Green Endeavour revolutionizes customer management with Zoho CRM

The company

Green Endeavour houses two well-known and respected wholesale brands, Suncoast Fresh and Fruitlink. These brands joined hands to achieve their common goal of improving how real food is sourced, and distributed to customers. Suncoast fresh is a market leader in supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to some of the best restaurants, cafes, and bars on the south east coast of Australia and has three HACCP-approved warehouses in the Rocklea fruit markets in Brisbane, Coolum, and Byron Bay. Fruitlink excels in providing fresh fruits and vegetables to supermarkets and retailers and has a leading reputation as an innovative grocery wholesaler.

Suncoast Fresh and Fruitlink merged in 2021 to form Green Endeavour, headquartered in Brisbane, Australia. Today, the company has emerged as a gourmet food specialist within their market sector.

While the two brands continue to operate as individual entities, Green Endeavour is focused on combining resources and enhancing their overall efficiencies by:

• Fast tracking their ability to become a greener and more sustainable business.
• Doubling the industry experience.
• Increasing their capabilities and gaining operational efficiencies.
• Strengthening their overall product and service offering to their customers.

The challenge

Green Endeavour wanted to overcome the following challenges:

• Elimination of manual data handling and user errors.
• Orchestrating and speeding up the customer onboarding process.
• Facilitating paperless onboarding.
• Clear and better visibility of prospective and current clients.
• Automating repetitive tasks to enhance the overall efficiency of their sales team.

The solution

Zoho was the most obvious choice for Green Endeavour, as both Suncoast Fresh and Fruitlink had used Zoho successfully in the past. Both companies firmly believed Zoho exceeded their expectations in usability, affordability, and customization capability.

Implementation with A1CRM

A1CRM is an Advanced Zoho Partner who worked with Green Endeavour to implement Zoho applications and integrate them with third-party applications the business already uses to ensure a smooth and efficient business process. Cyrill and her team from A1CRM made sure they understood the scope of the merger, determined the best possible ways to address their requirements, combined the two different onboarding processes, digitalized everything to ensure a paperless operation, and ensured zero disruption to the existing processes and integrations, all within a few months time.

Sarah Strathern, the projects and innovation manager for Green Endeavour, spoke about how much A1CRM and Zoho have helped the company.

Better lead management

Lead management at Green Endeavour is a unique and complex process. The sales team receives leads from its industry contacts and word of mouth. Before using Zoho, these leads were entered into the common spreadsheet. With the business growing, the spreadsheet became monstrous, containing duplicate data, making it tedious and overwhelming for the sales team to manage leads and follow ups. It was paramount for the team to use a structured system, which was clean, free of duplicate data, easy to use, and could centralize customer data to enhance the overall efficiency of the sales team.

Since the sales team is always on wheels, they use Zoho CRM's mobile application to enter leads from any place, at any time. Green Endeavour has also used several data validation rules when entering data to avoid entering any incorrect information. Zoho CRM has successfully been able to eliminate manual tasks and human errors caused by the shared spreadsheet. It also acts as a central repository for customer data which gives the sales team clear visibility of prospective clients and maintain a better and long-lasting relationship.

Efficient follow up enabled using workflow rules

The leads entered in the CRM are cold leads, which require rigorous follow ups by the sales team. Green Endeavour has implemented workflow rules to schedule reminders for follow-up calls, which helps acquire previously untapped opportunities. The integration between Zoho CRM and their existing telephony system, 3CX—available in Zoho Marketplace—has allowed the team to follow up with customers directly from their CRM without switching tabs.

Orchestrated customer onboarding

At Green Endeavour, hot prospects are evaluated on various parameters to identify if they can be onboarded as a customer. Some of these parameters include the credit credibility of the owners and financial reputation of the prospective customer. 

This entire qualification process is automated using Zoho CRM's integration with other Zoho applications. The process starts when a credit application is triggered from the CRM using Zoho Forms. These forms, when filled out by the customers, are synced in Zoho Writer, and sent back to the customer for their digital signature to finalize the document using Zoho Sign. The finalized document is then synced back to the CRM using Zoho Flow. The workflow rule within CRM updates the lead status and triggers a notification to the admin team to proceed with the next steps to onboard the customer. This entire automation has helped the team go paperless and has also eliminated any manual and repetitive tasks which were otherwise performed using to-and-fro paper transactions between the sales team and the customer.

Customized modules to fit their business

Green Endeavour uses unique business terms which are different from the general modules available in the CRM. A1CRM harnessed the power of customization available within Zoho CRM to modify and create custom modules suitable for Green Endeavour. A few examples are:

• Call schedule - Used by the admin team to prepare a call plan for its sales team every week.
• Call template - Used by the sales team to determine their agenda for the call with their customers, including what products they require before the next delivery.
• Site audits - Used by the sales team to help customers with merchandising.
• Specials - This is the most crucial module used by the sales team to refer to while talking to their customers and pitching the latest special offers available to them.

These customizations have been a huge relief for the sales team at Green Endeavour as they no longer had to refer to several spreadsheets before calling a customer. It has also saved them time, which can otherwise be spent on strategizing for sales growth.

Canvas for customized CRM interface

Green Endeavour, along with A1CRM, has pushed beyond boundaries to customize their CRM for the sales team and reduce time spent on endless scrolling to find relevant information. The team has used Canvas to customize and personalize their CRM interface. The team can pick the modules they need while on a call and have them at the top of the screen for easier accessibility while talking to the customer. Canvas has empowered the team with the ability to present data the way they envision.

Insightful dashboards for team leaders

Green Endeavour is result-oriented, and their leadership team stays on top of all activities performed by the sales team. Dashboards help the leadership team quickly reference essential business numbers, activities performed by the sales team, activities pending for the sales team, top-performing sales agents, average call durations, call scheduled status, and similar details. They also give the team clear visibility of all prospects and their status. The dashboards pull the data from several modules of the CRM and give a graphical representation for faster reference.

Benefits and ROI

Green Endeavour isn't shy about sharing their amazing experience using Zoho affirming Zoho and A1CRM have become a critical part of their business operations. The team attests Zoho has streamlined their entire onboarding process, reduced the time spent by the sales team at every stage of the sales process, and eradicated human error, which has allowed the sales team to emerge as a strategic leader by eliminating mundane work and allowing them to utilize more time to develop better strategies. 

Strathern noted that Zoho integrated with their existing accounting system and stock management system which has delivered the best possible results for the company. Green Endeavour is happy to say that using Zoho has allowed them to streamline all of their business operations from onboarding to auditing retail outlets saving them time and money.