Duratuf increases their ROI 400% using Zoho CRM

Key results:

• ROI400%

The company

Duratuf Products Private Limited is an industrial rubber products supplier based in Kolkata, India. They specialize in 53+ rubber products including electrical rubber mats, cow mats, and rubber sheets. For more than 12 years they have helped over 2,700 customers across 45+ countries. Headquartered in Kolkata, Duratuf has warehouses in six locations in India and the UAE.

About EasyToCheck

EasyToCheck Software Solutions is a Premium Zoho Partner and Zoho-certified consultant based in Noida, India. They have helped Duratuf and other Zoho customers set up and customize Zoho CRM.

The challenge: The CRM journey before Zoho CRM

Duratuf's CRM journey led them to various products before Zoho. As the company grew and their needs changed, they had to move from one product to another. They began their journey with SalesBabu CRM, before eventually migrating to Vtiger. Later on, they migrated again to Odoo CRM. "We were looking for a product that would scale with the growth of our company," said Aayush Kejriwal, CEO, Duratuf Products.

For almost two years, they customized Odoo to suit their business requirements. "We spent a lot of money customizing Odoo. That was one of the reasons we were unsure about shifting from that product, even when it wasn't meeting our needs," Kejriwal said.

Speaking about the challenges they had with Odoo, Kejriwal described that they couldn't get relevant information from the CRM to create reports from it. Apart from that, they found it difficult to connect Odoo to their accounting system.

Before Zoho CRM, Duratuf's sales team was collecting a lot of data but they didn't have any control over that data. There were a lot of manual errors leading to data discrepancies. The reports created based on the data were unreliable and did not offer actionable insights. More so, customizations were expensive on Python-based Odoo.

Kejriwal added that some of the basic workflows that they could easily set up on Zoho were challenging in Odoo. They solved this problem with Zoho.

It was a tough decision for the team to start from scratch with a new product. The investment was big, too, and that was a matter of concern. However, they feel that moving from Odoo to Zoho CRM has been one of their best decisions.

Kejriwal reported that moving to Zoho reduced their development costs and customization efforts significantly. "We spent a lot less money and time on Zoho CRM than what we spent on Odoo, mostly because we could do a lot of the customizations on our own, very easily."

The solution

Zoho CRM had been on Duratuf's radar since 2013. They kept a close watch on the developments and proceeded with the implementation in 2019 through EasyToCheck.

They wanted an experienced partner who could do the customizations for a reasonable price. "We were looking for a partner who would keep us at the core of CRM and Books. A partner who would help us stay with Zoho instead of developing new apps." That's what they found with EasyToCheck. Kejriwal described that EasyToCheck helped them make the best use of the platform's existing features.

Speaking about their experience with the partner, Kejriwal shared, that the partner helped them build a location database. Before, because of wrong location data, customer details would get lost. They faced issues like duplicate and misspelled city names, too. EasyToCheck helped them build a custom module for locations and lock the information in place. Now the city, state, and country names are taken directly from the database ensuring error-free data. "They helped us set up a Books and CRM integration. We worked a lot together to identify the problem areas and resolve them," Kejriwal said. "We are happy with their services. They helped us a lot during the migration."

In Duratuf, the sales and marketing teams as well as part of the finance team use Zoho CRM daily. They have plans to extend the usage to the purchase team in the upcoming months so the supply side of the business is also captured by the CRM.

Expanding on how Zoho made this possible, he added, "We knew all our branch data are in the backup system that Zoho provides. That has helped us expand to different locations in one go. Without the backup from Zoho, we would not have done it so fast."

They have also mapped the inventory in CRM using the web tabs feature. With this, the team can see all their inventory in different warehouses across the country. This helps save time instead of going and asking different departments for updates.

Capturing the right data leading to great customer insights

Apart from their three websites Duratuf's main lead sources are online marketplaces, an adwords campaign, and also other platforms. One of the major challenges they overcame with Zoho CRM was capturing data while communicating with the customer.

