Replicating its successes in bundling purpose-built software packages, Zoho is aiming to redefine the customer relationship management applications market by introducing CRM for Everyone.
Unveiling the product at its recent customer event in Austin, Zoho is bolstering the cross-functional aspects of its suite offerings by zeroing in on team utilization, which could cover any division of an organization from sales to legal and from pre-sale engineering to customer success.
By rolling out team-level template for capturing customer engagements and interactions that span from solution engineering to contract management and onboarding, the product serves as a central project dashboard overseeing everything in order to optimize collaboration so that everyone involved in the sales process from key stakeholders to support operations is on the same page.
Like Zoho Desk for customer service operations and Zoho One for growing enterprises, Zoho CRM for Everyone is designed to remove bottlenecks across different functional areas in order to deliver consistent user experience, redefining the rules of best of breed applications by positioning collaboration as the catalyst that paves way to boost productivity.
Prashanth (PVK) Krishnaswami, Head of Market Strategy, CX Products at Zoho, said it will be quick and easy for most business users to optimize the value of CRM for Everyone because of its elegant user interface and intuitive collaborative capabilities, calling it the first true democratization of the CRM paradigm.
Within a span of six years, Zoho Desk had grown to more than 100,000 customers by 2022, while the number of customers running Zoho One now exceeds 50,000 since its introduction in 2017.
Riding on that momentum, there is every reason to believe that tens of thousands of its customers – among its base of 100+ million users – could be taking advantage of Zoho CRM for Everyone – now in preview mode with pricing still under wraps – in the next few years.
As rivals are either raising prices or force migrating customers from the legacy environment to the Cloud or one of the many emerging AI co-pilots, Zoho CRM for Everyone could be seen as the clear alternative by appealing to those seeking to curb the mounting costs of running both CRM and team collaboration tools.
Throughout the two-day Zoholics event in Austin, CEO Sridhar Vembu reiterated the importance of offering affordable technology products to business users by prioritizing value and customer satisfaction over profit.
Saving money is a mantra that Vembu often preaches and weaves into his daily life in a small village three and a half hours from the closest airport in Southern India even though he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country running a billion-dollar company.
At a time when a number of its competitors are facing headwinds amid the seismic changes with the growing popularity of Generative AI that casts a pall over a swath of enterprise IT spending items that may now go defunded, the privately-held Zoho is taking a contrarian approach through creative bundling and unbundling of cloud services, all of which are being managed and delivered from its own data centers, thereby ensuring consistency and uptime performance.
Despite that, the contrarian approach remains a work in progress. During the conference, some customers have expressed their concerns over the software sprawl that they are wrestling with after adding multiple products from Zoho only to find them struggling for a common data model or easier interoperability across many instances of Zoho systems in different regions.
Vembu listened intently as he vowed to deliver consistent user experience despite the fact that some of those issues that customers were confronting might have more to do with the need for Zoho to comply with sovereign data rules across different countries, the same reason that travelers needing to carry AC adapters and converters in order to function when globetrotting.
Instead of banking on expensive master data management tools to fix these perennial integration issues that have impaired enterprise visibility for decades, Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, said Zoho’s approach is to rely on AI to do the heavy lifting by using features like natural language processing powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI engine, as well as smart summarization and unified search to source information kept within Zoho apps that are becoming more widely used than ever among its installed base of 100 million users.
Vegesna said customers running Zoho Projects for project management and Zoho Notebook for note taking will all benefit from the incorporation of such AI enhancements, while industry-specific workflows will be significantly improved by tapping into more bundled use of Zoho Sign for digital signature, Zoho Workdrive for file management and Zoho Lens for augmented reality remote assistance. All of these will be cohesive enough with the ultimate goal of driving greater collaboration by leveraging Zoho’s domain expertise native to verticals like aviation, manufacturing and healthcare.
Going forward, Zoho is building out a series of new products for financial management and other back-office functions from payment processing to spend management that will all be based on a single database and data model mitigating the risks associated with the software sprawl once and for all.
For most business users, Zoho executives hold the firm conviction that in the land of many technology choices there are only two viable options available – Microsoft and Zoho, both of which are developing from the ground up tightly integrated collaboration, productivity and mission-critical enterprise applications through the same cloud.
Perhaps, the day could come even when the former would be considered prohibitively expensive for the masses and Zoho could rise to the occasion as the business software for Everyone.
List of Zoho Customers
| Customer | Industry | Empl. | Revenue | Country | New Product |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coinhako | Banking and Financial Services | 110 | $15.0M | Singapore | Zoho Desk |
| Enivix | Distribution | 95 | $10.0M | Brazil | Zoho Desk |
| Eva Gardens | Professional Services | 20 | $2.0M | United States | Zoho One |
| Foodhub | Professional Services | 986 | $110.0M | United Kingdom | Zoho One |
| Health Care Information | Professional Services | 125 | $15.0M | United States | Zoho Desk |
| Island Psychiatry, PC | HealthCare | 100 | $12.0M | United States | Zoho One |
| Island Psychiatry, PC | HealthCare | 100 | $12.0M | United States | Zoho Desk |
| Jws Waste & Recycling Services | Professional Services | 83 | $24.2M | United Kingdom | Zoho Desk |
| Luxer Corporation | Retail | 115 | $12.0M | United States | Zoho Desk |
| NAF | Education | 120 | $10.0M | United States | Zoho Desk |
| RJG, Inc. | Manufacturing | 180 | $15.0M | United States | Zoho One |
| Screen Tight | Manufacturing | 130 | $15.0M | United States | Zoho Desk |
Source: Apps Run The World, June 2024
- Adelphi Medical Staffing, a United States based Professional Services organization with 50 Employees
- Versa Networks, a United States based Professional Services company with 750 Employees
- Oracle, a United States based Professional Services organization with 159000 Employees
| Logo | Company | Industry | Employees | Revenue | Country | Evaluated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Adelphi Medical Staffing | Professional Services | 50 | $5M | United States | 2024-12-25 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 750 | $175M | United States | 2024-12-03 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 159000 | $53.0B | United States | 2024-10-05 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 260 | $34M | Netherlands | 2024-09-17 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 10 | $1M | United States | 2024-09-11 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 10 | $1M | United States | 2024-09-06 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 1000 | $250M | India | 2024-08-20 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 1137 | $211M | United States | 2024-08-01 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 250 | $40M | United States | 2024-08-01 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Manufacturing | 1100 | $260M | India | 2024-07-31 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 10 | $1M | United States | 2024-07-19 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 850 | $135M | United Kingdom | 2024-07-10 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Manufacturing | 20 | $3M | United Kingdom | 2024-07-10 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 250 | $35M | Netherlands | 2024-07-05 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Banking and Financial Services | 30 | $3M | Kenya | 2024-07-03 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 25 | $2M | United Kingdom | 2024-07-02 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 18800 | $7.3B | United States | 2024-07-01 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 850 | $135M | United Kingdom | 2024-07-01 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 600 | $110M | Australia | 2024-06-29 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 2800 | $553M | United States | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Education | 1600 | $358M | United States | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Media | 500 | $259M | United States | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Manufacturing | 50 | $5M | United States | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Automotive | 450 | $75M | United States | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Banking and Financial Services | 1000 | $250M | Canada | 2024-06-28 |
| Subscribe | Subscribe | Professional Services | 74 | $8M | United Kingdom | 2024-06-27 |
