Sugar Automate

Overview

Sugar Automate lets administrators create easy-to-follow, visual business processes for users to complete against their Sugar records. Each Smart Guide is an end-to-end process that is split into color-coded stages, and each stage contains one or more call, meeting, or task activities that the user can complete with optional dependencies and actions on related records. This guide covers how users can engage with Sugar Automate after it has been configured by an administrator.

For more information on creating new Smart Guide templates, which an administrator must do before users can begin any Smart Guides, please refer to the Sugar Automate Administration page in the Administration Guide.

Prerequisites

• Sugar Automate is included with Sugar Sell Premier and Enterprise+, and it enables the guided selling capability. Sugar Automate can also be purchased as an add-on for Sugar Sell Advanced, Serve, and Enterprise. Please contact your Sugar partner or representative to learn more.
  • If you purchased Sell Premier, users who are assigned the Sell Premier license type are granted access to guided selling.
  • If you purchased Enterprise+, you must assign the Enterprise and Sugar Automate license types to the users so that they have access to guided selling.
  • If you purchased Sugar Automate as an add-on for Sugar Sell Advanced, Serve, or Enterprise, you must assign the Sugar Automate license type and a CRM license type to users who should have access.

Use Case

Throughout this guide, we refer to an example decision-making Smart Guide to demonstrate the features of Sugar Automate. The Smart Guides in your Sugar instance have been custom-built by your Sugar administrator and will, therefore, look different from the one shown here. The following image shows the example Smart Guide that we refer to throughout this guide:

The example Smart Guide contains four stages of customer decision-making (Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Loyalty). Each stage contains several activities which must be completed as calls, meetings, and tasks.

Beyond managing the decision cycle, alternative use cases for Smart Guides in Sugar include managing the internal sales process (e.g. Target, Convert, Sell, Nurture) or other internal processes that do not require a lot of logic but do require a standardized sequence of events.

Because a Sugar record may participate in more than one Smart Guide, it is possible to attach multiple, complementary Smart Guides to a record. For example, you could start the decision-making Smart Guide and the sales-process Smart Guide at the same time to ensure that the customer's Awareness stage aligns with the selling cycle's Target stage and so on.

Core Concepts

A Smart Guide is a set of chronological stages through which most customers proceed as they participate in the decision-making process. With Sugar Automate, your administrator has the freedom to create multiple, unique Smart Guides specific to your various customers' Smart Guides or even for regulating your internal business processes.

Smart Guides

A Smart Guide in Sugar is the multi-stage process shown just above the subpanel area in the Smart Guide panel. The Smart Guide contains all of the stages and the activities that make up those stages. The Smart Guide panel is where users can build, update, and track every task or action that must be completed to help a customer advance to the next stage in their Smart Guide. The result is a streamlined process that synchronizes every piece of your customer-facing activities from marketing and sales through to onboarding and renewal.

For more information about Smart Guides, please refer to the Starting a New Smart Guide section of this page.

Smart Guide Stages

Customer Smart Guide stages are the major steps within a Smart Guide. A traditional Smart Guide is sometimes characterized by stages such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Loyalty or Bonding. Depending on your business needs, you may have more or fewer stages or even several variations of the Smart Guide for different types of consumers or audiences. A Smart Guide's stages are represented in the Smart Guide panel as arrow-shaped column headers:

For more information about Smart Guide stages, please refer to the Completing Smart Guide Stages section of this page.

Smart Guide Activities

Each stage in a Smart Guide may be broken into one or more activities that must be completed before the Smart Guide considers the activity's stage complete. When a new Smart Guide is created, a record is created in Sugar's Calls, Meetings, or Tasks module to represent each activity in the Smart Guide. In the Smart Guide panel, a stage's activities always appear directly below the arrow-shaped column header for the corresponding stage:

Activities in a Smart Guide may also contain one or more sub-activities. When sub-activities exist, you must expand the parent activity to access them. Simply click on the downward-facing arrow to the left of the activity's name to reveal its sub-activities:

Sub-activities will be slightly indented and display the default order number x.1, where x is the order number of the parent activity. For example, if an activity numbered 3 contains two sub-activities, the sub-activities will be numbered 3.1 and 3.2 by default.

For more information about activities, please refer to the Completing Smart Guide Activities section of this page.

Starting a New Smart Guide

Customer Smart Guides may be related to any combination of records in the modules configured by your administrator to work with Sugar Automate. The Smart Guides in your Sugar instance have been custom-built by your Sugar administrator and may be available in all or some of these modules. The following steps to create a new Smart Guide will apply to any Smart Guide-enabled module.

