CRM software

Our review of Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a cloud-based business management software offering a 360° approach to your business activities. It helps streamline business processes, improve the customer experience and close transactions faster.


Last updated on 9 mn
Profile picture for Axel Lavergne

Axel Lavergne

Co founder and chief editor

Axel is one of Salesdorado's co-founders. He's also the founder of reviewflowz.com, a review management tool for B2B SaaS companies

My opinion

Customer reviews

  • Full-featured CRM with numerous tools and a complete ecosystem
  • User-friendly, easy-to-use interface
  • Excellent integrated gamification module
  • High dependency on the Zoho ecosystem
  • Weekday support only
  • A short learning curve to configure filters

Ideal for B2B SMBs with few tools, looking for an affordable, easy-to-use CRM solution

From 0 for up to 3 users

Free plan and 14-day free trial

4.2 / 5
Our opinion
4 / 5
(2489 reviews)
4.3 / 5
(6443 reviews)
4.4 / 5
(4431 reviews)
4.2 / 5
(901 reviews)

Zoho is undoubtedly one of the market leaders in commercial CRM for SMEs in the United States. But little known in France.

Zoho offers an impressive range of software, from CRM to visio, email management, a chat module, and even a lightweight CMS for easy creation of mini-sites.

Zoho CRM, the brand’s flagship product, has undergone a number of changes recently, with a new pricing structure, and a thorough overhaul of its entire graphic charter, which was its main weakness. The tool still offers impressive functional depth, at prices that remain very reasonable.

Salesdorado’s advice
By using our links to Zoho CRM, you can benefit from $100 of free credits on your Zoho account when it is created. We also get paid, at no extra cost to you.

My Zoho CRM review in a nutshell

Perimeter Score My opinion
Overall rating 4,2 Zoho CRM is a very solid CRM software package, and its integration with the other tools in the suite makes it a very powerful solution, ideal for streamlining the sales processes of SMEs and VSEs.
Ease of use 4,4 Great efforts have been made to improve the user experience, which until now had been a little dated. In our opinion, it’s a great success: the interface is easy and pleasant to use, making it easier for your teams to adopt it.
Easy to install 4,4 Functionally, Zoho is very comprehensive, especially when it comes to Sales automations capabilities, which logically translates into a short learning curve. However, the major efforts recently made to improve ergonomics help to balance this aspect.
Customer service 4,1 7/7 support (in English) is a paying option, but we’ve put a lot of effort into our documentation (in French), which is very useful for configuring your sales automation rules.
Integrations 4,1 Another strong point of this tool is its integration with other applications in the Zoho suite. If you use other applications, Zoho CRM integrates natively with all major business applications.
Value for money 4,5 A free version of the tool is available to allow you to test the main functions, with up to 3 users. Then, for €20/month/user, you start to really exploit the tool’s potential. A more than fair price, given the depth of functionality on offer.

Contact management with Zoho CRM

Zoho’s UX has recently been reworked to make it easier for you to use the tool. In terms of contact management, this translates into a chronological view that brings up priority prospects or customers through a highly visual, easy-to-use interface!

zoho crm contacts

Salesdorado’s advice
The colored label indicates the type of action to be carried out for each prospect and its deadline. Click on it to access the associated activity.

The tool provides you with a large number of advanced filters for querying CRM data according to tasks, notes, email exchanges and other activities.

If you want to develop your presence within an account, in anAccount Based Marketing logic, Zoho CRM offers you the possibility of creating “company” accounts and then assigning several individual contacts to them.

corporate account

It’s easy to organize people into active leads and assign them different classification categories. You can attach documents to individual contact records, displaying all uploaded files in the document library.

By following the link below, you’ll receive $100 in credits and a 15-day free trial of Zoho CRM.

Salesdorado’s opinion
With modular configurations that can be adapted to your organization, Zoho CRM makes it easy for your sales reps to manage and update their contacts on a daily basis.

