CRM

Zoho CRM is arguably the star of the show with the highest number of users among Zoho apps. First released in 2005, CRM has grown from a small solution for beginners to a full-fledged suite of an application competing with the industry leaders on many fronts.

The landscape of cloud-based CRM systems for small- and medium-size businesses is quite competitive, and there are formidable contenders in the market for every requirement and budget. The spectrum of SaaS CRM systems seems endless with open source and free offerings inside of the spectrum to full-fledged industry-specific solutions on the other hand. Bitrix24, Highrise, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Insightly, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Sugar CRM are just a few that come to mind.

Well, this book is about Zoho CRM, so I know which one I will be recommending. That said, Zoho CRM may not be an answer for everyone. The premise of this book is that CRM is one of the most important, if not the most important tool, for your business. So, choosing the right one early on is crucial.

We will see how Zoho CRM addresses the requirements of a wide range of businesses. No matter if you are about to start your business in a month, currently bootstrapping, or you have been in business for the past 15 years managing a team of 100 salespeople across the globe, Zoho CRM can play a key role in managing and streamlining your marketing, sales, and client servicing efforts.

Zoho CRM offers five different editions with each packing a host of features suitable for different tastes and needs :

• Free edition: This edition offers the core modules such as Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Feeds, Documents, and mobile apps for up to 10 users, completely free of charge. This is a great way to start using Zoho CRM and upgrade to one of the paid editions as your business needs grow.

• Standard edition: In addition to the features available in the Free edition, you will have access to sales forecasting, reports and dashboards, document library, roles and profiles, mass email, call center connectors, and the ability to store up to 100,000 records of information.

• Professional edition: Similarly, the Professional edition offers all the features available in Free and Standard editions, plus email integration, social features, Google AdWords integration, workflow automation, inventory management, macros, and the ability to store unlimited records.

• Enterprise edition: This edition offers territory management, custom applications, custom buttons, workflow approval processes, page layouts, custom modules, and multiple currencies on top of the features available to the Professional edition.

• Ultimate edition: Last, but not least, the Ultimate edition adds even more features to make it the choice for larger organizations by throwing in sandbox, dedicated database cluster, priority support, advanced customization, advanced CRM analytics, and enhanced storage.

• CRM Plus: A recent addition to the CRM family, CRM Plus provides a more holistic approach to the traditional CRM system by combining the Enterprise edition with Zoho Campaigns, Desk, SalesIQ, Social, Projects, Survey, and Reports. This package allows users to centralize all their marketing, sales, and client servicing processes in one place without the need to jump between different platforms while saving considerably in direct and indirect costs .

One of the areas Zoho CRM excels in, compared to the rivals, is a lower barrier to entry. Zoho CRM allows organizations of up to 10 employees to use it free of charge for sales management and later upgrade to a suitable paid edition as they need more features.

SalesInbox

A new addition to the Zoho suite, SalesInbox claims to be the first mailbox specifically designed for salespeople. According to Zoho, SalesInbox automatically organizes and prioritizes sales activities based on the sales pipeline and the stage in which each deal is. Using Zoho CRM criteria and rules features, SalesInbox could become a sales team’s best friend and put an end to the manual work between email and CRM.

SalesIQ

Zoho SalesIQ is a live chat solution that you can install and enable on your website to understand how visitors are interacting with your website in real time. It provides the visitors of your website with a familiar chat box placed on a corner of a webpage, so they can ask the sales or support team for help right away, or leave a message without leaving the page.

You can use SalesIQ in conjunction with Zoho CRM and streamline the conversion of site visitors to prospects and ultimately buying customers. You should consider using SalesIQ if you are serious about capturing website visitors and turning them into customers or providing them with an interactive support channel.

The Free edition provides a decent set of features for you to get up and running with SalesIQ and later upgrade to one of the paid editions as your requirements grow.

Survey

Zoho Survey is a versatile tool to create online surveys and collect information from leads, prospects, or existing clients through a number of questions. You can dispatch surveys on your website, via mobile, or email and have the collected information from these channels store in the back end of Survey for later analysis.

