Overview
Welcome to Sugar Community Edition, a commercial open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.
The Sugar application
Sugar enables organizations to organize, populate, and maintain information efficiently on all aspects of their customer relationships. It provides integrated management of corporate information on customer accounts and contacts, sales leads and opportunities, plus activities such as calls, meetings, and assigned tasks. The system seamlessly blends all the functions required to manage information on many aspects of your business into an intuitive and user-friendly graphical interface.
The system also offers a graphical dashboard to track the sales pipeline, the most successful lead sources, and the month-by-month outcomes for opportunities in the pipeline.
The Sugar community
Sugar is based on an open source project, and therefore, advances quickly through the development and contribution of new features by its supporting community.
Welcome to the community!
Audience
This guide is designed for users and administrators who are new to Sugar, or to CRM and web-based applications.
Feature overview
Sugar consists of modules, each of which represents a specific functional aspect of CRM such as Accounts, Activities, Leads, and Opportunities. For example, the Accounts module enables you to create and manage customer accounts, and the Activities module enables you to create and manage activities related to accounts, opportunities, etc. These modules are designed to help you manage customer accounts through each step of their life cycle, starting with generating and qualifying leads to customer support and resolving reported bugs. Many of these steps are interrelated and as a result, each module displays related information. For example, when you view the details of a particular account, the system also displays the related contacts, activities, opportunities, and bugs. You can view, edit, and create this information.
As an administrator, you have the power to implement access control for these modules. You can customize the look and feel of Sugar across your organization. You can even create new modules if needed.
Core features
Sales Force Automation
- Lead, Contact, and Opportunity management to pursue new business, share sales information, track deal progress, and record deal-related interactions
- Account management capabilities to provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, and status
- Sugar Dashboards to provide real-time information about leads, opportunities, and accounts
Marketing Automation
- Lead management for tracking and cultivating new leads
- Email marketing for touching prospects and customers with relevant offers
- Campaign management for tracking campaigns across multiple channels
- Campaign Wizard to walk users through the process of gathering information such as the marketing channel, targets, and budget needed to execute a campaign effectively
- Campaign reporting to analyze the effectiveness of marketing activities
- Web-to-Lead forms to directly import campaign responses into Sugar and capture leads
Customer Support
- Case management to centralize the service history of your customers and monitor how cases are handled
- Bug tracking to identify, prioritize, and resolve customer issues
Collaboration
- Activity management for emails, tasks, calls, and meetings
- Content syndication to consolidate third-party information sources
Administration
- Edit user settings, views, and layouts quickly in a single location
- Customize the application in Studio to meets the exact needs of your organization
- Create custom modules in Module Builder
