Zoho CRM

As a Digital Marketing Manager of Northstar Commercial Partners, we implemented Zoho CRM and Campaigns about two years ago. It’s been fine. If you’re simply looking for a place to store your contacts and have a decent way to find them, along with mediocre analytics, then Zoho CRM is acceptable. There are a number of shortcomings that we’ve found since adopting the product. Firstly, integration between CRM and their email management product Zoho Campaigns is frustrating. Navigating between the two as opposed to having them in one product suite is one annoying side. The search function on CRM frankly, well but bad. For instance, if I want to quickly find “John Smith” and I type his name into the search – you would think all first results would be “John Smith”. However most of the time, I need to go to pages 3, 4, or 5 to find this person. The reason being, if “John Smith” is listed as a referral under “Jane Smith” – then many times, Jane Smith populates first. It honestly makes very little sense. Finally, the email side of Zoho CRM makes no sense. Let’s say you’d like to email a number of people – they could be Contacts, Leads, or Associated with Deals. One would think you could write up an email, and send it out to all 3 – right? No. You need to create a unique email for whatever segment you’re emailing. So only Contacts can receive emails created in the “Contact Email” portion, Leads in the “Lead Email” portion, etc. etc. Why not have a simple way to email both leads and contacts?

Our company was using Act! before which was much, much worse. Zoho CRM’s mobile platform is surprisingly good, and I know our CEO really appreciates it. One of the issues when signing up for a CRM service is the fact you’re pretty much committed for a couple of years (the stress of a complete migration is too much). While we’re staying with Zoho CRM for now, I’m always looking for new options.

Zoho offers a wide variety of email marketing tools, easy-to-use gamification features, and can be applied in plenty of interesting ways. With the help of Zoho, my company Maple Holistics can integrate with G-Suite, Slack, Office, MailChimp, Zendesk, and many other platforms. It has a number of project management features such as workflow automation, email marketing tools, financial tools, and AI-powered analytics. Overall, it's not your run-of-the-mill marketing tool and should certainly not be underestimated.

Myself being marketing manager of Print4Hospitality, used Zoho CRM for a time. They do updates regularly; it still seems to be out of date compared to the other providers in terms of functionality.  It is relatively cheap but not particularly easy to use, which is a must for any sales or marketing team.

Pros:-Cheap and Easy to set up.

Cons:- Lacks functionality and Not very easy to use.

I am Goro Gupta, Branch Principal of Momentum Education Finance and  Director and Property Strategist of 10 Properties in 10 years. We started using Zoho as it had a great workflow setup (at the time) coupled with a Kanban view for our finance business. About 6 months ago, we almost switched to Salesforce, but one of my friends (who is a Zoho systems integrator) introduced us to Zoho one. While the transition was anything but smooth (accounts wise), it fulfills almost all of our requirements, including project management and deals etc. Our main feedback is to make it look 'sexier' as it looks like engineers have created it (as opposed to salesforce)

Pros: Zoho is very flexible and allows us to build it to suit our needs. A couple of custom modules make our CRM work exactly as we work. It saves us time and along with the other Zoho One apps such as Projects, People, Campaigns, Reports & SalesIQ. Digital Eagles use Zoho for the majority of business function. Seamless integration between Campaigns and CRM, CRM and Projects, etc. make our work easier to manage. We love that Zoho can also be updated from our end. If we realize we need another field we aren't waiting 2 days for a vendor to take care of it. We do it ourselves quite easily. 



Cons: Zoho is a very vast, complicated product. Sometimes the way it has been designed is limiting overall. Zoho is meant to manage "most" businesses and "most" functions but that doesn't always mean our edge-case is covered. Support is usually very good but there are times when communication and times can be a barrier. Zoho is such an important part of our business that it MUST run 



Overall Experience: We are Zoho enthusiasts. After coming from more complicated and less user-friendly systems, Zoho is a straightforward, business-friendly way to handle our CRM requirements.

The team at Hook Agency had an interesting experience with Zoho, as we have tried integrating it for a company, and found it difficult to onboard, thus abandoning it.

A non-profit I'm on the board of also has been using it – forcing me to get back in there, and the backend to me just feels archaic in comparison to newer tools available in the industry. The overall idea is there, but I believe this platform survives more on legacy users, than on generating any large meaningful new userbase, just because the look, feel and usability of the tool is poor. 



The pro's are that it does have a history, so there are tons of integrations – and it handles a ton of different activities, so rather than using 5 different platforms, you can use this all-in-one.

Pros: All office needs are handled by this software.

Cons: Delay in support.

Pros: Reporting. Dashboards, Association factor of leads and contacts.

Cons: Customer Support, Lack of Customizations.

Pros: Decent CRM

Cons: Lacks a lot of features compared to sugar orSalesforce.