More about Zoho CRM

Manage sales opportunities in Zoho CRM

The aim of Zoho CRM is to enable companies of all sizes to optimize their customer relations throughout the entire lifecycle: from first contact to closing the deal.

With this in mind, the software gives you all the tools you need to implement the right marketing strategies, which will enable you to move your leads through your sales funnel:

New prospects start out as leads and are converted into contacts when qualified. At this point, the company associated with the prospect becomes an account. As with many Zoho CRM features, you use what you need. If you’re only generating a few leads, you can skip this step and have new names appear directly in the contact list.

Zoho CRM business

However, if you need to generate a large number of leads from multiple sources, Zoho helps you collect them using a feature called SalesSignals. This option lets you monitor various sources: chats, emails, social networks. Then, to be notified in real time when, for example, a prospect mentions your company on Twitter.

zoho crm activities

The “Activities” view above gives you an overview of the tasks you’ll be facing over the next few days!

Salesdorado’s opinion
Zoho enables you to track your leads across your entire sales funnel and across all your channels. Advanced lead tracking features from multiple sources make Zoho a solid opportunity management tool, and will take your sales team to the next level.

More about Zoho CRM

Sales automation on Zoho CRM

Lead scoring

If you read us regularly, you’ll know that any well-structured sales organization relies on lead scoring processes to focus its efforts on the most valuable prospects.

Zoho CRM gives you the keys to implementing these business processes: in the settings, under “automation”, you’ll find a link to “rating rules”. Using the suggested criteria, you’ll be able to fine-tune your sales strategy.

lead scoring

For example, the above rule will add 10 points to all your prospects in the Paris region whose sales exceed €50,000. Once you’ve defined your criteria, they will apply to your entire contact database.

To get quicker access to the leads that interest you, you can sort your leads according to their rating in the contact management tool.

Lead routing

Lead routing or allocation consists of dispatching leads to the relevant sales reps according to the sales organization you have set up. Same process here, choose “allocation rules” then start defining your criteria.

Lead routing

In our example, all leads with sales over €30,000 will be assigned to Hugo. We didn’t have much choice in our demo account, but you can create more sophisticated lead routing rules and automatically allocate your leads to different members of your sales team.

Note that these rules only apply to leads imported or captured via your web forms.

Automated reminder sequences

Sending automated email sequences is less essential in B2B than in B2C, but the fact remains that you have more important matters to deal with than chasing up your prospects one by one.

With Zoho CRM, it’s possible: from the same part of the menu, select “worfklow rules”. Next, the tool is easy to use: build your sales automation scenario by adding your conditions, triggers and actions. You can create up to 10 conditions for a single worflow.

workflows

The above example is not suitable for a reminder scenario, but such a scheme is relatively simple to define: when X hasn’t sent me an email in Y days, I automatically send him the Z reminder email.

Salesdorado’s advice
If you’re comfortable with the tool, go a step further and use lead scoring rules within your follow-up scenarios to feed your prospects information based on their progress through your sales funnel.

Macros & integrations

Who hasn’t dreamed of being able to automate some of the non-value-added actions you carry out on your contact base? Even when we know that a feature of the tool must exist and allow us to go much faster, we’re always afraid of wasting more time looking for it than carrying out those time-consuming little tasks by hand…

With Zoho CRM macros, you can trigger a series of automated actions for certain manual actions, such as sending an email or updating a contact. A little bonus: thanks to AI, CRM can even identify these time-consuming tasks and suggest time-saving macros!

macros

In addition, when you want to automate certain actions that require connection with third-party applications (for example, sending a notification to your logistics department that a deal has just been won), Zoho CRM offers you “webhooks” to link these applications to your CRM.

Salesdorado’s opinion
For SMEs, the sales automation solutions offered by Zoho CRM are more than complete. You won’t be limited in any way with this tool, and you’ll optimize your processes with performance gains to match!

