Strata saves approximately 45,000 man-hours per month using Zoho CRM

The company

Strata is a commercial real estate investment firm established in 2019. They help people invest in fractions of commercial real estate like offices, warehouses, factories, and retail outlets. Investors sign on to their platform and choose one of many property investment opportunities, which Strata then manages on their behalf, including tenants, rental payouts, and asset liquidation. They manage over 1,800 crores worth of assets and have properties in over six locations, with an active investor base of nearly 3,000 investors, who mainly consist of high net worth individuals.

We spoke to Narendran Sivakumar, who is currently the Senior Manager of Strategy at Strata. He started off as a digital marketing manager for the firm and also managed its internal CRM operations. Though he has since shifted to a strategic decision-making role, he's still Strata's Zoho CRM super admin.

Sivakumar feels that Zoho CRM plays a crucial part in Strata's business process. "Our investors choose Strata primarily for three reasons," he says. "The first is that investors trust us because Strata is very diligent when it comes to identifying good commercial properties." The second reason is their technology; investing with Strata is a fully online process that involves a dashboard through which investors can track their investments, and they communicate with investors regularly via email, WhatsApp, SMS, and personal phone calls. The third reason that people choose Strata, Sivakumar believes, is the quality of their assets.

"The reason we opted to use Zoho CRM is because it made our sales process fully digital," Sivakumar says. "It enables our sales team to identify, manage, and communicate with our investors digitally, and of course—since we use Zoho CRM Plus—we were also able to use Zoho Desk for ticket management and Zoho Campaigns for email marketing and communications."

The challenges

The solution

Strata uses Zoho CRM Plus as its primary client management software. Their sales team uses it to manage their client interactions, keep track of their clients, assign staff members to clients, take notes, and keep track of the conversations. In addition to Zoho CRM, they also extensively use Zoho Desk and Zoho Campaigns—both part of the Zoho CRM Plus bundle. They've also used Zoho Survey to an extent.

Strata's internal proprietary dashboard (Strata Dashboard) consists of data sets that are connected with Zoho CRM. Asked about how well the integration works, Sivakumar says, "It solves most of the requirements we have, and we're a business that isn't very straightforward. We appreciate the level of customization and flexibility that the CRM has; we feel that it's extremely capable."

Strata's teams use Zoho CRM daily to acquire and manage customer leads and to track conversations with them via phone and email. These leads are later converted into prospects and different lead categories based on how likely they are to convert.

Apart from sales, Strata's marketing team also uses CRM to send out marketing emails and other business communications.

As the super admin, the first thing Sivakumar does when he first logs into Zoho CRM is look over the reports, from which he derives daily insights from. He then moves on to any pending questions and issues that need attention.

Next, he opens one of the filter functions to look at specific leads. Sivakumar says he makes minor changes to layouts at least once a month, which may involve adding or removing a field or changing permissions. "Zoho's no-code DIY functionality is extremely good," he says. "It helps administrators make changes very quickly, and helps new staff members make small changes to better suit their daily requirements without having to reach out to a senior member or the technology team." 

At Strata, they've set up Zoho CRM in a way that enables salespeople to perform all of their critical duties, like taking notes during or after phone calls, logging their calls, sending WhatsApp messages, and sending quick post-call follow-ups. Strata's sales team uses the CRM app itself to call customers. "All our sales members use the Zoho CRM app. They can make calls to their customers in the app, which the app automatically logs," Sivakumar says. "It's a great way for us to track their performance." He finds it very useful to be able to send an email, look up information on an individual lead or salesperson, update records, and make notes—directly in the CRM.

"The fact that we're able to do all of this from one console—right from Zoho CRM—is a huge performance multiplier," Sivakumar says. "Instead of opening five different tools and keeping the information separate, we can put everything in one place."

Keeping track of customer data with leads and modules

Strata uses Zoho CRM as their primary lead management tool. Here, they keep track of customers from different channels like direct and channel partners.

