Zoho Alternative – a CRM tool analysis

Zoho Alternative – a CRM tool analysis

When it comes to finding the most suitable CRM tool, you can expect a crowded market with a veritable jungle of offers – all with the aim of guaranteeing you the best handling of your customer relationship management. Zoho CRM stands among the digital CRM solutions available, but what capabilities does the tool offer? What is the price? We’ll guide you through the powerful features of Zoho CRM and compare it to the numerous alternatives available on the market.

Customer relationship management

In the corporate world, a timeless mantra has echoed through the centuries, persevering through the ages: “The customer is king!” The sole aspect that has evolved is the approach to managing customer relationships: today, it’s termed “customer relationship management,” extending beyond timely delivery and maintaining amicable relations. In 2024, companies will need to go beyond merely sustaining positive relationships.

They will have to take customer service to a new level and be able to identify the customer’s needs even faster than the customer themselves. The traditional methods of pen and paper or occasional gift baskets are no longer sufficient solutions. In the digital age, this implies: CRM system. And it should be a good one at that! A system that efficiently manages customer data, monitors interactions across various channels like email, phone, social media, and more, to make timely, customer-centric decisions.

In short: your sales department simply cannot work without a functioning CRM system. But thank goodness it doesn’t have to! The right CRM system exists for every company size. Your sales team is spoiled for choice. This is where we come in and present a href=”https://zoho.codafish.net/en/apps/crm”>Zoho CRM as a tool. We also look a little outside the box to draw a comparison with other providers on the market.

What is a Zoho account?

Before we go any further, let’s start with the basics. Zoho is the complete solution for digitizing your business activities. From accounting, CRM, marketing, and project management to human resources, all of your relevant departments can be mapped in one integrated system. Zoho offers more than 40 modules and tools specifically tailored to your company’s needs. The first thing you need for this is a Zoho account. Here you can enter not only your personal data, but also all information about your company. Everything you enter there forms the basis for your CRM software: the profiles of your sales staff, email addresses, and a number of other things. As soon as your account is set up, you can get started!

 

Is Zoho reputable?

One of the most important questions you will always ask yourself at the beginning is whether the tool you have chosen is reputable. Not only with regard to the security of the stored data but also of course with regard to its public image. After all, you want to be able to convince your customers that your CRM tool ensures your work is effective! With Zoho, you are definitely on the safe side. More than 50 million users worldwide now trust Zoho and give the CRM system an average rating of 4.5 to 4.7 out of 5 stars. In the international CRM arena, Zoho confidently competes with formidable rivals like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP, as evidenced by its CRM Watchlist Award. With offices spanning South Africa, India, Germany, the USA, Egypt, and numerous other locations, Zoho engages on a global scale and has solidified its position as a robust market partner over the past 25 years.

 

How much does Zoho CRM cost?

Zoho CRM offers four pricing models: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. With all packages, you have the choice between monthly or annual billing, with the annual option providing a 34% price saving. The platform’s packages range in price from €14 to €52 per user, delivering a diverse array of functions tailored to your company’s needs. However, you don’t have to select one of the packages immediately. This is Zoho’s huge advantage over other CRM competitors: you have the option to utilize the free version of Zoho CRM, accommodating up to 3 users. This version offers essential features including leads, contacts, tasks, deals, documents, and the mobile app.

This means that you can get to know the CRM platform at your leisure, test it for yourself, and use it for your day-to-day sales activities without any restrictions, and then decide on one of the packages according to your needs.

 

Who uses Zoho CRM?

This is also a question that many prospective customers ask: is Zoho right for me? Am I the right user for Zoho? Due to the large number of functions, you might question whether the system is compatible with your company and its size. But with Zoho, you don’t have to worry about that. Since its launch 25 years ago, it has become a popular tool for all sorts of companies. From self-employed people to small and medium-sized enterprises and large companies – they all rely on the strength of Zoho as a CRM system. Whether you want to use the basic functions or expand the system to meet your individual sales and marketing requirements, the flexibility and professionalism of Zoho CRM will give you a firm foothold in the world of CRM solutions.

