Item: Zoho CRM
Rating: 8
Author: Ashley Longstaff

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CRM as our partner management software. Whenever we're cultivating leads for our product, we enter them into the CRM, set up follow-up tasks, track our proposals and contracts. Before the CRM, we all had our own way of documenting and following up with partners, and now we have a streamlined, centralized place to put information and look for information.

Pros and Cons

Keep notes centralized in one place
Helps us see the big picture of everyone's tasks in the system
Helps us filter leads via tags for follow up

We tried looking into Zoho Projects for project management, but it was too cumbersome and didn't seem very flexible--we turned to Trello for that need.
I'd like an easier way to customized it a bit, but always had to involve someone from Zoho who sounds like they were from India, and the language barrier and strong accent was hard to understand and communicate what I needed.
There are so many features in Zoho, almost wish there was a way to hide those options we're not using at the moment.

Return on Investment

It's helped us become more efficient and transparent in the people we are cultivating relationships with
We can see the status of everyone's work rather than just our own
We don't know quite how to use all the forecasting and pipeline options, which would be really helpful for us

Support Rating

The support is there, but it's hard to interact with people from India with a strong accent. It would be nice to be placed with someone from the US that I can understand.

Key Insights

Do you think Zoho CRM delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Zoho CRM's feature set?

Yes

Did Zoho CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Zoho CRM go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zoho CRM again?

Yes

Usability

I wanted a product that was fairly intuitive and most of the features are intuitive, but not all without some training. Once you understand how everything is set up, it's easy to train someone and help them know what steps they need to take in order to use the software appropriately.

Contract Terms and Pricing Model

We're paying about $500-$600 per user, which seems on the higher end of what we'd like to pay, but it's still worth that cost. We only have to pay once a year which is nice.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zoho has been a great piece of software to help us centralize all of our contacts in one place, our history, and conversations with those individuals, as well as the history of a partnership with a larger organization that involves multiple people. We also use it as a place to store our more permanent, archive documents (contracts, other special documents), and people at our organization know where to go to find that key information. Also, having the availability to pull certain reports and even schedule those reports has been helpful.

High Marks for Zoho

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho CRM