Free Plan
Zoho CRM does a great job of delivering an excellent feature mix at a competitive price as well as integration with a long list of compatible Zoho products; all in all an easy pick for Editors’ Choice.
WHAT WE LIKE
- Free for up to 10 users
- Analyzes social media data for you
- Powerful email marketing tools.
COULD BE BETTER
- Workflow automation limited to Professional Tier
- Needs a lot of customization and initial set up
SCORE
- Ease of Use 9.1/10
- Support 9.2/10
- Pricing 9.8/10
- Features 9.5/10
What is Zoho?
Zoho CRM is an award-winning web-based CRM designed to attract, retain, and satisfy customers to grow your business.
The core of Zoho CRM’s functionality is lead and contact management, but also sales pipeline management and purchase control. You can already assume what these features can do when bundled together, especially when placed on a revamped and easy-to-use interface that is so typical about Zoho. The home screen now includes 10 different components, with the main module navigation panel still placed on top for easier searching. Nevertheless, the user is always welcomed to customize the dashboard and make it look more business-specific.
It works well regardless if you’re a small business, an entrepreneur, or a large enterprise. Zoho CRM can automate daily business activities, track sales, and engage customers in different platforms. Likewise, its mobile platform lets you take CRM on location so can get updates fast and real-time, and close more deals even when on the go.
Another interesting hint is that you can also extend the CRM’s functionality by integrating it with popular applications, including main Zoho productivity products, but also: Microsoft Outlook, MailChimp, QuickBooks, ConstantConnect and Google Apps; as well as with cloud-based connectors like OneSaas and CloudWork.
Is Zoho right for your business?
I’ll be honest — Zoho can look a bit old school. Even after recent refreshes, the look and feel of the software always manages to look a bit dated. In terms of functionality and navigating the major features that you need to run the CRM, it’s fine. The layout is quite straightforward, and all the features work well, though they can be a bit slow at times when importing large datasets.
It just looks a bit … meh. And while that might come across as a bit of a petulant thing to complain about, you have to remember: this is a bit of software that someone could be using every day, often for hours at a time. It has to look a little bit appealing so that people will want to login. Whether Zoho succeeds with that is up for debate, in my view.
Setting up Zoho CRM is pretty straightforward. You can select the version you want, get a confirmation link in your email, then set up your company information to customize your profile. You can then either take a virtual tour of the site or skip that and go right to a tutorial on how to migrate what you want into the suite.
To make sure you get the 15-day free trial, click the profile icon in the top right corner of the setup page, click “try other editions” and in the bottom left of the pop-up, click “switch to free version” to get a free trial. You can then customize your CRM to your liking.
After an investigation of Zoho CRM, I am a fan of the software for most businesses or industries. The differently priced packages, combined with up-to-date features, make Zoho worth checking out. Give them a try in the free version or with a 15-day free trial. There’s not much to lose. You might find it completely changes the way you work, improving efficiency and workflow.
Overview of Zoho Features
Sales Force Automation
- Lead Generation & Qualification
- Pipeline Analysis
- Sales Stage & Probability Analysis
- Competitive Analysis
- Real-Time Forecasting
- Quota Management
Lead Management
- Automate lead management process
- Fast track lead to deal process
- Capture leads from website
- Import leads from trade shows, seminars, direct mail, etc.
- Match sales-ready leads to the right sales people
- Convert prospects into opportunities, accounts, and contacts with a single click
- Sales processes as per own best practices (B2B & B2C)
Account Management
- Single database
- Customer data across products, geographies, account, and status
- Parent-child relationships between customer accounts and their subsidiaries
- Price quotes, sales orders and invoices
- Purchase history to find cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
Effective Follow-up
- Log important customer calls
- Save customer meetings and calls in an intuitive calendar
- Invite employees, leads and contacts to meetings and events
- Manage recurring events by day, week, month and/or year
Website Integration with Forms
- Create forms with no coding
- Set rules to simplify lead distribution
- Upload forms live instantly
- Catch leads directly into your CRM
CRM Workflow Management
- Workflow alerts while creating or modifying records
- Associate tasks to the workflow rules with CRM records
- Email notifications with templates and upon triggering a workflow rule
- Auto schedule the workflow actions at pre-defined interval
- Instant notifications to 3rd party applications via Webhooks
- Custom Functions
- Macros automate tasks
Productivity
- Business Card View
- Quick glance at important details of the contact without scrolling or searching
- Customize fields
CRM for Google Apps
- Custom Modules, API, Webhooks and Custom Functions
- Create campaigns, email marketing & autoresponders
- Enable security controls, organizational hierarchy & territories
Pulse
- Track records that are critical to your business based on your criteria
- Stay on top of sales updates in real time
- Identify cold prospects for a sales follow-up
- Sort updates by users and modules
- Sort records by record owner and module
- Complete visibility based on last activity
Sales Forecasting
- Revenue based on data within Zoho CRM
- Create, assign and revise sales quotas
