Mobile CRM Review: Sugar Mobile for iPhone
Mobile devices such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone continue to gain ground in enterprises, meeting a growing need for mobile access to data and applications. With sales professionals among the most mobile members of the workforce, customer relationship management CRM software vendors have been at the forefront of vendors offering mobile access to their applications.
Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is no exception. In its Sugar 6 release last year, the CRM software got a new look, with new buttons and icons for ease of multitasking along with other upgrades and features. SugarCRM has also added a new native iPhone application to its most recent CRM release: Sugar 6.1.
The SugarCRM Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform
SugarCRM is based on the SugarForge open source CRM software, and the company claims that more than 6,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM’s on-site and cloud computing services over proprietary alternatives. Sugar 6 was developed with simplicity in mind, based on the company’s belief that CRM should not be complex to deploy or expensive to use.
SugarCRM software allows organizations to organize, manage and track people, companies and sales opportunities through CRM dashboards in addition to sales trends and marketing reports and tools and customer profiles.
The Sugar Mobile for iPhone Application
Taking advantage of the newfound popularity of mobile CRM, SugarCRM announced a new iPhone CRM application in its November Sugar 6.1 release. The new mobile release offers a clean and intuitive interface to access your CRM system as a native iPhone application. For those who maneuver through popular Web services like Facebook or Gmail, you’ll most likely find that you can use Sugar CRM and the mobile app with ease.
Presently, only the Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise versions offer the iPhone application. A free trial of Sugar Mobile for iPhone can be downloaded from the Apple Appstore or accessed via the free trial page on the SugarCRM website.
As with most mobile CRM apps, to get started you simply provide your unique URL for mobile access and you username and password; this information will be emailed to you when you sign up for the account. When you access the Sugar Mobile for iPhone Application on your iPhone, you’ll need to use this information to connect to your CRM.