Recently SugarCRM announced it acquired Atlanta-based Salesfusion. Through the acquisition, SugarCRM will be able to build on its marketing automation business. The terms of the deal were undisclosed. SugarCRM CEO Craig Charlton pointed out that marketing automation is an area that needed to be enhanced at the company.

“We spent the last three or four months doing a fairly intensive market scan and dealing with a number of the possible opportunities, and we decided that Salesfusion was head and shoulders above the rest for a variety of reasons,” said Charlton via TechCrunch.

One of the biggest reasons why Salesfusion was selected was due to its customer focus. Charlton pointed out that Salesfusion had an impressive on-boarding process, which is why they get such a “quick time to value for the customers.” Salesfusion essentially guides their customers for 12 weeks until they fully graduate from the on-boarding process.

Last year, Accel-KKR reportedly acquired SugarCRM in a deal that was valued at more than $100 million. Prior to the acquisition, SugarCRM raised about $120 million from investors like DFJ and NEA. Following that deal, Charlton succeeded Larry Augustin. SugarCRM was originally founded in 2004 by Jacob Taylor (former SugarCRM CTO) and Clint Oram (current CSO of SugarCRM).

This was SugarCRM’s second acquisition under Charlton’s leadership. The first acquisition was Collabspot’s email integration products in March 2019.

“These acquisitions combined with our new product innovations clearly demonstrate that Sugar is on a solid growth path and strategically evolving our business every day. This is just the beginning of many more game‐changing announcements that will dramatically transform our company for employees, customers, partners, and the industry,” said Charlton in a statement about the deals.

Salesfusion launched in 2007 and raised about $16 million. Going forward, Salesfusion is going to continue operating out of its offices in Atlanta. And Salesfusion’s 50 employees are going to become SugarCRM employees.

“Sugar and Salesfusion share a common vision that the next wave of innovation in B2B is sharply focused on the customer experience,” added Salesfusion Logan Henderson. “The fact is that customer experience leaders significantly outperform their peers, generating higher average order values, better customer retention and satisfaction and significantly improved brand awareness. Salesfusion provides strong capabilities designed to supercharge marketing efficiency and productivity making marketers more effective at delivering engaging, on‐point customer experiences. As part of Sugar, we’re bringing together the best of everything in customer experience ‐ marketing, sales, service and intelligent insights ‐ to empower companies to perform better and create customers for life.”

W‐Systems president Christian Wettre pointed out that it is exciting to see Salesfusion join forces with Sugar since it adds Salesfusion’s powerful marketing automation platform solution to Sugar’s market-leading CRM to enable a comprehensive customer experience solution for companies everywhere. And Nucleus VP Rebecca Wetteman noted that a tightly integrated platform is going to accelerate time to value and increase sales and marketing productivity by “streamlining campaign creation, lead nurturing, and the handoff to sales.”