Zoho CRM Empowers Businesses of All Sizes and Industries to Increase Sales and Grow Revenue

In a Nutshell: Zoho CRM is the central module within the Zoho One enterprise solution for businesses of any size. The CRM module flexibly integrates with more than 40 others that support many management and operational requirements. Zoho software works for all types of businesses and industries, including the 150,000 companies that use Zoho CRM in 180 countries.

Many companies consider their customer relationship management (CRM) systems to be the heart of their marketing and sales operations. At its simplest, a CRM system allows a company to manage, analyze, retain, and exploit its prospective, current, and past customers to drive sales growth.

Although the CRM system market has many entrants, Zoho CRM has carved out an enviable position by making CRM the central component of its multifunctional Zoho One enterprise software that’s scalable to any size organization.

Zoho CRM is highly customizable for every industry or size of business, which is why there are not any industry requirements. Some of its biggest clients are in financial services, pharmaceutical sales, real estate, and insurance.

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“Over 150,000 businesses representing many sizes and industries use Zoho CRM,” said Dylan Mahood, a Zoho Evangelist. “Because we offer tiered plans, Zoho CRM is flexible enough to be used by a small startup with just one employee or a large corporation with over 1,000 sales personnel.”

Many companies have attested to the business-altering power of Zoho’s software through testimonials.

For example, Purolite, a global resin manufacturer, started with Zoho CRM and eventually implemented the Zoho One suite, which includes CRM and all of Zoho’s other applications. Purolite has since saved over 800 administrative hours per year by eliminating manual reporting, and its sales team experienced an average productivity increase of 5% to 10% by shortening its sales cycle. As a result, Purolite had a 271% ROI, including direct and indirect benefits, in only four months.

Zoho CRM is the backbone of Zoho One, a full-fledged suite of business applications. Zoho One offers many cloud-based functional modules, covering:

• Marketing and sales: Helps users recruit new customers through multichannel targeted messaging while helping managers plan and track campaigns ranging from prospecting to sales.
• Customer support: Allows businesses to integrate their engagement teams to prospect, acquire, and retain customers. This results in highly tailored experiences.
• Finance and accounting: Integrates accounting processes with sales, invoicing, order management, and payment processes. Provides recurring revenue and billing solutions as well as mobile-based expense management.
• Human resources: Handles the complete employee life cycle from hiring to retention to separation via one integrated platform. Includes collaboration tools to facilitate better decision-making.
• Business analytics: A platform for business intelligence and decision support using human and machine analytics. You can deploy visual tools in custom dashboards to integrate analytical data across your business.
• Productivity and collaboration: Coordination tools allowing users to share presentations and documents, communicate via email or chat, and host online meetings.
• Application development: Supports low-code development of custom mobile and web applications to meet unique requirements. Helps to reduce IT turnaround time and backlog.

Customers select which modules to install, depending on their business needs, with CRM at the center of the application suite.

The CRM module “starts as a blank slate that is highly customizable to support each organization’s specific needs, no matter the industry,” explained Mahood. “Users can customize their sales process, specify which information to collect and report, what processes to automate, and even customize the layout and look of the CRM. To jumpstart the setup for different industries, the Zoho Marketplace has industry-specific versions of Zoho CRM that come pre-customized.”

Users achieve overarching control of their Zoho custom solution through the CRM’s CommandCenter, which integrates the full suite of Zoho modules for perfect interconnectivity. The CommandCenter allows users to coordinate brand messaging across multiple channels, develop customer insights from the centralized knowledge base, and automate workflows to respond to complex, dynamic situations.

This system facilitates cross-functional collaboration across multiple teams, accommodates third-party application functions, supports workflow checks and balances, and provides built-in metrics to monitor overall performance.

Zoho’s main online accounting software is Zoho Books (also sold in the Finance Plus bundle and included in Zoho One). Zoho Books’ automation features are what distinguishes it most from QuickBooks. For example, you can create intelligent triggers that initiate workflows composed of predefined actions.

Businesses prefer Zoho Books for its end-to-end accounting, convenient collaboration, and platform integration. Zoho Books supports deal negotiation, sales order management, and invoicing.

Features include receivables, payables, inventory, banking, time tracking, and financial reporting. In fact, Zoho Books handles all accounting tasks, allowing management to concentrate on the business.

Zoho Books integrates with Zoho CRM and more than 40 other Zoho apps. The platform lets you add modules as your business grows so you can manage and operate all aspects of your business.

Zoho Books provides small businesses with a robust system for setting up no-code workflows to automate parts of their processes. Larger businesses use Deluge, the Zoho scripting language that makes the system extremely flexible and allows for advanced automation and integration with external systems.

One example of how businesses implement Deluge is when they need to fetch and update prices from a database daily.

“The deep integration between Zoho Books and Zoho CRM is also a unique selling point,” said Mahood. “Many businesses still use a CRM and accounting solution that are built by separate vendors so that crucial information gets lost when a customer is passed from sales to billing. Zoho’s integration prevents issues with duplicate customer information, allows for sales reps and account managers to see when their customers have paid, and streamlines communication between sales and billing teams.”

“Zoho CRM just had a major update,” said Mahood. “The newest release included AI-powered suggestions for cross-selling, AI-powered assignments to match the best sales rep with each customer, and wizards that let you break down complex data entry into a series of simple steps. We also updated the CommandCenter that lets administrators chart complex processes, automate steps, plan for exceptions, and monitor where bottlenecks occur, and added a new CRM Analytics mobile app for managers to check their team’s performance on the go.”

The new Zoho CRM Analytics mobile app breaks the shackles keeping sales teams bound to their desks. It helps sales representatives and managers access their Analytics Dashboards while away from the office. The app lets users track their key performance indicators, compare teams on their sales performance, and transform sales goals into attainable targets.

Another new feature allows users to configure workflows for Twitter and Facebook. Users can set up a system of actions and reactions that operate when specified conditions become (and remain) true. The workflows are completely customizable, allowing users to create tasks in response to tweets, update the status of leads to “interested” based on retweets and likes, and post a reply when someone leaves a comment on your post.

The latest update gives CRM/Cliq users the power to trigger notifications in Cliq. Cliq is a Zoho module that simplifies team communications with organized and searchable conversations, enables group collaboration, and empowers team members to construct AI-backed communication bots. This update lets users get alerts on their phones through the Cliq mobile app and avoid paying an SMS Gateway for credits to send text messages.

Zoho maintains a regular update cycle that introduces new features and fixes bugs. Users can stay abreast of the latest Zoho CRM changes via its Release Notes.