Week 61: CRM Continued with a Look at Zoho
Last week I introduced the topic of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in its broad sense as there was too much to cover in a single episode. This week, I have delved in a little further so as to give you a better understanding of the system. We were lucky enough to have a property friend of ours to get us a free (extended) trial on a program. After the usual sign-up, what followed was mind blowing. We are absolutely in love with Zoho CRM and can’t wait to get started. But, this was far from love at first sight as I was toying with the idea of going with a competitor brand that also showed some strong potential; ‘Less Annoying’ anyone?
As the name suggests it does exactly that; it's not as annoying as other CRM and has features that can really rival the biggies. Its interface is straight forward which makes communication a breeze and the dashboard application which anyone can navigate. I just loved its color codes, simplicity and the ease in which you can carry out most if not all functions. I don't like complicated things and much prefer simple than fancy. What's the point of having all the frills if you don’t enjoy using it? Being a novice I was leaning more towards Less Annoying CRM but couldn't help but wonder ‘what if’ I outgrow it soon and then end up having to learn something new. A better question, do I want it easy now and hard later or vice-versa? Hmm..plenty to think about.
Then Zoho came along and after having used Less Annoying (dummy account) I absolutely hated it. It was just full of (no doubt useful for some) #$%#* I didn't need, well not anytime soon. Zoho just looked grim in comparison to the former, it didn’t make me want to open my laptop and crack on. After a couple of boot-camp sessions with its rep it slowly started to grow on me. We were told we can add/remove icons/tabs and basically configure the whole thing to our liking. Now we're talking! (church bells at last). This was the revolution as far as I was concerned, it made the world of difference. Unlike its rival Zoho can ‘annoy’ me anytime it wants baby, with all these add on’s and cool features how can one resist?
I got down to it and what felt like a lifetime but only a short week my personalised Zoho was born. I completely renamed the headings on some of the pages and added my own specific fields. I kept some of the originals but mainly new entries. It was starting to look more and more unique to my industry and I can manage most functions & tasks that I could think of just using Zoho alone. No need for separate packages and consolidating all my duties from the one platform. How is that for productivity? A snippet of my desired layout:
Home page: at a glance; see what my agenda is for the day in terms of tasks, meetings and events. I don’t like clutter and have kept this space open and airy
Contacts: pretty self explanatory (just a revised version of there’s), with a click of a button enter my solicitor, contractor and financier’s information against the live property
Leads: don’t want to bore you with the details but have made quite a lot of changes here. As leads are the lifeblood of this business you want to keep a firm eye on these. Two main categories being ‘Agents and Vendors’
Deals: again highly significant but without going into intricacies it's basically all my ‘Joint Venture’ (JV) Partners, ‘Sourcing Agents’, ‘New Build’ projects and the likes.
Projects: manage all aspects of my renovation and make sure it runs smoothly, comes in on time and under budget
Products: a record of all my stocks, both rental and sold property together with vital information such as GDV and Managing/Selling Agents involved. If I need to go back to something for whatever reason it is all there and easily accessible
Activities: kept to the original, it's basically any action you undertake on any of the above and provides a useful history/timeline for all work undertaken.
I can firmly agree that Zoho Kicks Ass! and if you are in two minds regarding the use of CRM, then if the above list is not convincing then I don’t know what is…