Hello. My name is Martin Schneider and I am the marketing manager here at SugarCRM.

Today I’m going to share with you how I use Sugar everyday to develop communications with prospects and customers, capture leads and send them to salespeople, and track the return on investment of our marketing program.

Let’s start by logging in to Sugar CRM. Sugar is a web-based application that runs on many different platforms. This is my Sugar homepage. The display of the homepage changes based on the role of the user. Because I am in marketing, I see information about leads and marketing programs. I can change what information I see with a few clicks of my mouse.

Here I can view my top campaigns as well as reports such as all opportunities by lead source, and leads by campaign. I use these reports to measure the effectiveness of my marketing efforts and replicate successful campaigns. One tool I rely on is the campaign wizard. The campaign wizard walks me through the steps it takes to create, execute, and track campaigns across multiple channels.

Today I’m going to create a new email campaign. I can set my budget, cost, expected revenue, and objective. I want my email to include a link to a page on my website. A special offer or a new product, for example. I can create a tracker URL for the link. When the email’s recipient clicks on the link, SugarCRM will add that recipient to a click-through link list. Sugar allows me to create accurate target lists based on Sugar reports or through importing third-party lists. I want to target companies in the manufacturing industry with annual revenue of over 1 million. Finally, I’m going to add the email I want to send to this campaign. I can create a brand new email right here using Sugar’s HTML editor or I can edit one of the existing email templates. I use email templates to ensure campaigns are brand consistent and coordinated across customer channels. I’ve created some HTML-based email templates within Sugar without writing any actual HTML code. I can make my changes here before sending out my email.

The campaign is now complete. I can send a test message to a select target list first. Once I am ready, I will activate the campaign. The view status button allows me to monitor my campaign’s execution to ensure my email reached the targeted audience. This chart displays the status of my messages. I can see how many emails were sent, how many recipients opened their email, and even how many of them clicked on the embedded links. If I click on the click-thru link bar here, I can access a list of recipients who clicked on the embedded links in the email. I can add this list to another target list and follow up with them later based on their interest.

I use Sugar’s campaigns module to reach specific targets based on metrics that I was able to measure with Sugar’s reports. Next, I will use Sugar’s campaigns module to capture leads from my website directly into my Sugar CRM system.

Sugar’s web to lead form presents all fields and values from the leads module. I can drag and drop the fields I want to capture in each form to ensure useful information is handed off to salespeople for follow up. Without the need for any technical resources, I created my web to lead form that will directly import campaign responses into Sugar. I want all the new leads to be associated to the campaign I created earlier. I also want to qualify and track leads by handing them off to the correct sales representative. Next, I can embed my customizable form within our customer phasing website. Once a new lead visits my website, they can enter their information via the form I created.

I can close the loop between marketing and sales by automating the handoff process. The web to lead form I designed routed the lead to the correct salesperson based on territory, team, or specialty. The salesperson can then convert leads to opportunities and ensure appropriate follow up. This allows me to measure the effectiveness of this marketing campaign from the initial offer to a closed sales opportunity. I can easily view the return on investment of my campaign. This chart enables me to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns relative to budget, channel, expected revenue, and win rate to gain a full picture of how marketing programs impact the sales pipeline.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about these SugarCRM features. You can watch additional demos here to see how Sugar improves other customer phasing processes. To try these features yourself, please sign up for your own free 30-day trial of Sugar today.

Get started now with your own personal SugarCRM by going to http://www.itontap.com/try-web-based-crm-software-for-30-days

Brought to you by Troy Netreba from I.T on TAP, helping businesses spend more time on sales by reducing marketing administration.  Visit  http://www.itontap.com/

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Tags: crm, CRM Software, marketing management

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 12:13 am and is filed under CRM Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.