How to migrate SugarCRM into SuiteCRM?

Keep it so simple that anyone at your company can understand the process and the steps for using the CRM. If there's no accountability or confusion with the company's process, you'll be one of those companies that says their CRM sucks when it's more a testament of your own internal controls that suck. Here's a sample process: 1. Not everyone you ever talk to is a prospect or worth being in your CRM. Decide with your team the one question you can ask anyone that determines if they're a qualified prospect. This question should speak to the pain point you're solving. For example, if I was trying to sell Expensify to someone I might ask "Do you guys spend alot of time managing expense reports?". If they say "yes" then add them as a prospect and add data on how large the deal might be and if they have a budget to make a purchase. If they say no then add them to a Mailchimp newsletter if they are interested in getting updates. Make sure there's a call to action in the newsletter that would allow you to know if they ever become a prospect. 2. The next step is getting them appropriate information and/or including scheduling a demo to get them interested in using your product. The goal is to get them to a free trial if it's an individual or a small pilot. 3. After a pilot phase you'd want to convert them to a paying customer. The activities at this stage will be more building the relationship and supporting any issues or concerns they have with the pilot. 4. Once a paying customer you want to turn them into evangelists or testimonials or referrals you can use for your site or for press releases. This is an often missed step and significant opportunity. Continual engagement with an already paying customer helps to improve the product but an evangelist for your company is the most valuable asset you have: More customers from referrals without any cost. In conclusion, you're looking to identify where each prospect is in the funnel and know what the next steps are at any given time to move them across the funnel. Prospect > Pilot > Customer > Evangelist (A good service for this in the early stages of your company is StrideApp.com) Creating a follow up task at each stage and with each interaction is critical. Your day should be divided among getting new prospects in the funnel and following up with existing prospects.

A reseller typically purchases the SaaS at a discounted price and bill their client directly. I've seen reseller discounts range between 10% and 50%. The discount should be competitive with your industry, and allow a reasonable ROI for resellers. The reseller discount is typically for the life of the user otherwise expect resellers to offer their clients a competitor's SaaS. An affiliate or partner program that pays a commission for referring clients creates a direct relationship between your company and the users. In these types of programs, your commission could be a one-time payout upon referral, a recurring % of sale for the first year, or a recurring % of sale for the life of the client.

It sounds like you're off to a good start with your lead generation. While it is important to keep lead volume strong, it's even more important to have a way to follow up with these leads and continue pushing them through your sales funnel until you can convert them into revenue. Without that follow-up, especially if you're generating leads through PPC, you're likely wasting the budget and energy you're putting toward your marketing efforts in the first place. The first thing I'd recommend you do is create an automatic "kick-back" email that triggers as soon as a lead downloads your ebook. Be sure to thank them for downloading, give them a link to access the ebook, and then (most importantly) include your call-to-action for the next step you want them to take. Second, figure out how you're going to handle these leads from a sales perspective. If you're stretched for bandwidth, I'd recommend a system where you assign dollar values to different types of leads, and only have a sales rep follow up with your highest value leads. How much is an ebook lead worth to your business? How much is a demo lead? What about someone who actively requests to be contacted? You'll find that as you get these systems and processes underway, it'll be extremely useful to have a CRM system both for integrating with your marketing efforts and for helping your sales team to be able to sort and prioritize the leads they're reaching out to. Lead conversion is a daily focus of mine in my role at HubSpot, and I'd be happy to chat further about how to get a strong marketing/sales funnel set up so you're better equipped to manage the leads you generate and better able to convert them into dollars. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help!

I've worked with a couple of CRMs; if you are looking for a custom-like solution, I'd recommend Podio. Salesforce has a lot of options, but tends to overwhelm folks who are not familiar with their tool. If I didn't go with Podio, I'd choose HubSpot because of the integration with their other sales and marketing services. I don't know any other details about your venture, so it is hard to offer a tool that will grow with you. I'm happy to discuss more and give you a more detailed answer. Just book a call and we can get rockin' -Shaun

Great Question! I see you are not looking to spend too much money on this so my recommendation would be to use free tools that will only cost you the time you take to set them up yourselves. 1. Accommodating contacts (engaged vs not engaged, segmenting, custom fields and flexible reporting). For this I would recommend you use Podio. It is free for up to five users and will let you do all that and more. You can set up your templates with all the fields you want (drag & drop) and they are completely dynamic so you are welcome to change them at any point in time. 2. One Place to See All Interactions. I would use Mandrill (from the makers of Mailchimp) to send and track all mail related interactions. They have webhooks that you can use to create all sorts of custom workflows behind the scenes. Of course this also means you can integrate it with Podio's excellent API to keep all your data in the same place. Eventually you could even code in a workflow that would drip customized your content to subscribers using Mandrill. Essentially removing any need for additional software. Best of luck! And let me know if you have any more questions!