SugarCRM has a large amount of functionality out of the box. Often, however, we are hired to expand the platform so it can fit the business needs of organizations that need to dynamically assemble quotes, proposals and bids from a wide variety of product information.
Now, a “product” does not have to just be a physical product that you sell – it can also be services or bundles of services.
Example of dynamic data drop downs in SugarCRM may include:
- Quote generation – where you select a product and then various options are dynamically populated throughout the quote based on previously selections and inventory availability.
- Inventory and Production data – where lead-times and delivery times may be added or help add to a timeline for production based on what you are selecting in the quote.
- Proposal templates – where the selection of a product or service needs to set other documents that get assembled into a final proposal.
- Legal and dynamic contract clauses – where the location of customer or delivery needs to append contract clauses or language to a quote or pass these values into a final template that needs to be pushed to UETA & ESIGN compliant e-signature systems like Echosign or Docusign.
Another important addition you can make to SugarCRM is the dynamic creation or related modules. You can do this to set up related modules that have data pre-populated or passed down from parent modules.
E.g.
When you select a particular product in an opportunity it then dynamically creates a related product as a new line item. Think of it as creating a new “custom” product in SugarCRM. Normally there is no relation between an opportunity and a product in SugarCRM, it just is not joined to the opportunity.
In short, what we’ve done is take something that often forces a salesperson entering in an order, bid, proposal, quote – whatever – and take it from 40+ steps down to 4 for some clients. This is all due to the use of dynamic data and customizing the modules accordingly. If you try to associate products from studio – you cannot edit in an opportunity.
In many cases we have turned a 40 minute quote and proposal process into a 5 minute process through the use of SugarCRM custom programming and dynamic data. Think about how much time is taken up by your current proposal process?
That is not even the tip of the iceberg.
You can assemble dynamic quotes involving multiple warehouses and inventories. You select a product which now looks at related records and determines which inventory would be best for the customer and more cost effective for you.
Real client examples of this include:
- Sales quotes and proposals drawn from a real-time inventory ERP/MRP system (FROG) for a furniture manufacturer with multiple inventories.
- Dynamic quotes for a cable company looking to determine whether they had installations and/or equipment close to or already in the building where the customer needs to be served.
- Assessment data & SugarCRM reports that told that same company whether other customers or leads have inquired about service and may present an opportunity for the cable company to bundle or re-pitch cold leads with a lower price.
- Dynamic reports that run billing information against cancelled customer accounts to ensure that a telecommunications company(re-biller/re-seller) was not still paying Verizon/Comcast/Whomever for lines it didn’t have customers for.
- Dynamic pipeline reports that could alert management when a salesperson got a deal to a phase known to be 95% close rate – yet consistently failed versus the company “normal” rate. This enables management or even senior executives to step in or take action if the deal was important (or make a change in someone’s employment status).
- Marketing reports for “walk scores” for neighborhoods or sales territories based upon the company’s assets and resources in a given location.
Generating Workflows for Multi-document PDFs in SugarCRM
We often get called upon to create SugarCRM instances that can generate a multi-page PDF based upon dynamic data in the quoting or pricing phases. The end goal is for a salesperson to generate a single PDF that combines the entire proposal – from pricing to work order or Master Service Agreement (MSA). We’ve also passed this document to Docusign with either dynamic fields – or a more simple approach where the document itself is passed through Docusigns’s API and signature fields are overlaid in the appropriate places.
Honestly, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this and our clients often find that the simpler approach of overlaying fields is better than tying to push more data than is needed into Docusign.
By doing the assembly of contract and legal information in SugarCRM you are offloading a lot of technological risk and tech debt by controlling all of your legal content and disclaimers before it gets to the signature phase.
For more information about how we can help you with SugarCRM development or workflow development – contact us today.