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What Are Some of the Highlights of Zoho CRM?

Home » Blog » What Are Some of the Highlights of Zoho CRM?

At Valenta we do a lot of Zoho Consulting in the area of CRM. We have helped numerous clients with previous Zoho integrations. Additionally, we frequently help clients start new CRM projects. We always assess what a business needs, where it wants to go, and what the best CRM is to get them there. In many cases that CRM is Zoho. In this blog post we will cover the highlights of Zoho CRM, the benefits of Zoho CRM, and provide our Key Takeaways.

Highlights of Zoho CRM

Zoho Corporation is a private company that was founded in 1996 in Chennai India. Zoho offers cloud-based CRM and ERP SaaS solutions targeted at SMB (small and mid-sized business) clients globally. In 2020 Zoho surpassed 50 million customers. In 2017 Zoho launched Zoho One which is targeted at providing a full range of business software solutions. As of 2021 there are 50 different modules that make up Zoho One. Zoho is a modular platform, users typically start with CRM basics and then add on from there.

The number one attribute of Zoho CRM is that it is user friendly. Most users adapt to it very easily and find it very straight forward. From an administrator perspective it is quite easy to create customized fields and it is also extremely easy to create new layouts. Many of our clients find the ability to create project or sales process mandates for a team to follow extremely helpful. This mandate or required steps ensures they have teams go thru a sales process for each and every deal.

Sales opportunities are tracked as “Deals” in Zoho. The Deals portion of the Zoho CRM feeds into intuitive dashboards and reports. There are easy to set roles and permission levels for every team member for process integrity and privacy. Zoho allows the ability to “Tag” contacts and leads for easy searching. Zoho also allows users to search leads, contacts, accounts, and deals in a multitude of different ways. Zoho CRM features an AI tool called Zia which comes with pre-programmed automation and macros for common repetitive tasks.

Benefits of Zoho CRM

There are numerous benefits with Zoho CRM including these 5 important benefits of Zoho CRM. Regarding some of the main features, Zoho has a rich set up that includes expected, task management, account management, contact record management, and lead management. It also provides email integrations for Microsoft and Google inboxes. The sales forecasting and deal management is on par or exceeds other CRMs on the market. Zoho CRM provides the capability to attach documents to leads, contacts and deals. Examples of documents our clients wish to attach include quotes, proposals, invoices, RFPs, emails, and more.

Regarding advanced features, more than most CRMs, Zoho takes an omnichannel approach to customer communication. Zoho CRM provides the ability to track email, phone calls, social media, live chat, and webform responses within the platform. We already mentioned customization, but the ease with which fields, customer layouts, buttons, and workflows, can be customized sets industry standards. Our clients like how they can require information in specific fields for data capture. Zoho CRM provides REST API and Webhooks. Zoho CRM supports multiple payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal, WePay, Forte and several others. Zoho CRM also provides hosted payment pages and multiple currency support.

Zoho has excellent sales prediction capabilities. It allows users with permissions to track sales by products, service, region, and team results. Zoho offers goal setting within the CRM platform and provides custom dashboards, charts, KPIs, funnels and target measurements. Zoho Apps include, Zoho Books, Zoho Expense, Zoho Inventory, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Creator for customer subscriptions, Zoho Mail, Zoho Cliq for payments, Zoho Checkout for e-commerce, Zoho Flow for automation, Zoho Desk for customer support. Support comes in the form of online resources and live chat plus email and phone support 24/5 for paid plans.

Zoho CRM Pricing at the time we write this blog is as follows:

  • Free for up to one user for basic CRM
  • $49 per month per user for their Basic Plan
  • $99 per month per user for the Standard Plan
  • $249 per month per user for the Professional Plan
  • Custom Price per month per user for the Enterprise Plans
  • Zoho tends to pack a lot of features into their packages.

Check out the Subscription pricing

Key Zoho Takeaways

The writer of this blog has used Zoho CRM, Salesforce, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Pipedrive, ACT!, plus a few others – and would place Zoho CRM in his personal top two favorites. The number 1 strength of Zoho CRM is its ease of use and low learning curve. Other big advantages include the easy importation of contacts and leads plus the fact that all data is secure and protected by AES 256 encryption. Zoho CRM features excellent account management tools and many third-party integrations including Office 365, G Suite, Mailchimp, Facebooks ads, and Twilio. The only downside we have been able to find with Zoho is a limit to the number of fields that can be customized. We have never needed to surpass this number. However, on occasion we have had to put some thought into this area to not exceed the limits.

Want to Learn More?

We have covered a lot in this blog concerning Zoho CRM, the highlights of it and the benefits of Zoho CRM. At Valenta we have a lot of experience with Zoho and a lot of respect for the company and Zoho CRM. Many of our staff are trained on Zoho and we can provide consulting on projects, training, and act as outsourced administrators and developers.

Valenta is a business consulting and business software integration services provider. We focus on serving small and midsized businesses. We provide the same services large consulting firms offer to the Fortune 1,000. Valenta provides offshore or near shore virtual staff in addition to consulting and software integration services and can provide virtual CRM Administrators for SMB CRM implementations.

To know more about CRM, read our blogs about What is CRM? , What makes a successful CRM implementation? and the differences between CRM & ERP?

Contact Us to understand how our services can help you.