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ZOHO CRM Partners Implementing Zoho Into NZ Businesses

What I’ve Learned From Using ZOHO CRM in Our Own Small Business

Using ZOHO CRM in our own marketing company positively impacted how we understand our marketing, look after our sales leads, convert sales and forecast our company’s growth. It’s grown my confidence in understanding how to best demonstrate to businesses where ZOHO CRM is a fit, how it can impact their business and improve both their sales and marketing.

One of the most common things I find when talking to a business is when I ask ‘how do you know your marketing is working? Or “ Do you know which part of your marketing is the most effective way to market?’, is that most business owners don’t know.

They don’t know how much it cost to get a lead or what’s involved in the sales process moving forward. They know something are working (or not! but not what they are, or why!) They are just busy doing the work they need to do and hoping that the marketing they are throwing out there sticks.

Sometimes they give up on something because they don’t feel it worked, but they don’t know why it didn’t work.

When we applied those same questions to ourselves at Identify, we found we also weren’t sure on the answer. We had already implemented ZOHO CRM + into other businesses,  as a partner, so I knew it was effective for them but it wasn’t until we fully implemented it into our business, that I began to see just how powerful it can be for a business wanting to maximise scaling without building a large team, or wasting time on junk leads.

How it’s helped me as a marketer

I’m an intuitive marketer. That with experience in working with hundreds of businesses gives me confidence in knowing some activity works better than others for particular businesses. But I’ve got blind spots on my own business, like most of us do! I’ve found it easy to follow the buzz or vibe, without knowing if it’s the BEST thing.

What it’s done for me as a strategist, is that it has helped me really understand the power of numbers and how important it is to understand your data and know where it’s going. Feelings can only get you so far.

For example, I can do an event somewhere and everyone in there is engaging and amazing and it feels like  they really want to work with us. But if they are not actually signing up for what we do, was that event a success for anything other than my ego?

What we’ve done with Zoho is we’ve used it to make our business work better and help direct how our marketing works.

I wanted to go through with you some of the things we’ve done to do that.

SITE TRACKING

The first thing is that we have site tracking on our website. The site tracking helps us measure the customer journey and provides us with background data of leads. If a contact, who is close to making a decision,  goes back onto our site, we can be alerted (should we need to)

PAGE SENSE

Page sense shows us how people operate on our website which has allowed us to change the way our website converts people that visit. It shows us where people click on the page and how people interact and it also shows where people are visiting and what pages they’re on and how long for. It means we can optimise the site based on true user experience, and unblock areas where visitors get stuck

SALES IN A BOX

In sales in a box, my emails are synced and then grouped.  it helps us prioritise our actions. It’s synced across my emails, and helps filter out emails that aren’t a part of the deal pipeline. So I look after my deal pipeline and current clients first, and then I talk to everybody else. It helps me prioritise my time and filters out the things that have nothing to do with that.

THE SALES CRM

We also use our CRM very carefully. All of our leads go into our CRM and they are carefully documented as to where they’ve come from. We’re able to get really in-depth and customised reporting including being able to  look at the value of each lead over time and the conversion rates of the different leads.

From doing this we’ve learnt that LinkedIn, for example, which has less leads for us in terms of numbers has the highest conversion rate and the value of those leads are higher. That means more time on LinkedIn.

We get lots of leads from Facebook but the conversion rate of those is quite low and the value is lower so less time on Facebook.

It helps us to really direct where we are putting our money, our time and our effort and helps us grow the business with the right type of clients that suit our business best.

We also use it alot for sales forecasting because we are learning the sales cycle of our clients from prospect to lead to client. We are able to see when money is likely to drop in, when will be our busiest times and prepare for particular projects that we are doing.

CAMPAIGNS

The CRM is connected to our campaigns, and we’re able to nurture leads and clients through nurture sequences built out on Zoho. This has recently been supplemented by a new offering of Zoho’s called Marketing Hub, which is far more flexible – but for basic workflows, this campaign area helps to automate our relationship building.

SOCIAL

The last thing that really helps is zoho social. Social media management , analytics and reporting is a part of the Zoho CRM package. People often say, ‘man, you guys are everywhere’, but in reality, we use a social scheduling tool to help a little team make the most of our time. We use it well in advance to put the information in that we need. By doing all these things together, we’ve been able to create with a very small team, a really strong marketing presence without overloading ourselves.

Zoho CRM helps us get the most of the leads we get, generates activity in the right places and helps our business grow. This is the sort of thing we can do for the business we work with, and we love seeing the impact it can have, not just for us, but for the businesses that have used and implemented it. We love working with Zoho CRM and are thrilled we get to use it on a day to day basis and that it gets used by our clients.

I think it’s worth adding, I used to think it was a terrible platform! I was made to use it with a company about eight years ago, and found it clunky, buggy and horrible to use.

The user experience is so much improved. Thank goodness!

Need a better CRM? Want to see what is possible for you and find the right fit? Make a time and we can help (we NEVER suggest anything unless it’s going to work for you)

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