- Assess individual and team performance
- Forecast accuracy against commit amounts
- Fully customizable forecast reports and dashboards
MailMagnet
- Captures, collates and distributes customer email activity within your CRM
- Get notification and reply to customer emails within CRM
- Intuitively scans your mailbox and displays only relevant emails
- Send emails via your favorite mail client
- Get a copy of the email linked to the right lead or contact in CRM
- Link prospect and customers emails with your CRM data
- Share emails from prospects based on your own rules
- Create mail merge templates for different modules
- Get updated user info in merged documents
- Manage templates in secured folders
Document Library
- Role-based folders, sub-folders
- Share collateral to your salespeople
- Send documents from your CRM
- One document can have multiple versions
- Quick feedback from colleagues to improve document
Social CRM
- View social interactions of your brand with prospect
- Reply to direct messages, likes and mentions via your brand’s social profile
- Engage future prospects from within the social stream
- Stay tapped on customer’s interests and updates
- Comment or like them inside CRM
Mobile CRM
- Real time access to customer data
- Receive sales alerts
- Search customers nearby, create tasks
- Capture trade show leads directly into Zoho CRM
- Digitalize and save business cards on your iPhone
Sales Tracking
- Sales Opportunity Management
- Monitor sales opportunities across sales cycle
- Import sales opportunities from third-party solutions and services
- 360-degree view
- Drag-and-drop customization wizard
- Big deal alert
- Sales pipeline and sales escalation process
- Free Edition
Overview of Zoho Benefits
Zoho CRM offers a wide range of benefits, most of which related to closing more sales and attracting more customers. But how exactly does its functionality help your customer relationships improve? Let’s check this out:
It automates vital sales operations
The core value of Zoho CRM is that it automates daily sales tasks, converts web visitors into hot leads, imports prospects from external sources and parties including trade shows, direct emails, and seminar. Once imported in the system, leads are matched with the appropriate sales agents, and converted into buyers sooner than you could ever imagine. Most of sales operations in Zoho CRM are single-click ones, and can be customized to meet the specific needs of your business.
Zoho CRM also allows you to manage customer accounts, such as: monitor all accounts from a shared database; view them across products, locations, account, and status; and track their purchase history for cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Likewise, you can accurately forecast revenue, establish/assign/edit sales quotas, identify individual/team performance, measure forecast accuracy, and create customizable forecast reports and dashboards.
Gives access to important data in real time
Zoho CRM offers a handy Opportunity Tracking tool allows you to see where your customer is in the sales cycle, which is the deal’s size, contact history, and competitor profile to help you craft more fitting messages. Access these data in the easy, accurate Dynamic Reports & Dashboards.
Zoho also lets you identify and target inactive leads with historical data to realign your customer messaging. The Business Card View, for instance, allows you to quickly access all pertinent customer information in one window without the need to scroll or search. The Notes Section displays the time and content of past conversations for a more personal and logical communication. Sooner than you think, relationships will be streamlined, and you will be able to make smarter and more profitable business decision.
Makes maximal use of social media
Like it or not, most of our customers nowadays are coming from Twitter and Facebook pages, which is why it is essential to have a CRM that can link them to our products/services. Zoho CRM, for instances, follows their behaviors and categorizes them as leads and contacts, so that you could connect with them and send them invitations to give your work a look.
Allows you to go mobile
Zoho CRM has a special, dedicated mobile edition for Android and iOS users which helps stay in control of customers even while on the go. You can control their actions, access sales records, or send invitations directly from your mobile device.
It is integrated with Google Apps and Zoho suite
Zoho CRM connects to key Google Apps like Gmail, Docs and Calendar smoothly, on top of its native integration within the Zoho suite of apps. The result is you get to enhance the base system significantly with complementing apps.
Technical details
| Deployment | Devices | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hosted Open API |
Windows Linux Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based |
Email Tickets Live Support Training Phone |
| Customer Types | Pricing Model |
|---|---|
| Small Business Medium Business Large Enterprises Freelancers |
Free Monthly payment Annual Subscription Quote-based |
| Language Support |
|---|
| English, Chinese, German, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Portugese, Polish, Turkish, Swedish |
Zoho Pricing Overview
| Free Trial Free Edition |
Standard | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| √ | $20 | $35 | $50 | $65 |
Pricing information for Pipedrive is supplied by the software provider or retrieved from publicly accessible pricing materials. Final cost negotiations to purchase Pipedrive must be conducted with the seller.
Zoho has a free option for up to 3 users. With the free version, you get the benefit of incorporation with social media accounts, logging of sales tasks, events, call logs, and notes. Additionally, you can save up to 10 email templates with the free version. So, is Zoho CRM really free? In this initial version, yes, it is. You do not need to input your credit card details.
