SugarCRM Snaps Up sales-i, Targets Revenue Optimization

SugarCRM has acquired sales-i, the revenue intelligence platform provider, for an undisclosed fee.

In doing so, the prominent CRM player pulls new capabilities that promise to enhance sales profitability and enable more intelligent account management.

After SugarCRM and sales-i first partnered in June last year, several customers will already have access to those capabilities.

These match “soft data” from SugarCRM – like: when did I last speak with this customer, and what did we talk about? – with “hard data” from sales-i, such as: what have we sold you, or what should we sell to you?

As Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM, said when announcing the acquisition:

This combination delivers actionable, intelligent sales strategies that will improve revenue, maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and produce more efficient salespeople.

To understand how the combination of soft and hard data will do this, first consider that sales-i pulls much of its “hard data” from the ERP system. Next, it applies machine learning to isolate associations between products based on previous sales patterns.

When a customer purchases a product, sales-i then calculates the probability of them ordering an associated offering.

With this knowledge, salespeople can make calculated decisions to pursue possible new revenue opportunities each time the business sells any single product.

As Paul Black, Founder and CEO of sales-i, summarized:

The partnership of sales-i and SugarCRM has enabled companies to gain unrivaled insights into their customer buying behavior.

“Together, we’ll expand our capabilities and accelerate development processes that will benefit customers and create a significant market impact.”

Currently, joint customers can access all those real-time, “unrivaled” sales insights via SugarCRM dashboards, with alerts signaling the most promising opportunities.

sales-i also calculates a confidence score for each opportunity – indicating its accuracy – and its potential value. That enables cross-/upsell prioritization.

Soon, all these capabilities may come part-and-parcel with Sugar Sell – and perhaps across its CRM suite to support service and marketing teams, alongside sales personnel.

Sharing his thoughts on that potential, Stephen Hurrell, Research Director in the Office of Revenue at ISG’s Ventana Research, stated:

Upselling and cross-selling to the same customers is more profitable than finding and selling to new customers, but it requires a fuller understanding your customer gained from building and sustaining a long-term relationship.

“This new announcement from SugarCRM seeks to address this need across many industries and enterprises.”

Interestingly, by building sales-i into its platform, SugarCRM also addresses a prominent caution in last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (SFA) Platforms 2023.

In that study, the analyst noted that Sugar Sell still does not include machine-learning-based, next-best-action recommendations. This acquisition changes that and may help the CRM provider move from the challenger quadrant to the next edition’s leader square.

Moreover, as the sales-i platform leverages machine learning, its insights will become increasingly accurate as users engage with and feedback to it.

Yet, while addressing that gap may be one motivation behind the roll-up, sales-i has also made quite some claims over the past year while marketing the integration. It even stated:

No other integration can offer as many valuable insights or deliver such rapid (ROI).

It then backed this up by winning the 2024 SugarCRM Partner Award, based on shared customer outcomes, partner performance, and commitment to Sugar’s service and product standards.

Now, as this acquisition closes, many more customers can put that rapid ROI promise to the test.