Introducing Zoho 'Affordable' CRM - Enterprise Edition

Zoho CRM which is part of our Business Applications set (Zoho Invoice, Zoho Projects, Zoho Meeting, Zoho People, Zoho DB, Zoho Creator etc) is now going one step further with the launch of Zoho CRM – Enterprise Edition.

This new release comes with a broad set of new capabilities making it easier for medium to large organizations to implement Zoho CRM. Some of the enhancements to the update include…

• Introduction of Role-based Security Administration
• Enhancements in product Customiation & Data Administration
• Multi-language Support (11 Languages)
  
• SSL Support for Professional & Enterprise Versions
• Integration with Zoho Sheet
  
• and lot more as mentioned here.
  

The key enhancement is the introduction of the Role-based Security Administration which makes it easier for managing the access permissions of users in an organization with multiple levels of hierarchy. In this Role-based Security module we introduced Roles, Profiles and Groups concept providing greater flexibility in access-control and customization.

The image below summarizes the new Role-based Security Administration section. Existing users: Please look at this document to understand how these changes compare to our previous version.

This video gives a quick introduction to this functionality. An online demo of the application is availble here.

Pricing:

As with other Zoho applications, Zoho CRM is very affordable. Here is the pricing information.

1. Personal Edition – Free for 3 Users
2. Professional Edition – $12/User/Month
3. Enterprise Edition – $25/User/Month

Professional and Enterprise Editions are also free for the first 3 users. Detailed information on Pricing (along with feature separation between these three editions) is available here.

Zoho CRM Integration with Zoho Productivity Suite:

Zoho Sheet is now integrated into Zoho CRM which lets users edit Zoho CRM data on a spreadsheet using the ‘Zoho Sheet View’ option available in most of the modules. This provides an easy way of editing your form-based relational content in a spreadsheet view and saving the changes back to the CRM Database.

This is just a starting point and we plan to do an extended integration with our productivity suite once Zoho CRM is part of our Single Sign-on System (currently in the works).

Competition:

It is a well known fact that Zoho CRM competes with Salesforce. But the unknown fact is that the functionality of Zoho CRM is more broader for Personal and Professional Editions. Here is a quick comparison between these two applications. You’ll notice that ‘Affordable Apps’ doesn’t necessarily mean less-featured apps. All this functionality is available at fraction of the cost. To give you a quick example, for a 5 person organization, the savings with Zoho CRM are 3x and 8x (per year) with our Personal and Professional Editions respectively against the competition.

More information on this update and the application is available on our new Zoho Wiki-based help. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this release.