My Zoho Journey

I've been in the CRM space for over 20 years.  


The beginning


When i started, I had recently graduated from University had just begun at my first real job.  I was technically hungry,  and happened to find an ACT disk (3.5 disk) in the bottom of a drawer someone had left behind in my new 10x10, windowless office.  I worked for a very entrepreneurial person who, at various times, had 25 new businesses starting up.  I grabbed this "new" software and ran with it.  I started helping several companies customize and use the software to run their businesses.  Years later I was officially certified and the beginning of my CRM career was born.


We have talked to thousands of CRM users throughout the years, performed thousands of migrations, customized ACT software to meet their needs, worked with various add on products to make the software do more, and trained teams all over the world.  


                                                    Grow better / Strengthen your business


The problem was I wanted software that would exceed my clients' expectations not just meet them.  It needed to be something they could not only  grow with but grow better and needed to strengthen their businesses.  I wanted to help my clients work on their business through developing new automated processes, better integration, and helping my clients to be more mobile with flexible software that works across multiple platforms.  Switching to a cloud platform has put an end to the mundane tasks of getting on-premise software to work with the latest patches, dealing with problems caused by windows os issues, and changing office products.  


Zoho has been a product that has been around for over 15 years.  They started in a very crowded difficult space and are now listed in the top CRM products.  They have over 7,000 team members and over 40,000,000 users.  With over 40 applications, they use the Zoho Suite of products to run their own business.  They love to say "we eat our own dog food"  Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Books, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Mail, Zoho Marketing Hub, Zoho Social, Zoho Desk, Zoho Assist, Zoho Documents, Zoho Events  and much more.  They don't take investors, they own their own company and don't have to worry about pleasing shareholders, they worry about doing what is right for the customer.  They have yearly conventions, Zoholics, all over the world, they have quarterly meetups all over the world.  I could go on and on.  They like to stay personally connected because they care.


                                            Eating our own dog food


What was most important to us was getting all our data over to Zoho and "eating our own dog food" .  I started with Zoho Social which is an easy platform to setup, it links your social medial accounts to one hub where you can manage all your social posts from one spot and analyze  which posts are doing well.  Next we setup Zoho Desk, we supported over 2,000 users in our managed services / IT services department and needed to centralize our support process and easily run analytical reports on our business.  We used Zoho Assist to logon to our clients pc's.  At the same time we were converting our ACT CRM database over to Zoho CRM, this process was complicated since getting all of our notes, histories, activities over was very important.  Now we can access this important information on our mobile devices, ipads, macs, and pc's.  Once that was setup, then we setup Zoho Sites so our contact form now links directly into our Zoho CRM and ZohoCampaigns, Zoho Marketing Hub already has marketing workflows (journeys) built in.  We also setup Zoho Sales IQ which allows us to chat with our website visitors and lets us know if they have been back to our site.  Zoho Page Sense gives us analytics on our website and we can view heat maps of where are visitors are going.   We're in the process of switching over to Zoho Books from Quickbooks and have been very impressed, we can see when someone views my estimates or invoices.  We can send surveys out from our Zoho Books


We have become quite integrated with Zoho and these are only a few apps that I am mentioning.  There is so much more.  See what I mean about a software package that doesn't just meet my needs, it very much exceeds them.  The CRM market has transformed in the last 5 years, if you feel like you should be getting more out of your CRM I highly recommend looking at zoho. What are the issues are you currently having, what's broken, what could be better and what can help you move forward in your business goals for the year?  What's stopping you from thriving?


#ILOVEZOHO