Apart from standard survey building and distributing features, Zoho Survey automatically translates your surveys to 30 languages,¹ and integrates well with email campaign apps such as Zoho Campaigns and MailChimp.

Campaigns

Another powerful app in Zoho’s arsenal is Campaigns, which offers all the tools you need to run successful email campaigns. It integrates well with other core Zoho apps, especially CRM, removing the need for third-party solutions in most cases.

Any modern organization needs to include email marketing in some shape or form in their business practice. Staying in touch with customers as well as prospects is crucial and Campaigns allows you to do just that. Despite social media being a major channel for connecting with your audience, email still remains the most effective way of communication and making sales happen.

Moreover, Campaigns offers email templates to get you up and running in minutes, plus email automation features to save you time and help your campaigns be more effective. It also provides you with detailed campaign reporting tools for monitoring and fine-tuning your efforts.

There is a free edition that allows storing up to 2,000 contacts and sending up to 12,000 emails every month, so you have little excuse not to start sending that monthly newsletter that you have been delaying.

Sites

Unless you are visiting us from a planet where websites are so passé, you most probably have a website for your business and chances are that setting it up was not particularly a pleasant experience.

There was a time, not so long ago, that if you needed a visually bearable and decently functional website, you either needed to know some graphic design and also coding in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (three of the main technologies behind every website), or you were at the mercy of web design companies and freelancers.

Times have changed for the better. Now everyone can build a usable website that looks modern, has most of the functionalities of a business website, and works on mobile phones as well. Services such as Weebly and Wix allow you to simply drag and drop building blocks on webpage skeletons and create a website ready for prime time. Zoho, too, happens to have their own website creation wizard: Zoho Sites.

Zoho Sites provides you with a platform to easily and quickly create a professional looking website with all the modern features you need, such as blogs, social, multimedia, e-commerce, and forms.

What is great is that you can do all of these without writing a single line of code or knowing what the difference between HTTP and HTML is.

Similar to other Zoho apps, you can start with a free plan, which offers enough features to get your website up and running; and opt for the paid, more feature-rich edition down the road.

Social

Social media management has become a part of the business routine of every forward-thinking business. The immense power of social media allows you to delight prospects and clients by conveying a more personal and conversational message across multiple channels.

With a multitude of available social channels, however, it is hard to stay on top of publishing, monitoring, and responding to communications and staying productive and keeping your sanity in the process.

Fortunately, there are tools that help you manage social media, including Zoho Social, a capable social management tool. As of this writing, it allows you to centrally manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram.

You, and your team collaboratively, can publish on selected channels in one go, schedule messages, and monitor the performance of your messages. You can also listen to a social channel for what people are saying about your business or personal brand.

Another useful feature of Social is that it connects to Zoho CRM effortlessly and improves your productivity by providing you with contextual information about your social connections that may be on the CRM as well.

As usual, you can start with Zoho Social free of charge and upgrade to a paid plan when you need more features.

Contact Manager

Having a stand-alone app for managing your contacts may seem totally unnecessary, but don’t mistake Zoho Contact Manager for your average contact on your laptop or smartphone.

Contact Manager is actually a mini CRM allowing you to store and manage your contact database more effectively. You can share contacts within your team, define and assign tasks and follow-ups around contacts, manage deals related to contacts, and integrate your contact database with third-party services such as Google Apps or MailChimp.

If you believe you don’t need a full-fledged CRM solution, Contact Manager is a great way to start introducing order to your sales processes and centralizing valuable client information .

Forms

Sometimes you need to collect information (online) from staff members, local community, clients, or your website visitors. To do so, you usually place some sort of a form on a webpage and encourage people to fill it up and submit it back to you.

However, not all forms are created equally. A form could be a simple Contact Us form, a long survey, or a complex form with automation workflows embedded for approval collection.

