Zoho CRM

In last few years, Zoho CRM has emerged as a software of choice for small and medium businesses. It started out as a low-cost alternative to Salesforce, however, with a bouquet of additional services being offered by its parent company Zoho Corp., it has emerged as one of the market leaders. I have been working on Zoho CRM since 2011 and have recommended it to many other businesses and clients. Out of the box, Zoho CRM will offer you the basic lead management with features like Accounts, Contacts, Potentials, Campaigns, Docs and basic reporting. You can use the web forms and API for pushing leads into the CRM and using depending on which plan you have opted for, you can also control user access and divide leads and users into territories. A basic reporting is offered and you can automate most of your tasks based on lead activity and actions. Zoho offers multiple plans and integration with its complete suite of Zoho Apps. Apps like SalesIQ for LiveChat, an alternative to Google apps with Zoho Docs and Zoho Mail, Zoho Campaign for Email marketing, Zoho Books for Invoicing and Zoho Survey for Surveys and Zoho Reports for creating graphical reports. Some of these may be part of your plan or you may have to purchase them additionally. But Zoho has ensured that all the software you will be needing for running successful Sale and Marketing operations is available to you under one banner. Zoho CRM also integrates well with other third-party tools likes Google Apps, Mailchimp, Quickbooks etc. The support is available via Email, Phone and Forum. If you cannot get to a rep on call, you can expect a reply back of your queries within 24 hours.

Zoho CRM may be the most affordable solutions out there, it is far from being a perfect CRM. There is a reason Salesforce is dominating the market. Almost all of the Sales and Marketing tools will have an out of box integration with Salesforce, with Zoho CRM you may have to find a workaround for making your favorite marketing tool talk to CRM. Even though a mobile app is available, it lacks features of a full desktop version and, therefore, fails to reach its full potential. You need to be online in order to work and cannot save your work offline and then sync it afterward. Zoho CRM does provide reports, however, if you are looking for complete intelligent reporting which will enable you to take business decisions, you will have to integrate Zoho's BI solutions Zoho Reports. If you don't mind working on Excel then you probably won't need Zoho Reports. The lack of any customization available will also be a hindrance for those who are looking for implementing additional processes or getting more out of the data.

The hardest part for any Organization is to have its Sales team and Managers concentrate on actual selling rather than spending time learning and playing around with the CRM software. Zoho CRM is easy to learn and with its simple UI design, your Sales team will not have an excuse for not filling out the right data or moving the lead through the correct lead cycle. If you’re a small to medium business and are looking for an affordable and feature rich CRM solution, then I would highly recommend Zoho CRM to you.