Leveraging Zoho CRM to Automate, Streamline, and Scale Your Sales Process
Before we dive into all Zoho CRM has to offer, let’s take a moment to define CRM in modern terms. CRM stands for customer relationship management. To fully understand what this means today, we have to take into account how technology has redefined the way businesses relate to current and potential customers.
Before the internet, ecommerce, and smartphones, managing customer relations was much more straightforward. Now, the ways companies connect and engage with the public (potential clients or customers) is much more broad. From social media, digital listings, and websites, to email campaigns and online shopping, tracking a lead through the stages of a sale is much more nuanced. The web sales landscape has expanded so much, just over the last ten years, that CRM practices and tools are constantly expanding to keep up.
With such a wide scope of potential customer interactions, recording and evaluating engagement is a multifaceted task that can become overwhelming without the proper tools in place. As technology continues to advance, keeping up with this division of modern commerce and properly tracking customer relations is more important – and often more complicated – than ever.
Why is having a clear CRM strategy, a defined lead-to-sales pipeline, and an established sales process so important? Because if a company doesn’t know what is working, they are ill equipped to maximize resources and results. Focusing your time, energy, and money on proven strategies is only possible with the proper view of how your company relates to current and potential customers and clients.
Why Zoho CRM?
At Nourish & Sow, we see CRM as the central component of the modern business. We have spent countless hours navigating this realm for both ourselves and our clients. In our experience, Zoho CRM provides all the tools needed to find out how customers are connecting with a company and what turns a lead into a customer. It also keeps a team on-task, ensuring consistency through well-defined processes.
Zoho CRM allows you to get more done, while spending less time focusing on software and less money on paying developers to build complex code. We help our clients automate key parts of their daily operations, such as workflows, campaigns, customer journeys, and more, so they can spend more time with the customer and less on the process.
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Who does Zoho CRM work for?
Zoho CRM is customizable for any business, no matter size or industry. From automating sales processes to building out onboarding and training protocol, Zoho CRM helps focus the entire team on what’s next. It also creates a level of consistency that can be hard to achieve when a team is remote, new, or expanding quickly.
Other features included tracking trends in sales cycles while simultaneously assigning the next task to the proper team member. If knowing more about sales calls would be helpful, you can even integrate your phone to track your calls to show who they were with and how long they lasted.
Zoho CRM for real estate is very popular. Having the ability to manage buyers and sellers alongside all their property listings is a game changer. Communication and sales flow can be automated to prevent leads from falling through the cracks. By tracking things like deal progression or the homes a potential buyer has viewed, a real estate sales team is equipped to meet the customer where they are in their home buying journey, backed by valuable information, in real time.
Even brick and mortar retail stores can benefit from Zoho CRM. We have a client who runs a piano retail store. They track when customers visit the store and make specific notes, such as what pianos a shopper is interested in. If they don’t make a sale on that visit, the sales team has all the necessary information needed for an effective follow up. Even if they haven’t interacted with a potential client for six months, they can pick up that lead right where they left off.
A great aspect of Zoho CRM, and Zoho products in general, is the ability to integrate third-party software, including over 800 apps. Visit the Zoho Marketplace to see which of your favorite apps already work with Zoho CRM. If an existing integration isn’t available, you or a developer can leverage Zoho’s open API to create your own to fit your exact needs. So, it is not surprising that many software sales companies use Zoho CRM because of how well its features can integrate with other systems and automate the client onboarding processes.
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How Zoho CRM Stacks Up at a Fraction of the Cost
Salesforce and HubSpot are comparable to Zoho CRM, but when it comes to price they are much more expensive. A company could spend thousands more a year using other CRM platforms. Zoho CRM is also included in Zoho One, which is a one-stop-shop for running a modern business. At Nourish & Sow we have access to Zoho CRM through our Zoho One subscription, which also gives us access to seemingly endless business solutions. To learn more about Zoho One, check out a recently published blog “What is Zoho One and Why We Recommend It.”
Here is a simple look at Zoho CRM pricing compared to the other top platforms:
Zoho CRM vs Hubspot / Zoho CRM vs Salesforce
Plan
Zoho CRM
Salesforce
Hubspot
Free
Standard
Professional
Enterprise
Ultimate
*pricing based on per user, per month on annual subscription plan
How Zoho CRM Works: A Few Zoho CRM Basics
Zoho CRM aggregates customer communication, including indicators such as website visitor tracking. With the ability to automate actions based on website traffic, you can truly meet the customer where their interest lies.
Let’s say a lead engages with your brand via your website, through the possibilities of Zoho CRM, you can automatically nurture that lead by sending them specific email marketing tied to the product or services they browsed. Then, based on their interactions with your first email, Zoho gives you the ability to customize the next step of engagement.
Basically, what happens once you have a lead is totally up to you. Zoho is extremely customizable and equipped to follow and support your unique process. So you determine the details of your process, not the platform.
Another invaluable Zoho CRM benefit is helping companies define and implement a customized sales process. Clocking customer interactions helps determine where a potential customer is in the lead-to-close pipeline. This helps not only personalize interactions, but it also makes it easier to follow a workflow tailored specifically for the needs of any industry.
The system is flexible while offering ways to improve and enhance your sales process. This is one of our specialties at Nourish & Sow. As we set up Zoho CRM, and other Zoho apps, for our clients we employ our understanding of sales and the power of the Zoho suite to maximize the effectiveness, efficiency, and customer impact of their sales process.
The bottomline is interest shown through one simple click can trigger a sales process built specifically for the type of interest shown. Here are two of the primary tools we use to automate workflows and define sales processes with Zoho CRM:
- Workflow Rules – Used to update invaluable information relative to the lead stage. Built to help you define a set of actions to take place when certain conditions are met. For example, if a lead is marked as “qualified” or “interested”, an email can be sent automatically to that customer sharing more information on your company’s product or service, signed by someone on your team (sales rep).
- Blueprints – Used to create sequenced order of events. When an action takes place, the next step is prompted or automatically fulfilled. Let’s say a company wants to ensure that a sales team member reaches out at a specific point during the lead-to-close pipeline. Blueprints allow you to define such steps rigidly. Not only does this create a process that can be followed with every lead. It also makes training and onboarding your team much easier.
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As a Zoho Authorized Partner, we have helped many clients revamp and navigate their approach to CRM using Zoho. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, the flexibility of Zoho CRM allows you to build a system to fit any industry and/or workflow.
To learn more about achieving exceptional customer relationship management, book a free consultation with us today. When you speak with us, we will evaluate your needs and help you decide if Zoho CRM is your best move.
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