existing IT and customer service infrastructure. You can also quickly customize it to automate your unique business processes.
Open Source CRM Bells and Whistles: SugarCRM Themes & SugarCRM Plugins
Sugar comes with a vast repository of themes and plugins built by the community and Sugar specific developers. SugarCRM themes are intuitive and help shape the tool for your everyday needs. Meanwhile, the Sugar plugins are immensely powerful. Consequently, they help expand on the functionality to really customize it to your personal businesses requirements.
The Bells: SugarCRM Themes
SugarCRM themes are a great way to build a customized, comfortable space for you to work with every day. There are many Sugar theme developers that constantly release both free and premium Sugar themes that can fit specific needs.
The Whistles: SugarCRM Plugins
When the layout of the SugarCRM themes falls short, there are the Sugar plugins to pick up the slack. As we have mentioned above, Sugar is an open source CRM. Sugar has a community of developers using the platform every day who are constantly looking for ways to expand functionality while finding new use cases. Developers can create custom scripts and functions to expand the functionality of Sugar. Additionally, they often release their code to the public as either a free or premium Sugar plugin!
Using SugarCRM & Other Apps to Optimize Your User Experience
Sugar is a fantastic tool as we’ve discussed to really grow your business. But we’ve only scratched the surface of how it can be used. This open source CRM is great when paired with other Turnkey Linux apps that will help grow your business. It is also fantastic to look at a few other third party private apps. A few big options to combine with Sugar are Magento, WordPress, MailChimp, among many others.
SugarCRM & Magento for eCommerce
With the use of a SugarCRM plugin, you can connect it to eCommerce websites like Magento seamlessly. With the use of the Sugar Magento Connector, you can use Sugar to take action in Magento. This plugin allows you to sync data from Magento, directly into Sugar. You can also create leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and related products directly from your Sugar dashboard.
SugarCRM & WordPress
There is a fantastic WordPress Plugin called WordPress to Sugar Lead that connects Sugar beautifully with your WordPress site! Additionally, this plugin provides a Widget Form anywhere you want for easy, fast, and hassle-free Sugar Leads. The plugin is simple yet very powerful. It dynamically generates a Lead-form on a Widget, based on your choice of fields, and then maps them automatically to your Sugar dashboard.
SugarCRM & MailChimp
You can market to the right people at the right time by segmenting your MailChimp subscribers based on Sugar data. SugarChimp automatically syncs your data between Sugar and MailChimp so that you never have to worry about it. MailChimp will always have the most up-to-date information, so you can be confident when you send the next campaign that you have the latest and greatest data.
SugarCRM Hosting & Easy Install SugarCRM
SkySilk offers many advantages for SugarCRM hosting. For example, we offer you a Linux VPS for you to use for SugarCRM hosting. However, you can also use Sugar in conjunction with several other great Turnkey Linux apps that will really help boost your business!
