Larry's main message in this interview is that CRM needs to expand beyond Sales Dept's to every part of the organization that interfaces with the Customer. (Certainly good for bottom lines of SaaS companies like SugarCRM who license their software per user per month.) I agree this approach is a great way to have the entire organization be customer focused by enabling them with information they need to competently interact with each customer in a meaningful way.
A little bitter sweet for me as I would as Larry Augustine what about if my CRM implementation is failing BECAUSE I use SugarCRM.
While every system has it quirks, bug and missing features, SugarCRM certainly has some VERY notable holes that have been around for quite some time and they have no plans when these 'Feature Requests' might be fixed.
Duplicate Detection
A great way to look stupid in front of a customer is to be using a partial and incomplete duplicate record. Any company who uses any type of CRM fights the battle with duplicate records and must maintain system and processes to battle them. In SugarCRM the tool you use to search for duplicate is grossly under-powered. You can't even OR a bunch of potential identifying clauses together. The search tool ANDs every entry. Therefore, to run a decent search, because you can't OR a bunch of data overlapping clauses into one query, you MUST run ONE query for each data point you want to search on for potential conflict. Talk about inefficient. What decade are we in Larry? This is the question I get from the person who we assign to perform this ridiculously inefficient search, everyday, multiple times for every new lead.http://www.sugarcrm.com/support/bugs.html#issue_47265
Workflow can't make Entity Associations: Lead to Campaign
Anyone it Marketing knows you need to justify and define your spend base on the results of your campaigns. One main goal of any campaign is to generate leads. Associating a Lead with a Campaign is a must have operation. ERRRR, hard stop. SugarCRM won't let you write a Workflow rule or Mass Update rule to associate a Lead with a Campaign. So I can't write a Workflow Rule that say, Upon Save of New Lead, set Lead.Campaign = Campaign X, when during a specific 'Campaign' season. Workflow lets me write all sorts of great rules, but traversing the Lead to Campaign relationship is not in it list of doable actions. What!!! The Mass Update feature has the same issue. Therefore, Lead involvement in a Campaign can only be set manually. (Insert cost for unnecessary manual lead data management here.)http://www.sugarcrm.com/support/bugs.html#issue_48521
I can't imaging how any modern day CRM system can be successful without these features. We continue to stammer along as a SugarCRM customer without them. I don't think we'll be buying licenses for the rest of the users in the company.
