As best described by Jan Sysmans, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for SugarCRM, when asked about the updates to SugarCRM 6, in SugarCRM 6.4 he said, "A lot of changes below the hood". The SugarCRM 6.4 release is sporting a REACH theme: Extend Your Organization's Reach with Sugar 6.4. What does this mean? Let's drill it down...

• Better import capabilities, including direct LinkedIn sync, allowing you to better reach your customers
• With support for DB2, Sugar reaches more IBM customers
• Section 508 compliance road map: extending the reach of SugarCRM to visually-impaired customers
• New Calendar Module allows Sugar users to more easily reach out to co-workers and customers
• Sugar Private Cloud is a new deployment option

What else would help you extend your organization's reach?

 

We all should! Seriously, regardless of your role in your organization, dashboards are an excellent, quick view of the information contained in your CRM system. We take the time to put the information into our CRM system, why not allow it to present the information we want to see most, back to us, in a clear, concise manner.

I’m a Marketing user and I have a plethora of dashboards I view on a daily basis, but my top choices are:

• Leads by Lead Source

• Opportunities by Lead Source 

• Actual Revenue by Lead Source

For me, it’s important to see that:

A) My department is generating leads

B) The leads we’re generating are warm enough to become opportunities

C) And that we’re closing leads and can calculate a positive ROI

For Sales, dashboards are very important from both a sales management reporting perspective, as well as a sales user perspective. Here are some examples of useful dashboards for sales:

• Pipeline Charts

o Opportunities closing this month, next month, this year 

• Opportunities by Product

o Opportunities closing this month, won opportunities, lost opportunities 

• Sales Leaderboards (to see how your entire team is doing)

• Top Customers

• Actual Revenue (by month, by quarter, by fiscal period)

• My Open Leads or My Open Opportunities

For those in the customer service area, dashboards provide a compact view of your tickets/cases and allow you to prioritize your efforts. Some customer service centric dashboards include:

• Tickets by Priority

• Tickets by Customer

• Tickets open more than 30 days

All users have the ability to go in and create any dashboards they want and then share them with whomever they’d like. For example, a CEO could share their high level dashboards with the rest of their management team, or the VP of Sales could share some with their sales team, or individual users. The bottom line is, all users can have many dashboards and create, delete, share and hide whichever dashboards they see fit, making dashboards very effective for each individual user.

If you have specific dashboards you think others would benefit from, please share them with everyone!

 

We are all living in a mobile world and all we want is to quickly and easily access all the information we can possibly get, right at our fingertips. That's not too much to ask, right? 

Sage SalesLogix Mobile is quick and easy to use, as it is built on next generation web application technology. Because Sage uses its Sdata web service to communicate directly with your main database, there is no syncing of data necessary. I'm definitely not the most technical person in the world, or anywhere close, but I do know that not having to sync definitely speeds things up. Plus, with a single URL to access your data, end-user installation is not required.

I recently watched a demo of the new Sage SalesLogix Mobile v1.2 and here are my favorite/most useful take-aways:

• Enhanced productivity
  • Improved visibility
    • Single-press pick lists and lookups
      • No more multiple clicks to validate actions
      • More of a "click" and "go" approach
    • "Clear" button on text fields = No more backspacing
  • Faster data entry/lookups
    • Custom keyboard for URLs, Email and Phone data entry
      • Example - A ".com" button exists when you're typing URLs
    • Faster search with hash tags (Sdata handles hash tag queries)
      • Example - Opportunity: "#closed ab" --> Closed opportunities where name starts with "ab"
  • Localized for multiple languages (French, German, Italian, Russian)
    • Multi-lingual support through single portal
• Calendar Improvements
  • New week view
  • Month view shows activity count and selected day details

What else would you like to see in SalesLogix mobile?

 

 

Dave Wallace, Director of Product Management for Sage SalesLogix CRM, provided Technology Advisors’ customers a preview of the new SalesLogix v8.0 coming out next year.

