The Thoughts of Matt Palmer
(Distilled from http://www.sugarcrm.com/home/Sugar_Suite_Documentation/189/)
Offers the ability to create or update scheduled activities, or to search for existing activities. By managing Activities within the context of an Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, or Case, the true value of Sugar Suite comes to light. Sugar Suite allows you to manage the myriad of calls, meetings, notes, emails and tasks that you need to track in order to get your job done.
Contacts are the people with whom your organization does business. As with accounts, Sugar Suite allows you to track a variety of contact information such as title, email address, and other data. Contacts are usually linked to an Account, although this is not required.
Accounts are the companies with which your organization does business. Sugar Suite allows you to track a variety of information about an account including website, main address, number of employees and other data. Business subsidiaries can be linked to parent businesses in order to show relationships between accounts.
Leads are the people or companies with whom your organization might do business in the future. Designed to track that first point of interaction with a potential customer, leads are usually the hand off between the marketing department and the sales department. Not to be confused with a contact or account, leads can often contain incomplete or inaccurate information whereas contacts and accounts stored in Sugar Suite are core to many business processes that require accurate data. Leads are typically fed into the Sugar Suite system automatically from your website, trade show lists or other methods. However, you can also directly enter leads into Sugar Suite manually.
Opportunities track the process of selling a good or service to a potential customer. Once a selling process has commenced with a lead, a lead should be converted into a contact and possibly also an account. Opportunities help you manage your selling process by tracking attributes such as sales stages, probability of close, deal amount and other information.
Cases are the handoff between the sales department and the customer support department. Cases help customer support representatives manage support problems or inquiries to completion by tracking information for each case such as its status and priority, the user assigned, as well as a full trail of all related open and completed activities.
posted at: 11:10 | category: /knowledge/software/sugarcrm | permalink