Zoho CRM in the Enterprise: Driving Value and Growth in a Diversified, Global Company

Joshua Greenbaum, Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC)

“I was at a workshop recently and people were asking: ‘Can Zoho do this and this and this?’ Nine out of ten times the answer was yes.” — Graham Dallas, Group Business Development Director, ABL Group

Introduction: Bridging the Standardization/ Competitive Advantage Gap

In an ideal world, technology exists to enable business success, and the more closely technology can be tuned to customers’ specific business requirements the better. The advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) has complicated that imperative, however. SaaS works best for vendor and customer when it serves two important goals: the first is to provide well-established standard processes that customers use to set up best-in-class business functionality; and the second is to support process standardization while still allowing customers to develop innovative business processes and user experiences that meet their specific goals and drive competitive advantage. Doing both well, however, while still supporting innovation and competitive advantage, hasn’t always worked as well as vendors and their customers would like.

 

Successfully balancing these two sometimes opposing needs has been an important component in the success of Zoho Corporation and its flagship Zoho CRM products across a wide range of industries and geographical markets. Zoho CRM’s combination of comprehensive, built-in functionality, and the flexibility of Zoho's integrated suite of applications and tools, has allowed customers to use Zoho CRM as a platform that can optimize their use of technology in the service of business success. This optimization, in turn, allows them to bridge the gap between the often-competing need for standardization and competitive advantage. This flexibility extends to the contractual and deployment side of the equation as well. Zoho’s unique licensing terms and conditions allow customers to mix and match the components of CRM and the rest of the extensive Zoho suite in ways that support customers’ requirements, not the vendor’s business goals.

 

This combination of standard best practices and flexible competitive customization, when done well, allows a company to continuously deploy core CRM capabilities across two important axes. The first axis is defined by the ability to provide a closer process and functional fit, particularly as a company grows and its business opportunities and challenges evolve. The Zoho CRM platform’s user experience – both within individual apps like CRM or Analytics, as well as within the development tools provided by Zoho – makes it easy for customers to adapt their Zoho environment to their specific needs while maintaining the standard best practices that represent the most effective way to manage everyday CRM processes.

 

The second axis can be seen in the increased number of users whose key business processes – standards-based and customized – are supported by Zoho. This increased user base is part of the inherent virality of Zoho’s applications, and is facilitated by Zoho’s relatively low cost and simple contractual terms and conditions. This advantage is not to be discounted: The low cost of adding new users and new functionality and the ease with which this can be done both technically and operationally make it very easy for Zoho CRM customers to expand their internal user base with a high degree of confidence in the expansion’s return on investment.

 

This report is the second in a series by Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC) on how Zoho customers are able to leverage the company’s applications and platform to meet their specific business opportunities and challenges. The customer experience described in this report will look specifically at Zoho CRM as both a highly functional CRM application in its own right, as well as the keystone application in an integrated platform that can be extended to meet the particular business requirements of its customers.