Among the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) apps available on RackWire’s Linux Hosting is SugarCRM.  While at a previous job I had an opportunity to use this CRM and I would like to share some of my experiences with this product.  Sugar is an app that is ideal for managing sales leads and contacts.  In addition sugar is also very well equipped for handling marketing campaigns newsletters and targets.  In this entry I will show you how easy it is to create a sales lead.

Lead generation is among the most important aspects of sales.  Without an adequate number of leads, your sales will start to diminish as your opportunities for new clients dries up.  In addition, there must be an effective way that you manage your leads to better equip your salesmen with all the information they will need to close the sale.  Sugar is designed to be able to manage, edit, add and remove sales leads in the system.  Also it is effective at giving you a quick glance synopsis of all the leads in the system.  Also, please note that I will be discussing specific fields that I feel are very important.  You still want to ensure that you fill out every data field that you possibly can to better equip your sales staff!

When starting to use Sugar, you will want to get ALL sales leads from your company into the system.  To do this, from the main page you select the “Create Lead” shortcut off the left side of the screen:

Now you will see a screen filled with empty boxes for your information on the new lead.  Start with the Lead Source.  This is where you choose from the list of options in the drop down menu; select the option that best describes how you developed this lead.  Be sure to utilize the Lead Source Description field to get into specifics!

Now you want to fill in all the information that you have on the lead in the most appropriate place.  Remember to not leave out any information at all, as the success of your salesmen will be affected by the lack of knowledge they have on the lead.

Your next primary concern is the status of the lead.  This will help your salesmen know how to best prioritize their time, working on the hottest leads first.  Also Sugar enables your salesmen to re-status the lead to help them organize and prioritize their leads on their own.

You will see that this even has an option for ‘Dead’ and a check box for Do Not Call.  It is important to add leads that are ‘Dead’ and that you do not intend to call so that this is documented that the lead has been exhausted.  This way there won’t be additional calls made to them and they won’t get increasingly frustrated with your company.  Also, some time down the road there may be a promotion or a marketing campaign that may want to target dead sales leads, so you should still enter these into your system.

Now that ALL of the data fields that can possibly be filled in, are, you’ll see a text box at the bottom that looks like this:

This is best thought of as a general comments field.  Your salesmen can use this to make notes about the lead, also this is a place for you to put any and all extra information that you feel your salesmen may be able to use to help them.

Get SugarCRM from the RackWire App Market now!  Or get your Own Linux Hosted SugarCRM System, which also comes with cPanel.