Traditionally, you or someone you hire would need web programming knowledge to create a form with such capabilities. With Zoho Forms, all you need to do is to drag and drop the form fields to a form, do some configurations, and then publish your modern-looking form online for people to populate.

Zoho Forms allows you to quickly create functional forms, collect data, analyze the performance of your forms, and integrate them with Zoho apps, such as CRM; or third-party apps, such as MailChimp, to automate tedious data entry tasks.

Again, you can start using Zoho Forms for free and upgrade to a paid edition as your requirements grow.

Motivator

Another newcomer to the Zoho suite, Motivator, is a sales activity management tool. It allows you to set sales targets and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your team, then it automatically analyzes sale information extracted from Zoho CRM to generate team member performance so that top salespeople are identified, acknowledged, and rewarded for their achievements.

Motivator has a feature called TV Channels, which allows you to show a leaderboard of your team performance on big screen TVs to motivate the team and encourage employees to compete in a healthy and rewarding environment.

Mail

Zoho Mail is Zoho’s answer to popular services such as Gmail, or Outlook.com. Although it may be much less popular compered other old timers, it is arguably one of the easiest to use and most feature-rich mail services in the market. Plus, it is ad-free. No more pesky ads in the sanctity of your inbox, ever.

In addition to the default web interface, Mail offers native smartphone apps for iOS and Android. You can also configure your favorite desktop or mobile email client (Spark, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) to check your Zoho account emails.

For business users, Zoho Mail integrates well with other Zoho services such as CRM. You can enjoy a single sign-on feature (one user account to use multiple services) and host one domain (i.e., yourwebsite.com), plus up to 25 users, all free of charge.

Notebook

Notetaking apps are everywhere. Many of them are average at best, and some of them are amazing. Good notetaking apps, such as Evernote and Microsoft OneNote can massively contribute to your productivity and help you minimize clutter.

Zoho offers its own version of a notetaking app, Zoho Notebook. It helps you organize your notes in a variety of formats: text, image, audio, checklists, and sketches. Notes offers a smartphone app for iOS and Android and a web clipper to capture content snippets while web surfing.

As of this writing, Zoho is yet to release a desktop version for Notebook, similar to what Evernote and Microsoft OneNote offer. As an avid Evernote user since 2009, I can see that Zoho Notebook shows promise, especially that it sports a pleasant and easy-to-use interface and is 100% free.

Docs

Zoho Docs is a cloud-based storage space on steroids. You can store up to 5GB of files on a free edition of Docs, sync your files between devices, and use Zoho productivity suite (Writer, Sheet, and Show) to edit your documents in the browser or via their native mobile apps.

You can download the Zoho Docs desktop synchronization tool and your documents between a local folder and the Docs folder seamlessly.

If you are already a Google Drive or Dropbox user, you will feel right at home with Zoho Docs. The free edition of Docs offers features almost identical to the free edition of Google Drive; however, the paid edition gives more bang for your buck compared to the paid edition of the Google Drive.

Projects

With hundreds of free and paid options available in the market, finding the right project management tool that covers all the bases and doesn’t break the bank seems like a daunting job.

Luckily, Zoho has a powerful project management tool called Zoho Project . It offers a decent combination of ease of use, features, and cost-effectiveness making it a formidable choice in the crowded market of cloud-based project management tools.

With Zoho Projects you can run multiple projects across multiple teams, share information with clients and outsourced teams easily, create time sheets for your projects, create Gantt charts and other complex reports, collaborate seamlessly with all the stakeholders, and mange project documents and in a central environment.

You have access to your projects via browser and native mobile apps. You can also connect Projects to other apps such as Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice as well as third-party services such as Google Apps and Dropbox to maximize your productivity and efficiency.

Zoho Projects comes free of charge if you are planning to manage one project at a time. You can always upgrade to paid editions if you need more from your project management tool.

Connect

Zoho Connect allows you to create a private social network for your organizations. It provides you with all the basic tools and features to set up a social network for your team to connect and collaborate in real time.