 

Features of Zoho

So, the basic questions have been answered, now it’s time to get down to business – we’ll tell you all about Zoho’s features, which make many of the alternatives a little bit pale in comparison. As mentioned, the platform encompasses over 40 applications for your business, each with numerous features meticulously crafted to elevate your CRM experience to new heights. This means that not only features, but also countless add-ons and interfaces are available to your sales team. Zoho Mail as an email tool, Zoho Projects for your project management, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for your telephone activities and communication with Zoho Cliq and, of course, your website for newly acquired leads and lead management. These can all be linked together! But we’re giving too much away already, let’s dive into the different clusters of functions.

 

Data management with Zoho CRM

What must a CRM system be fundamentally capable of? Obviously – to keep the data that is relevant for business operations together. All contact details for customers, service providers, and suppliers are therefore combined in one CRM solution – and Zoho CRM is capable of much more besides. With comprehensive lead management, the software enables you to systematically acquire new customers by reaching them via an omnichannel framework. Your sales team can’t always be everywhere all the time – and Zoho knows this. This is why it offers you a digital solution to capture every new user on your website or prospective customer on the phone, process the contact and prepare it for further follow-ups by the sales team.
This solution provides intelligent web forms that you can integrate into your website. As soon as the form is filled out and sent, it appears as a lead in your CRM. Does your customer have a question that they would like to clarify before contacting you? Then you can also use the live chat feature on your website. Chat live with the customer or use the in-house AI bot Zia to generate standard answers, which Zia uses to answer the customer’s questions and passes on to you immediately if the customer needs a more precise answer. The information contained in the lead is automatically transferred to your CRM tool. Ads on social media or Google Ads can also be connected to the CRM so that you can immediately synchronize relevant data obtained from the ads with your platform. Zia further assists by categorizing newly acquired leads based on diverse indicators and assigning them according to sales territory, products, departments, and employees. With this categorization, you can swiftly design targeted email campaigns and seamlessly convert leads into contacts or even customers.
Omnichannel communication by phone, email, live chat, and social media not only helps you manage leads but also contacts. You can import every little bit of information received via various channels into the CRM and assign it to the right place and customer.

 

Business intelligence – the flagship functions of Zoho CRM

While we’ve had a little glimpse of business intelligence through lead management, Zoho elevates the technologies for capturing, integrating, analyzing, and presenting business information to a whole new level: the powerful sales automation and process management functions give you a wide range of options for comprehensively optimizing and digitizing your sales and work structure.
Imagine the following scenario: using lead management, you have acquired a lead via the contact form on your website, an email or a live chat, which is entered into your CRM tool. For all further steps, you can configure a complete process management system in advance, which every employee in your company can use as a guide. With the sales process builder, you can ensure the various processes that are essential for your sales. You can link processing rules to this, which assign leads to a specific employee, for example. Finally, you can implement a review process that checks, cleanses, and approves lead information. This means that each lead can be analyzed on the basis of a large number of evaluations.
If process management gives the go-ahead for the lead, the next goal is to convert this lead into a contact and, ideally, into a customer. To streamline this process, Zoho assists you with comprehensive workflow automation. This gives you the opportunity to design blueprints to organize your processes and fundamentally structure the entire workflow based on conditions, deadlines, and assignments. Tasks and follow-up activities can also be linked to the workflow so that every Zoho CRM user, and of course your sales team, can view the current status quo for each lead, contact, or customer and adopt the workflow if necessary. In our scenario, this means that the incoming lead initializes the “contact lead” workflow. This to-do runs on the dashboard of the employee assigned. Once this has been completed, the next step in the workflow is processed. Zia also monitors your workflow closely and recommends enhancements or even pre-built workflows that have demonstrated effectiveness, which you can adopt at your discretion. And which can also dock onto other areas. As part of your email marketing strategy, you can employ drip campaigns to send pre-built messages to leads or customers, seamlessly integrating them into the Marketing Automation component.
Process management, including workflow automation, is designed to provide you with the most important thing, namely efficient deal management: you can utilize a dashboard to instantly view the current status of business deals, spanning from quotation to review to closing, allowing you to analyze all sales phases for each customer. You can also create various sales pipelines. Zia also supports you in this aspect, leveraging the data to generate automatic forecasts for your business transactions.

