TOM. The Sale Closer. - App of the Month

We're excited to announce TOM. The Sale Closer as the August 2013 App of the Month. TOM is a unique iPad app for SugarCRM that uses advanced Constraint Management methods to help you to close your sales opportunities from SugarCRM in the most effective way. Join us for a live demo August 21st on the next SugarCRM Community Webinar.

Name, title and brief bio?

Simon is director of TOMfor BV and Partner & co-founder of BPI-Group BV. BPI-Group BV is a management-consulting group specialized in strategy development and program management for complex (client related) business environments for Industry, ICT, Healthcare and Pharma. TOMfor BV is developer of the TOM APP combining the experience, processes and know-how of many years of sales and sales process engineering in software tools for all customer related processes. Simon is specialized in Sales and Business Management, process engineering based on TOC, LEAN and SixSigma.

When you designed and built this app, what problems were you looking to solve for SugarCRM users and how does TOM solve those problems?

We have seen that many Sales People have problems focusing on and eliminating the most important constraints in their sales campaigns. A lot of time is spent on issues, which are less important and at the end a major constraint is blocking their deal. A waste of precious sales effort and time, which cannot be spent on attractive business one can win.

This is why we created TOM. Our sales APPs combine professional Opportunity Management with TOC (Theory of Constraints from Dr Eli Goldratt, author of the Goal). They support Sales to identify and eliminate their sales Constraints. We implemented that in such a way that Sales and Business Managers get a view on their most frequent opportunity constraints. We help Sales focusing on winning their business and give management access to real time information to analyze the Constraints and eliminate the Root-Cause. This will add substantial value for both Sales and Business Management.

What unique or interesting ways does TOM make it easy for users to use?

We believe that CRM is necessary but not sufficient for a company to be successful in the future. CRM provides critical data for executives to manage their business. But Sales, one of the most important sources of this information doesn’t get much value from their CRM systems. Our objective is to add value to Sales make them benefit from and use CRM. We want to make it as easy as possible for sales to reach their goal, which means “Meet or exceed their sales target”. TOM will help sales with constraint based opportunity management navigating to the order and provides Executives with information they need to have to support sales in closing the most attractive business deals. This is why we believe TOM creates a breakthrough is Sales and Business management.

What attracted you to being a part of the SugarCRM ecosystem?

I’ve worked most of my corporate career for Hewlett-Packard in the period that HP endorsed open systems and focused on partners for creating value for customers. SugarCRM being an Open Source company does have the same philosophy and is easy to get access to. Beside that SugarCRM is one of the fastest growing companies with a large installed base.

For someone who wants to create their own SugarCRM apps, what resources would you recommend that helped you?

My recommendation would be to work with SugarCRM regional management and the SugarCRM partners and position the APP in line with the SugarCRM strategy to leverage on their marketing and messaging. In our case we did focus on adding value to the SugarCRM user by providing them with the necessary opportunity management and tracking tools.

What is your vision for TOM? What can we expect to see in the future?

We introduced the first version of TOM. We are planning to add extensions for Key Account Management and Product & Program Management in the near future.

Want to learn more?

Check out TOM. The Sale Closer. Available at a special discounted price for SugarCRM users at SugarOutfitters.