Dear Business Owner/Entrepreneur,
You've likely arrived at this web page after discovering SugarCRM and thinking it might be able to help your business earn more revenue and profit.
Perhaps you've already decided that your business definitely needs CRM software and SugarCRM is one of the products on your shortlist.
Either way, you're ready to investigate the next step and you're looking for somebody local who can help. Somebody who knows SugarCRM well, who can demonstrate it for you and answer all your questions. A company that works with SugarCRM every day, who you're confident could support you – if you decide to move ahead with SugarCRM….
That’s where we come in. We offer SugarCRM hosting and a whole lot more….
Australia's Leading SugarCRM Customisation Experts
IT on Tap has done more development work with SugarCRM than any other Australian company…and you'll understand that more clearly when you read below about the advanced features our programmers have added to Sugar for other clients.
Most importantly we're local, we're in your time zone, we know what we're doing and we're just a phone call away. We'll set up SugarCRM to ideally suit your business, we'll load your data, we'll get you up & running quickly – and we'll support you at every step of the way.
Customised Or Off-The-Shelf?
If you have a lot of previous experience with CRM software, or if you already have a detailed plan for automating your business processes, then we can customise SugarCRM to suit your specific needs.
Once we have a clear picture of what you want to achieve, we'll be able to tell you how long it would take and, most importantly, how much it would cost. Between our Australian office and offshore we can access up to 49 experienced SugarCRM developers – enough to tackle any implementation, no matter how large or complex it must be to meet your needs.
If you’re new to the world of CRM, then we’d strongly suggest you get started with what we call a "standard build" – an unmodified, stock-standard configuration of SugarCRM designed to suit a broad range of companies like yours. You can be up & running within a few days and at minimal cost.
As you gain experience at using a CRM within your business, a picture will emerge of what the perfect solution for your business would look like. Then we can sit down together and work out how best to get you from here to there in easy steps.
An End-To-End Marketing & Sales System - Built Around SugarCRM
If you're willing to look beyond CRM for just a minute, we invite you to look at our complete, end-to-end system for marketing and business automation. Check it out:
You see, we know that CRM software is a key piece of technology….but it's certainly not a complete solution, not on its own.
And there's a problem that occurs sometimes when you deploy CRM into a typical SMB or SME…If your existing software systems aren’t linked together then you run the risk that your brand new CRM could become just one more isolated "island" of data, separate from everything else.
You see, if your business already has
- a list of customers in your accounting system
- a mailing list in your email marketing software
- a list of registered website visitors; and
- several lists of prospects that your sales reps are working on
then adding CRM software to the mix won't solve the problems that all those separate lists create. All the confusion, the missed sales opportunities, the poor customer service, the unnecessary labour costs – all because your business doesn't have a single, complete view of each customer.
Until now.
For the first time you can get a fully automated, end-to-end, affordable system that ties all the different parts of your business together.
Each of the software components is the best in its category, the ideal solution for SMBs and SMEs. Let's run through some of them:
- Customer Database – of course that's SugarCRM
- Accounting – that's MYOB, the accounting software used by around 80% of Australian SMBs
- Web hosting – the Joomla Content Management System, developed in Australia and now running more than 7 million websites worldwide
- Shopping cart – Magento, the open source eCommerce platform favoured by industry insiders and already downloaded over a million times
Although each of these products is a leader in its category, they'd never been integrated together before we created the IT on Tap automated business system.
I know you're going to love our system – used properly it will literally transform your business, turning it into an automated revenue machine.
I'll explain some of the key features in a little more detail below. Read on if you're interested, or just jump to the end if you aren’t.
Of course if you're still only interested in SugarCRM hosting, and you aren't ready to look at our additional capabilities yet, then that's fine too.
Just jump to the end and complete the form. We'll get you set up with a free trial account, let you get logged in to try things out and we’ll be standing by to help if you have any questions.