 

The analytical tools provided by Zoho CRM

These forecasts must, of course, be compared with your actual sales, and your sales activities evaluated accordingly. You have several functions at your disposal for this purpose: the CRM software allows you to generate customized reports from summaries, which you can assign and share within the system, as well as embed in third-party dashboards, such as those used by your suppliers. You can create charts in a wide variety of formats from all datasets, enabling you to identify trends in sales data and compare them with competitors as well as your individual target metrics for your sales team. You can integrate not only target metrics but also KPIs to measure various productivity areas effectively. Zia alerts you to any anomalies and provides real-time notifications. Pipelines, deal closure, revenue, activity tracking, daily insights, forecasting, and post-sales analysis are just a selection of the analytical features offered by the CRM software.

 

Security and governance

Powerful functions, sales optimizations, and the like are important, but especially in the age of digitalization, they quickly fall down the list of priorities when considering the guarantee of security. CRM software is only as good as your security precautions. Zoho CRM already guarantees these precautions in the basic settings by assigning roles, profiles, and groups. You can define a role for each user or team: from admin to normal user, you can configure access rights and functions accordingly here and then assign this role to each user in their profile. This strictly defines areas of competence and responsibility and integrates your hierarchy system.
All of this is guaranteed by the CRM exclusively on the basis of data security and compliance – for your company’s data and your customers’ data. Accordingly, fields with confidential data are automatically encrypted, CRM activities are monitored with audit logs, and unauthorized IP addresses are only granted limited access. In terms of encryption, the CRM software uses AES, one of the world’s most reliable standards when it comes to confidential data that is collected and processed exclusively under the provisions of the GDPR.
However, the CRM system not only ensures compliance with the GDPR, but also with HIPAA: HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is about ensuring the integrity of protected health information. This includes ensuring that CRM systems have the necessary safeguards in place to protect this electronically stored health information, or ePHI for short. Zoho thus ensures that users and organizations are able to comply with HIPAA.

 

Possible alternatives to Zoho

We’ve covered a lot of Zoho’s features, but let’s be honest – the features of other CRMs can’t be ignored either! And if you look at these, many CRM systems can be seen as viable alternatives to Zoho. Especially those that have dominated the market for some time and have long since aligned themselves with the needs of customers, provide excellent customer service and are true big players in the field. But which alternative to Zoho could be convincing in terms of application comparison and price? Let’s turn on that spotlight and take a closer look at the competition!

 

Zoho vs. competitor

If you enter CRM System into Google, you get 372,000,000 results within 0.31 seconds. No one has the time to consider all of them so that’s why we’re using a few selected CRM platforms for comparison to take a closer look at the price, options, processes and tools. Sorting them is our mantra numero uno! So what is the best solution for you? Here are the 5 CRM competitors for you to evaluate.

 

Salesforce

The name lives up to its promise: Salesforce CRM is one of the oldest CRMs among the competitors and, thanks to the use of Einstein AI Technology, a pioneer in the field of AI-supported sales clouds. Here, too, all interactions from sales and email marketing to customer service are automatically synchronized, sales signals are recognized by Trusted AI and the best timing for making contact is determined. It is not without reason that Salesforce CRM can call itself the market leader and, as a highly developed system, tends to be used by large companies. You can test the tool for 30 days before you have to pay the entry price.

