Sun State Hauls in Increased Sales Productivity with SugarCRM

Sun State International Trucks, a full-service truck dealership in central Florida, is getting a lot of mileage from SugarCRM’s Sugar Sell sales automation and sales-i revenue intelligence solutions.

Besides new and used trucks, the company also offers trailers, school buses, financing, parts, and maintenance services. “We have a lot of moving parts in our company,” says Steve Jiran, vice president of parts sales.

With so much to offer, Sun State International needed a robust CRM system. But when Jiran joined the company in early 2023, it had more of a basic contact management system rather than a true CRM system.

Jiran immediately reached out to SugarCRM, a company whose technology he had used at a previous job. Beyond Jiran’s earlier work with the Sugar Sell solution, Sun State chose the Sugar Sell/sales-i combination in late 2023 for several other reasons as well.

“sales-i already had the API and everything working with Procede, our business management system,” Jiran relates. “It was just a matter of getting access to all of our data imported into Sugar in the structure that we wanted.”

Sun State went live with Sugar Sell and sales-i in December 2023. It implemented Sugar Sell across all business areas, including wholesale, leasing, parts sales, and service. The unified CRM platform ensures consistent information and provides visual pipelines to track deals from inception to completion. With Sugar, sales representatives can see which departments are communicating with the customer and when, for a more cohesive customer experience.

The company implemented sales-i across its parts department. Powered by artificial intelligence, sales-i brings together key data from the company’s Procede enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and Sugar Sell. This provides a 360-degree view of the customer and surfaces upselling and cross-selling opportunities based on historical sales patterns and customers’ buying behavior.

Sun State started slowly with Sugar, taking its time to get employees trained on the systems and getting all the data synchronized.

“We’re crawl, walk, run,” Jiran explains.

The company finally entered the run stage in January 2024, and once it was running, it found value in the Sugar solutions quickly. One of the primary benefits is a central source for all customer information, not just contact details.

With different departments potentially working with the same customers at the same time, it was valuable for Sun State to have all of the touches in a single space.

“If one of my salespeople is out on the road and finds out something for our leasing department or has a truck lead, we have all of those opportunities logged into Sugar so we can track them, which we couldn’t do with our previous system,” Jiran says.

Using Sugar, Sun State saw a 6 percent growth in the supplies portion of its business in 2024, at a time when supply chain issues caused massive disruptions for the trucking industry as a whole.

“We still grew in a down year for the parts business. I give a lot of that credit to us having a more focused approach with our customers due to SugarCRM and sales-i,” Jiran says.

With all interaction details on a single platform, Sun State streamlined processes as well. Salespeople and managers can see interactions, planned appointments, appointment details, and other important information, saving 10 percent on planning time. And communication on account details and progress has increased 25 percent.

“Using Sugar Sell, sales reps engage in customer conversations armed with insights on customers’ current and potential purchases, giving them an advantage in picking up additional business and increasing sales volume,” Jiran adds. “Additionally, sales-i enables access to sales data analytics for each customer directly from Sugar Sell.”

Jiran hopes to derive further benefits from Sugar Sell and sales-i as Sun State deepens the technology’s integration with its other business systems.

The Payoff

Since adding Sugar Sell and sales-I from SugarCRM, Sun State International has seen the following results:

• a 6 percent increase in parts sales;
• a 5 percent increase in aftermarket sales;
• a 10 percent decrease in appointment planning time;
• a 10 percent productivity increase; and
• a 25 percent increase in communication by sales team members.