By allowing you to create custom apps and integrate other services such as Zoho Projects, Zoho Docs, Google Drive, and Calendar services, Connect helps you streamline internal communications processes and keep employees engaged while boosting their productivity.

Similar to other Zoho apps, Connect offers a free edition for you to start building your organizational social network and later upgrade to paid plans if you need more features.

BugTracker

If you are into software engineering, you know that during the software life cycle, proper bug tracking is very important, and using a powerful bug tracking service will make the lives of everyone involved in the project easier.

Zoho BugTracker offers all the essential features a robust bug tracking service should provide, plus bug automation features with workflows, out-of-the-box integration with Github and BitBucket, file sharing, collaborative dashboard environment, and SLA (Service Level Automation) automation.

Meeting

Zoho Meeting is an easy-to-use and powerful web conferencing and live collaboration tool for you to take your remote meetings to the next level. You can schedule and run unlimited meetings with up to 20 hosts (paid edition) and 100 guests (paid edition) to join your web meetings.

Zoho Meeting allows you to remotely control a participant’s computer, making it a great tool for remote demoing or troubleshooting. Although there is a handy desktop plug-in, Meeting doesn’t need you to install an app to run or join meetings and is completely browser based.

It also integrates well with other services such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Chat, Zoho Calendar, Google Calendar, and Google Apps.

As with most Zoho apps, you can start for free and set up one-on-one meetings right away.

Vault

We all use a myriad of apps and services every day, each requiring an account, which as prehistoric as it may be, requires a username and a password to log in. Until technology comes up with a better way of authenticating users, there is no escape from memorizing or storing account information somewhere in a secure place.

Fortunately, there are several apps and services such as 1Password, or Keychain Access in Mac OS that store our passwords for us, so we can spend our precious brain power on Candy Crush, or something less disappointing.

For teams and businesses, Zoho Vault promises to alleviate this very challenge and make password management easy. Vault manages all your passwords securely and centrally, logs you into sites and services without the need for manual password entry, allows you to share managed passwords with select team members, monitors usage of each password, and grants or denies password access accordingly.

Showtime

If you teach or train people for a living, or just give occasional presentations to a large audience, you know how important it is to keep the audience engaged and turn them into active participants during a session.

Zoho Showtime builds on this simple but crucial fact and provides a tool for you to run a smooth show while keeping your audience fully engaged during and after a session. You can motivate the audience to express their opinion, run polls, ask questions, and later when the session is over, send feedback from and monitor how people engaged with your content.

Showtime is a promising and possibly game-changing service for forward-thinking trainers. The great news is that it is available for everybody to use free of charge .

Chat

Zoho Chat provides a powerful communication platform for your team, free of charge, where you can create channels, share documents, and do more in a modern environment available on your computer and your mobile phone.

Zoho Chat is very easy to use and you get it up and running for your organization in a few minutes. You will feel quite at home if you used other tools such as Yammer or Slack.

Creator

Zoho Creator is a powerful platform for creating fully customized cloud-based applications. If you have a specific set of business requirements that you can’t find in any existing tool, or the available solutions are too expensive, too trivial, or too advanced, you can quickly create your very own solution with Creator.

One of the things that makes Creator great is that in many cases you don’t need to do a single line of coding to make functional apps. Creator offers many tools to program and automate your business processes, but for simpler apps, you don’t need to know any coding.

Simply drag and drop data fields (text boxes, lists, buttons, etc.) to create forms and Zoho Creator will do a lot of magic in the background to turn those forms into a full-fledged application.

My first encounter with Zoho was through Creator. Back in 2008 I was in charge of the marketing department of an international real estate brand. We had a clunky CRM system, which no one used properly, and it quickly became a bottleneck in our daily business processes. We were losing valuable information because salespeople refused to use that behemoth of a CRM.

To mitigate this, I ended up creating a mini CRM for the sales team from scratch only using Zoho Creator. The app was multiuser, secure, always available, and accessible from everywhere. It even generated listing data automatically to send to the local media for advertisement.