Note: For more information on configuring modules for Smart Guide access, please refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

1. Navigate to the lead's record view and locate the Smart Guide panel or tab. The administrator may have configured Smart Guides to show as a panel under the record view or as a tab as shown here on an account record:
    
2. In either view, the selector menu will be on the right side of the Smart Guide Options Bar. Click on the down arrow to see the available Smart Guides listed in alphabetical order:
   
3. Select the Smart Guide you want, and then click on the Start (+) icon to start that Smart Guide for the current record.
   

The Smart Guide is now active.

Please refer to the sections under Working With Smart Guides for information on managing the Smart Guide.

Working With Smart Guides

To move through a Smart Guide, simply progress through the stages by completing one activity at a time. The following sections explain how to complete stages and activities in a Smart Guide.

Completing Smart Guide Stages

Smart Guide stages are the major steps represented in the Smart Guide panel as arrow-shaped column headers. To complete a stage within a Smart Guide, you must complete all of the activities under the stage. When all of the stage's activities are complete, the stage header will turn green to indicate that it is complete. In the image below, notice that the first stage is considered complete even though the Track Clicks activity is yellow. The yellow activity was marked "Not Applicable" and, therefore, is considered complete.

Note: Many instances have been configured to use different statuses (e.g. Closed, In Progress, Invalid) for records than the statuses used in a stock Sugar instance. Your administrator may define which statuses Sugar Automate considers "closed" for your instance. For more information, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

For more information on the various color states for Smart Guide stages, please refer to the User Interface section of this page. For more information on completing activities within a stage, please refer to Completing Smart Guide Activities.

Adding Smart Guide Stages

At any time during a Smart Guide, you may choose to add a new stage to the cycle. Adding a stage to one Smart Guide will only affect the current Smart Guide and will not affect other Smart Guides that may be using the same template. Follow these steps to add a new stage to an existing Smart Guide:

1. Click on the Add Stage button at the top of the Smart Guide panel:
   
   The quick-create drawer will appear, showing the edit view of a Smart Guide stage record. The Smart Guide field should already contain the name of the active Smart Guide that will have the new stage:
   
2. Complete the following fields for the new Smart Guide stage:
   • Name: Enter a label for the stage in the Smart Guide. For this example, we have named the new stage "Upsell".
   • Smart Guide Stage Template: Your administrator has likely created pre-configured stage templates in Sugar as part of the setup and administration process. A stage template usually contains pre-defined activities attached to the stage. If you choose to use a Smart Guide stage template, the related activities will automatically carry over to your Smart Guide in a not-started state. If you choose not to use a Smart Guide stage template, the new stage will not contain any activities. Instead, you must manually add them as explained in the Adding Smart Guide Activities section of this page.
   • Order: Enter the step number that corresponds to where the stage should appear under the overall Smart Guide.
     • The order number is displayed to the left of the stage's name in the Smart Guide panel.
     • By default, a new stage's order number is the next sequential number after the last stage in the existing Smart Guide (e.g. if the Smart Guide contains four stages, then the new stage's default "Order" value will be 5).
     • If you want to override the default order number to position the stage earlier in the Smart Guide, you will need to adjust the numbers of the stages that occur after the new stage. To adjust the Smart Guide's stage numbers after saving the new stage, click the Edit button on the misnumbered stage(s) and type the correct number into the Order field.
3. Click "Save" to return to the record view of the Smart Guide with the new stage. If the Smart Guide becomes too wide for the row, then the stages will wrap around to the next row.

To configure activities within the new stage, please refer to the Adding Smart Guide Activities section of this page.

Removing Smart Guide Stages

If you need to remove a stage and its activities' point values from a running Smart Guide, simply choose "Delete Stage" from the stage's actions menu.

Keep in mind these important points regarding deleted Smart Guide stages:

• The deleted stage will only be removed from that specific Smart Guide and will not affect other Smart Guides in Sugar.
• Deleting a Smart Guide's stage also deletes any call, meeting, and task records from Sugar that were created by the stage.
• If the deleted stage is not the final stage of the Smart Guide, then we recommend re-numbering the stages that occur after the deleted stage. For example, if your Smart Guide has four stages and you delete the third stage, the remaining stages will retain their original numbers: 1, 2, and 4. To resolve the numbering, click the Edit button on the misnumbered stage (e.g. stage 4) and type the correct number (e.g. "3") into the stage's Order field.

