Zoho has all the required applications to run an entire business, from sales & marketing, to customer service, accounting, HR and so on! With some 50+ business applications and various functional product suites, identifying which Zoho product is a good fit for your business is easily intimidating.
Before identifying the right Zoho application or suite of products for your organization start by asking questions internally about your firm’s needs. Then it is a process of matching those to the Zoho family of solutions. Here are a few of the questions to begin with:
- Which business processes and tactics are key to achieving your firm’s goals and objectives?
- What are the tasks that your staff performs and which might benefit from better use of technology?
- How must your staff and departments work together to achieve these objectives and how can technology aid with this inter-dependence?
- What are your priorities – what things are the most urgent to fix or improve?
- How much budget can you allocate to software, implementation and training?
Now let’s take a closer look at how you can find answers to these questions and then identify the right Zoho solution that fits your business.
1. Which business processes and tactics are key to achieving your firm’s goals and objectives?
You’ve likely heard the phrase “form follows function.” In the context of choosing the right software solution, “form follows function” seems to make a lot of sense. The phrase is often taken to mean that you and your team should first understand what are the goals that they want to achieve, what are the objectives that can help them achieve those goals, and what’s the strategy to accomplish those objectives and goals. When you have answers to these questions, you can find the right Zoho solution that will fit your needs.
Before purchasing a Zoho solution, identify:
- What’s in the day of the life of your Marketing Director? Or Sales Manager? Customer Support Executives? Accountants? Or Marketing Coordinators?
- What are the tactics that your Marketing Director, Sales Manager, Accountant, or Customer Support Executives follow to achieve their individual goals and objectives? These tactics involve tasks. And, tasks are better performed with technology.
Zoho provides easy-to-use 50+ products that help you perform every kind of task. Zoho has diverse solutions that can meet every unique business need. Zoho’s applications can help you capitalize on the top business and technology trends and achieve your goals in 2022 and beyond. You can even customize Zoho products to match your exact individual, departmental, or business goals. Zoho’s product portfolio ranges from:
Zoho CRM – A customer relationship management software that makes selling better, smarter, and faster. If you want to go one step further with your CRM tool, Zoho has CRM Plus.
Zoho CRM Plus – CRM Plus includes Zoho CRM and other excellent tools that bring sales, marketing, and customer support together in one platform. With CRM Plus, you get Analytics, SalesIQ, Social, Campaigns, Desk, Projects, SalesInbox, and Survey.
Zoho Bigin – You need a small business CRM solution, Zoho offers Bigin that is designed to manage your customer pipelines.
Zoho Finance Plus – If your business need is to manage orders, taxes, accounting, and fulfilment processes, Finance Plus is the right choice for you.
Zoho Marketing Plus – If you need a solution to unify all of your marketing efforts on one platform, Marketing Plus does exactly that.
Zoho One – With Zoho One’s operating system for business, you get all the applications that you need to run your business, from any browser, from anywhere.
Zoho created an entire portfolio of software solutions with patience and anticipation. Now they are available under one single integrated suite, Zoho One, that provides a total operating system to your business and puts it completely on the cloud. So whatever your business needs are, Zoho has a solution to solve your problems.
2. What are the tasks that your staff performs and which might benefit from better use of technology?
Your staff performs various tasks on a day-to-day basis. Your Sales Managers need to assign sales territories, set quotas, mentor the members, build a sales plan and so on. Similarly, your accounting team needs to pay bills, bill clients and customers, track assets and expenditures, manage payroll, and do so much more.
When you know your tasks clearly, you can easily select the right Zoho solution and help your employees accomplish their tasks faster.
Once you’ve made a list of your daily activities, follow these steps to find the right Zoho solution:
- Are there any bottlenecks in your daily work? Complement the activities list with your current bottlenecks to see what solutions you need from your new Zoho software.
- See which aspects of your team’s work or business need to be managed with the new software and make a list of problems that the solution will need to solve.
- When looking for the right Zoho software, search for a product that addresses your business and/or departments’ problems.
Whether you need a solution to automate sales & customer support, manage finances, help you manage marketing campaigns, or do you need an operating system to manage your entire business operations, Zoho has an entire portfolio of software solutions for your team, department, and business.
Want a complete list of Zoho solutions and learn how they can help you? See All Zoho Applications here.