The team loved the app and used it even after I left that company. I could have created a web app from scratch using HTML, PHP, and MySQL, but it would have taken me a month to create, test, and deploy something usable. With Creator, I took the app from concept to launch in four days while running the marketing department.

AppCreator

Another recent addition to the Zoho family, AppCreator allows you to quickly and with minimal or no coding create native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows phones and tablets.

With AppCreator you can publish your apps internally within your organization, or publicly through one of the app stores.

As of this writing, AppCreator is quite new and available via invitation only.

Reports

If you are into data crunching and analysis, and spreadsheets don’t meet your requirements anymore, Zoho Reports is a great option to consider. We live in the age of big data and data science is the talk of the town. A plethora of powerful tools such as R, Python, and Tableau are available; however, not everyone needs the data scientist’s toolbox.

Zoho Reports is one of the less-known gems that provides you with a powerful toolset for collecting data from multiple sources, performing calculations and analyses, collaborating, data visualization, and more.

Using Zoho Reports you can manage millions of records and create business intelligence to contribute to the success of your business. You can also integrate it with Zoho Creator and other apps and services.

Zoho Reports offers a free edition for you to crunch up to 100,000 records of data, plus a number of paid editions for heavier use. If you still rely on spreadsheets for data analysis and visualization, I strongly suggest you give Reports a try .

Site24x7

Site24x7 is for organizations, IT professionals, and developers who want to monitor the performance and availability of websites, servers, and web applications. With a host of features to let you monitor that your business platforms are doing alright and make sure everything stays in check, Site24x7 could be a great help to your business.

Books

Zoho Books is a powerful, yet affordable, accounting software in the cloud. With Books, you get all the features you (or your accountants) expect from an accounting and bookkeeping software, plus a host of other useful features.

You can issue customized invoices and accept online payments via a service such as PayPal, connect to your bank accounts for automated cash flow and account monitoring, create powerful reports that management and clients can understand, track your inventory, and let clients see what concerns them during a project.

You can also connect Zoho Books to other apps such as Zoho CRM, Projects, and Reports and make them all operate as a big connected system to manage your entire business.

To make your life easier, Books offers mobile and smartwatch apps, so you are always up to speed with what is happening in your business financially.

Invoice

If you are happy with your current accounting software or don’t really need a complete accounting software, Zoho Books may not seem so appealing. Sometimes all you need as a solopreneur or freelancer is to be able to issue an invoice now and then. In this case, Zoho Invoice may just be the answer.

With Invoice, you can define your products and services, add clients, and quickly issue estimates and invoices. You can also customize your invoices to your liking and include the option to get paid online from within the invoice you send to clients.

Moreover, you can track expenses, set up reminders for your customers to pay you on time, and track time for your projects, so you can get paid accurately for the amount of work you put in.

The good news is that you can start using Zoho Invoice for free for up to 25 clients with all the features available to you .

Subscriptions

If you have recurring billing in your business, for example, you accept monthly payments for the subscription site you run, then Zoho Subscriptions can take care of the entire back end of the payment system for you.

With Subscriptions, you can create your pricing model, automate billing and payment management, monitor your payments, and make strategic decisions accordingly.

Zoho Subscriptions connects to most of the common payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe, and, of course, Zoho apps such as CRM and Books to make your life easier.

Expense

Zoho Expense is an affordable and effective way to get your team expense management in order.

You can upload receipts for your daily business expenses on the go via a native mobile app, which is quite handy for business travelers. Employees can create expense reports by entering receipts and importing card transactions, and then submitting the expense reports for approval and reimbursement. Accounts will love this way of receiving clear and structured information.

You can connect Zoho Expense to Zoho Books, Invoice, and CRM, as well as QuickBooks and Slack (for notifications).

Inventory

Zoho Inventory offers an easy-to-use and cost-effective inventory and order-management solution in the cloud. Using Inventory, you can create and manage sales and purchase orders, keep track of available stock, and get real-time reports on your logistics operation. All of these are possible while you work from your office or on the go via the Inventory mobile app.

