This post is part five from my company blog detailing my history with CRM. You can start here if you can’t sleep and want to read the first four parts. This post specifically deals with how I found Zoho CRM and how it compared with some of the CRM industry leaders.
I did not want to make the same mistake twice. We looked in depth at all the viable CRM apps currently available. At one point I realized that we should have just bitten the bullet and stayed with NetSuite. The $200K we lost with Oasis CRM would have covered us for five years with NetSuite. I am fond of saying the two biggest mistakes I have made in business were going with NetSuite and leaving NetSuite. Kind of like buying a boat I guess.
The short list was narrowed down to Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, Entellium CRM and ZOHO CRM.
I looked at MS CRM a year ago and I could not get my head around it. It needed a lot of hardware and middleware and it really looked like more of a CRM platform than a CRM solution. Everything had to be customized to get any functionality out of it. We took another look at it this year and pretty much all agreed that it still was not right for our business.
I implemented Salesforce for a non-profit that I volunteer for. In general very good software but in order to get the full solution we were going to have to integrate with three other vendors for campaign integration, accounting integration and proposals. Not only was that getting very expensive it was going to be a very tippy boat trying to get all that implemented. As a straight CRM app it really stands at the top of the heap
Entellium seemed to be a solid middle ground product. The UI looked kind of weird but seemed to be very functional and they had some sort of early beta of a QuickBooks interface. It also seemed to be fairly priced for the functionality.
I first looked at ZOHO CRM to use for the non-profit I work with because of the price. At the time $12 per user/month after the third user. About two weeks into the ZOHO CRM implementation for the non-profit was approved for a free, one year 10 seat Enterprise Salesforce account that we had applied for a month ago. I abandoned ZOHO CRM because we were just handed 11K worth of enterprise class software from the industry’s leading vendor. ZOHO CRM was too cheap to be any good anyway.
As I was implementing Salesforce for the non-profit I realized that it was very similar to ZOHO CRM. At one point I started implementing a feature in Salesforce and then I would try and implement the same feature in ZOHO CRM. ZOHO CRM matched Salesforce feature for feature but for the most part the ZOHO implementation was easier and cleaner.
I will post a more in-depth comparison between all of the platforms but to the end the history lesson we decided to implement ZOHO CRM for D-Tools and I just abandoned the free Salesforce account for the non-profit and re-implimented ZOHO CRM for them.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
microsoft crm...I found your post comments while searching Google. Very relevant especially as this is not an issue which a lot of peaople are conversant with....
microsoft crm...I found your post comments while searching Google. Very relevant especially as this is not an issue which a lot of peaople are conversant with....
Hi,Your should try Maximizer CRM 10. Its works well with accounting software as Quickbook.Regards,FiatluxNY
Hi,Your should try Maximizer CRM 10. Its works well with accounting software as Quickbook.Regards,FiatluxNY
help with accounting...Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links...
help with accounting...Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links...
We have recently abandoned Salesforce.com after discovering that a) the latency with the connection and loading pages has started to worsen and more importantly b) their sales/service and billing teams treat you with disdain unless you have a large volume of seats with them.In 10 simple minutes of rolling out the Zoho CRM app the product has realised everything that we could not achieve with salesforce.com.
We have recently abandoned Salesforce.com after discovering that a) the latency with the connection and loading pages has started to worsen and more importantly b) their sales/service and billing teams treat you with disdain unless you have a large volume of seats with them.In 10 simple minutes of rolling out the Zoho CRM app the product has realised everything that we could not achieve with salesforce.com.
