SugarCRM Features That ACT! Users will Absolutely Fall in Love With
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This CRM comparison speaks to the many differences between SugarCRM and ACT. It is among the first CRM comarisons since ACT! was acquired by Swiftpage.
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SugarCRM Features That ACT! Users will Absolutely Fall in Love With
- 1. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com SugarCRM Features That ACT! Users will Absolutely Fall in Love With
- 2. Click to add subtitle Presenter Name Date of Presentation e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com September 26, 2013 Josh Bailey SugarCRM Features That ACT! Users will Absolutely Fall in Love With Vs.
- 3. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Price and Hosting Professional Premium Hosted 35$ 35$? The pricing for SugarCRM and ACT! are about the same for a hosted solution. At least it was. As most people know, ACT! was up until very recently owned by Sage Software. Swiftpage bought ACT! this last February, and their pricing for a hosted option is no longer listed anywhere without contacting them for a quote. ACT! has been primarily an on-premise solution when it was under Sage management, and Swiftpage is trying to get it into the cloud market, but that’s still really in its infancy. Sugar has always provided the largest variety of hosting options, allowing for on premise installation, hosting on your own cloud, on their cloud, on a partners cloud… really Sugar is available from anywhere you want to access it.
- 4. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com User Interface If looking at both SugarCRM and ACT! side by side, the biggest difference you will notice between the two is the user interface. Sugar is much more attractive, and there is much less clutter on the screen than the Windows-97-themed ACT!, which can come on as a little clunky at first. It’s boxy layout and over-packed views make ACT! a challenge to find what you’re looking for quickly. Sugar, on the other hand, has clearly defined layouts, attractive use of color, and a drag and drop interface, making your information more quickly accessible. I’d also like to mention that when I started the free trial of ACT! (in order to put together this webinar) I kept getting booted off and landing on this page (next slide).
- 5. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com ACT! is primarily an on premise solution as I mentioned, and although they do claim to have a hosted cloud option, you have to contact them for custom pricing. I just hope ACT!’s on-demand instance doesn't kick their users off as frequently as their on-demand demo does.
- 6. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Workflow Workflow is a feature that’s been pretty much nonexistent in ACT! up until recently. And their current workflow features, which they call “Smart Tasks,” are unfortunately nothing special. ACT!’s Smart Tasks allow you to build workflow only off of your Contact and Opportunity modules. The options for triggers and alerts are quite limited as well, and from what I observed in the demo it can be quite strenuous to even set up workflow for simple automations. In comparison, SugarCRM has workflow that can control every field of every module in your system. It can send alerts, automate field changes and updates, and a lot more. For instance, let’s say you get a lead in Sugar. Workflow can convert that lead into a contact, create an opportunity for the new contact, assign that opportunity to a sales rep, and then send an automated welcome email from that sales rep thanking the new contact for their interest in your business.
- 7. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Marketing Features Attractive Lead Forms Powerful Reporting And speaking of leads, Sugar offers a lot of powerful marketing features that ACT! lacks. One of these is lead forms. Sugar allows users to create attractive lead forms right out of the box. You can tie lead forms to marketing collateral like white papers, create fully customizable landing pages, or just make general contact forms for your website. When a prospect fills out one of these forms, the lead is automatically entered into your CRM database, tied to a campaign, and you can have a notification sent to your inbox letting you know of the new lead to follow up on. Sugar’s robust reporting features allow you to track which marketing campaigns are generating the most leads, as you can see on the report on the right. By seeing which campaigns are resulting in the most leads, you can tailor your future campaigns around the aspects that make your best campaigns most successful.
- 8. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Email Marketing ACT! provides very few integrations for email marketing. Obviously the big one that they push is Swiftpage. Even the email clients that ACT! does integrate to, the integrations aren’t the smoothest and the analytics are limited. Sugar integrates with inBOX25 (which you can see screenshots of here), MailChimp, PolarisMail, LotusNotes, YahooMail, Google Mail, Outlook, and several others. inBOX25 and Sugar, provide a very strong email marketing solution at a relatively low price. inBOX25 provides attractive email templates, like the one you see on the right, and analytics over every aspect of your campaign. It even keeps track of all your opt outs and automatically checks them off in your system, remembering not to send future emails to those individuals. You can also dive into your contacts to see a complete history of their interaction with your email campaigns.
- 9. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Reporting As you can see, ACT!’s reporting is pretty bland, and that’s not only because it lacks the modules and functionality to build in-depth reports, even the out-of-the-box reporting is limited. Not to mention, it’s not dynamic. If you want a fresh report, you have to go into the reports and run a fresh report. Sugar makes reporting much less of a headache. Sugar gives you the ability to make attractive reports off of any module in the system, picking filters off of any filed within the module. Even pulling filters from related modules is very simple to do. You can build tables, lists, bar graphs, pie charts, or funnels. Reports in Sugar can be easily put on your dashboard, and they change dynamically as information changes in your system.
- 10. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com We also… We also develop other business to business solutions for the cloud and resell ERP software. Some of our applications include: And More!
