Our review of Zoho CRM

Zoho is undoubtedly one of the market leaders in CRM for SMEs in the United States, but it remains relatively unknown in France.

Zoho offers an impressive range of software solutions, from CRM to video conferencing, email management, a chat module, and even a lightweight CMS for creating mini-sites with ease.

Zoho CRM, the flagship product of the brand, has undergone significant changes recently, including a new pricing structure and a complete redesign of its graphic interface, which used to be its main weakness. Despite these changes, the tool continues to offer remarkable depth of functionality, all at very reasonable prices.

My Zoho CRM review in a nutshell

Contact management with Zoho CRM

Zoho’s user experience has recently been revamped to make the tool even easier to use. For contact management, this means a chronological view that highlights high-priority prospects and customers through a visually clear, easy-to-navigate interface!

Zoho CRM provides a wide range of advanced filters that allow you to query CRM data based on tasks, notes, emails, and other activities.

If you’re looking to expand your presence within an account in an Account-Based Marketing strategy, Zoho CRM lets you create “company” accounts and assign multiple individual contacts to them.

It’s easy to organize your contacts into active leads and categorize them according to different classifications. You can also attach documents to individual contact records, with all uploaded files displayed in the document library.

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

Manage sales opportunities in Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is designed to help businesses of all sizes optimize customer relationships throughout the entire lifecycle—from initial contact to deal closure.

To achieve this, the software provides all the tools necessary to implement effective marketing strategies that guide your leads through the sales funnel:

• B2B email campaign management
• Lead capture
• Lead nurturing
• Segmentation
• B2B prospecting tools
• Interaction tracking
• Lead assignment to the appropriate salespeople

New prospects start out as leads and are converted into contacts once qualified. At this point, the company associated with the prospect becomes an account. Like many of Zoho CRM’s features, you can use only what you need. If you have a smaller volume of leads, you can bypass this step and have new contacts appear directly in your contact list.

However, if you need to manage a large number of leads from multiple sources, Zoho offers a tool called SalesSignals. This feature allows you to monitor various channels such as chat, email, and social media, and even get real-time notifications when a prospect mentions your company on Twitter.

The “Activities” view above gives you a clear overview of your upcoming tasks!

Sales automation on Zoho CRM

Lead scoring

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

Zoho CRM gives you the tools to implement these sales processes: in the settings under “automation”, you’ll find the “scoring rules” option. Using the suggested criteria, you can fine-tune your sales strategy.

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

To prioritize your leads, you can sort them by score in the contact management interface.

Lead routing

Lead routing refers to assigning leads to the appropriate salespeople based on the sales structure you have in place. The process is similar here: choose “assignment rules” and start defining your criteria.

In our example, all leads with sales exceeding €30,000 are assigned to Hugo. While our demo account had limited options, you can create more sophisticated routing rules to automatically distribute leads to your team members.

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

Automated follow-up sequences

While sending automated email sequences is more common in B2C, the truth is that in B2B, you have more pressing tasks than manually following up with every prospect.

With Zoho CRM, it’s possible to automate this process. From the same menu section, select “workflow rules”. The tool is user-friendly: you can create your sales automation workflow by adding conditions, triggers, and actions. You can set up to 10 conditions per workflow.

The example above is not suited for a follow-up scenario, but defining a reminder workflow is relatively simple: for instance, when X hasn’t replied to an email within Y days, the tool automatically sends a reminder email Z.

Macros & Integrations

Who hasn’t dreamed of automating some of the repetitive tasks you perform on your contact list? Even when we know a tool feature exists to speed up these tasks, we often spend more time looking for it than performing the task manually!

With Zoho CRM’s macros, you can trigger a series of automated actions for tasks like sending emails or updating contact details. As a bonus, thanks to AI, the CRM can identify time-consuming tasks and suggest macros to save you time!

Moreover, when you need to automate actions that involve third-party applications (e.g., sending a notification to your logistics team when a deal is closed), Zoho CRM offers “webhooks” to connect these apps with your CRM.

Ergonomics & User Experience on Zoho CRM

For a long time, users criticized Zoho CRM for its outdated interface and the difficulty of offering a pleasant user experience, which impacted team adoption rates. Good news: Zoho CRM has listened to its users and revamped the software’s ergonomics— and it’s been a success!

In terms of UX, a lot of work has been done to make accessing the various features as simple as possible. Tracking your leads, managing tasks for each account, and even using the workflow editor we mentioned earlier are all easy to master.

The tool also triggers automatic reminders based on your scheduled activities, ensuring nothing is missed. We also appreciate the small optimizations made with AI, like the suggested macros that help streamline your sales processes.

Integrations

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

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

Zoho CRM is also part of the Zoho suite, which includes over 40 applications, such as:

• Zoho Webinar
• Zoho Social for advanced social media management
• Zoho Books for accounting
• Zoho Surveys for creating and sending surveys to your prospects and contacts

This is a significant advantage, as it allows you to easily deploy other elements of the suite without relying on third-party providers.

Customer Reviews

As far as user reviews go, Zoho CRM scores 3.9/5 on G2 and 4.2/5 on Capterra. Here’s a summary of the key feedback from regular Zoho CRM users:

Advantages & Disadvantages

Zoho CRM Pricing

Free Version

To help you evaluate the tool and test its features, Zoho offers a free version for up to three users, which includes essential functionalities such as lead, account, and deal management.

Zoho Bigin

Zoho also offers a lightweight version of its CRM: Zoho Bigin. This is a small, pipeline-oriented CRM aimed at small businesses.

Zoho Bigin is available for just €7 per month per user (billed annually). It allows you to set up five web forms, integrate email, and create custom dashboards.

This is an excellent option for small teams just starting out, as it provides real CRM functionality at an extremely affordable price.

Zoho CRM

As shown above, Zoho CRM’s offering is based on four plans:

• Standard – €20 per user per month. This plan includes lead scoring, automation workflows, multiple sales pipelines, and custom dashboards.
• Professional – €35 per user per month. This level adds the SalesSignal tool for tracking prospect activities, forms integration, and built-in inventory management.
• Enterprise – €50 per user per month. This plan includes Zoho’s AI tool “Zia”, a multi-user portal, and mobile SDKs.
• Ultimate – €65 per user per month (billed annually). This top-tier plan includes advanced business intelligence integrated with Zoho’s Analytics tools.

Do you use Zoho CRM? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below! 🙂