Last month, Zoho announced a major CRM update under the banner: “CRM for Everyone”.
The update teased a series of features that will provide extended access to core CRM capabilities so different departments can collaborate on customer deliverables from a shared central platform.
That starts with each department building its own Team Module within the organization’s CRM.
The Module may include a customized view of CRM data, a space to set up automated alerts and automations, alongside a place to store relevant work folders.
Additionally, a Request Profiles feature allows one member from each department to raise a request to another and – via its Module – track the request’s progress.
No matter if the request relates to a particular task/deliverable or if it’s a general query, a member may make it on the CRM.
Notably, there are other capabilities, such as the ability to launch and track shared workflows that run between different departments. These may cover contract management, onboarding, and request proposals, to name just three examples.
Yet each capability returns to the central goal of encouraging organization-wide communication and collaboration on a central CRM platform.
According to Prashanth “PVK” Krishnaswami, Head of Market Strategy for the Zoho CX Group, an organization that completes that goal could massively reduce its cross-functional email. Moreover, it may increase the visibility and comprehension of sales-focused workflows and tasks.
“Currently, sales teams record information but rely heavily on communication tools like email, chat, or meetings for coordination, which can lead to delays, accountability issues, and lower quality deliverables,” said PVK during an interview with Small Business Trends. “We’re addressing this by integrating communication and coordination activities into the CRM.
This allows for end-to-end process management, visibility, and accountability, significantly improving outcomes such as turnaround time, deal closure time, and communication quality.
As a result, businesses can streamline operations and enable better business intelligence (BI) via a single focus point for customer operations.
The challenge, as with most cross-department tech initiatives, will be buy-in. Sales may get customer success, support, and marketing onboard, but will HR, finance, and creative also embrace the platform, or will it become just another application they install and forget about?
Invariably, the solution is for sales leaders to sell what is in it for each stakeholder and carefully articulate the benefits. Hopefully, that should be second nature. But, an excellent trick is to point to recent issues – such as second-hand articulation of customer requirements and lost communication threads – before spotlighting how “CRM for Everyone” will overcome them.
After all, as PSK stated:
By integrating these interactions into the CRM, we ensure accurate communication, seamless back-and-forths, and effective change management. This streamlines activities like developing proposals, filling out RFIs, creating personalized demos, and proofs of concept, ultimately improving the customer journey.
Of course, Zoho isn’t the first vendor to integrate CRM and collaboration. Salesforce has long considered this, especially since its $28BN Slack acquisition. Yet, attempts to integrate the platforms – like its Slack Sales Elevate release – have largely gone unnoticed.
Zoho may have more success with an approach fixated on making it easy for individual departments to organize data and configure their own workflows without coding.
Moreover, enterprises leverage Zoho for more than CRM. That familiarity may help to overcome departments’ hesitations about embracing its CRM for Everyone concept.
After all, CRM for Everyone leverages Zoho’s project management and collaboration tools – which much of the broader business may already use – within a single app.
That app will become generally available later this year, with Zoho likely to charge less for non-sales users, with the overarching objective to develop a wider adoption of CRM. However, the enterprise tech giant has not yet confirmed this.
Earlier this year, Zoho won a 2024 CX Award for “Best CRM Platform”. Watch the Final Ceremony here to catch up on the Awards and unmask all the other winners.