 

Zendesk

The Danish software company, headquartered in San Francisco, is regarded by CRM experts as the CRM solution for customers and their purchasing behavior that well-known companies such as Cisco and Barnes & Noble rely on. Its lead tracking feature enables the recording and tracking of pending sales – a dream come true for every sales expert team! However, you have to get to grips with Zendesk quickly: the system only offers a two-week test phase!

 

Freshsales

Freshsales could be seen as Zoho CRM‘s pricing buddy. Here too, you can use the tool with up to 3 users free of charge for an unlimited period and upgrade to one of the three packages as required. Freshsales aims to support you in your work related to customer relationship management and sales processes. It focuses on the customer journey and has a built-in telephony and comprehensive chat function.

 

Bitrix24

The cloud-based software Bitrix24 is a project management tool with integrated CRM. Up to 12 users can use the tool free of charge and display their daily work in the form of tasks, deadlines, etc. in the dashboard. In addition to the CRM, sales automation as well as quotations and invoices can also be created here. Bitrix24’s range of services can be enriched by adding tools such as Mail, Slack or Zapier and can even include a team of more than 50 employees in the Professional package.

 

HubSpot

The winner in the categories “User-friendliness” and “Optimal introduction to a CRM platform” has been HubSpot CRM for years. Numerous video tutorials make it more than easy for companies to get to grips with the CRM system and immerse themselves in it. Only the price casts a shadow on the sunny side of CRM: the fun with HubSpot is often spoiled by expensive additional options, such as VoIP telephony, and even the package price for just 5 users isn’t too easy on the wallet.

 

Which is the best CRM system?

Well, that’s the question of all questions – we could make this article even longer and compare not just 5, but over 60 CRM systems, including the alternatives. Looking at all functions for sales, marketing and support, Zoho CRM and its alternatives Salesforce and Freshsales are way ahead. Companies will find what they need for smooth customer relationship management in all software systems. We can only give recommendations here, but also a tip: which system is best for your company depends on the size of your company, your goals and your budget. If you are satisfied with the free trial offered by Zoho and Freshsales, then start with them and you can meet all the requirements that arise with the extensions. Is your company already large and growing rapidly? Then Salesforce would also be an option. The best thing about all three tools is that you can try them out extensively in the test phases and make the right decision for you.

 

FAQs about Zoho CRM

Do you still have some questions about the CRM platform? Then we hope we can answer you below!

 

Is Zoho free of charge?

Yes, you can use Zoho with up to 3 users free of charge for an unlimited period. The basic functions for your CRM are available to you. If you want more Zoho users or additional functions, you can easily upgrade to one of the four price packages.

 

How secure is Zoho Mail?

Zoho Mail is the software’s email application and allows you to manage all your business emails and calendar entries. Zoho Mail impresses above all with its USP of unsurpassed security and data protection. In practice, this means that the emails not only pass through reliable data centers, but that all messages are also protected by in-transit and S/MIME encryption. Thanks to comprehensive security-relevant components, the system also recognizes fraudulent emails and protects you against VIP fraud, spear phishing, malware and malicious email attachments. Strong email protection policies and spam filters that are implemented also protect you from cyber-attacks. The software also offers a comprehensive authentication process to ensure that only authorized persons have access to the relevant emails.

 

How can I cancel Zoho?

Depending on which billing model you have chosen, you can cancel Zoho either monthly or annually. To do this, go to your account and close or delete it.

 

Conclusion

You’ve gathered a wealth of information about CRM solutions – as mentioned, there are several factors to consider when selecting the best CRM solution for your company. If Zoho has convinced you, we will be happy to assist you as an official Zoho partner to realize your digital projects with the CRM platform! And we can tell you that Marketing Automation is the perfect extension for your CRM – we will show you all the possibilities in comparison and design your CRM platform according to your wishes. Contact us and book your free consultation!

codafish – Your Zoho partner for all digital applications

So – what’s stopping you? Do you have any questions or are you ready to schedule this transition in and get started right away? If so, please reach out to us, and we’ll be delighted to provide you with guidance and support through every step of the process, leveraging our Zoho support to ensure a smooth implementation.