Zoho’s applications can help you capitalize on strategic technology trends, achieve your goals, and enhance digital capabilities in 2022 and beyond. You can even customize Zoho products to match your exact goals.
“The most important thing the Zoho product suite does is to liberate the managers from the chokehold of mundane processes that keep them busy but unproductive, efficient but not effective.”
– Rajendran Dandapani, Business Solutions Evangelist at Zoho
3. How must your staff and departments work together to achieve these objectives and how can technology aid with this inter-dependence?
The organization is a complex system, and its functions cannot be performed without each other. In every business, there is a functional interdependence. Each functional area must work together for the organization to achieve its objectives and goals. Sales functions and Marketing functions are interdependent on each other as to increase sales they need to market the product. Finance and Administration functions – they both depend on each other for records, they share ideas and work together.
Using technology to keep your teams and departments connected just makes sense. Technology not only makes it easy to work together and collaborate, but is also an effective way to operate today.
So if you want your sales and marketing teams to work together, use Zoho CRM. If you want to unify all your customer-facing teams, use Zoho CRM Plus. If you want a unified platform for your back-office operations, from invoicing to order management to accounting, Zoho Finance Plus is the right solution for your inter-dependent finance and back-office teams. And even better one, if you want one single integrated suite that provides a total operating system to your business and puts it completely on the cloud, go with Zoho One. In short, Zoho has a solution that allows your staff and departments to work together and help them achieve their objectives.
4. How much budget can you allocate to software, implementation and training?
By now, you should have a clear shortlist of Zoho products that you need to meet your goals and accomplish tasks. This means you’re ready to review Zoho pricing and make sure you’re aware of all the various costs involved. Having a clear, defined budget means the process will be a smooth one.
Apart from the actual software subscription cost, a key part of investing in new software is the implementation process. This includes any customization that is needed, process changes, prototyping functional areas of the business as well as system configuration. You need to invest in software training as well to increase the software adoption rate among your employees.
With Zoho, you don’t have to worry about budgetary constraints as Zoho is the most affordable software product in the market.
Zoho products provide customers with incredible value and unquestionable return on investment.
For more than 25 years, Zoho is bootstrapped and profitable. Zoho puts 60% of its revenue back into research and development (R&D), unlike its competitors who routinely spend close to that on sales and marketing. As Zoho invests more in product development and customer support than in sales and marketing, it passes all savings onto customers by keeping Zoho pricing affordable.
Zoho never upsells you or binds you with costly multi-year subscriptions. It keeps the prices of all products affordable with flexible month-to-month contracts. So with any Zoho product, you get real value and the subscription perfectly fits your budget.
Know more about Zoho products and pricing.
5. What are your priorities? What things are the most urgent to fix or improve?
You can’t do everything at once. Choose your priorities. What is the biggest problem a team is facing or maybe a department? What problems would you solve first?
Priorities are most important because they direct the organization’s focus. Priorities need to be translated into activities. To complete these activities, you need a certain tool.
For instance, if automating your sales and marketing process is your priority right now, you need Zoho CRM. If you want to set-up coordinated marketing efforts across multiple channels, you need Zoho Marketing Plus. If you need to track your key business metrics and identify outliers and predict the future, you need Zoho Analytics.
Identifying your top priorities right now would help you choose the right Zoho solution for your needs.
6. What software and tools do you currently use?
You might have already invested in some software tools and don’t want to migrate all data or switch to a new solution. With the options available on Zoho Integrations Marketplace, you can pick and choose from 1000+ best-of-breed, ready-to-use, third-party extensions to add to your Zoho solution based on the business needs or intended functions.
Most of the Zoho extensions are available at no cost with zero coding requirements during the integration process. Zoho can seamlessly integrate with your existing applications and improve flexibility.
Zoho also offers you the option to build your own custom solution for your specific needs. Zoho Creator is a low-code application development platform that allows users to create custom applications to solve their unique business needs.
Check out Zoho Integration Marketplace Favorites.
Start using Zoho Products!
Identifying which Zoho product is a good fit for your business is easily intimidating. There are a lot of factors that go into technology selection, especially with Zoho, given its breadth and depth of products. This is where a Zoho solution partner can help you. As a Zoho Authorized Partner, First Direct Corporation is here to help you answer all your questions and find the best Zoho products based on your goals, objectives, tasks, tactics, budget, and priorities. Please contact us at (845) 221-3800 or fill out our online contact form to send your queries to us.