They use various fields to keep track of their extensive lead data, including lead creation time, investor age, KYC (Know Your Customer), lead owner, and the presales manager and ad campaign that produced the lead. They've also added other important parameters, like the client's type, current status, and sub-status. Once leads enter the system, assignment rules allocate them to salespeople on a round-robin basis. 

Speaking more about their exhaustive data collection process, Sivakumar explains that their need for specific customer information is due to the nature of their business. Customer data also includes date of birth, as well as business or profession-related information. They use notes to keep track of key details, like whether the main investor is investing on behalf of someone else, like a family member. In the Leads module, they also keep track of the property the lead has expressed interest in, as well as all conversations held over email and phone. Explaining their unique business model, Sivakumar says, "We're not a regular SaaS company, nor are we a regular sales company. Our use case is very different, but we're still able to use Zoho CRM and customize it to match our requirements—and that's something that we appreciate quite a bit."

Another module they use regularly at Strata is Channel Partners, which are their distributors. "We keep a track of our distributors, their names, the salesperson assigned to each of them, their company name, and 'empanelment number,'" Sivakumar says. They also store in their internal database and track in their modules additional partner-related data, like their areas of operation, properties they're selling, and their customer volume.

Since most of Strata's business is conducted over calls and meetings, they use the Tasks module quite extensively to keep a track of everything. They also use tasks to keep track of ownership change requests.

Customers' KYC data is automatically pushed from the internal server to Zoho CRM's Leads module, where they track business- and customer-related data. Customers are asked a series of risk-related questions before investing, and their answers are also tracked in the CRM to help the sales team build clear customer profiles.

Extensive report usage

The strategy and operations teams at Strata extensively use Zoho CRM's reporting feature to identify and track individual- and business-level performance. The marketing team uses the reporting functionality to keep a track of the number of leads they generate on a daily basis. It also helps the company gauge its lead quality ratio every week once leads are sorted based on different variables like qualified, unqualified, pre-qualified, contacted, attempted contact, and any other category Strata creates.

Based on the lead quality ratio reports, the marketing team can track the performance of different marketing campaigns and identify their most successful ones.

They also use reports to track individual performance in the sales department, including metrics such as the number of calls made, messages sent, number of clients managed by a salesperson, and number of lead conversions—both at the individual level and company wide. This helps them keep track of bottlenecks in the sales pipeline and individual workloads. The operations and strategic teams use reports to identify long-term trends, such as identifying long-term growth in the number of leads, in numbers of clients, and other demographic information. These in-depth reports provide visibility into growth along certain demographics like age, location, gender, and other variables.

Keeping data clean with approval rules and data restrictions

Zoho CRM administrators at Strata use the approval process for leads that need to be transferred from one designated person to another. This is handy when an individual is unable to work on a lead for some reason. Such leads are sent to the approving authority or manager and are assigned to another person. Roles and permissions are used to restrict or allow data visibility for different profiles. This means that individual salespeople can see only the information related to their clients, whereas the head of the sales team can view information related to all customers, and the super admin can see all the data in the system. 

Using data restrictions, Strata ensures that individual salespeople have editing access only to their records, and that the super admin is the only one with editing permissions for all records. This keeps the data clean and ensures there's no overlap of information between records.

Tracking lead quality using validation rules

There are various ways that Strata tracks lead quality using validation rules. Apart from lead status, they also use a stage called "sub-status." For unqualified leads, salespeople are required to state in the sub-status stage the reason the lead doesn't qualify, which can vary from affordability to simply being a "junk lead." If the reason doesn't fit any of their preset reasons, then the reason entered needs approval to be added to the sub-status. The company applies validation rules to keep these sub-statuses in check. No one can add random reasons or leave the field empty, which means the team can track the reasons leads aren't qualifying and take appropriate actions more effectively.

