The Kings Secure Technologies group built a 360° sales pipeline with Zoho CRM

The company

The Kings Secure Technologies (KST) group of companies is a specialist integrator of security, fire and life safety systems headquartered in Bradford, UK. It serves a wealth of B2B industries including retail, defence, warehousing, manufacturing, and commercial finance, as well as high-net-worth individuals. Founded in 1971, the group has eight UK offices, a footprint in over 20 countries, and an 800-strong workforce. With several strategic acquisitions driving rapid growth since 2020, the business is on target to achieve a £60 million turnover in 2024.

Discover how this booming business boosted the visibility of its data and shook up its stale sales meetings with Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics.

The challenge

After acquiring three security businesses in as many years, the KST group found in 2021 that it was struggling to visualise, standardise and interpret its data. Without a CRM system in place, its opportunities, sales targets, performance KPIs and more were recorded in separate spreadsheets and documents. It was impossible to understand the performance and health of each division, business, or the group as a whole.

What's more, KST's monthly sales meetings were dull and uninspiring. Each salesperson would present a different PowerPoint deck listing their opportunities and won deals, which would take them hours to prepare. "Our sales meetings used to be very tedious. We'd go through each presentation line-by-line," explains Jo Goulden, Head of Marketing.

With inaccurate, inconsistent reporting and fragmented data holding this ambitious business back, KST's CEO Bob Forsyth decided to source a central CRM platform. He tasked Jo Goulden, the group's Head of Marketing, with onboarding a CRM that could house and bring together each division's data to unlock further opportunities for growth. It was imperative that the chosen CRM had to integrate with KST's existing field service management (FSM) platform as well as its in-house quoting software, "DYMENSiON".

Jo was nominated as KST's "CRM Champion" and assigned a task force of internal users to evaluate, trial and test various platforms. Following a colleague's recommendation, she also enlisted the technical expertise of Bill Quinn from 1 Cloud Consultants (a certified Zoho partner) to assist with the project throughout.

KST's requirements at a glance:

• Amalgamate data from multiple companies inside one application.
• Integrate with the FSM and in-house quoting platform, performing daily syncs for real-time insights.
• Deliver extensive reporting capabilities with visual charts, graphs, and widgets.
• Improve KST's dull, disjointed sales meetings using a deals module in Kanban view.
• Assist with effective resource planning through opportunity scheduling capabilities.
• Be intuitive and easy to use, ensuring widespread adoption.
• Offer a cost-effective licensing plan.
   

The solution

Jo's focus team evaluated several CRM choices but found that none were as user-friendly or customisable as Zoho. With Bill's help, Jo onboarded each of the group's businesses into the platform, utilising custom layouts, deal stages and pipelines tailored for each. This allowed KST to see the entirety of its data in one place for the first time, both for each individual business unit and as a whole.

By using API connections between the CRM, its FSM and its quoting software  "DYMENSiON",  KST's critical data could flow back and forth in real-time. This eliminated the need for double data entry by the sales team whilst keeping each system aligned and accurate. For instance, setting the status of an opportunity in the CRM to a bespoke stage called "quote in progress" now triggers the new deal data to be pushed into the FSM. From here, a job is raised and a unique "sales opportunity ID" is generated before being pushed back into the CRM opportunity record. Meanwhile, at the close of a deal in the FSM system, the final sales and margin values are pushed back into Zoho and updated in the opportunity. "It ensures that Zoho is kept absolutely in line with the field service management software," explains Jo.  When it comes to quotes, KST's in-house tool "DYMENSiON" allows its BDMs to build very complex proposals that can be up to millions of pounds. These values flow into the FSM and then into Zoho CRM.

For KST's weekly sales meetings, the power of Zoho CRM has been transformative. No longer does each salesperson have to spend hours compiling their prospects, opportunities and won business into a cluttered spreadsheet or poorly formatted PowerPoint. Now the team simply load the Opportunities module of Zoho CRM to see a snapshot of the team's performance in Kanban view. They can filter by salesperson, product type, deal value and/or stage to drill down into the specifics.  "Zoho CRM makes our sales meetings much more dynamic, much more accurate and we have a better view of everybody's pipeline. The meetings are much more enjoyable and meaningful," explains Jo. "Jo said to me, "Last week was the first time that we were able to run a sales meeting completely out of Zoho." As soon as I heard that, I knew we had achieved the project objectives," adds Bill.

As more and more of Jo's colleagues began to see the value in Zoho, she was asked to expand its use across more departments, with KST now counting 60 CRM users across the group, up from an initial 8. Jo was also being asked to produce increasingly detailed reports, KPIs, dashboards and widgets to slice and dice the group's data and enable further data-led decision-making. Bill made no hesitation in recommending Zoho Analytics to enhance the CRM's reporting potential and meet KST's intelligence-hungry needs.

Zoho Analytics is designed to integrate seamlessly with Zoho CRM, enabling Jo to unlock the deeper, real-time insights that KST desired within a few clicks. "It's a really easy system to use. Analytics plugs directly in with Zoho CRM. We know we always have accurate data," explains Jo. Bill helped Jo build new dashboards, leverage new dynamic widgets, and discover how to dissect the group's data in endless colourful, interactive and innovative ways. As a result, KST's CEO Bob Forsyth is empowered to build better board reports in less time by simply copying and pasting Analytics' charts and graphs into his presentations. "He believes that using Zoho Analytics saves him several hours a month," beams Jo.

It's clear that combining Zoho CRM's savvy sales prowess with Zoho Analytics's arithmetical acumen has truly delivered a software solution that's fit for Kings!

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