"Capturing communication data was the problem, which we found much easier in Zoho CRM," Kejriwal noted. He said this helped them get a better understanding of their diverse clientele.

Explaining how Zoho CRM gave them a 360-degree view of their customers, Kejriwal said, "The major benefit we got is by connecting Zoho CRM with Zoho Finance. That was a game changer for us. We now connect data from our various lead sources to get product-wise profits."

Duratuf is now able to segment their customers product and profit wise. More minutely, they can segregate the data if a customer or product segment is giving them more revenue or higher margins, so they now streamline and segment until the profitability is clear.

According to Kejriwal, this was not possible with their earlier CRM. "This is something unique we are getting from Zoho CRM, which is helping us a lot now. It's actually changing the way we handle our customers."

The marketing team at Duratuf is making the most of this complete customer data. The Google Ads data gets directly stored in Zoho CRM, too. Then, the team checks the daily count of leads. "Once we connect this data to Zoho Analytics, we get data about product categories, the kind of customers who are buying our products, and from where they are generating more revenue and more profits. All those details are coming from CRM."

It also gives Duratuf a clear view of the geographical regions they are performing well in, and the areas where they need improvements. "We get a graphic representation of data about where the leads are coming from and where not. Then the marketing team changes their activities based on that data."

Speaking in depth about how they are using Zoho CRM to capture more customer data than before, Kejriwal noted that using different fields in the Leads module helps them capture more details than just a customer's name and contact information. This data also helps them keep track of the customer if the sales person handling that client leaves. Once a new salesperson takes on the customer, they already have the data they need including past communications. This means more time is saved in training and knowledge transfer. "It takes very little time to train and bring the people up to speed. This has also helped us engage better with the clients," Kejriwal mentioned.

Increasing process efficiency using custom modules and dashboards

Kejriwal pointed out that the modules and dashboards in Zoho CRM have helped eliminate internal disputes, increased collaboration, and saved time.

 "We have customized our home tabs and created a daily dashboard for our sales and presales team. Zoho has made it possible for us to split the sales and presales process." — Aayush Kejriwal, CEO, Duratuf Products.

Duratuf has created a lead filtering process using Zoho CRM. This helps their sales team track valid leads instead of surfing through hundreds of junk ones.

"One of our challenges was that all our leads were going to the sales team without any verification. They were getting a lot of bad leads and irrelevant queries," Kejriwal lamented.

One of their main lead sources, which yielded up to 90% of their leads, showed a large percentage was invalid. To solve this problem, the Duratuf team split the sales team into presales and sales.

"We used CRM and split the processes, and increased conversions. We have doubled the count of converted leads from the same lead source," Kejriwal explained. 

Now, the presales team contacts and qualifies the lead, then it is assigned to the sales representative, ensuring increased chances of a deal closure. Explaining how this improved their lead generation, Kejriwal said, "We increased the number of good leads from the same source from 5% to approximately 12%."

Apart from the online marketplaces, Duratuf also uses website forms are linked to the CRM for lead generation. These forms have automated country codes, which makes data gathering easier.

To have a better idea of how each profile is performing, Duratuf has made good use of the dashboards in Zoho CRM. They have created multiple dashboards for different profiles. For example, a salesperson's dashboard has a prequalified leads list, pending calls, and tasks list for the day. Similarly, sales coordinators and sales managers have their separate dashboards. Managers can see which leads are overdue, and where action has not been taken. The sales managers can keep track of the followups made or missed by the sales people, too. In case of response delays, sales people can get notifications about this. "This has helped people work faster," added Kejriwal. Since they have regional lead assignments to sales representatives, the assignment rules feature help assign a lead to the right person according to the location data.

They have also integrated with cloud telephony to keep track of calls made by sales people. Kejriwal says this has added to their view of in depth customer interactions as they get "very good insights."

Some of Duratuf's most-used modules in CRM are Leads, Deals, Accounts, and Contacts.

