Item: Zoho CRM
Rating: 7
Author: Dan Schmitt

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zoho CRM in our business to track and forecast sales pipeline, as well as to record all contact and account information for prospects, customers, and partners. The Zoho CRN product addresses the issue that many, if not all, organizations experience data clutter. It allows us to track historically key performance indicators, in order to make sound business decisions both on a finance, sales, operations, and product front.

Pros and Cons

Dynamic Search
Module Customization
Template Creation
Role Based Access

Process Automation
No-Code Integrations - Deluge script development needed in order to do many basic CRM tasks
Lack of Native 3rd Party Integrations

Return on Investment

Zoho CRM has cut in half the time it would take to derive data via its reporting tool
Sharing information within the business is extremely easy and is another time saver
Company revenue growth 10-12% YoY due to forecasting models provided by Zoho

Product Scalability

While Zoho is designed to be flexible, it can only do so much without knowing how to code. Many of the automation tasks require low-code or deluge scripting capabilities. There is Zoho support or Zoho partners that can assist with the, but the customization aspect of API integration is struggle if you are working with tools that do not have a native integration (which are not that many compared to other CRM products).

Zoho Customer Experience

With other Zoho tools, such as Desk, one can support their customers and improve the customer experience post-sale. During the sales cycle, the use of Activities in CRM can be used to improve the customer journey. This will log email, meetings, and call tasks in order to improve the time to close your Deals.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign and Outreach

While some of these other tools can act as a basic CRM, it has strengths in other areas, like mass email campaigns. Zoho is great for data manipulation and quoting/invoicing. But Zoho strengths are, at the same time lack results in the email marketing component because of its use of its own SMTP server. So what we found was that Zoho may not be best suited to support every aspect of an organization.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Zoho CRM again?

Other Software Used

ActiveCampaign, Drift, Outreach, Zoho Desk, Calendly

Likelihood to Recommend

Zoho CRM would appear to function great for basic CRM functionality. It does well in the customization of record fields and role-based access. However, for more advanced data flows or integrations with other 3rd party applications, it requires a lot of low-code data process builds. Many native integrations, that would be available in Hubspot or Salesforce, just simply isn't available for Zoho, so a lot of additional work needs to be done to integrate.

Zoho CRM - A suitable option

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho CRM