Today, Zoho is launching a brand new resource. We're calling it Zoho Academy: an online, self-service archive of educational content designed to help people do business better. Our intention? We know that businesses need two things if they're going to do what they do well: the right tools and technology, and the right models to emulate. We've been offering you the first all along. Now we're embarking on the second by scanning the business landscape, gathering up the best examples and best practices we can find, and offering them to you in one place.
Our goal is to keep selling the tools, but give the knowledge away for free.
Zoho roots for businesses of all sizes. It's is a core value we've held from the beginning. For years, we've done so by enabling access to competitively-priced software—because we believe money should never be an impediment to accomplishing big things in business.
At some point, we realized that even though we offer the technology to solve virtually any business problem, there was one more element we could provide to help our users succeed: well-researched, comprehensive information about how to run a business that runs on our software.
When we started kicking around the idea of Zoho Academy, it was because we realized our customers have questions that are bigger than how to use our products. You want to know how to run your day-to-day operations better. You want best practices. There are concepts and strategies you need clarification on. The mess of information out there is overwhelming. You have a businesses to run, after all; and you don’t have the time to go separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to finding the sources you can trust.
And while software is our craft, we also know a few things about running a business. After all, we’ve been around since 1996. In that time, we’ve built a suite of over 40 products to meet your needs as well as our own—from sales and marketing, to finance, to IT and help desk, to email and internal communications, to HR. We’ve grown our user base to over 35 million. We've grown our team to over 5,000. And we've done all of this without a penny of outside funding.
So while we are, at heart, a software company, we wanted to do more than teach our customers how to use our products. Because the truth is that you can’t run your business on software alone. The questions your business has are sometimes bigger than the software it runs on.
We've started with a goal that applies to any business today: building a highly effective website. If you click in today, you'll find 8 ebooks on everything from homepages, to About Us pages, to FAQs, to online shops, to customer testimonials, to business blogs, to web forms and CTA buttons... along with a 9th ebook that highlights and details the best websites we've seen so far in 2018.
Moving forward, our goal is to keep developing materials and resources for the biggest, most pressing questions you have about running your business.
Of course, you don't have to use our products to get business value out of Zoho Academy... and that's precisely the point. While there is some content on this site specific to our products, we understand that a wide range of factors goes into your software decisions. And even if we're not your software choice, we'd like to be a part of what makes your business thrive.
If you're reading this blog, you probably already know that our apps can solve just about any business problem. Now we've got a growing knowledge base that'll soon be able to do that, too.
Fantastic Idea. This was shared by a marketing friend of mine and is exactly what I believe I need to grow my business with him. Please continue to improve the entrepreneurial opportunities by providing the information that goes along with the spirit of independence. Thanks again for Sharing!
That's our plan, John! We'll keep you posted here whenever a new set of ebooks goes up... and if you have certain topics you'd like to see covered, let us know, and we'll add them to our list!
Loved to explore this section. Iris
So glad to hear you enjoyed it, Iris! Stay tuned here for announcements about new Zoho Academy content.
We should talk, I’m the author of the International bestselling book called Plan Your Website and I’ve been teaching people who to create successful websites for over 10 years now. I often tell people that a website is not as important as a CRM and the data you collect and act upon. Love this new direction Zoho is embarking upon.
Hi there, Steve! I so appreciate your comment—of course, as a CRM ourselves, we won't argue with you about its importance! We'll be sure to check your book out, and would love to be in further conversation about this topic...
This is great news. I have a suggestion related to this. In the Zoho Forums I see many of the same questions come up again and again and again. As an example, in the CRM forums people have been asking for the ability to associate one contact with many accounts for years. Then a few years back the response became "you can now do this with a custom module". Well, why in the world doesn't Zoho just create a video showing people how to make this custom module? I bet it would take someone at Zoho one hour. It seems to me there are a ton of areas where Zoho could do this and I could provide many more suggestions :-). Basically low hanging fruit where Zoho could provide tremendous value to user with very little time spend on Zoho's part (versus software development which is very time consuming). Thanks for listening.
Zohound, thanks so much for getting in touch with this suggestion. More explainer videos in our support pages indeed sounds like it would be of great value for users. This sounds like a project for our support team. I'll be sure to pass your comments on.
This is the best knowledge base I have ever read! Been an hour and I am not able to stop. Such an interesting piece of content. Would be great if you can share them as PDF's or provide a download link.
Shwetha, I'm so happy to hear this! We're working with the design team to have this content eventually downloadable as PDF files. I'll be sure to let you know when it happens.