Completing Smart Guide Activities

The activities in a Smart Guide represent calls, meetings, and tasks in their corresponding modules in Sugar. Because they exist in Sugar as normal records, you can work with activities as you normally would in the Calls, Meetings, and Tasks modules, or you can manage them via dashlet, calendar, or in the Smart Guide panel. This section explains how to complete activities using the Smart Guide panel. For information on using the other methods, please refer to the Sugar Application Guide.

A Smart Guide's activities exist under the stage they belong to. A stage may contain any number of activities and sub-activities. The following sections explain each type of activity in detail.

Calls and Meetings

Call and meeting activities in the Smart Guide link to the Calls and Meetings modules respectively. The activity's start time and duration are determined by the administrator and are relative to the Smart Guide's timeline (e.g. 7 days after the stage begins or 1 day after the previous activity has been completed). The connector will automatically add the activity's assigned user and the person associated with the Smart Guide's parent Sugar record (e.g. the lead or contact) as guests for the activity. This ensures that the activity appears on the assigned user's calendar and that the call or meeting shows up in the lead or contact's subpanel. You can add or remove guests via the call or meeting's record view as usual. A call and a meeting activity are highlighted in our example Smart Guide below:

Note: The administrator can configure Sugar to send guest invitations for call and meeting activities. This option is set on a per-activity basis and may not apply to all calls and meetings in a Smart Guide. Depending on how this is configured, the invitations will either send to the activity's assigned user and the related lead or contact at the beginning of the Smart Guide, or the invitations will send to the activity's guest list when the parent stage begins.

To complete a call or meeting activity, you can simply close it in Sugar as you would normally close any other call or meeting or you can complete it directly in the Smart Guide panel by clicking the Complete checkmark on the activity:

Upon completing the activity, it immediately turns green in the Smart Guide panel and 100% of its point value is credited toward the progress of this Smart Guide in the progress bar and dashlets. For more information on how points are tallied, please refer to the Progress Bar section.

Additional options for calls and meetings are available via the activity's actions menu:

• Preview: Click on "Preview" to expand or refresh the intelligence pane and view details about the activity without leaving the current page. To close the preview, simply click the "X" in the corner of the intelligence pane.
• Edit: Click on "Edit" to open the edit view of the call or meeting record related to the activity. From the edit view, you can add and remove guests, assign the call or meeting to another user, change the call or meeting dates, and edit the fields on the record.
• Add Task, Schedule Meeting, Schedule Call: Select one of these options to create a sub-activity directly under this activity. For more information, please refer to the Adding Sub-Activities section.
• Assign Me: Choose "Assign Me" to instantly change the Assigned To user of the call or meeting to yourself.
• Not Applicable: The Not Applicable option sets the related call or meeting's status to "Canceled" in Sugar and marks the activity as complete in the Smart Guide. The activity will turn green in the Smart Guide panel and 100% of its point value is credited toward the progress of this Smart Guide in the progress bar and dashlets. For more information on how points are tallied, please refer to the Progress Bar section.
  • Activities that are blocked by an earlier activity will not display the "Not Applicable" option until the block has been removed.
  • When "Not Applicable" is chosen for a call or meeting activity that contains one or more sub-activities, the parent activity will save as "Canceled" (green) and its sub-activities will close as "Not Applicable" (yellow). The administrator will have defined whether the activities marked Not Applicable be recognized as complete or simply ignored in the Smart Guide's progress and momentum calculations via the "Not Applicable Action" field on the Smart Guide template.
• Delete: If the administrator has permitted "delete" actions for activities on this template, you will see a delete option in this menu, as well. For more information on deleting activities, refer to the Removing Smart Guide Activities section of this page.
• Copy: Create a new call or meeting for this Smart Guide by copying the current one. You will be given the opportunity to edit the call or meeting details before saving.

Note: Many instances have been configured to use different statuses (e.g. Closed, In Progress, Invalid) for records than the statuses used in a stock Sugar instance. Your administrator may define which statuses Sugar Automate considers "closed" for your instance. For more information, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Tasks

Task activities are completed as records in Sugar's Tasks module.

• Agency Task: This task represents an action to be completed by a third-party supplier or a non-Sugar user such as a credit check or procurement approval. This activity links to the Tasks module and must be closed by a Sugar user after the agent has completed it.
  
• Automatic Task: This task represents an activity that is performed by an automated process, typically within Sugar (e.g. workflows or Advanced Workflow) or in a connected app. The Smart Guide's target assignee must manually close this task in Sugar to complete the activity in the Smart Guide.
  
• Customer Task: This task represents an action to be completed by the customer, such as a survey or request for information. This activity links to the Tasks module and must be closed by a Sugar user after the customer has completed it.
  