Tracking survey data using Zoho CRM

Strata uses Zoho Survey to conduct customer surveys before and after purchases. Surveys are connected to Zoho CRM, which makes it easier to collect and update data automatically. "We use surveys extensively. It has been extremely helpful for us, as Zoho Survey is connected directly with the CRM. So I know which customer or what kind of customer has what reference with us," Sivakumar explains.

Surveys are often sent after sales to gauge customers' levels of satisfaction with the business, as well as to understand the kind of reward the clients prefer. "We've used surveys for a wide range of use cases," Sivakumar says. "All our customers are mapped in the CRM based on different parameters like stage, location, and demographics. That data is connected to Zoho Campaigns as well."

After building a survey, they use Zoho Campaigns to send it to a targeted list of customers generated from Zoho CRM. Key integrations enable them to use it for customer data updates, as well. For example, Zoho Survey's integration with Zoho CRM helps them update location data for customers; customers receive surveys wherein they're asked to update their location data, and their responses are automatically updated in relation to their email addresses in Zoho CRM.

Curating effective outbound communications with Zoho Campaigns

"We use Campaigns as a primary outbound communication tool," Sivakumar says. "We appreciate the ability to create a wide range of lists and segments that are designed based on individual sales members." Using the information from Zoho CRM, they've created lists based on specific criteria, like customers who are interested in a specific location or a list of main account holders. This helps them create targeted campaigns. "This kind of segmentation has been very useful for us," Sivakumar says.

Integrated products

Apart from their proprietary in-house dashboard, Strata uses the G-Suite for their business. Their email functionality is seamlessly connected to CRM Plus inbox, and some of the data is linked to Zoho CRM through an API.

When people sign up on Strata's website as customers or distributors, this information is fed into Zoho CRM. When new accounts are created, that account information is both kept internally in their internal dashboard and synced with Zoho CRM to maintain data accuracy.

Benefits and ROI

"CRM Plus has been a pleasant experience. We are very, very satisfied with what this CRM has done for us. we sometimes feel that there is so much more that we can do, and we are constantly working towards improving it."

- Narendran Sivakumar, Senior Manager Strategy, Strata

Talking about the time saved with Zoho CRM's lead management system, Sivakumar says "Let's say we save roughly 15 minutes per salesperson per interaction. I have 15 sales members; let's multiply that by the ten people that they will talk to daily. So that's 2,250 hours everyday. Multiply that by 20 working days, and we're saving around 45,000 man-hours a month."

Regarding how Zoho CRM has made their work easier, Sivakumar says, "The drag and drop is an extremely good CRM functionality that helps us make quick modifications to improve our business processes quickly and easily."

As for other features, he mentions that Zoho's data transfer options make it easy to transfer data from one account to another when an employee leaves. "The CRM data is transferred over to the super admin or another other profile that we specify, and it's relatively easy to keep track of that information." He also adds that they've found it "extremely easy" to bulk-import data into the CRM from other platforms or from other data sources. "It has also been very easy to extract data from the CRM as and when we needed."

Sivakumar says that he finds the UX easy to understand, and that it's easy to create reports and to identify and gather information in the CRM.

"It's also easy to manage staff members and to make changes to our layouts, customizations, and modifications when needed," he says. "The platform is so good that the small amount of time that I give Zoho CRM as a super admin is enough. I'm able to continue being the super admin even though that's not my full-time responsibility."

Sivakumar has been the super admin for Zoho CRM for more than three years now and says he's extremely satisfied with his overall experience.

Recommendation for Zoho CRM Plus

When asked about recommending Zoho CRM Plus to peers in similar industries, Sivakumar has this to say: "To anyone in the financial services space or the real estate space, while there are very specific, customized CRMs built for these industries, they're either very expensive or don't cater to the use cases of an Indian business or key businesses in general. Zoho CRM is a platform that is extremely affordable and flexible, and it enables you to build and modify a customized CRM that will suit your business requirements."