Pioneering market leader in the Indian UAS market elevates business operations after employing Zoho CRM

Key results:

• Implementation time3 months
• Payback period3 months

The company

ideaForge is a vertically integrated company with an in-house product development center, allowing it to design, develop, engineer, and manufacture indigenous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The company designs, develops, engineers, and manufactures UAVs in-house, with a focus on performance, reliability, and autonomy.

ideaForge is the pioneer and the pre-eminent market leader in the Indian unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS”) market, with a market share of ~50% in FY 2022. Its customers have completed over 400,000 flights using ideaForge UAVs and now an ideaForge manufactured drone is taking off every five minutes on average for surveillance and mapping in India.

ideaForge UAVs are equipped with industry leading specifications and capabilities, comparable to those of other established global players in the UAV industry. Company's customers include Indian armed forces and civil customers comprising certain of the central armed police forces, state police departments, disaster management forces, forest departments, government and private contractors, enterprise sectors and many more.

The challenge

ideaForge's early days, the company relied heavily on MS Excel for data management, forecasting, tracking, and other operational work. However, as the company grew and scaled its business up, these tasks became time-consuming and demanded more manual input for similar operations. Along with these challenges came added risk factors, such as potential loss of information, incorrect data updates, and internal miscommunication.

The solution

Since ideaForge recognized the need for a centralized platform where the team could record and track all sales and marketing activities in real time. The team knew it was time for a change and that only a CRM tool could enable a structured approach that would help the sales and marketing teams streamline their activities.

Upon evaluating other players in the market, the organization chose to tackle its business challenges with Zoho CRM because of its renowned name in the Indian market and the seamless integrations it promises. Positive reviews of Zoho CRM's performance also left the ideaForge no room to second-guess their choice.

ideaForge's robust team was able to implement the system quickly. Within three months, the company had engineered an end-to-end process inside Zoho CRM. The team also credits Zoho CRM's support team for playing an integral role in the implementation process.

Sanket S. Katkar, Marketing Manager at ideaForge, leads the Digital Marketing and MarComm and oversees the execution of ideaForge's digital marketing activities and strategies in order to achieve the company's goals and generate more business opportunities in the digital market environment. He's also responsible for managing various automations and software systems—including Zoho CRM—that bridge the gap between various departments and streamline processes.

One-stop solution for sales and marketing

ideaForge employs Zoho CRM for end-to-end lead management. By streamlining the entire lead management process with Zoho CRM, the organization nurtures its consumers' expectations efficiently.

Zoho CRM's integration with Zoho Forms facilitates one of the primary sources of ideaForge's partner lead generation process. Zoho Forms powers the "Partner With Us" form on its website, through which submitted data is instantly captured and reflected in Zoho CRM. ideaForge's diligent team of developers also used Zoho CRM's API build a custom solution to connect their website to both Zoho CRM and an internal software tool.   Through this integration, the team captures form entries in Zoho CRM through this integration, which also collects leads from exhibitions, events, and social media. Additionally, website visitors can get their queries resolved by utilizing Yellow.ai's chatbot, which is also integrated with Zoho CRM. Other lead sources include referrals, online and offline campaigns, direct sales, and more. The system captures every lead accurately, and thanks to its automation, ideaForge has seen a sharp decrease in the number of manual inputs required.

The company has set up workflows so that once a sales representative is assigned to a lead, Zoho CRM instantly sends an email to the sales rep and other stakeholders with the lead's details. This notification proves to be highly beneficial, as it improves the team's efficiency and reduces the time it takes to execute the next step in the process.

Katkar says Zoho has made the lead management process much smoother. Prior to adopting Zoho's solutions, the company encountered a few challenges when it came to sharing lead details internally using traditional sources; they had to share information with different individuals via email, or to give access to certain folders. Now that ideaForge's sales and marketing teams use the same platform to run their tasks and get centralized access to information, the company's business processes are easier and more transparent.

Making informed decisions with advanced business insights

The reports generated in Zoho CRM are crucial to ideaForge's overall approach to strategy and formulating new business goals, as they enable deeper analysis of leads, trends, and sales forecasts. The sales team also uses reports to track various KPIs, such as the number of leads regionally, the status of leads, and so on, which helps them understand areas that need to prioritized and areas that deserve less focus. Furthermore, tracking lead quality enables the marketing team to measure how fruitful their marketing efforts have been.

Enhanced approach to data maintenance

The sales team notes that Zoho CRM played a fundamental role during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact continues. At a time when meeting people in person was unsafe, ideaForge's sales reps used Zoho CRM to update their activities, track time, and send updates to their respective managers. Zoho CRM was key in facilitating an environment of smooth internal communication.

Integrating with Zoho Campaigns to enrich customer interactions

Thanks to Zoho CRM's integration with Zoho Campaigns, ideaForge sends automated email campaigns and newsletters in bulk to diverse groups of people. Product updates, recent achievements, and visions for the future are some of the topics they cover.

Benefits

Since deploying Zoho CRM, ideaForge has observed a remarkable increase in employee productivity and efficiency. Furthermore, Zoho CRM delivered ROI within three months of implementation. Katkar attributes this to Zoho CRM's user-friendly GUI and its ability to integrate seamlessly with APIs.