• Internal Task: This task represents an action in the Tasks module assigned to a Sugar user such as sending a proposal.
  
• Milestone: This task represents a significant decision or moment in the customer's Smart Guide that requires no action. Milestone activities are represented as records in the Tasks module and must be closed by a Sugar user or via an automated process. For example, an Advanced Workflow process could be configured to detect a milestone of $10,000 in revenue from a customer and then automatically close the related milestone task.
  

To complete a task activity, you can simply close it in Sugar as you would normally close any other task or you can complete it directly in the Smart Guide panel by clicking the Complete checkmark on the activity:

Upon completing the activity, it immediately turns green in the Smart Guide panel and 100% of its point value is credited toward the progress of this Smart Guide in the progress bar and dashlets. For more information on how points are tallied, please refer to the Progress Bar section.

Additional options for tasks are available via the activity's actions menu:

• Preview: Click on "Preview" to expand or refresh the intelligence pane and view details about the activity without leaving the current page. To close the preview, simply click the "X" in the corner of the intelligence pane.
• Edit: Click on "Edit" to open the edit view of the task record related to the activity. From the edit view, you can assign the task to another user, change the task's due date, and edit the fields on the record.
• Start: Starting the activity will update the task's status to "In Progress" and change the activity to blue in the Smart Guide panel.
• Add Task, Schedule Meeting, Schedule Call: Select one of these options to create a sub-activity directly under this activity. For more information, please refer to the Adding Sub-Activities section.
• Assign Me: Choose "Assign Me" to instantly change the Assigned To user of the task to yourself.
• Not Applicable: The Not Applicable option sets the related task's status to "Not Applicable" in Sugar. The activity will turn yellow in the Smart Guide panel and 100% of its point value is credited toward the progress of this Smart Guide in the progress bar and dashlets. For more information on how points are tallied, please refer to the Progress Bar section.
  • Activities that are blocked by an earlier activity will not display the "Not Applicable" option until the block has been removed.
  • When "Not Applicable" is chosen for a task activity that contains one or more sub-activities, the parent activity will save as "Completed" (green) and its sub-activities will close as "Not Applicable" (yellow).The administrator will have defined whether the activities marked Not Applicable be recognized as complete or simply ignored in the Smart Guide's progress and momentum calculations via the "Not Applicable Action" field on the Smart Guide template.
  • For more information, refer to the Removing Smart Guide Activities section of this page.
• Delete: If the administrator has permitted "delete" actions for activities on this template, you will see a delete option in this menu, as well. For more information on deleting activities, refer to the Removing Smart Guide Activities section of this page.
• Copy: Create a new task for this Smart Guide by copying the current task. You will be given the opportunity to edit the task's details before saving.

Note: Sugar Automate automatically adds "Not Applicable" to the available status list options for the Tasks module. Activities that are blocked by an earlier activity will not offer the "Not Applicable" option until the block has been removed.

Adding Smart Guide Activities

You can add an activity to a Smart Guide via the actions menu on the stage where you would like the activity to go. The added activity will only be available for that specific Smart Guide and will not affect other Smart Guides in Sugar. You may also add sub-activities under the activities in a Smart Guide. For more information, please refer to the Adding Sub-Activities section.

Follow these steps to add a new activity to a stage in an existing Smart Guide:

1. Expand the stage's actions menu by hovering over the stage header and select one of the first three options for a task, call, or meeting as desired. Alternatively, click "Copy" from a similar activity's Actions menu to duplicate, edit, and save a new activity in the Smart Guide.
   
2. Complete the record's fields for the new activity.
3. Click "Save" to return to the record view of the Smart Guide with the new activity.

Adding Sub-Activities

You can add a sub-activity to a Smart Guide via the actions menu on the activity where you would like the sub-activity to go. The sub-activity will only be available for that specific Smart Guide and will not affect other Smart Guides in Sugar. 

Follow these steps to add a sub-activity under an activity in a Smart Guide:

1. Find the parent activity that should contain your sub-activity and expand the parent activity's actions menu.
   
2. Click on "Add Task," "Schedule Call," or "Schedule Meeting" to create an activity record under the current activity.
3. The quick-create drawer will open for the corresponding Sugar module.
4. After completing the activity's fields, click "Save." The sub-activity will be slightly indented and display the default order number x.1, where x is the order number of the parent activity.
   
5. To add another sub-activity to the same parent, return to the parent activity's actions menu and select the appropriate activity type to create. Complete the activity's details and save. The second sub-activity will display the default order number x.2 when shown in the Smart Guide panel.
6. Click "Save" to return to the record view of the Smart Guide with the new sub-activity.

