How to use Zoho CRM for Small Business?

Last Updated: February 2, 2023

One of the most popular CRM systems is Zoho CRM. According to the Info-Tech Research Group’s Emotional Footprint report, Zoho CRM led all other CRM vendors with a 90% emotional footprint on its customers.

Zoho CRM is affordable, easy to use, flexible, and integrates well with numerous third-party applications. Zoho CRM features make selling easier for marketing and sales professionals.

Customers are the priority for any business. Building and managing the strong relationship with your customers is important for loyalty and business sustainability.

CRM software helps understand your customers and build a personalized connection with them. The usage of the CRM system has grown drastically over recent years, even among small and medium businesses.

Who Uses Zoho CRM Software?

CRM software from Zoho is suitable for different industries with its diverse set of functionalities. 

  • Travel Industry: Travel CRM software like Zoho CRM helps manage the pipeline for upcoming bookings and plan and execute different marketing activities.

  • Real Estate: Zoho CRM for real estate helps with property management and sales process automation. Real estate agents and brokerage firms widely use it.

  • Retail Shops: Zoho CRM helps with delivering an outstanding experience to your customers. It assists in executing loyalty programs, customer feedback, etc.

  • Hotels: Hotels and other businesses in the hospitality sector can benefit from Zoho CRM’s guest management functionalities. It helps with service management and analyzing customers’ sentiments.

  • Banking: The banking sector uses CRM from Zoho for client management, contacts management, and tracking the communication history with different customers.

Key Zoho CRM Features for Marketing & Sales Professionals

Zoho CRM helps businesses organize their contacts, manage leads and deals, and stay focused on building customer relationships by automating redundant tasks. It boosts productivity and helps brands grow. Here are the key Zoho CRM features which are useful for marketing and sales professionals:

  • Sales Pipeline Management

    Zoho CRM ensures that leads are distributed evenly among members of the sales team. You can also create follow-up tasks for leads and segregate them based on priorities.

    By getting customer activities, pending deals, associated contacts, and other related information in one place, provides real-time insights into customer data. You can connect with customers based on the availability during previous conversations with them. This way, you can also identify important and loyal customers and offer them additional services.

  • Marketing Automation

    CRM software from Zoho helps users understand their website visitors and analyze their behavior. You can run different types of marketing campaigns is a hassle-free manner. It integrates with Google Ads to keep track of your campaign-wise expenditure.

  • Sales Automation

    Zoho CRM helps with defining the workflow rules and assigning hot leads to the most suitable sales reps. Macros is Zoho CRM customer relationship management software that helps automate repetitive tasks and achieve higher efficiency with sales automation.

  • Data Analytics and Predictions

    Zoho does the task of creating pie charts, bar charts, and other types of graphs for easy data interpretation. It assigns scores to leads in different stages and predicts future sales with accuracy. This can help you to allocate your resources better and assign tasks to improve future sales.

  • Report Generation

    Zoho CRM can generate sales and marketing reports in real-time. It gives a piece of updated information about the performance of other sales and marketing activities. This way you have a good idea of your performance from last time and make better decisions. There is support for several languages to help people from different regions.

  • Workflow Automation

    You can define the rules to automate your daily workflow and streamline your business processes. You can assign different actions for data from different sources. You can also create macros that contain all pre-defined instructions for automation and can be triggered any time with just a simple click.

  • Conversational AI Assistant

    Zoho CRM has an AI assistant Zia whom you can ask anything you want. Besides fetching any data that you need, it can take notes of conversations, predict sales, detect any irregularities in data, automate repetitive tasks, and much more. It is in-built and saves a lot of time for the sales team.

  • Team Collaboration

    You can create groups for different sales teams and keep everyone updated on the platform. You can leave notes on sales records or broadcast announcements. Zoho CRM makes it easy to discuss and share records. There are live chat and tagging options also.

  • Security

    You can assign role-wise permissions and control access to data stored in Zoho CRM. It also ensures that your sales process is compliant with privacy regulations. This helps in maintaining the trust of your customers that their data is not leaked as well.

  • Omni-channel Engagement

    You can connect with your customers over different channels like email, telephone, social media platforms, live chat, etc. Regardless of the email service you use, it can integrate and sync all your data. This helps in strengthening your relationships with customers.

  • Mobile App Functionalities

    Zoho Mobile App is available for both Android and iOS. It lets you access the sales analytics dashboard, manage your schedules and deals, track your business visits, keep the sales team in the loop on every new development, and so on.

    You can take a photo of business cards during events, and the information gets stored in the CRM.

  • Integration with third-party Tools

    Zoho CRM can be integrated with most other commonly used business tools. This includes applications and tools like GSuite, Office 365, and Outlook, Twilio, Slack, and Zapier, and more.

    You can connect to data storage services like Google Drive, sales platforms like MailChimp, and other useful third-party tools. You do not have to shuffle between different applications, and you get all the synced data in Zoho CRM.

    This improves the productivity and performance of sales teams. You can also use features like search filters to search for specific data, customized dashboards, and pre-built report formats for working efficiently.

Give it a try: Travel Agency CRM Software | Sales CRM Software | Mobile CRM Software

How to Use Zoho CRM Effectively?

Zoho CRM can be used by anyone from startups to large organizations for boosting sales and improving customer relationships. It is already used by different industry verticals like real-estate, healthcare, insurance, legal, media, restaurants, travel, banking, tax, freelancers, and non-profits in several countries. 

