Stephen Hurrell's Analyst Perspectives

I was recently a guest of SugarCRM at their 2025 Analyst summit with an opportunity to meet with the executive team and new CEO, David Roberts. 

SugarCRM is a venerable CRM offering that started as an open-source project and over the years has matured into a very flexible CRM system with offerings for sales, marketing and service. The new CEO, David Roberts joined the company toward the end of 2024 and has spent his time talking to customers, analysts and partners to draw up a new strategy for SugarCRM in terms of reviewing the ideal customer profile (ICP) and setting out a new go-to-market plan and product roadmap. 

Leadership has doubled down on the previously announced focus on Manufacturing and Wholesale Distribution, which is to say they will not only be supporting this vertical, but also will intentionally market to these potential customers. In terms of the size of customers, the target is those with up to 2000 employees. Smaller companies will be served by partner resellers either via co-selling or selling directly by partners. The company will deliberately be seeking out partners with domain expertise in manufacturing and wholesale distribution. 

As to the product itself, the new strategy will prioritize functionality that is targeted at helping management and also individual sellers. Given the focus on manufacturing and wholesale, the sales-I product, acquired in 2024, will be especially important as it allows for deep analysis of non-CRM data such as ERP data to identify existing accounts that have the potential for upsell and cross-sell based on similarities to other customers past purchases. While new customer acquisition is important, for many manufacturing and distribution enterprises, much of their revenue derives from existing customers. SugarCRM has been very deliberate in the usage of generative artificial intelligence and predictive AI on its underlying platform. CRM data is typically a combination of structured data such as account records and unstructured data such as emails, calls and texts. Traditionally, unstructured data was reliant on sellers manually entering the data, including meeting notes and summaries. This data entry activity is seen as a chore for many, and accuracy and timing are often an issue. Starting with emails and voice to text capabilities, SugarCRM will be releasing additional automated data collection during 2025. Many current buyers are looking for a trusted partner to work with, rather than being sold to, so it is important that sellers are well prepared before engaging with a company. SugarCRM showcased their ability to summarize meeting notes and emails between buyers and sellers to better prepare sellers, and to be used as a valuable source to help managers monitor and coach. We believe that through 2026, one-third of enterprises will deploy AI-assisted sales productivity tools to reduce admin tasks and free more time for buyer engagement. 

In addition, using sales-i enables recommendations of products and services to offer a customer. The company has also been focused on usability with two aims; uniformity of experience and enhanced navigation. Interestingly they have focused on having colors be uniform across data presentations such as graphic displays so that a data point referencing sales stage, for instance, will always use the same color pallet across graph and tabular displays.

SugarCRM has always had a very flexible data model, which can be a blessing and a curse. In general, the larger the customer, the more they will dictate the implementation design. However smaller organizations are looking to follow best practices from the provider or the implementation partner. Up until now, it has been the SugarCRM professional team that has maintained templates to be used as part of implementation, leaving the product itself as a tabula rasa shell. It was announced that as part of the new go-forward roadmap, these templates will be productized with the aim of building more best practices into the base product. In theory this should help sales with intentional demos that fit the target ICP, speed up implementation and hence time to value, and make it easier for the product to also come with prebuilt analytics and workflows that can be modified as needed. 

SugarCRM is a solid product, and the executive team is taking deliberate steps to make their go-to-market model more predictable and repeatable. Focusing on manufacturing is a good move, but manufacturing is not Silicon Valley or SaaS tech, and typical messaging will need to carefully be phrased to appeal and connect with potential customers. Likewise, touting AI without connection to positive outcomes may not resonate. The announced product roadmap is deliberate and speaks to a focus on delivering realizable value as opposed to the latest technology or the newest “shiny object”. For many in their target market, the focused capabilities of SugarCRM will be more appropriate than “shiny object” offerings and using AI. And while SugarCRM has had some previous resets, under the new CEO and with commitment from investors, SugarCRM is developing an identity that will be of serious interest to manufacturing and distribution companies. I strongly recommend that for those who are looking to modernize the front office, SugarCRM may be a more appropriate CRM system that you should evaluate. 

Regards,

Stephen Hurrell