Why Zoho One is the ideal CRM solution for New Zealand Soloprenuers, Who Want to Scale and Grow Their Business.

If you’re a solopreneur growing a business in New Zealand you want to be able to do as much as you can yourself, without having to get new employees or team members to keep your costs low. The idea that you can build a brand and awareness of your business without a team can feel like an impossible mission — but it IS possible.

You just need to use marketing automation and clever apps to keep everything connected. There is so much to choose out there and it is really hard to work out what you need. A lot of businesses and particularly smaller ones especially solopreneur will often go and collect a bunch of different solutions as they grow, and realize that they’re actually paying quite a lot of money overall for a whole bunch of cheap apps, or using free solutions, but nothing talks to each other.

We recommend Zoho One as an ideal option for those people who want to have a business where they’re running it themselves as a solo employee. The way they’ve set it up at only cost you $45 AUD a month per employee (which is you!) to get a bunch of features that really help your business.

In this blog, we’re going to go over some of the basic ones to help you work out whether this is a good fit for you.

The CRM is incredible

Zoho have an excellent CRM to help you with the sales process and look after your customers. Keeping track of leads, prospects and conversion to deals, the sales process, working out cash flow management, pipelines and all those different things that are really tricky when you’re the only one doing it. But with Zoho One, it comes with the full CRM that you can use to do that.

We love using the CRM ourselves in terms of working out where our leads come from. It’s helped us determine what marketing we do in the future and where we put our time and energy in terms of our events, advertising, and marketing.

It also shows us our lead times from original contact to sale to help us work out how many customers we actually need to be getting in the door and how many leads we need to be getting to achieve those customer numbers.

Small businesses in New Zealand often know they need a CRM but don’t set on up — if that’s you, I encourage you to think again and make it a priority

Zoho Analytics

The analytics on Zoho are excellent. You really get to have great insight as your business grows. You can take those along to your accountant to have a look and advise, plus any business coaches or anyone else you’ve got. Learning to understand your numbers is an important part of growing a business and the analytics options on Zoho provide you with great intel with what’s going on in your business and how people are working with you.

Zoho’s Sales in a Box

Sales in a Box is one of the things that I really most enjoy using with Zoho One. What it does is that it orders my emails and so the top priority is given to people that have got deals on the table or clients, then people who are leads and then after that it’s all the other stuff I don’t need to focus on. It really helps me focus my day and helps me convert people quickly to add them to my CRM. It’s just a very easy tool that you can use with your email to cut down the noise that happens.

ZOHO Sites

Zoho Sites is one of the hidden gems of Zoho One. I’m currently building my own website on it –rachelklaver.com– and it’s very easy to use and integrate with the rest of Zoho One. Building your website on Zoho Sites means for $45 a month your website is hosted as WELL as everything else.

Plus, it has great page builder, similar to WordPress so that you’ve got a website that you can build yourself or you can get someone to build for you. At the moment, it’s better for services than for people doing sales although you can still put payments through it. It’s not really built for e-commerce.(though this will change)

Sales IQ

Sales IQ is the chat and the visitor tracking on your website. You can have this as a separate feature but with the Zoho Sites it will automatically integrate with that which is really great. It also has Zoho Campaigns which are for your normal email campaigns and then there’s Zoho Social as well.

Zoho Social

We recommend Zoho Social to all our clients, even though who are not using the rest of the Zoho Suite.

Zoho Social helps you really put yourself everywhere with a fraction of the time by being able to automate and post your content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and your Google My Business page. (as well as Twitter which I don’t use but other people might.)

Page Sense

It has Page Sense which is similar to HotJar. We recommend this, as it helps you work out how to better optimize your web page. Page Sense comes as part of your Zoho One.

Zoho Forms and Zoho Survey

You can build forms on it for your lead generation and use Zoho Survey to use it to client surveys and gathering information.

The Marketing Hub

One of the new things in Zoho One is the marketing hub which I think is fantastic. It helps you build out customer journeys and run effective marketing automation. It’s a lot better and less clunky than previous Zoho options and we’re really happy with the way that it can cleverly integrate with your website and create some lovely nurture sequences from lead generation to help convert leads into customers.

ZOHO Backstage

Backstage is their events platform. It’s for people running large scale events and conferences as opposed to sort of a half-day training. If you’re running a conference or something like that you can use Backstage — it makes your event page look beautiful. It syncs with Eventbrite so it’s really effective in terms of ticketing and processes. I’ve used it to run events for small business owners here in New Zealand and loved working with it. (I now use Eventbrite and embed code onto my Zoho site website as an alternative)

And so much more

There are also other options here that wouldn’t really normally be appropriate for a solopreneur but there are a help desk and an assist which both help you be able to support your clients which is great. Another app that we think is great is showtime for webinars, while Zoho meeting can be used for web conferencing, a little bit like you would use Zoom. All in all, there are 40+ apps to help your business — and these can integrate together to work as one.

We see Zoho One as being really beneficial to someone who’s wanting to grow their business and get a great marketing/business suite for a very low cost. At $45 AUD a month per employee, you get all that functionality and solutions. It’s well worth it for a smaller business running with one to two people, wanting to grow and use their all-important cash in the best way.

Rachel Klaver is the marketing strategist for Identify Marketing, based in New Zealand. We’re ZOHO partners, and help small businesses implement ZOHO into their business (be it a team of one, or a team of 50+) You can make a time to talk ZOHO , marketing automation or marketing strategy HERE