The Standard, Professional and Enterprise versions all allow for a 15-day trial period before charging your card, while the Ultimate Edition offers a 30-day free trial. If you sign up for an annual deal, Zoho Standard starts at $12/user per month. The next pricing tiers are $20/user per month for Zoho Professional and $35/user per month for Zoho Enterprise. The Zoho Ultimate Edition comes in at $45/user per month.
Zoho Standard provides features such as scoring rules, email analytics, workflow conversion, tags and groups, forms, unique fields, customized reports, and dashboards, as well as 100,000 records.
Zoho Professional offers everything in the standard package, plus upgraded features. These include real-time sales notifications, process management, web-to-case forms, macros, inventory management, validation rules, automatic field updates, Google Ads assimilation, webhooks, and unlimited records.
Zoho Enterprise has all the perks of Standard and Professional, along with tools for large companies. Some of the features are conversational AI, email for specifically for salespeople, and visual CRM view.
It also has BI Tools such as a target meter, comparator, anomaly detector, as well as multi-user portals, custom modules and buttons, sub-forms, mobile SDK and app distribution, autoresponders, email parser, conditional fields, and data encryption (EAR).
Finally, the Zoho CRM Ultimate Edition has a dedicated database cluster, advanced customization, automation suggestions, data enrichment, enhanced storage, and email sentiment analysis. The Ultimate Edition offers a 30-day free trial.
Zoho CRM ease of use
I’ll be honest — Zoho can look a bit old school. Even after recent refreshes, the look and feel of the software always manages to look a bit dated. In terms of functionality and navigating the major features that you need to run the CRM, it’s fine. The layout is quite straightforward, and all the features work well, though they can be a bit slow at times when importing large datasets.
It just looks a bit … meh. And while that might come across as a bit of a petulant thing to complain about, you have to remember: this is a bit of software that someone could be using every day, often for hours at a time. It has to look a little bit appealing so that people will want to login. Whether Zoho succeeds with that is up for debate, in my view.
Setting up Zoho CRM is pretty straightforward. You can select the version you want, get a confirmation link in your email, then set up your company information to customize your profile. You can then either take a virtual tour of the site or skip that and go right to a tutorial on how to migrate what you want into the suite.
To make sure you get the 15-day free trial, click the profile icon in the top right corner of the setup page, click “try other editions” and in the bottom left of the pop-up, click “switch to free version” to get a free trial. You can then customize your CRM to your liking.
After an investigation of Zoho CRM, I am a fan of the software for most businesses or industries. The differently priced packages, combined with up-to-date features, make Zoho worth checking out. Give them a try in the free version or with a 15-day free trial. There’s not much to lose. You might find it completely changes the way you work, improving efficiency and workflow.
Frequently Asked Questions for Zoho CRM
How good is Zoho?
Among reviewers, the consensus seems to be positive. Zoho tends to rank between four and five stars (out of five) within the professional reviewing community. Among actual business owners, the overwhelming amount of feedback is also optimistic. As one Quora reviewer responded, “[Zoho CRM] is the best software I have come across.” This comment was by no means unique. We found the interface simple to navigate, smooth running, and very intuitive.
What’s new in Zoho?
Zoho makes it easy to keep up with new features or updates on the software. The easy-to-follow timeline on their website posts new functionalities in the suite regularly. As of 2019, several new upgrades were added, such as UI enhancement, Zia Voice for Android, the ability to create surveys within campaigns, the capability to build relationships between multiple reports.
A new feature allowing customers to book meetings with you was added this year, as well as identifying duplicate records, monitoring the finance flow of an event, cloning your Blueprints, and several others.
Is Zoho a good company?
When you check into the background of Zoho, the reviews of the company itself seem favorable. With over 1,000 reviews on Glassdoor, Zoho has an overall rating of 4.3, and a score of 4.4 on Indeed. On their website, Zoho claims it plans to stay a private company indefinitely. They also hire many high school students and train them through Zoho university, claiming 15% of their engineers come from the program.
One of the more admirable traits of the company is that they state that they purposely keep the cost of marketing low to save the customer money. Zoho also seems to be quite stringent about your privacy and refusing to sell your information or track your clicks.
Does Zoho integrate with Microsoft Outlook?
Yes. Zoho has a Microsoft Outlook plug-in for both Windows and Mac users. You can sync events, contacts, and automate tasks with Outlook via Zoho CRM.
Make faster sales with these extensive automation and integration features. Get started with Zoho CRM today! Get $200 in Zoho Wallet Credits valid for 30 days when you sign-up using a business email. These wallet credits can be used to purchase any Zoho app or edition upgrade. T&C Apply