Completing All Sub-Activities

When completing a parent activity that contains sub-activities, the sub-activities of the parent will also be marked as completed. A warning message will appear asking you to confirm that you want to complete the parent activity and all sub-activities. You cannot complete a parent activity that contains blocked sub-activities. 

Removing Smart Guide Activities

If you need to remove an activity from a running Smart Guide, check the activity's actions menu. The administrator may or may not have configured this Smart Guide to allow deleting activities. For information on disabling the ability to delete activities, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide. 

If there is no Delete option in the activity's actions menu, you may choose "Not Applicable" from the activity's actions menu. This will change the status of a call or meeting activity to "Canceled" or will change the status of a task activity to "Not Applicable". A Smart Guide activity that has been marked "Not Applicable" is considered completed by the Smart Guide and 100% of its point value is credited toward the progress of the Smart Guide in its progress bar and dashlets.

If you do see the Delete option for the activity, carefully consider whether you truly want to delete the activity or if you should simply mark it "Not Applicable" instead.

For more information on how points are tallied, please refer to the Progress Bar section. For more information on the options available in the actions menus for activities, please refer to the Completing Smart Guide Activities section.

User Interface

Smart Guides are easy to follow in Sugar because they utilize intuitive colors and symbols that quickly convey information about their progress.

Smart Guide Options Bar

The Smart Guide Options Bar appears in the Smart Guide panel or tab above any Smart Guides related to the current record. If no Smart Guides have been related to the record, then you will still see the options bar, where you can choose to start a new Smart Guide for the record. The following options are available for the Smart Guide:

• Smart Guide counter: Next to the subpanel label, a number in parentheses represents the number of Smart Guides related to the current record.
• Widget Layout Configuration button: The gear button opens a configuration screen with the following options:
  • Active/Archived toggle: Only "active" Smart Guides are shown by default. To view archived Smart Guides, switch this toggle to "Archived". For more information on archiving Smart Guides, refer to the Smart Guide Actions Menu section.
  • Vertical/Horizontal Mode toggle: Use this option to switch to the presentation mode that you prefer. There are two presentation modes available for a Smart Guide: vertical mode and horizontal mode. In the default vertical mode, stages will wrap to the next row when a Smart Guide is wider than the visible area; in the horizontal mode, stages are presented left-to-right continuously with a scroll bar for viewing stages beyond the visible area. When the Smart Guide loads, it should automatically scroll ahead to the first stage that is in progress. 
• Smart Guide selector menu: The selector menu shows the list of Smart Guides that have been configured by your administrator for the current module in alphabetical order. For more information on creating new Smart Guides, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide. 
• Start button: After choosing a Smart Guide from the Smart Guide selector menu, click the Start button to create a new, running Smart Guide related to the current record. For more information on completing the Smart Guide, refer to the Working With Smart Guides section of this page.

Smart Guide Colors

Sugar Automate relies on a color scheme to quickly communicate the status of stages and activities in a Smart Guide. The following chart explains the colors utilized by Sugar Automate:

Color	Example	Description
Gray		Scheduled (Not Started)
Blue		In Progress
Green		Completed
Yellow		Incomplete (or Not Applicable for activities)

A stage will not turn green until all activities in that stage have been completed and are also green (or for Not Applicable activities, yellow). If you start completing activities in a future stage without completing activities in a previous stage, then the incomplete stage will be yellow to remind you that you have missed activities that you need to complete.

In the example Smart Guide, the first stage, Awareness, is yellow because we have commenced work on stage two, Consideration, without completing all of the Awareness stage's activities. Complete the two gray activities to change the Awareness stage's header to green, indicating that it has been completed.

The same colors are used to reflect the Smart Guide's progress when viewing the Smart Guide dashlet. When we look at the same Smart Guide via dashlet, the first stage remains yellow, and the second stage remains blue:

Note: Many instances have been configured to use different statuses (e.g. Closed, In Progress, Invalid) for records than the statuses used in a stock Sugar instance. Your administrator may define which statuses Sugar Automate considers "closed" for your instance. For more information, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Progress Bar

The Smart Guide panel contains a progress bar that represents how far along a Smart Guide is based on the point values and statuses of the Smart Guide's activities. For more information, please refer to the Understanding Progress and Momentum section of the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Note: If a user adds activities or stages to a running Smart Guide, that Smart Guide's point value and Progress Bar will adjust accordingly.

