If you want to succeed in today’s competitive market, it’s imperative that you leverage the information you already have on your customers.
Every time someone makes a purchase or engages with your brand, you capture little snippets of precious information – and this data can be used to deliver services that are directly tailored your target audience. Trust me, if you’re serious about competing in 2019, you’ll need a CRM solution in place.
At the moment, there are plenty of solutions available on the market. And chances are that you’re already familiar with SugarCRM and Oracle – two of the leading CRM contenders. But how can you possibly choose between the two solutions? To aid you in the decision-making progress, we’ve put together this comparison guide to SugarCRM and Oracle.
Let’s take a look.
What you need to know about SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a cloud-based CRM solution designed to help businesses handle sales automation, accounts management, marketing automation, and other customer relationship management needs you might have.
Serving more than 50,000 companies worldwide, SugarCRM is – alongside Oracle – one of the leading enterprise CRM solutions on the market right now. It’s a very popular tool for businesses in need of comprehensive and accurate account management for marketing-related processes. The software is especially popular due to its availability in nine different languages.
When it comes to SugarCRM, most companies are drawn to its high level of customizability. This stems from the software being an open-source platform, meaning that anyone with the required IT expertise can tailor the software based on their own needs and requirements. While this will undoubtedly make it a bit too complicated for most small businesses, this option for tailoring your own bespoke software is exactly what makes enterprise CRM such a popular option for larger organisations.
With SugarCRM, you can expect a wide selection of available communication channels, such as emails, messaging, integrated social networks, conventional phone calls, and the possibility of arranging one-to-one meetings. For developers, the multi-faceted communication capabilities of the system will help bolster professionalism, as well as track and capture valuable opportunities related to brand awareness and brand influence.
Additionally, the solution offers a clean and familiar navigation system, which has a tame learning curve that can be tackled by those without an in-depth experience with various CRM features or the SugarCRM free trial version. And, just as with most other CRM applications, the system features a variety of categories in its drop-down menu, such as
- Accounts
- Calendar
- Reports
- Contacts
- Documents
- Leads
- Emails
- Meetings
- Campaigns
- Calls
- Quotes
What are the key benefits of SugarCRM?
Being an enterprise CRM, it’s clear that SugarCRM is designed to provide you with much more than your average CRM and communications tool. This software is specifically created to help businesses develop more advanced customer engagement strategies, which in turn will promote stronger relationships between the brand and its target customers. Here’s some of the key features of SugarCRM.
Complete team engagement functionality
Setting up a helpdesk that’s streamlined to provide the best quality service to existing and prospective clients can be a challenge. And while it’s easy, and a money-saver, to simply bundle all support to helpdesk agents, it’s really not the most practical solution nor the best way to match the right skills and talent to the right problem.
SugarCRM can eliminate confusion by allowing customers to get involved with the very process of their engagement. The system provides eight levels of support, starting with the main administrator and all the way down to accounting, technical support staff, and campaign representatives.
To increase efficiency and convenience, there’s also been added a variety of communication channels. And the best part is that all of them operate in a single platform that promotes collaboration among teams and customers.
Seamless integrations
Technically, SugarCRM does not have the capability to integrate natively with other commonly used business apps. Naturally, this can be very annoying for users. However, the system goes around this issue with a publicly accessible API code known as SugarExchange. With this smart addition, users will be able to integrate Sugar with systems such as CloudAgent, MailChimp, Zapier, Zendesk, and many others.
Moreover, LDAP integrations are also enabled through SugarExchange, which allows single sign-ons and standardized access for employees. This will help simplify the lead management process, especially for larger enterprises.
Smart reporting capabilities
SugarCRM’s reporting capabilities are comparable with some of the best business intelligence solutions on the market, especially when it comes to their data analytics capabilities. Not only does it provide an easy-to-understand summarized version of you team’s performance report, it also allows executives to identify trends and spot potential problems before they become serious.
Additionally, the solution also allows users to create as many customized data visualization dashboards as they need, thereby enabling them to provide a more accurate data representation to their teams.
Mobile access and support
Every good software solution on the market is now designed with a mobile-first approach.
With the Sugar Mobile application, support representatives will be able to serve customers on the go, managers can effectively and conveniently track staff performance, marketing teams will be able to extend the reach of campaigns, and customers will be able to contact support agents on their mobile.
In other words, the future is mobile.
What you need to know about Oracle CRM
Like SugarCRM, Oracle is another key player on the Enterprise CRM market.
Oracle is well-known for its robust and intuitive interface, as well as its many different product lines and deployment solutions. It’s clear that Oracle CRM – as comprehensive as it is – makes customer relationship management a lot simpler and more practical, whether you’re looking to optimize marketing and sales processes, or boost productivity.
