How many agents out there us Top Producer to manage all their customers? A lot right…I tried it for The Legacy Group, but do not use it anymore. Unfortunately they make you buy a year contract so I’m still paying for it…When I buy a product I expect it to do everything I need, and top producer just doesn’t. It crashed all the time, it was a bad interface, and it was browser specific.

Since I love open source, and I love FREE, I want to introduce SugarCRM. a Free, open source, customer relationship manager. If you think free mean “bad, or cheap” you have to look at this product. It is a commercial grade product, that can seriously compete with Top Producer, Act, Outlook, etc…

The current version is 4.5.0 which is very nice. I started using Sugar around 4.2 and liked it then, and the new version is very nice. Version 4.5.1 is coming out at the end of December with 2 added features that I can’t wait to use.

• Newsletter manager - timed delivery of e-newsletters
• Auto create web based lead forms - drag and drop form creator

The one problem with SugarCRM is that it might be overwhelming for most Realtors. We actually do not use the full product, we only use the Campaign manager. The campaign mananger allows you to send a one shot email to all your leads. We use this for our newsletter. Sugar can track views, clicks, forwards, bounces, and opt-outs. Very nice, even if you don’t plan to use the entire product, the campaign manager is great, and with the new implementation of the newsletter manager, we will be using this product more and more.

Also, since it is open source, you have access to the code. Of course, I don’t expect you to start hacking sugar, but if you think you can improve the product, you can hire someone or go to Sugar’s forums and see if someone will help you out. There are already a lot of add-ons for Sugar including mailmerge extensions, mapping, organizing…

If all you want is a newsletter manager, you might want to think about PHPlist. A small newlsetter manager, that handle sign-ups, delivery, and opt-outs. I will probably use both to capture leads this year.

I just wanted to touch on some really good products…later on i will show some more detailed examples of using these products, but right now, I have to get ready for Hawaii.

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