  • Acquire New Customers

    Increasing sales is the most important reason for implementing Zoho CRM. It helps with identifying, nurturing, and following up on quality leads. This way, you focus on priority leads and achieve higher conversion.

  • Retain Your Existing Customers

    Zoho CRM lets you identify high-value leads based on their interests and preferences. The CRM also takes into consideration their feedback for better services. Hence, you can create personalized services for valuable customers and guarantee more business.

  • Improve Your Brand Visibility

    Zoho CRM lets you create marketing campaigns and follow up on their performance. You can remove the existing ones that are not doing well and focus on those with a better outcome. Zoho CRM also provides analytics about your target audience and their preferences.

How Zoho CRM Help SMBs and SMEs?

Any business that sells something or deals with customers and wants their business to grow will need a CRM. Small businesses are one of the biggest drivers of the economy and provide services to customers regularly. And they largely depend on Zoho CRM to execute their sales and customer service initiatives.

  • Deliver great customer service

    As a small business, you cannot risk losing your customers to your competitors. Zoho CRM system can ensure that customer queries are handled as soon as you receive them. This makes them feel valuable and ensures that their issues are dealt with requisite attention.

    Further, the self-help portal enables customers to find an instant solution to frequent issues. You receive reminders so that you do not miss out on important communication.

  • Make better business decisions for growth

    Using spreadsheets, sticky notes, and other data management methods is okay if you do not have many contacts. But these strategies cannot provide you a clear picture of your business and help you make informed decisions like Zoho CRM.

    Apart from that, manual processes are not scalable when you grow. CRM software like Zoho can provide all the data at a single place from multiple locations and departments.

  • Stay up to date with lead flow

    If you are struggling to prioritize your leads, Zoho CRM can help you. If you cannot handle a sudden rise in demand, you will not generate good revenue. Zoho CRM system has the sorting functionality to respond timely to all the important leads and close deals.

  • Track sales performance

    There is complete transparency in terms of any lead status by using Zoho CRM features. Every member of the sales team can update the system with the latest details. This way, you can see what improvements you can make to help expand your business.

  • Save time on data entry

    Entering data manually and making reports is a tedious task. Zoho CRM system can not only do the task for you but also remove duplicate entries. It can provide analytics and reports in real-time based on the information stored in it.

  • Easy to get started

    Zoho offers flexible pricing plans which are suitable for small businesses. You do not have to pay for those features that you won’t use for your business. When your business grows, you can always change the subscription plan without any hassle.

    Additionally, it requires no hardware infrastructure besides a browser and a working internet connection. If you had been using some other CRM before, migrating to Zoho just requires you to follow a few simple steps for transferring your existing sales data.

  • User-friendly interface

    Your sales team does not require any training to understand the working of Zoho CRM. It has a simple interface that helps in focusing on the main goal, that is, increasing sales.

  • Customization options

    After taking the plan that suits your business the best, you can customize the CRM to align with all your business processes. The process is simple and does not require the need of a technical team to get completed.

  • Secure and reliable

    Zoho CRM ensures that your business’s confidential data stays protected with features like encryption, audit logs, IP restrictions, two-factor authentication, and more. You can assign levels to different users who are authorized to access the data.

  • Zoho CRM with WhatsApp Integration

    WhatsApp and Zoho CRM integration is a great way for businesses, especially SMBs, to connect with customers. You can define message templates for WhatsApp, access all conversations with your contacts on WhatsApp, and more. Along with WhatsApp messages, you can share files, images, videos, etc.

How to Use Zoho CRM for Sales Management?

Zoho CRM is a great tool for salespeople to help them engage with prospects, categorize their leads based on territories, and boost overall performance. Let’s find out more about Zoho CRM software’s role in sales management.

  • Make sales forecast

    Zoho CRM analyses the data stored and forecasts your revenue. If there is a scope for improvement, you can identify it in real-time and work with your team accordingly to boost sales.

  • Categorize tasks

    Identify regions and products that are more profitable with Zoho CRM. Then categorize your priorities based on your current performance. This will give your sales team a better idea of distributing tasks for the upcoming quarter or year.

  • Automate sales processes

    When you automate tasks like data entry that are repetitive using Zoho CRM, you can use your time to work on customer relationships. Connect with potential leads, close deals, and improve your sales. This way, you save time and get a lot more work done.

  • Get insightful sales report

    Zoho CRM can do all the quantitative analysis and report creation. This guarantees accuracy and gives better insights into sales trends, marketing campaigns, team performance, and more. There are standard templates, too in case you want to create a customized report quickly.

  • Gamify the sales process

    We usually like playing games and being competitive. With Gamescope in Zoho CRM, you can change the way you perform sales-related tasks. Mundane tasks can be turned into contests, and your team members can compete and perform up to their potential.

Wrapping Up

Zoho CRM software is for different industries and business functions. With the exhaustive list of Zoho CRM features, you can all processes that can help in delivering outstanding customer service.

Published On: April 26, 2021
Ayushee Sharma

Ayushee is currently pursuing MBA Business Analytics from SCMHRD, Pune with a strong background in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IGDTUW. She has 2 plus years of full-time work experience as an SEO content writer and a Technology Journalist with a keen interest the amalgamation of business and technology.

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Ayushee Sharma

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