The Importance of Branding
It is difficult to under-appreciate the importance of marketing. Making your company or product appealing and familiar provides more opportunities for new and continued sales. Often overlooked, however, is internal marketing – bringing your brand alive for your own employees! This can create an emotional connection to your company and products. This can lead to greater motivation to work hard and even increase loyalty toward your company.
Out of the box, Sugar is branded for (unsurprisingly) SugarCRM. But it does provide a few ways for you to use input own brand on your Sugar instance with very little effort!
Branding in Sugar
The most effective method is to replace the SugarCRM logo with your own. Simply upload your logo by navigating to Admin > System Settings and choose an image under the “Select Logo” field. Save your changes and you are done! The login page will now feature your logo, and the footer (look in the bottom left corner of every page) will as well.
While you are in this section, you can also update the “System Name”. This is what is shown in the browser title on every page. Using your company name is a good starting point, but feel free to enter whatever works best for your business!
The stock modules in Sugar are often adequate, but depending on your business needs, renaming them may help with your internal branding. Do you have Companies and Customers rather than Accounts and Contacts? Or maybe Hospitals, Students, Candidates, or Pets? Sugar provides a quick way to update the module names to fit your needs. Go to Admin > Rename Modules and rename as many modules as you like.
Finally, there are likely at least a few modules that your company doesn’t even use. This can not only be confusing to your users, but it can distract from your brand. Don’t use Opportunities, Forecasts, or Knowledge Base articles? Just go to Admin > Display Modules and Subpanels. Sugar provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to hide any modules or subpanels.
Further Customization
With effective branding of Sugar, your employees may not even need to know the name “Sugar” is associated with the tool they use. Interested in branding even further? How about replacing the Sugar cube (in the top left corner and in the browser tab) with your own logo or icon? Or modifying the color scheme to match your brand? This can all be done with a little bit more work using Sugar’s Module Loader and some custom code. There’s almost no limit to what you can do to make Sugar look like your very own product!
Branding = Pride of Ownership
You've likely spent quite a bit of time and money getting your CRM up and running. These little touches which make it "yours" really help users take the new solution into their day to day activities.
Intricity Experts Article by:
Alan Beam
Sr. Solutions Engineer