- 11. e2b teknologies | 521 fifth avenue | chardon, oh 44024 | 440.352.4700 | www.e2btek.com Josh Bailey jbailey@e2btek.com 440.352.4700
Editor's Notes
- The pricing for SugarCRM and ACT! are about the same for a hosted solution. At least it was. As most people know, ACT! was up until very recently owned by Sage Software. Swiftpage bought ACT! this last February, and their pricing for a hosted option is no longer listed anywhere without contacting them for a quote. ACT! has been primarily an on-premise solution when it was under Sage management, and Swiftpage is trying to get it into the cloud market, but that’s still really in its infancy.Sugar has always provided the largest variety of hosting options, allowing for on premise installation, hosting on your own cloud, on their cloud, on a partners cloud… really Sugar is available from anywhere you want to access it. And ACT! was, up until recently, the same price as Sugar, but I don’t know how much that has changed since changing management.
- If looking at both SugarCRM and ACT! side by side, the biggest difference you will notice between the two is the user interface. Sugar is much more attractive, and there is much less clutter on the screen than the Windows-97-themed ACT! The ACT! user interface is very unintuitive to navigate around. Not to mention, ACT! can come on as a little clunky at first. It’s boxy layout and over-packed views make ACT! a challenge to find what you’re looking for quickly. Sugar, on the other hand, has clearly defined layouts, attractive use of color, and a drag and drop interface, making your information more quickly accessible. I’d also like to mention that when I started the free trial of ACT! (in order to put together this webinar) I kept getting booted off and landing on this page (click).
- ACT! is primarily an on premise solution as I mentioned, and although they do claim to have a hosted cloud option, you have to contact them for custom pricing. I just hope ACT!’s on-demand instance doesn't kick their users off as frequently as their on-demand demo does.
- Workflow is a feature that’s been pretty much nonexistent in ACT! up until recently. And their current workflow features, which they call “Smart Tasks,” are unfortunately nothing special. ACT!’s Smart Tasks are pretty limited, allowing you to build workflow only off of your Contact and Opportunity modules. The options for triggers and alerts are quite limited as well, and from what I observed in the demo it can be quite strenuous to even set up workflow for simple automations. In comparison, SugarCRM has workflow that can control every field of every module in your system. It can send alerts, automate field changes and updates, and a lot more. For instance, let’s say you get a lead in Sugar. Workflow can convert that lead into a contact, create an opportunity for the new contact, assign that opportunity to a sales rep, and then send an automated welcome email from that sales rep thanking the new contact for their interest in your business.
- And speaking of leads, Sugar offers a lot of powerful marketing features that ACT! lacks. One of these is lead forms. Sugar allows users to create attractive lead forms right out of the box. You can tie lead forms to marketing collateral like white papers, create fully customizable landing pages, or just make general contact forms for your website. When a prospect fills out one of these forms, the lead is automatically entered into your CRM database, tied to a campaign, and you can have a notification sent to your inbox letting you know of the new lead to follow up on. Sugar’s robust reporting features allow you to track which marketing campaigns are generating the most leads, as you can see on the report on the right. By seeing which campaigns are resulting in the most leads, you can tailor your future campaigns around the aspects that make your best campaigns most successful.
- ACT! provides very few integrations for email marketing. Obviously the big one that they push is Swiftpage, which we were actually customers on a little over a year ago, and decided to opt out of due to various usability problems. Even the email clients that ACT! does integrate to, the integrations aren’t the smoothest and the analytics are limited. Sugar integrates with all the most well known solutions on the market, whether it’s email based or any other application. If there’s a solution that would be useful in a CRM, there’s probably a Sugar developer who’s made the integration. As far as email marketing specifically, Sugar integrates with inBOX25 (which you can see screenshots of here), MailChimp, PolarisMail, LotusNotes, YahooMail, Google Mail, Outlook, and several others.inBOX25 and Sugar, provide a very strong email marketing solution at a relatively low price. inBOX25 provides attractive email templates, like the one you see on the right, and analytics over every aspect of your campaign. It even keeps track of all your opt outs and automatically checks them off in your system, remembering not to send future emails to those individuals. You can also dive into your contacts to see a complete history of their interaction with your email campaigns.
- The last thing we’ll talk about today is reporting. There’s an ACT! report up there on the top right. As you can see, ACT!’s reporting is pretty bland, and that’s not only because it lacks the modules and functionality to build in-depth reports, even the limited reporting that they do offer is limited. Not to mention, it’s not dynamic. If you want a fresh report, you have to go into the reports and run a fresh report. During my trial of the ACT! demo, I found it hard to even run the reports that they had pre-built in the system. The control over reports filters was very small, and I wasn’t able to drill down deep into my customers behaviors, because ACT! doesn't even track things like customer interactions or behaviors.Sugar makes reporting much less of a headache. The rest of the reports here were all made in Sugar, obviously a better looking system. Sugar gives you the ability to make attractive reports off of any module in the system, picking filters off of any filed within the module. Even pulling filters from related modules is very simple to do. You can build tables, lists, bar graphs, pie charts, or funnels. Reports in Sugar can be easily put on your dashboard, and they change dynamically as information changes in your system. For instance, you can build a sales pipeline funnel for your dashboard, and once a sales rep closes a deal, that information will change in live time on your dashboard, giving you an executive real-time snapshot of your company all from one place.
- In conclusion, ACT! is good for basic contact and account management, but that’s about it. So if you’re currently on ACT! or thinking about it, why not pay about the same price for a solution that offers so much more, Sugar. Sugar is fully customizable on every level and offers quick cloud access to all your data from any location with internet access. We’ve even built some custom modules into Sugar to keep track of our passwords and marketing activities. And it took no longer than an hour and only a few months of experience on the system. Sugar provides a solution to just about any business problem you have, and it can even cater to problems you’re not even aware of yet. Thanks again for coming to today’s webinar. We’re e2b teknologies…