One of the things we love the most about SugarCRM is that it can be customised completely, whether that’s with the built-in Studio features, or with our highly-skilled development team.
As you use SugarCRM more and more, there’ll come a point where you’ll think “wouldn’t it be great if…”.
Maybe you’ve had some feedback from one of the users that has a request, something that Sugar could do that would save them 3 hours a week, for example. At this point, you can either contact your account manager or me.
Your ideas with my SugarCRM knowledge
I’ll say at the top here: there’s no such thing as a terrible idea. There are bad ideas, but from bad ideas can grow workable – or better – ideas. There’ll be a purpose in every conversation we will have, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
I’ll ask plenty of questions: be prepared for a lot of “why” and “have you thought about,” but there’ll always be a workable end result.
When you consider that I work with all of our clients, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I have an incredibly broad spectrum of subject matter. You might be surprised to learn that there are overlaps between seemingly-disparate industries. One of our clients is based in marketing, and from one of the ideas they came up with, the solution fit very neatly into one of our pharmaceutical client’s systems.
So when you are preparing to approach us with a speculative idea or a full and formal brief, what do you need to know?
In short: just a sense of where you want to go with your initial request.
If you’re looking to integrate your SugarCRM with an external software platform, it’s helpful to know how you’d like the integration to work at a simple level. Or, if you’re not sure and you’d like to explore the idea with our guidance – we can help with that too.
To give you an example of how a new feature project could begin, one of our customers said to me, “I’ve got to go and see a client, I’ll see if there’s anyone nearby and make a day of it.”
After a few conversations focusing on how we could make this easier, we designed a dashlet that contained a Map View with pins of all other accounts assigned to the user within a 10-mile radius (as it turned out there were six other accounts within 10 miles, which saved our customer from manually going through each account and locating them in relation to each other).
The next steps
The process after speaking with me is that I will probably double-check a couple of the details or find out via another “have you thought about” that will inform the design of the solution. From then, a proposal will be sent out, and after approval, it’ll get invoiced and the projects team will take over. I remain close to the delivery, answering any questions and helping where I can.