Hi Bogdan,What you really want is a specific marketing automation tool that works with a CRM system. NetSuite had a lot of the functionality you are asking for but in the real world the system was almost impossible to get any valuable reporting metrics out of. Salesforce has almost zero email campaign management built in. You have to go to a third party to get anything useful out of it and then back in to the system.In our case we are thrilled at the ease of how we can get (very) targeted email campaigns quickly out using the built in Zoho tools and the results we get in the form of orders. For us, ease of use and predictable results are more important that granular metrics. However I am sure that the Zoho CRM team has enhanced marketing on their feature list and will implement at some point. Maybe when they they get their Zoho Mail system fully up and running?Just my .02 YMMVAdam
Hi Bogdan,What you really want is a specific marketing automation tool that works with a CRM system. NetSuite had a lot of the functionality you are asking for but in the real world the system was almost impossible to get any valuable reporting metrics out of. Salesforce has almost zero email campaign management built in. You have to go to a third party to get anything useful out of it and then back in to the system.In our case we are thrilled at the ease of how we can get (very) targeted email campaigns quickly out using the built in Zoho tools and the results we get in the form of orders. For us, ease of use and predictable results are more important that granular metrics. However I am sure that the Zoho CRM team has enhanced marketing on their feature list and will implement at some point. Maybe when they they get their Zoho Mail system fully up and running?Just my .02 YMMVAdam
Hi Craig, Sorry for the late reply. For our needs we would have had to integrate salesforce with third party campaign management, proposals and quickbooks for accounting. That is a pretty tippy boat. The built in Zoho functionality eliminated all but the accounting link. Currently we manage the entire sales process from leads to sales orders in Zoho and then manually enter into Quickbooks to produce the invoice. Not ideal but we do not produce that many invoices a month and the savings just in software licenses for SF or NS easily make up for the inconvenience.If you need a totally hosted end to end solution and you can live with the NetSuite business practices, software complexity and pricing model then you should strongly consider them. However keep in mind that by the time you get NetSuite fully implemented I bet Zoho will have an end to end solution of sorts.Just my .02Adam
Hi Craig, Sorry for the late reply. For our needs we would have had to integrate salesforce with third party campaign management, proposals and quickbooks for accounting. That is a pretty tippy boat. The built in Zoho functionality eliminated all but the accounting link. Currently we manage the entire sales process from leads to sales orders in Zoho and then manually enter into Quickbooks to produce the invoice. Not ideal but we do not produce that many invoices a month and the savings just in software licenses for SF or NS easily make up for the inconvenience.If you need a totally hosted end to end solution and you can live with the NetSuite business practices, software complexity and pricing model then you should strongly consider them. However keep in mind that by the time you get NetSuite fully implemented I bet Zoho will have an end to end solution of sorts.Just my .02Adam
Hi Adam,Good posting here, quite informative. You've been actually mentioning integrating 3rd party application into any CRM system. We're currently reviewing some vendors and ZOHO is one of them.But what I need is a marketing / email automation tool. Although most CRM systems have campaign management tools, this meets only some of the needs. In terms of real campaign management (not only stats, but campaign implementation), we need real machines to do that: I'm talking about email management (delivery, stats about how many opened, now many clicked, on what etc) and all data should be fed back into the CRM system at record level (per lead / contact).So I'm really interested to find out how I can integrate such a system with ZOHO so I can automate my marketing activities, but still run most of things out of CRM.thanks a lot
Cheers,
Bogdan
Hi Adam,Good posting here, quite informative. You've been actually mentioning integrating 3rd party application into any CRM system. We're currently reviewing some vendors and ZOHO is one of them.But what I need is a marketing / email automation tool. Although most CRM systems have campaign management tools, this meets only some of the needs. In terms of real campaign management (not only stats, but campaign implementation), we need real machines to do that: I'm talking about email management (delivery, stats about how many opened, now many clicked, on what etc) and all data should be fed back into the CRM system at record level (per lead / contact).So I'm really interested to find out how I can integrate such a system with ZOHO so I can automate my marketing activities, but still run most of things out of CRM.thanks a lot
Cheers,
Bogdan
Adam - You mentioned that salesforce.com required third-party software for accounting, but Zoho CRM also does. We are using Zoho CRM for some things currently such as as quotes and orders for part of our business, but to replace our existing system we would need the accounting functionality for Accts Receivable, Accts Payable, etc. We can't use Zoho CRM to create invoices if there is no way to track customer balances, past due amounts, etc. Zoho said they will eventually have the ability to link with Quickbooks (although that sort of detracts from the benefits of a completely hosted solution). I understand your issues with Netsuite, but they do have all the accounting stuff built-in. Do you have any advice with regard to managing the accounting functionality when using Zoho CRM?
Adam - You mentioned that salesforce.com required third-party software for accounting, but Zoho CRM also does. We are using Zoho CRM for some things currently such as as quotes and orders for part of our business, but to replace our existing system we would need the accounting functionality for Accts Receivable, Accts Payable, etc. We can't use Zoho CRM to create invoices if there is no way to track customer balances, past due amounts, etc. Zoho said they will eventually have the ability to link with Quickbooks (although that sort of detracts from the benefits of a completely hosted solution). I understand your issues with Netsuite, but they do have all the accounting stuff built-in. Do you have any advice with regard to managing the accounting functionality when using Zoho CRM?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Adam.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Adam.