Startup to scale-up: Chef Bharath's journey with Zoho SalesIQ

Had we not installed Zoho SalesIQ, we wouldn't have made the next step to scale Chef Bharath. SalesIQ has transformed our organization as a whole.

- Swaminathan Balasubramanian, Founder & Publisher, Chef Bharath

About Chef Bharath

A one-stop B2B portal for everything related to the Indian Culinary Industry, Chef Bharath is part of a media startup run by Swaminathan Balasubramanian. It provides news and editorial services for various trade publications in India and Singapore.

How Chef Bharath found Zoho

Communicating with editorial consultants and journalists from all over the world encouraged Mr. Swaminathan to look for a strong communication solution for his startup media business. Ever since, his organization has been using Zoho Cliq and Zoho Mail, and this gave Swaminathan an opportunity to take a closer look at Zoho's suite of offerings.

His team wanted to have a 'Contact Us' button on their website for easy communication with visitors. Because of his satisfying experience with Zoho, Swaminathan decided to go with Zoho SalesIQ, the engagement intelligence platform.

How SalesIQ helped

Even though he only expected the chat feature, SalesIQ also came with tracking and automation features. It astonished Swaminathan and his team that they were able to get insights into their visitors, their location, and where they were spending time on their website. It enabled them to provide what their visitors wanted with regard to their content.

When visitors started consuming Chef Bharath's content, eager to learn more, they reached out to live agents via SalesIQ's live chat widget. SalesIQ would automatically transcribe the entire chat conversation into an email for easy delivery. Swaminathan could share it with his advertisers to optimize their activities further.

"The daily email from SalesIQ helped us improve our story performance. With SalesIQ, we are able to analyze the kind of stories that are performing well and those which did not perform well."

- Swaminathan Balasubramanian, Founder & Publisher, Chef Bharath

Startup to scale-up: Launching Kitchen Herald

With the increased response that Chef Bharath is getting, Swaminathan and his team decided to launch Kitchen Herald, an international portal that takes Chef Bharath's media coverage to readers around the world. They are electrified about this new venture and the opportunity to explore the potential of SalesIQ on a global scale.

"Before SalesIQ, we never knew where our readers were coming from. When we had installed it, we started realizing that we are getting a good number of page views across the globe."

- Swaminathan Balasubramanian, Founder & Publisher, Chef Bharath

There has been a misunderstanding that engagement intelligence platforms like Zoho SalesIQ are only for large firms. Swaminathan learned through his own experience that this is simply untrue, and he was able to find untapped market potential for his business with SalesIQ.

If you are interested in doing the same for your organization, startup or not, check out what Zoho SalesIQ can do to meet your requirements by booking a demo.

Check out our solution article on restaurants if you'd like to learn what else SalesIQ can do for the food industry.