More about Zoho CRM

Ergonomics & user experience on Zoho CRM

For a long time, users have been pointing the finger at the tool for its rather old-school interface and its difficulty in offering a pleasant user experience, resulting in high adoption in your teams… Good news, the Zoho CRM teams have listened to them and evolved the software’s ergonomics, and the least we can say is that it’s rather successful!

In terms of UX, a great deal of work has gone into making it as easy as possible for you to access the various functionalities. Tracking your leads, the actions to be taken for each of your accounts and even the worflow editor we’ve just presented are easy to learn. reminder

To make sure you don’t miss a thing, the tool triggers automatic reminders based on the activities in your schedule. We also appreciate the small, well thought-out optimizations thanks to AI, such as the automatically suggested macros, a turnkey tool for optimizing all your sales processes.

Salesdorado’s opinion
The overhaul of Zoho CRM’s UX was necessary, and it feels good 🙂 The result is a tool that’s a pleasure to work with, and one that will win over your sales reps for increased adoption!

More about Zoho CRM

Integrations

Third-party integrations are available on the Zoho Marketplace, and include all the most widely used business applications, including G-Suite, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Evernote, ClickDesk, Microsoft Office 365, QuickBooks, Zendesk Support or GoToMeeting.

In all, over 600 integrations are available, including 100 VOiP telephony providers.

Zoho CRM is part of the Zoho suite, which includes more than 40 applications, including :

  • Zoho Webinar
  • Zoho Social for advanced social network management
  • Zoho Books: for accounting
  • Zoho Surveys: allows you to create and send surveys to your prospects and contacts.

This is a real plus, as it enables you to deploy other elements of the suite very simply, without going through other service providers.

Salesdorado’s opinion
If you don’t want to use the other solutions in the Zoho suite, all the essential application integrations are here!

More about Zoho CRM

Customer reviews

As far as user reviews are concerned, Zoho CRM scores 3.9/5 on G2 & 4.2/5 on Capterra. We’ve summarized the most important feedback from everyday Zoho CRM users for you:

Advantages & Disadvantages

  • Optimized lead follow-up It offers you all the functionality of the “prospects” or “accounts” fields to record meetings, interactions, emails, phone calls, emails directly from Zoho…”; “It’s a powerful CRM tool that integrates internal chat and email marketing, including synchronization with social networks, calendars and reminders.
  • Ease of use : “Zoho has a simple, easy-to-use interface compared to other software”; “It’s user-friendly and easy to use for email, support and communication.”
  • Small learning curve: “While CRM’s filter settings are impressive, it can be a little tricky for new users to find their way around. However, once you’ve learned how to configure the filters for a personalized search, it will become much easier.”

More about Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM pricing

Free version

To enable you to get the measure of the tool and test its various features, Zoho offers a free version for up to three users, with access to the essentials: lead, account and transaction management.

Zoho Bigin

Zoho offers an ultra-light version of its product: Zoho Bigin. This tool is a small, pipeline-oriented CRM dedicated to small structures.

Zoho Bigin is available from €7 / month & per user (invoiced annually). The tool lets you set up up to 5 web forms, integrate your email messaging, and create customized dashboards.

This can be a great option if you’re just starting out, as it lets you take advantage of real software that will stay with you for a long time, at a very attractive price.

Zoho CRM

pricing

As you can see above, Zoho CRM’s offering is based around 4 products:

  • Standard – €20 per user per month. This plan includes the lead scoring features we mentioned, automated scenarios, and the ability to create multiple sales pipelines and customized dashboards.
  • Professional – €35 per user per month. This level includes the Sales Signal tool for tracking your prospects’ activity, forms integration and the integrated inventory management solution.
  • Enterprise – €50 per user per month. This package integrates Zoho’s AI tool called “Zia”, the multi-user portal as well as the mobile and MDM SDKs.
  • Ultimate – €65per user per month, billed annually, which mainly adds Zoho’s advanced business intelligence solution, integrated with the Analytics tools.

More about Zoho CRM

Do you use Zoho CRM? Tell us what you think in the comments! 🙂