Download a case study of our SugarCRM deployment at the State of Vaud.
Today we announced, with SugarCRM, Optaros’ implementation of SugarCRM. As we have already implemented a number of CRM solutions based on SugarCRM for our clients, one might think “what took you so long to use it internally / eat your own dog food”. We rolled out the solution end of last year, so this post is not really breaking news as such, but a follow-up to the press release.
To put this news into perspective; right when I joined Optaros in early 2006, we implemented SugarCRM for our Swiss organization focusing on customer management, marketing and campaign management. We quickly drove the adoption of SugarCRM among our marketing, sales and delivery crew and had everything up and running in a couple of weeks. This was our pilot release where we were able to learn more about the capabilities of SugarCRM as well as how to deploy it into our processes. Based on the learnings made, we then implemented SugarCRM for our entire organization which included the United States, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom.
When implementing SugarCRM across the entire organization, we wanted to have solid support for our entire lead, opportunity, forecast management and revenue reporting processes. Being open source, we could easily extend SugarCRM’s opportunity management and forecasting module to fit with our specific needs as a professional services organization. Based on our previous experience with implementing CRM solutions in large, multi-geography organizations, we obviously spent a lot of time making sure that we assimilated the solution and got all relevant users on-board.
What we have today is a solution that perfectly fits our needs in sales and marketing, while ensuring consistency in our forecasting and revenue reporting (cash is king). And, due to the user friendliness of SugarCRM, we also have a large number of Optards (not only sales & marketing) regularly maintaining our leads and customer data, as well as the interactions we have with them. Open source technology and business process assimilation coming together, by the book.
