Leading provider of network security uses Zoho CRM to accelerate bookings

The company

EfficientIP, a leading provider of network security and automation solutions, is trusted by more than 1,000 customers worldwide in various industries. The company has been recognized as the world's fastest-growing DDI vendor. With 15 years of experience in the industry, EfficientIP has a unique understanding of the challenges organizations face in modernizing network infrastructures, and helps its customers drive digital transformation, quickly meet new business needs, and gain agility.

Enterprises in all sectors currently rely on EfficientIP's offerings to successfully deliver significant IT initiatives such as cloud transformation, hybrid workforce, or Zero Trust security. The company offers solutions that help organizations simplify the management and security of their networks, allowing users to access critical applications and services that keep their businesses flowing.

The IT industry needs constant reinvention and innovation, and EfficientIP is growing rapidly in an industry that keeps changing. As a result, it chose to implement a CRM to streamline its processes, scale its business, and help it in its journey of expansion.

The challenge

Bart Rabaut, Vice President of Operations at EfficientIP, felt that the company had missed out on a lot of features it didn't know it needed before deciding to fully invest in Zoho CRM. Rabaut had previously been a user of other popular CRM solutions, all of which failed to meet his expectations—while also burning a hole in his pocket.

EfficientIP's leadership knew not only that their processes needed better workflows to make the customer journey smooth and successful, but that without a solid analytics tool, they wouldn't be able to reach their goals, as they wouldn't be able to track their employees' performance effectively. On top of that, they also needed a user-friendly tool to ensure employees would adopt it. That's when they decided to double-down on implementing Zoho CRM.

The solution

Having used other solutions in the past, EfficientIP found that Zoho was the answer to the issues it faced. At the start, the company only experimented with the tool's basic features and, after discovering the extent of the automations and workflows available, has since invested all of its time into it.

Breaking new ground for digital success

As a developer himself, Rabaut was very intentional in what he wanted to accomplish with Zoho CRM. He worked closely with Zoho CRM's enterprise support team, who provided guidance at every stage of the implementation. Now, EfficientIP regularly sends in feedback and requests for additional CRM features. "It was an honour to work with the enterprise support team. Sai Teja and the product management team were a huge help as they listened to my queries and met them with appropriate solutions." says Bart.

Workflows and automation pave the way for transformation

Rabaut was clear-sighted on the kind of KPIs and markers that he wanted to track with the company's CRM. His clear goals helped his team stay on track as deals moved through the pipeline, and he made sure his team understood the importance of automation; it not only saves manual hours that could be spent on other tasks, but also reduces the chance of errors. The team set up workflow rules to automate necessary processes, such as assigning tasks, sending emails, and updating certain fields when a rule is triggered. These were repeated tasks to achieve a specific goal. The best application that they used was to streamline their meetings with customers.

EfficientIP set up a sales development representative (SDR) team to organize meetings with clients. Because this was the first touchpoint with customers, the team wanted a rock-solid process to track this journey. SDRs would call prospects to set up meetings with sales reps, and measured how many meetings were booked, whether they took place, and how many prospects did or didn't turn up for scheduled meetings.

The SDR team created a system around this strategy of using meetings as a success metric, building their leads, contacts, and accounts systems from scratch to suit this unique follow-up method. Using this strategy, they were able to score leads and transform quality leads into accounts. The next step was to focus on marquee deal accounts—a habit which helped the team improve account penetration. These changes were among the first they implemented with Zoho CRM.

Opportunity management was a major focus when working with new accounts. It was critical for EfficientIP to track what deals were in which stage. By tracking specific scenarios with customers, the company could provide more value. It knew what each team was working on in the current quarter, and their goals for the next one. With this foundation, a clear picture of the revenue they were generating emerged. The teams used this forecasting, strengthened by Zoho CRM's analysis, to predict outcomes.

EfficientIP uses Zoho CRM mainly to find answers to the following questions:

• What deals are in progress? What needs to be done to take them to the next stage?
• Who are the customers, and what have they been sold?
• Where are we going to upsell?
• When and where do we link customers to support?
• Can we anticipate renewals?
• Is there churn?

Pushing boundaries with KPIs

EfficientIP owes its success to CRM's mature business intelligence, KPIs, and analysis features. Rabaut is a big fan of KPIs because tracking everything helps his teams be more productive. They let the data speak for itself and drive the business.

Rabaut's teams were hyper-focused on pipeline generation. They measured how many leads were generated by their sales team on a weekly basis and put a waterfall system in place to bring all of the data together. For example, if a salesperson had to bring in a certain amount of revenue by the end of the year, it would take x number of meetings, of which there was an allowance for cancellations.

Sales reps also created a pipeline to match the goals that they had to meet, which they used to track the number of meetings booked and the revenue associated with them. If the pipeline was set for a year, and the sales reps closed x number of sales for a total value of y, then management gave them a quota of z to meet. The quota of the sales rep is put in perspective of historical stats to calculate the needed number of meetings and pipeline to generate the goals.

Zoho CRM offers various types of KPIs, and EfficientIP used a combination of standard KPIs and target meters to set and monitor the targets for the sales team.

Forging ahead, armed with data

EfficientIP set up a brilliant automatic framework personalized for each sales rep so that they knew what was expected of them, which is more efficient than setting up four meetings every week. The company now measures each salesperson in real time and gives them realistic goals and advice on how to meet their targets more effectively. Narrowing the focus to each individual rep has helped them see much better gains. With a fully automated journey and reliable reporting, EfficientIP has built a precise system that delivers results. 

Discovering new opportunities 

Rabaut discovered how to combine the strength of multiple powerful apps, of which Google Cloud and Zoho CRM are his favorites. He synchronizes the business intelligence data he gets from Google Cloud to work in harmony with Zoho CRM, so that he has a complete overview of when a lead pops onto the radar to when the deal expires. Rabaut loves that Zoho CRM can form strong integrations with other apps in the market, as this helps him streamline operations for different departments within the company.

EfficientIP also constantly revisits its processes. Any inefficiencies in the workflow are quickly fixed after getting feedback from the sales team.

The company counts on continuing to reap these benefits, because EfficientIP made whatever they set up not only to suit their size but to scale, as well. If today there are 300 CRM users in the company, the same framework will support 5,000. They have their sights set on a big vision. Apart from the obvious productivity increase, the data insights that they get from Zoho CRM give them clear directions for which roads to take and which ones to avoid.

Benefits and ROI

After implementing Zoho CRM, EfficientIP has seen massive results for their bottom line and the way their business functions fundamentally. The company saw unexpected ROI in the increase in bookings and deal success.