CustomerCentrix

We are pretty new to CRM, so some of this is a little confusing. What is the difference between a Lead and Opportunity? The term prospect is also used in the Campaign module, which is also a bit too similar to distinguish yet. Similarly, there are Cases, Bugs and Project Tasks which all overlap somewhat in my vocabulary and experience. Is there some way to turn a Case into a Bug? Do I have to look at a list of all three to determine what to do today? At this point, I am not sure if this is a program that just has much more functionality than I want or there is some clever distinction between these similar entities that will all make sense soon. (after thumbing through the Sugar user guide, I found the modules section which does a decent job of explaining this, it is now starting to make sense)

The good news is that I have successfully imported a few hundred contacts with their associated accounts from my email csv file. It was just about the right amount of functionality vs simplicity to get done what I wanted.

To those who might be asking similar questions sometime in the future, I will give my own quick start for Sugar CRM.

A contact is a person, similar to what you find in your old fashioned address book. In your email system, you probably have a list of names and email addresses which might also have phone numbers, addresses and other stuff.

Closely related to the contact is the account which you can think of as the company that the contacts work for. These are your business customers or partners, although you might want to keep track of vendors and other business relationships within this system as well. Accounts and contacts can be created independently of each other, but you will usually have one or more contact for each account. Accounts and contacts are not necessarily paying customers. As soon as you have enough data to create a complete record (basic name and contact info), you can create an account or contact.

This system begins to make more sense when you think of it as encompassing several job functions or departments. In most businesses, there will be one or more people who handle marketing activities, sales, customer support, product development, etc. For Sugar (and probably most other CRM systems), the reason that you initially see an overwhelming number of tabs is that this is all possible tabs. Most users will only use a configurable subset of these tabs, which makes it look and work more intuitively for their particular job function.