Momentum Bar

The Momentum Bar is available as a column in the list view dashlet and offers an alternative view of the Smart Guide Momentum dashlet. The Momentum Bar represents how efficiently the Smart Guide is moving toward completion based on the expected time-to-complete that has been defined for each activity. For more information, please refer to the Understanding Progress and Momentum section of the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Keep in mind that the Momentum Bar will not always show a 100% value for completed Smart Guides; this is in contrast to the Progress Bar, which will always reflect 100% for completed Smart Guides. Once a Smart Guide loses momentum points, the points cannot be recovered, permanently impacting the overall momentum of the in-progress Smart Guide.

However, if the administrator has not assigned any momentum point values to the activities in your Smart Guide, the Momentum Bar will always display a 100% momentum value.

Note: If a user adds activities or stages to a running Smart Guide, that Smart Guide's momentum point value and momentum bar will adjust accordingly.

Due Dates

When viewing a Smart Guide panel on a record, activities that have a specified due date will display that due date as a color-coded tag on the activity in the Smart Guide.

The due dates shown on activities in the Smart Guide panel are color-coded as follows:

• Light Blue: The activity has not been completed and its start time occurs more than 24 hours from the current date and time.
  
• Blue: The activity has not been completed and its start time occurs within the next 24 hours.
  
• Red: The activity has not been completed and its start time occurs in the past.
  

Icons

When viewing a Smart Guide, you may see one or more icons on a Smart Guide activity. The following icons are used for Smart Guide activities:

Icon	Example(s)	Description
Activity Type		The type of activity (e.g., call, meeting, internal task) to perform.
Blocked		The activity cannot be completed because it is dependent upon the completion of an earlier activity.
Link		The link icon can be clicked to navigate to a URL that is related to the activity.
Sugar Action		An activity showing a Sugar Action icon requires the user to create, view, or edit a Sugar record that is related to the Smart Guide's parent record.

Click on the name of an icon in the above table to access detailed information about its meaning and functionality.

Activity-Type Icons

The activities under a stage in a Smart Guide represent calls, meetings, and tasks in their corresponding modules in Sugar. A small symbol located on the color-coded activity communicates the activity's type. The following symbols represent the different activity types in a Smart Guide:

Symbol	Activity
	Agency Task
	Automatic Task
	Call
	Customer Task
	Internal Task
	Meeting
	Milestone (task)

For more information on working with Smart Guide activities, please refer to the Completing Smart Guide Activities section on this page.

Blocked Icon

When an activity displays the Blocked icon (a circle with a slash) it means that the activity cannot be completed until one or more dependent activities have been completed first. This is further evidenced by the absence of options to complete the activity from the Smart Guide panel:

Hover over the Blocked icon to reveal the name of the blocker activities that must be completed.

Furthermore, if a user attempts to complete the activity via its Sugar task, call, or meeting record directly, they will be prohibited:

After completing the blocker activities, the dependent activity will allow access to the options to complete it and will no longer display the Blocked icon.

Link Icon

Some Smart Guide activities may display a Link icon that, when clicked, takes you to a pre-determined web address. When you hover over the icon, a preview of the link's address will appear. The link will usually be set to a URL that will assist you when completing this activity. Click on the icon to navigate to the URL in a new browser tab.

The link provided in this shortcut has been set within the template by your Sugar administrator. For more information on configuring the Link shortcut for activities, refer to the "URL" field description in the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Sugar Actions

Sugar Actions can be triggered based on changes to a Smart Guide and the related parent record of a Smart Guide. Some Sugar Actions will prompt you to create, view, or edit a Sugar record that is related to the Smart Guide's parent record. The administrator may have programmed the Sugar Action to automatically launch when its activity has started or finished, but you can hover over the icon to read a description of the action and click on the icon at any time to perform the action. In some cases, the administrator may have also programmed certain field values to pre-populate in the related record's form, such as a standardized subject line or description.

Manual Sugar Actions that require user action will appear on the activity in the Smart Guide as the following icon:

Note: Proactively performing a Sugar Action without waiting to be prompted will not prevent the prompt from occurring at the designated Trigger Event time, but you can click "Cancel" to reject the prompt when it occurs if desired.

For more information on adding and configuring Sugar Actions, refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Smart Guide Menus

Smart Guides give users options at three levels: Smart Guide actions, stage actions, and activity actions. The next three sections explain the available options for each level.

