With a 15-month ramp up time, Louise Vincent needed Zoho CRM to manage all her relationships from designing her products, producing them, to ultimately determining who would be her buyers.
Business: Natural Hero Ltd – High performance natural recovery products for sports and fitness.
The challenge: Managing parallel developments working with plant scientists, physiotherapists, and cosmetic specialists. Plus have to think about who will the business serve.
“It’s that juggle between moving that business forward and developing as a business whilst also keeping fairly on top of the key issues of the people you’re working with,” Vincent said.
They were looking for a solution that could handle their relations with trade, with suppliers, and with the outside world. Prior to Zoho CRM Vincent wasted a lot of time with emails, documents, and spreadsheets.
How discovered Zoho: Talked to a lot of colleagues and got peer recommendations.
Unique use case of Zoho CRM: Didn’t try to setup everything at once. Using Zoho CRM has been very iterative and at each stage Vincent reflects back on what she has been learned allowing her to change if necessary. No configurations are set in stone, nor are they costly to change. When they decide they want to handle things differently nothing is lost as they shift processes.
Advice for others: Don’t get sucked into administrative nonsense, look at what actions (e.g., reports) will have impact to your bottom line. For example, the sales pipeline report shows potential customers and what level they’re at with regard to their potential income. This allows you to see who and what you need to focus on next.
“There’s something rather seductive about [administrative stuff] where you can enjoy just ticking things off without seeing what the end result is,” said Vincent. “Make sure you’re looking at the reports that are measuring impact rather than process.”
“Whatever relationship management system you use, and I recommend Zoho, make sure it links up with real life,” said Vincent. “Don’t get so caught up on the processes that you forget what you’re using it for.”
Listen to the complete interview with Louise Vincent here.
CRM systems are (or at least, should be) all about "modeling real-world business processes so those processes can be measured, managed, and improvedâ€Of course you want to clean those processes up as best you can before automating them with a CRM system....but at the end of the day if your CRM can't duplicate what you need to do in the physical world - it's not going to be of much value to you. Zoho is pretty flexible in that regard.