American Music & Sound reduced its administrative time by ~20% with Zoho Analytics

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    ~20%Reduced administrative time
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    8+Data Source

"It’s not just the reporting; it’s how seamlessly Zoho Analytics fits into everything else we do in the business"

Jeff Hawley
Vice President, Marketing,
American Music & Sound / JAM Industries US MI/Pro

The company

American Music & Sound, a division of JAM Industries and established in 2002, is a leading distributor of professional audio and music products in the United States. The company partners with some of the world’s most respected brands, providing artists, producers, and audio professionals with cutting-edge tools and technology. JAM manages the sales, marketing, and logistics operations for over 500 global brands, supporting a vast catalog of more than 150,000 products. Serving retailers and end users across the US, AM&S plays a central role in bringing world-class instruments and professional audio solutions to musicians, producers, and live event professionals.

The challenge

Jeff Hawley, Vice President, Marketing, American Music & Sound / JAM Industries US MI/Pro, needed a centralized platform that could go beyond the limited reporting available in the individual applications that the company was using for different business operations.

The company used a wide range of apps, such as:

  • Zoho Desk: To track and analyze customer support interactions across divisions
  • Zoho Campaigns: To manage and monitor email campaign performance metrics such as open rates, click rates, and engagement levels
  • Zoho Social: To plan, publish, and measure social media activities across multiple brand pages
  • Zoho Forms: To collect feedback, marketing requests, and customer sentiment for analysis
  • Zoho CRM: To track sales pipelines, deal progress, and expected revenue
  • External social channels: To import data from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to evaluate both owned and competitor page performance

Though each of these apps supported dashboards, they limited visibility and lacked advanced analysis options. Cross-functional performance measurement required manual effort and multiple logins. Since reporting was fragmented across tools, it was difficult to get a unified view, which hindered collaboration between teams.

The team also needed to create ad-hoc reports to analyze data from ERP and sales to understand the performance on each front and get a comprehensive view by combining data from both sources.

The team needed a centralized platform to merge and analyze data across marketing, sales, support, and external datasets as manual processes.

The marketing team conducted an extensive evaluation of multiple BI and analytics platforms to understand which one offered the right balance of functionality, integration, and cost-effectiveness for marketing-centric functions

IMT Matcher saves £5,000/year with Zoho Analytics

"We didn’t have a unified marketing analytics tool, just bits of data in silos across Zoho apps. We wanted a single source of truth for faster insights."

- Jeff Hawley
Vice President, Marketing, American Music & Sound / JAM Industries US MI/Pro

Hawley wanted a solution that:

  • Offered easy integration
  • Enabled cross functional analytics
  • Had a user-friendly interface suitable for multiple teams across businesses
  • Enabled quick and secure collaboration

The solution

After assessing various tools in the market, the team determined that the built-in compatibility and comprehensive analytics capabilities of Zoho Analytics made it the most practical and value-driven choice.

With Zoho Analytics' out-of-the-box integration, data from Zoho CRM, Social, Desk, Forms, Campaigns, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn were brought into the platform for analysis. This enabled them to gain a unified view of marketing, sales, and support data across divisions, enabling faster and more informed decisions.

After adopting Zoho Analytics, the team was able to get in-depth insights on social media performance, marketing and sales correlation, customer support performance, and more. Ad-hoc and custom analysis was made easy like never before.

Multiple reports and dashboards were built for each of these analyses.

Social media insights

  • All-up Facebook dashboard:Consolidated performance of 10+ owned Facebook pages to assess reach, engagement, and growth trends
  • LinkedIn and Instagram dashboards:Monitored brand and competitor performance across impressions, followers, and engagement metrics
  • Competitive intelligence dashboards:Benchmarked AM&S brands against competitors to evaluate positioning, campaign impact, and share of voice

Apart from these, the report also enabled them to track key metrics like page reach, follower growth, post-level engagement, and content type effectiveness (like video vs. image posts).

Integrated marketing and sales intelligence:

  • Pipeline vs. campaign performance reports:Connected Zoho CRM sales pipeline data with Zoho Campaigns data to identify correlations between marketing activities and sales outcomes
  • Attribution analysis reports: Measured how specific campaigns or email initiatives influenced sales over time (e.g., identifying 30-, 60-, or 90-day lag effects)

Besides this, the reports also tracked campaign impressions, click-through rates, engagement levels, pipeline value, expected revenue, and deal velocity.

Customer support performance insights:

  • Agent performance reports:Monitored ticket volumes, response times, and SLA adherence to assess workload distribution and resource allocation
  • Case handling efficiency dashboard:Tracked trends in average resolution time and identified bottlenecks in support operations
  • Customer satisfaction analysis:Overlaid sentiment and feedback data (from Zoho Forms) with support metrics to understand how service speed affected customer ratings

Ad-hoc and custom analysis workspaces:

  • Created temporary or project-specific workspaces to merge external datasets (like campaign overlays and market insights) with internal data for deeper analysis
  • Used as a flexible environment for exploratory data modeling and strategic decision-making

These comprehensive reports and dashboards have led to improved cross-team collaboration, quicker insights for leadership, and measurable efficiency gains across internal operations and customer-facing functions. Multiple teams like marketing, sales, customer support, social media teams, and C-level executives benefited from this.

The platform also allowed them to set up tailored dashboards for specific teams or stakeholders, improving organization and collaboration so each group could easily access relevant reports without clutter or confusion.

Hawley mentioned that C-level executives found integration with Zoho Show very handy as it let them embed reports directly into presentation decks and even adjust parameters on live data during meetings, saving time and eliminating manual report updates.

He said that Ask Zia was one of the team's favorite features because even non-technical users could quickly generate reports and add them to dashboards with a single click. He also appreciated the multiple ways to share reports and dashboards such as email, password-protected links, direct links, internal access, and custom portals.

IMT Matcher saves £5,000/year with Zoho Analytics

"Zoho Analytics became our central marketing analysis hub. It’s where we merge data from different Zoho apps and external sources to get a complete view”

- Jeff Hawley
Vice President, Marketing, American Music & Sound / JAM Industries US MI/Pro

Benefits and ROI

The key benefit that American Music and Sound gained after adopting Zoho Analytics is that it created a data-driven marketing culture where decisions are backed by real insights instead of assumptions. It also strengthened cross-department collaboration and enhanced agility for reporting and strategic adjustments.

It created better visibility for leadership into operational bottlenecks and campaign ROI. Zoho Analytics empowered teams to make informed decisions quickly, driving higher marketing ROI and operational efficiency overall. It also reduced administrative time by about 20%, allowing more focus on strategic work rather than coordination.