Sugar User Group: Sugar Sales Automation Ideas

Native marketing automation within Sugar just involves sending email. The cost is free in that you can send as much email as you like (through your own mail server) without any restrictions to leads, contact, prospects, etc... Sugar then will tracks links, opens, unsubscribes and hard bounces.

However, most people prefer to have this done by a third party solution such as ConstantContact or MailChimp since they don’t want to handle spam complaints and deliverability issues of sending mass emails.

Act-On in comparison to services like ConstantContact or MailChimp is much more expensive, but has many more features and capabilities. In addition to sending email, at W-Systems we use Act-On to manage our webinars and are able to profile the data and then automatically make it available within Sugar.

In addition to handling webinars, Act-On also handles website tracking, white paper downloads, social media posting, and much more. If you would like to learn more about Act-On send us a message and we will be happy to give you a demo.

Sugar purchased a tool called ProcessMaker and is now working to integrate it for Sugar enterprise processes.
Usually process tools use API endpoints, so we would expect that it would be possible to trigger a transactional emails in Act-On or Marketo.

There are two types of workflows that exist in Sugar 7. 

1) The first option is available in both Sugar 6 and 7 and is accessible through the Admin Panel of Sugar (accessible for administrators) called Workflow Management. 
Workflow Management was covered in November 2014 User Group meeting.  It allows you to:
  - Create a workflow
  - Look at a certain module of Sugar such as Customer Service Cases or Leads
  - Look for a certain condition such as a lead saved with a certain status
  - Then in response to finding this information, send out an email or create a task or update a record automatically within Sugar.

2) In Sugar 7.6 if you have Sugar 7 Enterprise Edition you will get a new visual workflow designer.  There is a flowchart type designer that allows you to create complex business decisions such as pricing approvals, complicated workflows that have many steps and conditional breakpoints. This should be released in April 2015.

Starting off with Quotes is a process of building up the product catalog in Sugar and then using the Admin PDF Manager to customize the quote to match the visual layout that you wish to have paired to your customers. 

You can make this look like anything with your logo or with certain data points.  Check out support.sugarcrm.com to start out by reading the manual and familiarize yourself with these concepts.

Riva is a product that W-Systems has done about 50+ installations for as partners for Sugar.  Riva continuously is improving their product to work better with Sugar.  They have a cloud and an on-premise version. If you go to rivacrmintegration.com you will be able to browse more information about their integration with Sugar.