Zoho Inventory offers integration with shipping services, such as FedEx, UPS, and DHL; online stores such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify; as well as other Zoho apps such as Books and CRM.

If you manage a small inventory and shipping operation out of a single warehouse, you can give Zoho Inventory a try for free. As your business grows, you can opt for a suitable paid edition and manage tens of thousands of orders per month in multiple warehouses.

Desk

Per Zoho, Desk is the “industry’s first context-aware help desk software.”

Customer-centricity must be at the core of every business, and not degraded to merely a fluffy statement in marketing campaigns. Customer experience actually starts before customers buy your products or services and continues as long as the customers use them.

Zoho Desk tries to improve the often underwhelming (or worse) experience of dealing with help desks. Apart from standard issue tracking and ticket management tools, Desk offers a centralized, focused, and contextual interface to support teams to stay on top of the tasks in hand and manage incoming inquiries from various channels, such as phone and email, efficiently.

Zoho Desk also allows you to create a customer service portal and knowledge base for your customers, from which they can find solutions to common problems, or file and manage their tickets to new issues.

Detailed reporting, a mobile app for customer service on the go, and integration with other Zoho apps such as CRM and Projects is also available out of the box.

Even if you are a tiny operation, customer service should still be a key aspect of your business culture. That’s how you get loyal customers, repeat business, and referrals.

Assist

Zoho Assist provides an easy way to remotely access computers inside and outside your organization for tech support and troubleshooting.

Zoho Assist is a great tool if you need to show a customer how to do a certain task, or better, do it for them remotely while they are watching (and hopefully learning). You can save time and money and most possibly reduce your carbon footprint by minimizing site visits for trivial troubleshooting tasks.

With Zoho Assist you can also remotely access unattended computers (needs software installed), so you don’t need someone on the other side to give you access. You can transfer files, reboot devices remotely, and access multiple monitors on the host machines .

You can start using Zoho Assist for free for basic tasks, so nothing stands between you and helping your clients, colleagues, or your mom remotely with troubleshooting tasks. Now you can help her bring back that document that magically disappeared from her desktop.

ServiceDesk Plus

For serious IT support, Zoho offers ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand from ManageEngine (IT management division of Zoho). It allows you to track and manage IT tickets, resolve issues, and maximize end-user satisfaction.

With ServiceDesk Plus, you have various automation options at your disposal, self-service portal, out-of-the-box ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) workflows, SLA (service Level Agreement) creation, and a host of other features to ensure successful service desk operation for your business.

Mobile Device Management

If you need enterprise-level mobile device management for your organization, then Mobile Device Manager Plus could be for you. Offered by ManageEngine, the IT division of Zoho, Mobile Device Manager Plus lets you set up, supervise, and secure your enterprise mobile devices and apps.

Recruit

Zoho Recruit is a cloud-based recruitment solution for recruiting agencies and corporate HR (Human Resources) departments. You can create and manage job postings, publish them on company websites as well as job boards such as Monster and Indeed, parse resumes, manage candidates and communications, and automate tedious HR tasks with workflows.

There is a mobile app for HR ninjas and a free edition for you to give applicant tracking and interview scheduling features a try.

People

As you grow, your team grows too. Usually the moment you pass five employees, HR requirements, if not handled properly, start to impact productivity and other business processes. So, considering an HR solution early on may be a prudent way to go forward.

On the other hand, for companies larger than 5-10 employees, in-house or outsourced HR management will become a necessity.

Zoho People is a cloud-based HR management service, which helps you manage all HR-related tasks without losing your mind to needy employees. You can manage employee information securely, provide self-service features for managers and staff, perform time tracking and attendance, and create performance reviews and other important reports about your people.

You can start for free to manage up to five employees with Zoho People. Then as you hire more people, possibly through Zoho Recruit, you can upgrade to paid plans and utilize all the features that People provides in your HR processes.