At Zoholics Austin this week Zoho announced CRM For Everyone, the next generation of its leading CRM solution. The solution is available under early access for customers worldwide. The release is aimed at delivering a solution that works across all customer-facing functions rather than solely sales. The solution enables the sales team to work with other teams in the business, collaborating in a single application to ensure that solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy work better together.
Zoho also announced new capabilities and improvements within its CRM solution to help organisations interact with customers and between themselves more easily.
Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe, commented, “Traditionally, the CRM system has been built by IT and built for sales workflows. Over the years, it has accumulated a wealth of customer context, but access to the CRM is strictly rationed, and teams are forced to operate on their own islands with limited context. This is fundamentally antithetical to a great customer experience. Zoho CRM for Everyone exists to break down those silos, unifying all customer operations teams onto the CRM to deliver better customer experiences.”
Enterprise Times asked Sridhar where this fits within the Zoho CRM solutions, which include Zoho Bigin, Zoho CRM and Zoho CRM Plus. Sridhar replied, “CRM for Everyone is an umbrella term for a new set of capabilities we’re adding to Zoho CRM. The underlying product is Zoho CRM, so these capabilities will be available as part of Zoho CRM Plus and Zoho One as well.”
While the product is now available for early access, pricing is not yet available. Sridhar indicated that this would be available when the product goes GA. It is unclear, therefore, whether this will replace Zoho CRM with an uplift in price or whether it will have a separate and slightly higher price level.
I asked Sridhar whether CRM for everyone would be part of Zoho One. He replied, “Yes, CRM for Everyone will be available to customers of Zoho One through the early access program.”
What is new?
Zoho has initially announced three key updates to the CRM software, with the promise of more to follow.
Team Modules
Team Modules is what separates CRM for Everyone from other CRM solutions. It works on the premise that every team wants to have a different from of their organisation and customer data. These team level modules can have their own data fields, permissions, workflows and other customisations relevant to the individual team. The advantage is that the underlying customer data is shared and accessible across the CRM platform.
What isn’t clear within the announcement is the governance within the system, which would stop duplication of fields and data across the platform.
Requester Profile
Functions within organisations must be able to interact. Requester profiles enable people to do just that. For example, a salesperson might require sales enablement content about a specific customer, perhaps a case study from a specific industry. The salesperson could create a request in their module, which then passes into the workflow of the sales enablement team. The requestor can track the progress of their request, ensuring they don’t have to ask for repeated updates.
Refreshed User Experience
To adapt to this new way of working, Zoho has redesigned the user interface. The new solution enables teams to have dedicated workspaces. Where required, users can switch between modules and workspaces, enabling them to have different personas within the organisation. The no-code/low-code automation tools enable them to build workflows to automate tasks, both within and between the different modules. Zoho CRM for Everyone has also added greater accessibility for areas covering vision, motor activity, and interactions.
Integrations
One of the key benefits of the Zoho platform is the integration between different applications. I asked Sridhar what integrations to other Zoho Apps are there?
He replied, “Integrations are very important indeed. CRM for Everyone inherits all the underlying integrations currently available for Zoho CRM. There may be integrations specific to CRM for Everyone in the future.”
Everyone sells
“Whether it’s selling’s traditional form or its non-sales variation, we’re all in sales now.”
-Daniel H. Pink
Pink is right, and Zoho seems to have taken this to heart with this release. Zoho CRM for Everyone will enable everyone in every department to collaborate with colleagues and support the revenue generating activities of the firm. Zoho lists some examples of how the solution can help, which include:
- An account executive can work with a solutions engineer to coordinate a great product demonstration for a customer
- A marketer can perform win-loss analysis for specific deals
- A specialist can track the step-by-step rollout of the onboarding experience for each customer
- A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies
The solution will enable teams to better coordinate and automate processes both within and between functions.
Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “Modern CRM strategies demand that the entire enterprise contribute and orchestrate actions around revenue-driving motions that require visibility and collaboration across teams. This is what stands out about Zoho’s vision for CRM for Everyone. This is a solution that meets the modern sales and engagement strategy, reaching beyond the stagnant notion that CRM is a record or a database…it puts CRM at the center of the project called Revenue.
“It applies connected collaboration and a project management mindset to the operations of building durable customer relationships through cross-functional actions in order to seamlessly drive more profitable relationships with customers.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Two big questions remain unanswered. Will CRM for Everyone replace Zoho CRM, or will it be an additional solution? Secondly, what is the price for Zoho CRM for Everyone Regardless, this solution is exciting, especially when one considers the other software that Zoho can bring to bear for organisations. It will be interesting to see how the interaction between applications such as Zoho Desk (Customer Support) and others work with the new solution. Zoho One, which includes CRM for Everyone promises a complete and integrated solution to help many businesses run.
With further capabilities promised for this solution, it will be interesting to see what the uptake is. Also, considering that this solution has global availability, this is a major strategic play by Zoho. It often trials applications in India or North America first before rolling out further.