Smart Guide Actions Menu

The Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations:

Stage Actions Menu

The Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations:

Please note that the available options in the stage Actions menu may vary based on the configuration of the Smart Guide by your administrator. For more information on disabling stage actions, please refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Activity Actions Menu

The Actions menu allows you to perform the following operations:

Please note that the available options in the activity Actions menu may vary based on the configuration of the Smart Guide by your administrator. For more information on disabling activity actions, please refer to the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Dashlets

To further understand the Smart Guides in Sugar, the Smart Guide Plugin includes configurable dashlets that summarize Smart Guide progress. The list view dashlet for Smart Guides can be used to display a summary of all Smart Guides or just to show a summary of the Smart Guides related to the current record. Sugar Automate also includes a pie-chart style dashlet that can be placed on the record view to show a color-coded summary of the current record's Smart Guide(s). The following sections explain both ways to use the Smart Guide List View dashlet and Sugar Automate's color-coded Smart Guide dashlet in detail.

Smart Guide List View Dashlet

To see a list of Smart Guides on your intelligence pane or dashboard, you can add a list view dashlet for the Smart Guides module. The list view dashlet can be configured to show the progress bar and momentum bar for each Smart Guide plus the current stage and activity that must be completed.

To add this list view dashlet to a dashboard, choose "List View" from the Add a Dashlet page and "Smart Guide" as the module. For more information on Sugar dashlets, please refer to the Dashboards and Dashlets documentation.

Intelligence Pane List View Dashlet

A Smart Guide list view dashlet on a record's Intelligence Pane can be configured to display only Smart Guides related to the record you are currently viewing.

The following steps cover how to add a contextual Smart Guide list view dashlet to the Contacts module's record-view intelligence pane as an example.

1. Navigate to any record view in the module where you want to see the dashlet. For this example, simply click on an existing contact to see the record view for the Contacts module.
2. If needed, reveal the intelligence pane by clicking on the double arrow next to the contact's Edit button.
3. Click the floating actions button and the Add Dashlet option from the available options.
   
4. Add a new dashlet to the intelligence pane, selecting "List View" from the Add Dashlet menu.
   
   For more information on adding Sugar dashlets, please refer to the Dashboards and Dashlets documentation.
5. Select "Smart Guides" as the dashlet's module, place a checkmark next to "Relate to current record", and remove the "My Smart Guides" data filter to be sure you see all of the related Smart Guides that your team membership permits.
   
6. Adjust any desired data filters or display columns and then click "Save" to add the dashlet to the intelligence pane. Click "Save" again on the intelligence pane's edit layout to apply the changes to the current module's record view.
   

You will now see a summary of Smart Guides related to the current record in the intelligence pane for all contacts in Sugar.

Smart Guide Progress Dashlet

Sugar Automate's Smart Guide dashlet displays a pie-chart summary of the current record's Smart Guide in the intelligence pane. If a record is related to more than one Smart Guide, click on one of the Smart Guide subpanels to instantly refresh the pie chart's data accordingly. You can hover over each section of the pie chart to see the section details.

To add the pie chart dashlet to a record view, simply edit the intelligence pane where you would like to see the dashlet, selecting "Smart Guide" from the Add a Sugar Dashlet menu. For more information on adding Sugar dashlets, please refer to the Dashboards and Dashlets documentation.

After saving the edited dashboard, you will see the Smart Guide dashlet in the intelligence pane for all of the records in the current module.

Smart Guide Momentum Dashlet

The Smart Guide Momentum dashlet is available only on the record view dashboard for modules enabled for Smart Guide access. The dashlet offers an alternative, gauge-chart view of the Momentum Bar, which represents how efficiently the Smart Guide is moving toward completion based on the expected time-to-complete that has been defined for each activity. If the administrator has not assigned any momentum point values to the activities in your Smart Guide, the Momentum Bar will always display a 100% momentum value. For more information, please refer to the Understanding Progress and Momentum section of the Sugar Automate Administration Guide.

Keep in mind that the Momentum dashlet will not always show a 100% value for completed Smart Guides. Once a Smart Guide loses momentum points, the points cannot be recovered, permanently impacting the overall momentum of the in-progress Smart Guide. 

Note: If a user adds activities or stages to a running Smart Guide, that Smart Guide's momentum point value will adjust accordingly.

Smart Guide - Focus Drawer and Sell/Serve Console Dashlet

Users with a Sugar Serve or Sugar Sell license can view running Smart Guides for their accounts, cases, or opportunities on the Case Detail drawer on the Service Console and the Account Detail drawer and Opportunity Detail drawer on the Sales Console. You can also add a dashlet to the Focus Drawer dashboard for modules that work with Smart Guides.