- Storing financial transactions in SugarCRM
- Seamless MYOB integration
- Handle customer financial queries with frontline staff
- Financial reporting from SugarCRM
- Affiliate tracking and commission calculation
- Engage customers with web-based lead generation activities
- Email marketing – live integration
- Web shopping cart link to SugarCRM
- Automate customer debits and payment plans
- Appointments, tasks and contacts on your Blackberry, Outlook
Storing financial transactions in SugarCRM
The foundation for a lot of advanced capabilities that follow is the ability to store customer financial transactions – invoices, credit memos and payment records – in SugarCRM.
IT on Tap has developed a complete Accounts Receivable implementation for SugarCRM, enabling customer transactions to be store and managed within SugarCRM.
Below you can see a series of transactions linked to a single customer records in SugarCRM:
Individual invoices look like this:
…and here are the customer payments:
Enabling customer service staff to handle customer financial queries
What happens at your company when a customer calls to request a statement, a copy of an invoice or to make a payment by credit card?
Can the customer service person who takes the call handle the request? In most companies the answer is "no", queries like that must be referred to the Accounting department – who are generally on much higher salaries than customer service.
With your A/R transactions stored in SugarCRM, any of your staff can press the "Email Invoice" or "Email Statement" buttons to send a copy of the documents to the customer. They can equally easily quote a current balance owing or process a credit card payment on the spot. The customer request is quickly handled on the first call.
Keep your accounting staff doing complex accounting stuff – odds are they really don't like talking to customers anyway.
Financial reporting from SugarCRM
Now you can leverage the reporting capabilities of SugarCRM to analyse your financial performance in many ways, for example….
Sales breakdown by product:
Cash flow over a time period:
Seamless MYOB integration
IT on Tap’s SugarCRM to MYOB link replicates client records and Accounts Receivable transactions in SugarCRM across to your accounting software.
Your accounting records are kept up to date automatically – this means the end of the slow & expensive data re-entry work normally required to keep your client records in sync between CRM and accounting software. Key features include:
- adding / updating customers in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding / updating items in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding / updating projects (jobs) in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding invoices in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding credit memos in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding payments in MYOB from SugarCRM
- adding refunds in MYOB from SugarCRM
- applying payments and refunds to invoices in MYOB
- extensive SugarCRM data validation
Affiliate tracking and commission calculation
Marketing gurus such as Jay Abraham agree that selling through affiliates is the single most powerful marketing strategy available to a growing business. Unfortunately, until now it’s been easier said than done….the idea is great, but implementation is complex and difficult.
At IT on Tap, we think that marketing through affiliates is a must-do strategy for every SMB and SME.
In fact, we think this capability is so important that we include affiliate tracking as standard with our Joomla-based web hosting and SugarCRM hosting. That’s "standard" as in: no extra charge, bundled and ready to go.
Here's how it works in a nutshell:
First, someone joins your affiliate program and a client record is created for them in SugarCRM.
The unique Client ID on their record in SugarCRM doubles as their affiliate code. They add their affiliate code to a URL for a page on your website, e.g.
www.thinkbigmagazine.com/free-magazine?af=TBM1015006When someone clicks on that link and visits your website, a browser cookie is used to record the referring affiliate. As soon as they submit a form on your website – whether that means buying a product, downloading a free eBook or just signing up for your newsletter – then a client record is created for them in SugarCRM.
That client record is linked to the referring affiliate, as below:
Now you can easily run reports to track the performance of your affiliates, e.g. number of leads generated:
and sales breakdown by referring affiliate:
As always, the goal is to apply the 80/20 rule and focus on those things (affiliates in this case) that are producing the most revenue, and reduce investment of time and/or money in the rest.
Email marketing – live integration
Email campaigns remain the "workhorse" of online marketing – there's simply no substitute for contacting your list with regular messages to keep them engaged with your business and primed to buy.
For this reason one of our first SugarCRM projects was to enable live synchronisation of client records in SugarCRM with EmailOnTap, the email marketing solution that we recommend to our clients.