Oracle is designed to help manage and regulate customer relationships, from the process of identifying and capturing leads to opportunity tracking and management. It also allows forecasting optimization, reporting, analytics, and it also comes with a set of robust historical analysis tools for smarter, more effective business decisions.
It’s also worth considering that Oracle comes with a variety of robust, fully integrated marketing campaign management features, ROI measurement tools, and lead nurturing capabilities. It’s obvious that all of these features and capabilities, can help modern businesses separate themselves from the competition by building strong and memorable relationships with both customers and partners. And with an intuitive and user-friendly design, your sales and marketing teams will be able to tackle the most complex CRM tasks in quick and efficient ways, enabling you to greatly improve productivity for the entire organisation.
What are the key benefits of Oracle?
As we’ve now discovered, Oracle is a robust and feature-rich enterprise CRM platform. Following are a few of the key advantages businesses can expect to benefit from while using the Oracle CRM platform.
Easy deployment
The fact that it’s incredibly easy to deploy, is one of the main things that make Oracle one of the best customer relationship management solutions available. This is an especially useful advantage for busy companies that may not have the appropriate resources or capacity to properly deploy and tailor their software solutions.
Users don’t have to suffer through complex installation procedures, or buy additional software add-ons just to be able to use the system. The solution identifies your existing set of business tools and uses its comprehensive set of APIs to gain access to your company’s service-related data. It then syncs up everything, so that users can easily access the information and make the necessary modifications.
Seamless integrations
Oracle is designed to provide seamless integrations between your existing tools. The platform delivers functionality and performance in such a way that it bridges any information gaps and inconsistencies normally caused by human errors.
Additionally, the CRM is capable of providing quick and efficient integrations for even the most demanding infrastructure and existing multi-software systems. Oracle can connect to your other applications, as well a provide a secure and holistic preview on contextual data. With this feature readily available, companies can navigate through their entire system without having to develop additional IT resources.
Secure single-occasion sign on
Some CRM solutions can be frustrating for the average user. In fact, one of the most disliked features of CRM is that the user must log in their credentials every single time they need to use the software.
Oracle, on the other hand, offers a single-occasion sign-in feature which allows for automated authentication within the company networks and portals. The ease of access do not compromise the security of your company data, as Oracle is designed with robust security in mind. In fact, everything that occurs in the system is constantly configured and authenticated. Oracle also comes with safeguards such as Cross-Site requests, VPN, advanced forgery protection, and user validation.
What to look for in a CRM solution?
A good CRM solution can dramatically increase the success of your customer outreach campaigns. But which key components of CRM systems will be the most important one for you? To help you on your way, we’ve gathered up a quick checklist of things you should consider when choosing the right CRM software for your company.
- Is the setup fast and easy?
If you’re running a tight ship and your IT resources are limited, it’s absolutely imperative that you avoid any CRM software that require complex processes, extensive upfront training, or a steady admin to run the system for you.
In other words, if your resources are limited then SugarCRM might not be the right match for you.
- Is there mobile accessibility?
Sales reps and marketing teams need to be productive wherever they are. This means having the ability to access company resources anywhere, anytime. With CRM on your mobile device, you’ll have immediate access to ongoing transactions, contact information, customer data, and other tools that can help your employees deal or resolve customer queries or problems while on the go.
However, make sure that the application is feature-rich and fully functioning. Trust me, you don’t want to pay large sums for an amateur app that isn’t a full extension of your CRM.
- How are the sales processing tools?
A CRM’s main purpose is not just to make customer relationship management easier and more structured. In addition, it should also provide the tools and resources to make sales reps and marketing teams more effective. A good way to ensure this is to find a software with top-of-the-class sales processing tools.
Having more sales process capabilities in one single platform will allow your sales team to focus more on closing deals or resolving customer issues, rather than medical task management. This will also provide managers with an alternative method for breaking down their pipelines, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.
- Will there be effective contact management and syncing?
Manually entering contact information or updating customer data across multiple platforms can take up a significant amount of hours. You don’t want your sales team spending their time doing manual data entry and updating database instead of tracking down leads or closing deals.
Are you not sure if an Enterprise CRM is right for you? For small and medium-sized business, we recommend robust CRM solutions such as Capsule, GreenRope, FunnelCRM or HubSpot.
Take your business to the next level with enterprise CRM
A good CRM software can reduce repetitive tasks, and ensure that your employees can spend more time doing what their best at – communicating with clients, boosting performance and closing leads.
Today, SugarCRM and Oracle are two of the strongest enterprise CRM options on the market. But which one is the best option for you?
Honestly, that depends.
You see, comparing these two brands is not as straightforward as it might seem. The best software depends on what aspects of them you want to compare. Both SugarCRM and Oracle are robust CRM solutions – they’re just right for different organisations. Are you still on the fence when it comes to deciding on your next CRM? Simply leave your details on our contact page, and one of our CRM experts will get back to you with non-chargeable advice. What are you waiting for?