Last summer SugarCRM rolled out their 3 pillars. These were to be the core tenets upon which they would build their value proposition and differentiation. Recently these pillars were updated to include a 4th pillar “lifetime commitment to customers”.
It has long been thought that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is dying and on it’s way out. But if Sugar can bring new life to the CRM ecosystem I think we all stand to benefit.
#1: No-Touch Information Management
The No-touch Information management pillar places a focus on questioning if companies can better save the time of sales representatives. Essentially, do they need to manually enter a ton of information or can we get them better information by pulling it from a more authoritative data source?
On the other hand, the No-touch information management will take advantage of third party data, casting a wide net to find all of the rich sources of information and data that can be pulled in.
#2: Time-Aware CX Platform
The second Sugar pillar that unveiled surrounded offering a Time aware CX Platform. A traditional CRM system only gives snapshots of data at a specific time, for example, your CRM can tell you what the value is of all of the deals you’ve closed to date this year or the sales stage an opportunity is in. These snapshots do not give enough context to show important changes your CRM is going through. But, having a time dimension added to the relationships allow us to be able to understand where our pipeline stands today, compared to where it stood three months ago.
You can also combine getting time aware context and with machine learning and AI to produce actionable insights. This will give you answers to questions, that you haven’t even had a chance to ask yet.
#3: Continuous Cloud Innovation
SugarCRM has decided to focus on being the very best they can at helping companies to build strong relationships and giving them tools to support their processes. Therefore, in order to do this, they’re not gonna get into the field of cloud infrastructure themselves.
Similarly, Sugar will take advantage of web services that have already been perfected by other companies like Amazon. This means building tools that help customers to build extremely strong and mutually rewarding customer relationships.
#4: Lifetime Commitment to Customers
The fourth and final SugarCRM pillar is revealed, it is a continuous lifetime commitment to their customers. What this means is when you’re working with Sugar, they are defining their success based on their customer’s success.
In addition, when you start using a system, put a lot of information into it, and incorporate it into your production processes you’re putting a lot of trust in the technology provider themselves. You want to know that they’re on your side and will stand by you for the long term.
But the fact that SugarCRM is defining their commitment to their customers as being one of their four pillars, and one of their key success criteria means that it’s not enough for them to just build a good tool.
Conclusion
After analyzing these four pillars that SugarCRM has released we believe they are not more marketing fluff but instead a True Differentiator. But, by providing no-touch information management, a time-aware cx platform, continuous cloud innovation, and a lifetime commitment to customers these four pillars will greatly assist in achieving the goals that SugarCRM has laid out for themselves.
Check out this blog for more information on SugarCRM’s 4 Pillars!