Apart from the regular modules, the Duratuf team has built a few customized modules to fit their business needs better. Their custom module, Payments, has the list of payments made by the customers. The finance team put the payment details in this module for the sales team. Here, when a sales person reaches out to the customer next time, they have the details regarding the payments made by the customer.

Another custom module called Customers is used to filter and split data into lists of prospects and clients.

According to Kejriwal, the modules help them keep their data clean and available when required. "The data that we need, we can see at a glance, like when the customer was last contacted, when they should be contacted again, and what is the next action required. "These fields are enough for us."

Those fields are updated automatically using the blueprint feature.

Saving time by decreasing manual work with Blueprints

As there wasn't any centralized data collection system before, sales people at Duratuf were not able to collect data properly. Without a process, individuals used to collect data in different ways. This led to data loss, incomprehensible data, and junk data. While speaking to customers, sales representatives wouldn't collect the right data. "They were getting frustrated with the existing system," Kejriwal noted. 

With CRM's Blueprint feature, there is a process to capture data in the moment, leading to uniform data collection and no data loss. "The Blueprint feature helped us resolve these issues. It helped us streamline our information collection so we're not collecting dumb data," Kejriwal explained.

"The Blueprint feature helps a person save one hour daily. As the lead volume increases, we can handle it better," Kejriwal said. He added that since Blueprint saves a lot of manual labor, they have more time to focus on client interactions and building relationships. "Now, we can give the customer what they want in the least possible time."

Speaking about setting up the Blueprint feature, he said: 

Eliminating data entry errors with workflow rules and Client Script

Using workflow rules, Duratuf eliminated the chances of manual mistakes while creating a lead. While updating lead details, some of the fields are automatically filled in so there are no repetitions for the sales representatives. It saves them time and minimizes the manual efforts needed on the sales representative's part.

For example, updating a field called "lead channel," which records the source of the lead, can be done automatically whenever a lead comes in. Here, along with other information like the contact and name, the lead source is also recorded. With workflow rules, the lead source is updated automatically.

Similarly, once a deal is closed, it is automatically updated as a client. Duratuf used a field update using a Deluge function to change the status of the lead. Apart from this, they also use workflow rules to push data into notes. These notes help sales people to remember when and whom to follow up with.

At Duratuf, they use the Client Script feature to update leads details in a particular format. Using this feature, they save time by automating the information filled out in the fields once the location data is selected. This decreases the time taken to fill in lead details in the Leads module for sales representatives.

Validating GST compliance

Duratuf is using the Validation Rules feature to validate GST compliance of their leads and clients. They are also using the feature to make sure the company names and phone numbers are spelled correctly. Earlier, they faced lead duplication issues due to misspelled company names. "There are no more duplication of records due to misspelled names and wrong phone numbers," Kejriwal said.

Integration with WhatsApp for business messaging

Using Picky Assist, Duratuf has integrated WhatsApp with their CRM. Through WhatsApp, all new leads get a welcome text with a video link describing the company and its products. Furthermore, based on the lead's journey on Blueprints, at different levels, the customers get various information. For example, if it's a retail client, they are asked to visit the online store to shop. The sales person will click the send-to-the-store option and the customer will get the WhatsApp message and email with the purchase links. Apart from customers, Duratuf also uses WhatsApp to send their partners details of customers and vice versa. Instead of saving the customer's number and typing out the message manually, the whole process is done with just a click in the CRM.

Benefits and ROI

"Zoho CRM is an investment that fetches you good ROI, Kejriwal began. "With Zoho we could do more activities with less people. That is where the true ROI from Zoho comes for us. When we compare the license fee with the number of people we need, it evens out the numbers. It actually makes my annual license cost free. About 25-30% of resource cost is saved using automation, which is more valuable to me. Some of the things we are doing now were not possible without the automations in Zoho CRM."

Talking about the ROI, Kejriwal attributes their growth to the insightful reports they can now generate based on the CRM data and Zoho Analytics.