That means you never need to load another list again! Whenever a client record is added or edited in SugarCRM, the email marketing system is updated automatically. Set and forget, a lot of manual work goes away and you can just get on with marketing.
Engage customers with web-based lead generation activities
How do you best engage with your prospect list in order to generate sales leads? If you just continually send sales pitches to your list, people will start unsubscribing in huge numbers very quickly.
One of the best things you can do is engage your list in activities centred around the topic or theme of your business. Here’s a graphical representation of this approach:
What sort of activities can you run? Really the only limit is y our imagination….
Here are a few activities that the IT on Tap system supports as standard – meaning that website forms are available for your clients to book themselves in and the appropriate records are then created in SugarCRM:
- Download an ebook
- Request a free package or sample – e.g. a book, catalog or DVD that you send to them by post
- Sign onto a mailing list (e.g. a newsletter or a topic-specific “sublist” of your main prospect list)
- Enrol in a webinar
- Enrol to attend a live event
- Submit an enquiry – translates to a scheduled sales follow-up activity
The records created in SugarCRM enable you to more accurate target your follow-up marketing activities, e.g. sending an email to everyone who enrolled to attend a certain live event but not show up on the day.
Web shopping cart link to SugarCRM
In line with our objective to combine all customer interactions and information into a single database, we built integration between the Magento web shopping cart and SugarCRM.
When your clients order products and pay online through your website, client records, invoices and payment records are created in SugarCRM to fully record the transaction. Optionally it can also create tasks for your staff to follow up on shipping, customer service and other post-sale activities.
From SugarCRM those financial transactions are copied into MYOB to keep the company accounts up to date.
Linking your shopping cart with the rest of the system means that the online sales part of your business can hum along automatically as well – one less thing to worry about.
Automate customer debits and payment plans
The ultimate success in business is to build recurring revenue streams – customers who pay you month after month, preferably without having to be followed up each time. Gym memberships are a good example, along with pay-by-the-month insurance. Each one fits the model of: sell once, get paid month after month after month.
The IT on Tap system can help you reach this state of business Nirvana. The Payment Engine shown in the system diagram is a veritable "Swiss army knife" of customer payments. When loaded with customer credit card or bank account details, it can be configured to:
- make a debit to pay an invoice on a specific date, e.g. 7 days after issue
- run regular monthly debits, such as gym membership fees or membership website subscriptions
- implement complex payment plans, potentially with varying payment amounts each month, to pay off large purchases (the lay-by model)
Payment plans are stored under the client record in SugarCRM:
Appointments, tasks and contacts on your Blackberry, Outlook
If you or your sales team are on the road a lot, you probably already know the benefits of having 24/7 access to your email through a Blackberry or iPhone. Now you can add phone-based access to your appointments, tasks and contacts in SugarCRM.
IT on Tap’s SugarCRM hosting environment supports the Outlook Connector for SugarCRM, which provides a 2-way data link between SugarCRM and Outlook (and your phone along with it). Even when you’re away from your PC, you still have your up-to-date contacts and activities on hand.
What does it cost?
Let’s cut to the bottom line: everything comes with a price tag attached. We can’t work out exactly what your perfect solution will cost until we’ve discussed your business and your specific needs.
We can give you the pricing for SugarCRM hosting, which after all is what originally brought you to this web page. It’s A$70 per person, per month…plus GST if you’re based in Australia. Like all IT on Tap services there are no contracts or lock-in – you only pay month-by-month for as long as you want to use it. If we don’t deliver a good service, or if you don’t get good value and a great return on your investment, then you leave within a month – all the onus and risk is on us.
Taking the next step
To learn more and to try out SugarCRM for yourself, just fill out the form below.
You’ll immediately receive login details to access our demonstration system – you’ll be in and looking around within minutes.
If you have a question or specific requirement that you’d like us to help you with, then type it into the comments field and we’ll get back to you promptly.
We look forward to growing your business very soon!
Warm regards,
Ken Wood
Chief Tap Turner
IT on Tap