The Solo Pro and Zoho CRM
February 02, 2015
The Solo Pro and Zoho CRM
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Modules Used
- CRM
Overall Satisfaction with Zoho CRM
I'm a single-person company. Solo pros do not always need full-featured CRMs but as a writer, analyst and content consultant I deal with dozens of contacts and leads a week. Each individual represents a different company and position in the sales funnel. Without a CRM I find myself floundering, unable to remember when I last contacted someone let alone remembering what I needed to do for them.
Pros
- Zoho's "Last Contacted" is extremely helpful for me. I can't remember what I had for lunch, let alone when I last contacted a lead. Not every CRM or CRM substitute has the feature, which I find incredible. This single feature alone is why I decided not to go with competitor Nimble. (And why I gave up on using Outlook as my CRM.)
- Zoho views and filters are highly customizable. It took me a while to figure out how to modify the fields to get the views and filters I wanted. But once I got it, that flexibility became enormously helpful.
- That same customization level works for me when I do mail merges. I can filter to very tightly defined sets of contacts and leads, or easily send to my general list. As with the views and filters figuring out Zoho's ins and outs can be a challenge at first. But I figure that the time it takes to learn its intricacies is not because it's awkwardly built, but because it's exceptionally customizable and rich. I can live with the learning cycles, and as with anything else worth learning the more you use it the easier it becomes.
Cons
- I was very sorry to lose Zoho's integration with Outlook, which I loved. One day it just stopped working and the technician was never able to fix it. The problem is undoubtedly something on my laptop and I don't blame the tech -- he really tried -- but I miss the feature a lot.
- Did I mention that the more advanced features take time to learn? This is not a weakness -- it's due to Zoho's rich portfolio of features -- but do be aware of the learning cycle at the beginning if you want to make the best use of it.
- Positive: I am developing a content lead drip marketing system. I don't know how I could deliver it to leads at different stages without Zoho contact tracking.
- Positive: Sometimes I get busy and forget to use Zoho. The inevitable consequence is I'll go for weeks (or longer!) without contacting people outside of active projects. Then I wonder why my pipeline is drying up. Then I return to Zoho, run contact and task reports, and get busy.
- Negative: I really do miss the Outlook integration. Without it, it's harder to manage my customers via touchpoints and last contacted. I have to manually input a task, which is that I contacted them via email.
- Nimble and Outlook
To be perfectly honest I would love to use Outlook for my CRM. Talk about simple, and I have email up 12 hours a day at least. It worked all right with Outlook Business Manager, but since I moved to Exchange OBM no longer works. It's a pipe dream really, since I need Last Contacted and a lot (a lot) of filters for lead drip content.
Recently I tried Nimble, which looked promising until I realized they don't have a Last Contacted feature. That was it for me.
I should mention that I never tried the big multi-team CRMs like Salesforce. They are either 1) overkill or 2) too expensive or most often 3) both.
Recently I tried Nimble, which looked promising until I realized they don't have a Last Contacted feature. That was it for me.
I should mention that I never tried the big multi-team CRMs like Salesforce. They are either 1) overkill or 2) too expensive or most often 3) both.
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