SugarCRM workshop

Yesterday saw the first of what is probably going to be a six-monthly event.  It was a workshop around how are clients are getting the best out of the FREE version of SugarCRM, known as the Community Edition.

Attendees ranged from a planning consultancy with 270 employees, a law firm with 180 and a paten attorney with 150 employees.  Overall there were 11 people from 8 firms.

The topics discussed were very non-technical, it was all very much about rollout, user adoption etc.  The three over-riding aspects of a CRM implementation that we as a business try and get clients to think about are :-

1. Process
2. Habit
3. Culture

Usually in that order. You can’t change your firm’s culture overnight, but you can define new processes to encourage adoption of CRM and ingrain new habits amongst your team.  Do this well and culture will start to change itself.  These are first three topics we discuss in our tips booklet on law firm CRM implementation.

There was no set agenda we brainstormed an agenda at the beginning of the meeting and the following broad themes were discussed :-

• Client intelligence, key account management, user adoption & people management
• Integration, external connectors, email marketing
• Reporting

Come 4:30pm everyone was kind of “talked out” and there was some obvious shuffling of papers and in one case, putting on of a jacket, so I took that as a cue to wrap up the workshop.

Here's one lovely email I received this morning from one of the participants :-

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