Craig Charlton

Toxic environment in a sinking ship I disliked every aspect of working at Sugar except for its average product mainly because CRM is something I am passionate about. Its culture, employees & definitely management is sub-par, they all hover around the Cupertino office & if you're not there good luck! I watched them push out some of their finest sales representatives in favor of cliquey backbiting political relationships internally. Did I mention how PROCESS-driven Sugar is?! You would think for second rate small/mid-sized company they would be nimble, agile & move swiftly on execution but no they have processes for everything even when they need not exist or be so cumbersome. The biggest joke was how little resources they have in terms of personnel to sell & deliver its platform to large customers (or any customers really), for example they have a measly 4-5 sales consultants / engineers FOR ALL of North America where most of their business is. That means when a prospective client is evaluating SugarCRM, they've got to wait in line to book time with their overstaffed, exhausted & impatient sales consultants who are busy since there should be about 15-20 of them, it's laughable. Thus, most of their business is in the small seat range (sub 10 users) where customers can purchase self-service...what's the point of having a field salesforce then Sugar? I sold a few large new clients that were hard-earned & required me to establish relationships with key executives, only to watch the company mismanage the delivery of deal & implementation (often relying on 3rd party VARs to implement which inflates the $$ to implement). I have customers who I got to know on a personal level now suing Sugar or its partners for breach of contract, failure to deliver things like that...or simply just moved on to Salesforce or Dynamics. It's a miserable place to work. Their lack of resources, terrible toxic leadership & overall culture of losing due to their incessant defeats to Salesforce who DOMINATES them along with the other commodity players in CRM. All you have to is look how much their salesforce has shrunk over the years, they have no teams to sell at the Enterprise level, it's an empty bench likable to the bad news bears if you ask me, meaning the talent they do have is also the runts of the litter from SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Oracle & Microsoft. Just think of teaming with the last picks on the dodgeball team, and that's who you'll be working with at Sugar even at the Enterprise level where they don't belong anyway.