JoshSweeney

Marketing An Inexpensive SugarCRM Module

SugarCRM is a great platform to extend with custom modules. You can extend it into various areas of work and add functionality that the creators never thought of when SugarCRM was coming into existence. These modules are great for personal and company use but things get a little more complex when you decide to sell one.

This week ALT-Invest completed and released it’s first purchasable module for SugarCRM called GetSocial Twitter Pro. The fact that we weren’t some large corporation trying to drive users to our service and simply offered an inexpensive SugarCRM interface to Twitter meant that we were embarking on a journey that not many have taken.

What do I mean by this? SugarCRM offers the SugarForge for developers that want to post their work for all to use at no cost. We have posted multiple modules here but decided that to provide a robust module that was feature rich, we would need a little bit of compensation. This drove us to look at SugarExchange.

Somewhere between mid development and completion we looked at adding the module to the SugarExchange and found that there is a $2000 annual listing fee. This was just not feasible for a module that cost $25 and connected a free service ( Twitter ) to a community that mostly utilizes the free version of SugarCRM. Later we were told that SugarExchange was for corporate modules which, again, means companies that want to drive users to their software or service by offering a module. This seems like an odd positioning given SugarCRM market but that is for another day.

Now that we knew that the two biggest channels for attracting SugarCRM users weren’t going to work for us we had to get more grass roots than originally planned.

Here is what we have done so far:

Seeing that this is a Twitter module and we are Twitter users we started to leverage….. you guessed it, Twitter. There are many helpful SugarCRM users on Twitter so we started by posting screenshots to the new module which thanks to a few got retweeted. We will continue the Twitter effort over a period of time while trying to keep it from getting to spammy. Since we already posted the screenshots we are likely to follow up with posting the docs and then some more info. I think that three Tweets is enough when it comes to marketing one product on Twitter.

Next we hit up the bloggers. We searched out bloggers that used Twitter and SugarCRM that would be willing to review the module. Our offer to them was a free copy with no stipulations. One thing that we also made sure NOT to do was ask for a good review or anything like that. We simply asked for a review of a 1.0 module. Hopefully they enjoy it enough to give us a fair review that is accurate and provides value to potential customers. If they dislike it then at least we still get honest feedback that we can feed off of for the next release.

The third thing that we have done is created a press release to email out to any CRM sites that we identify to be valuable. We just finished the writing the release and will keep you posted on this process.

Since ALT-Invest is one of the organizers of the Atlanta SugarCRM meetup we will be giving a presentation dubbed: Building SugarCRM Modules for Fun and Profit. This will revue everything that we learned in the process of building a module with the intent to sell. In the presentation we  will mention the GetSocial Twitter Pro module as the case in point but will not go more in depth. Doing this will let people know it exists while still staying true to the focus of the group.

Lastly, we have to count personal and company blog posts such as this.

So far, this is were we stand on marketing our inexpensive SugarCRM module. As we further our efforts and make progress we will let you know so that you can know what to do or what not to do with your next module. If you have any suggestions then please leave comments or catch me on Twitter @JoshSweeney.