SugarCRM recently introduced its Productivity Suite — a bundled offer combining the flagship Sugar Enterprise CRM with the Hint relationship intelligence tool and Customer Journey plug-in. The goal of uniting these products is to reduce the cost of sales, save time, and increase sales velocity. We’ll get into the concept of sales velocity in a little bit, but first let’s look at how each of these bundled pieces contributes to the Suite:

The Big Three

Sugar Enterprise: SugarCRM’s Enterprise CRM is a sales empowerment engine. It offers Sugar’s acclaimed Advanced Workflow feature to automate business processes, CPQ capabilities and a product catalog for simpler quoting within an opportunity record, an Outlook plug-in to keep email communications top-of-mind, sharable/drillable dashboards for better collaboration between teams, and (as always) an easy-to-use interface and robust mobile application.

Hint: Through some sort of magical voodoo wizardry, the Hint product can pull a customer’s full social and corporate profile (from more than 70 data sources) in mere seconds. Through one-click data import, you can select the information you want to import to the record. The information you choose can include news where the contact’s company is mentioned, social media profiles, company size, industry, personal contact info, and more. It’s creepy, but gosh darn it’s effective.

Customer Journey Plug-In: The Customer Journey Plug-In is Sugar’s answer to a defined sales process. By establishing a repeatable progression with next steps and desired actions, it’s easier than ever to drive effectual processes across the entire team. Multiple journeys can be created to accommodate unique customer buying cycles or personas, so the sales team stays on-point with each and every interaction.

Sales Velocity

The concept of sales velocity relies on a simple calculation to predict revenue per day and help teams drive more sales. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of opportunities in the pipeline by the average opportunity value in dollars and the percentage win rates, and then dividing all of that by the average length of a sales cycle in days. It looks something like this:

Here’s how to get the numbers for each portion of the calculation:

# of Opportunities: How many opportunities do you have in the pipeline right now?

Average Opportunity Value: What is the sum of the value of all your current opportunities? Exclude the top and bottom 10% (or select your own outliers) for a more accurate reading. Now divide that sum by the total count to get the average opportunity value.

Percent Win Rate: Look at the previous fiscal quarter to find the average historical numbers on your win rate. Divide the total number of closed won opportunities by the total count of all opportunities within that same period to determine the win rate.

Average Length of Sales Cycle in Days: Calculate this by looking at the length of an opportunity from creation date to closed won/lost date and dividing it by the overall count of opportunities in that same period.

More opportunities in the pipeline is always a good thing, but for maximum sales velocity, you must think beyond quantity and hone in on quality. Look how sales velocity jumps by 130% when you change a few minor details in the equation:

Scenario 1

# of Opportunities: 250
Average Opportunity Value: $80,000
% Win Rate: 18%
Average Sales Cycle: 120 days
Sales Velocity: $30,000/day

Scenario 2

# of Opportunities: 250
Average Opportunity Value: $100,000
% Win Rate: 25%
Average Sales Cycle: 90 days
Sales Velocity: $69,444/day

What you’ll notice in the above calculations is that the sales velocity is highly influenced by the average sales cycle and opportunity value. Sugar’s Productivity Suite accelerates that sales cycle by filling in the blanks on customer information and keeping processes nailed down to streamline the whole sales experience. The faster you can convert those leads, the more sales velocity you’ll have. In a recent presentation, Sugar noted that several customers already using the Suite have seen the effects of increased sales velocity and are enjoying its benefits.

The Sales Productivity package is $85/user/month and is available now! To learn more or see a demo of the features, contact our sales team.