SugarCRM is one of the fastest growing CRM providers. Since 2004 Sugar grew from being a fairly unknown value-option sales tool for small businesses, into a robust and full-featured CRM platform for small, medium, and enterprise level businesses with thousands of users per instance. 

As SugarCRM became more sophisticated over the years they developed several editions of the platform with different sets of features, support agreements, storages capacities, and payment plans. The most popular edition is SugarCRM Professional – mainly for its relatively low cost and appeal to small but growing businesses.  

The SugarCRM Enterprise edition is a close second in terms of popularity. When compared side-by-side, Enterprise seems surprisingly similar to Professional – but don’t let charts and spreadsheets fool you. There may not be as many checkmarks in the Enterprise column as you’d like to see, but the ones that are there represent features that can add enormous value to the platform. 

Is Enterprise a Good Fit for Your Business? 

It’s worth noting that this added value is very specific and sophisticated. Enterprise is a platform that works best for businesses that want to refine their business processes or get into the technical and analytical weeds of their CRM software. Many businesses may not need this level of granularity – and many others may not realize that they need it.  

Upgrading to Enterprise is a good move for your business if: 

1. You love your SugarCRM Customer Journey Plugin – and want more from it.

You can automate you processes by pairing your Customer Journey plugin with the Advanced Workflow module in Enterprise. This means automatically creating tasks, sending email reminders, opening cases, and getting more functionality out of your Customer Journey templates. Customer Journey is a much more powerful tool if you have fuller, more detailed workflows to use in your templates. Advanced Workflow can help you build those workflows. So, if you want bigger and more complex Customer Journey functionality, then you’ll need to upgrade to Enterprise and utilize Advanced Workflow.  

2. You need better reporting tools. 

The Advanced Reporting module of Enterprise allows you to create more complex and detailed reports with better visualization options. If you want a single place to find multiple sources of different information, or you feel limited by the reporting options in Professional, then you may need advanced reports. The only caveat to Advanced Reporting is that some knowledge of SQL development is required. However, even if you don’t have someone on your team who can write SQL, you can hire contractors or partner with consultants to write for you – like us! 

3. You want to experiment with CRM customization. 

One of the lesser-known SugarCRM features is the sandbox, which is a spin-up of your CRM instance used for testing tweaks and customizations to the interface before making official changes. Let’s say your business has a really regimented rollout procedure that you want to refine. You can use the safe space of a sandbox to develop, test, and then push out prototypes of that procedure. The Enterprise edition comes with two free sandboxes, whereas Professional only comes with one. Many clients like having two sandboxes because it allows them to better organize their experiments. (For example, it’s not uncommon to use one sandbox for front-end users and the other for back-end users). You also have more SugarCRM support service available with Enterprise, so you have a bigger safety net for your sandbox experiments. 

4. You’re interested in business process improvement.  

Enterprise can elevate the way you provide customer experiences with Advanced Workflow and Customer Journey, provide more data-driven insights on your business with Advanced Reporting, and help you adapt your CRM technologies to meet your needs. This will save you time and money and your streamline processes. In this way, upgrading to Enterprise is a good way to kickstart overall improvement in all your business processes – not just in sales and customer relationship processes. 

Still not sure if you should upgrade to Enterprise? We’re here to help. Let’s chat about your CRM needs and come up with a plan that’s best for your business.