Dave dove into the updates in the Web Client from a Usability perspective, highlighting:

 

• List Management
• Account List View
• Detail View
• Scrollable Grids in Tabs
• Copy Text to Clipboard
• Move & Copy Contact
• Mail Merge

 

He showed Activities and Calendaring, calling out the ability to update multiple opportunities at one time and the new configurable pop-up alerts.
Next, onto the LAN improvements which included updates to the UI, the Windows 7 Thumbnails and how to mark a resource as a location and manage those resources. Then the big one, how to Add a Field!

In the Mobile version, we looked at the Month and Week views as well as new features including:

• Support for custom keyboard types on supported devices
• New date/time picker control
• Support for events
• Plug-n-play customizations
• Roles/secured actions

 

The discussion led to Data Safeguarding where we saw the addition of security to SpeedSearch indexes and password security for the web.

The hour flew by quickly as we only covered a portion of the new features and functionality in the SalesLogix v8.0 release. What else does everyone want to see?

 

Sage Customers Time to Start Thinking About Sage Summit:

July 12-15, 2011 at the Gaylord National Hotel and Conference Center in Washington, DC

Sage Summit is the conference for Sage customers and partners. It’s the single best event of the year for connecting with and learning from a diverse community of peers, product experts, and industry thought leaders.

For more information and to register visit: http://www.sagesummit.com/

Take advantage of Early Bird rates and Register Soon!

Partner Name: Technology Advisors
Promo Code: PTOC10

Microsoft Customers! Get ready for Convergence 2011:

April 10-13, 2011 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA

Convergence is the premier Microsoft Dynamics event where you can experience first-hand how you can optimize your business and improve your bottom line. This event serves as the meeting point for the Microsoft Dynamics Customer and Partner business community.

Top Five Reasons to Attend Convergence 2011 Atlanta:

1. Learn how you can get the most out of your Microsoft Dynamics solution.
2. Network and collaborate with your peers and the product experts from Microsoft.
3. Experience the latest solution innovations, new products and technologies.
4. The event is cost effective, convenient, and organized to meet your needs.
5. Get insights into Microsoft’s corporate direction and understand future plans for your Microsoft Dynamics solution.

For more information and to register: http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/convergence/atlanta11/about_overview.aspx

The 2011 SugarCRM Customer & Developer Conference is:

April 4-6, 2011 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco

This is SugarCRM's 5th annual user and customer conference, bringing together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and experts from around the world.

Packed with 2 days of business, technical and product presentations, SugarCon provides practical knowledge that you can apply to improve your company's performance.

For more information and to register visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/events/sugarcon

Technology Advisors, Inc. has partnered with LoyaltyProfessional, a business unit of the The Chapman Group, to increase their service offerings to clients. LoyaltyProfessional provides loyalty consulting and software, helping companies develop more valuable relationships with their customers. “Being a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) company, providing clients with services and solutions to give them the most complete view of their customers, it only made sense to partner with LoyaltyProfessional,” Sam Biardo, CEO and Founder of Technology Advisors, Inc. stated, “LoyaltyProfessional prides themselves on increasing customer loyalty and retention, which is exactly what we aim to do.”

We are pleased to announce Jason Nassi, Sr. Director, Product Management at SugarCRM will be joining us for the CRM Acceleration event on Thursday. Jason will present the SugarCRM 2010 and Beyond Roadmap and be onhand to answer questions.

Register Now for CRM Acceleration!

 Technology Advisors achieved Sage Software's Chairman's Club status for the 3rd year and made President's Circle for the 9th time.

2009 Chairman’s Club membership is awarded to Sage Business Solutions (SBS) business partners that develop an exceptional level of new business revenue through defined sales and marketing programs. Technology Advisors is one of 22 Chairman’s Club members and a top-selling Sage business partner across all of North America for Sage SalesLogix, SageCRM and ACT! by Sage.

View Official Press Release