To add the Smart Guide dashlet to a console, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Case, Opportunity, or Account tab on the Service or Sales Console.
2. Click on a record in the list and view the detail drawer for that record.
3. Expand the floating actions button and select "Add Dashlet".
4. Select the "Smart Guide - FocusDrawer & Sell/Serve Console Dashlet" from the available dashlets and then click "Save".

To add the Smart Guide dashlet to a focus drawer dashboard, expand the focus drawer by clicking on the focus icon, click on Add Dashlet in the floating actions button, and then choose "Smart Guide - FocusDrawer & Sell/Serve Console Dashlet" from the available dashlets and save.

Searching for Smart Guide Activities

The activities in a Smart Guide represent calls, meetings, and tasks in their corresponding modules in Sugar. Because they exist in Sugar as normal records, you can work with activities as you normally would in the Calls, Meetings, and Tasks modules. If you would like to search for a particular Smart Guide-related call, meeting, or task, simply navigate to the relevant module's list view and create a search filter using one of the Smart Guide-specific filter options. 

As an example, follow these steps to find all of the meetings that have been created as part of the "Purchase" stage of a Smart Guide:

1. Navigate to the list view of the Meetings module by clicking on "Meetings" in Sugar's navigation bar.
2. If needed, cancel any filters that may already be active on the list view and then click "Create" in the filter bar to start a new filter.
   
3. Expand the Select field under the filter bar and start typing "Smart Guide" to see the Smart Guide options appear.
   
4. Select one of the template options to find meetings from a specific Smart Guide, stage, or activity, or select "Is Smart Guide Meeting" to view all meetings created by Sugar Automate. For this example, select "Smart Guide Stage Template" so that we can specify the activity's parent stage.
5. In the next cell, choose "is any of" and then use the Search and Select field to find the stage titled "Purchase".
    

The list view should now be filtered to display all meetings that were created as part of a Smart Guide's "Purchase" stage. Please note that you will only be able to view records according to your team membership, user type, and role restrictions. For more information on teams and roles, please refer to the Team Management and Role Management documentation.

Smart Guide-Specific Fields

Sugar Automate adds many new fields to your Sugar instance, and some of these may be exposed on your task, call, or meeting records. The following fields are some of the more likely ones to be shown:

• Smart Guide Activity Start Date: The date and time that the task's status was set to "In Progress".
  Smart Guide Activity Completion Date: The date and time that the task's status was set to "Completed".
  Smart Guide Days to Complete: The amount of time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds that passes between a task's status being set to "In Progress" and it being set to "Completed".
• Smart Guide Order: The step number that corresponds with where the activity chronologically appears under the stage header. By default, this number will reflect the order in which the activities are created, but can be edited as needed. For more information, refer to the Adding Smart Guide Activities section.
• Smart Guide Points: The Smart Guide Points field controls the growth of the progress bar that is displayed for every running Smart Guide in Sugar. For more information, please refer to the Progress Bar section.
• Smart Guide Task: The Smart Guide Task field is only shown for Task activities and allows you to specify the type of task you are creating. For a detailed explanation of each available task type, please refer to the to Completing Smart Guide Activities section.

Archiving Smart Guides

To hide a completed Smart Guide, simply select "Archive" in the Smart Guide's actions menu on the right side of the Smart Guide panel.

Shown for completed Smart Guides only, "Archive" will hide the current Smart Guide from the Smart Guides subpanel. The Smart Guide will no longer show under the parent record but will remain visible in the Smart Guides list view and remain reportable. 

Un-Archiving Smart Guides

To un-archive a Smart Guide that was previously archived, navigate to the Smart Guides list view and click on the name of the Smart Guide to access its record view. If necessary, you can create a filter to display only Smart Guides with an Archived value of "True":
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From the Smart Guide's record view, use the Smart Guide actions menu (located in the panel below the record view) to select "Un-archive":

Canceling Smart Guides

Shown for in-progress or not-started Smart Guides only, the "Cancel" option in the Smart Guide's actions menu will stop the current Smart Guide without deleting it. The Smart Guide's incomplete activities will either be set to "Not Applicable" or will be deleted, depending on the Cancel Action configuration set by the administrator on the Smart Guide template. Canceled Smart guides will be set to a "Canceled" status and the progress bar will turn red. Smart Guides that have been completed cannot be canceled and will not have a "Cancel" option.

Deleting Smart Guides

In the case that you mistakenly start a Smart Guide, simply select "Delete" in the Smart Guide's actions menu on the right side of the Smart Guide panel.

Please note that the call, meeting, and task records that were created by the Smart Guide will also be deleted from Sugar when you remove a Smart Guide via the Delete option.