Close CRM vs. Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

Close is my #1 choice for sales teams, both inbound and outbound. The telephony features in Close are exceptional and they lead the Industry in features and innovation. The power dialer increases productivity by cutting down the manual time of physically dialing calls. All calls and interactions including SMS messages are automatically logged to the client's account within the CRM.

Incentivized

The way Community Tax uses Sugar from a users point of view is, it can house a lot of information for either a company or individual with the option of adding additional sub cases . The down side is there are licenses issued per user and 1 per user is not enough because most of the time we are multitasking. Therefore a program/software would be more suitable instead of using a URL.

Incentivized

• You can search for prospects by your activity & notes.
• It helps automate the follow up process.
• It ties cold emailing into a powerful CRM all in one portal.

Incentivized

• Very easy to set up and configure reports among teams. Very customizable and allows me to build reports that illustrate how the team is performing.
• Exporting granular reports into excel for in depth analysis and actionable measures.
• Ability to mass upload lots of information and leads. Important for our team to import lots of information on prospecting clients.

Incentivized

• Minor bugs? - Sometime when I'm replying to an account it attempts to send the email as a different user. Thankfully I've only missed it when sending internal emails!

Incentivized

• The back-end programming (logical hooks) for advanced customizations could benefit from a more user-friendly interface
• General layout could be improved by the addition of modern templates to customize the standard look and feel
• Support communities could be further improved with the addition of videos on how to do specific configuration, modules.

Incentivized

Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.

Close is a simpler platform to use when it comes to initiating email campaigns and managing leads. It has great visibility on opportunities and can be shared with specified users or can also be kept confidential. Close is not for someone who is very new to tools of its kind.

Incentivized

In the overall usage of the system I still give it a 10 out 10 because it's our day to day system that we use here at work. We all have come to love it because it's quick and easy to use. New updates are given to us by our supervisors or managers and it's easy to do new things in the system. The only Issue like I said before that I'm having is that once I put a payment date and want to modify the dates, it will only allow me to eliminate the date but not put a new one back in.

Incentivized

SugarCRM has never been down for us.

No response time issues ever. Very productive due to its ease of use.

Close's support team offers a really good service, they are always willing to help with whatever is needed or arises, they investigate everything they need to find a solution and give an answer as quickly as possible, their attitude is better and their optimism really helps in times of stress, they do a great job in record time.

Incentivized

Because it provides us with the necessary support and with the updates that are being made in the system, it allows us to improve our work experience and makes it easier for the entire team. When requesting some type of support it is effective and immediate and with this, it [does not] stagnate our productivity.

Incentivized

We feel clasroom training is essential to ensure user adoption and buy-in. Video and on-line training courses gave their place but being in a classroom setting enables the Team to make any potential CRM issues visble right up front.

Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.

Study, study, and study. Be prepared to train everyday until all processes are flowing nicely. The CRM is the elephant and figuring out where to take the first bite can be a challenge. But there is only one way to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. Systematic planning is very important.

Incentivized

For a specific sales team, Close performs better sales tracking and email and SMS management, with a fresh and modern interface, making the team's work more comfortable, with a holistic (but not complete) tracking and reporting of the data. Helping to improve the performance of each agent and obtain better results. For all other campaigns we use the predictive dialers mentioned above, Close is better for tracking current customers and for warm leads.

Incentivized

SugarCRM does not stack up well against Bloomreach; we moved away from SugarCRM to Bloomreach, which was much more suited and easily integrated into many different platforms. Bloomreach has a much nicer user interface for debugging and simpler screens for less technical audiences to utilize 3rd. Party support is rarely required, and lots of easy-to-understand documentation is available.

Incentivized

Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.

• Has allowed us to have full visibility into our pipeline
• Has allowed us to automate lead entry and follow up, saving us tons of time and helping us to make sure we're not letting people slip through the cracks. This is done through the Zapier integration and new email sequences feature

Incentivized

• I know that SugarCRM has made a positive impact on my day to day work. Since we have made the change to SugarCRM (over a year ago) it has made life easier, more productive, and efficient.
• Organization is key and this CRM has done this exceptionally for me.

Incentivized