What is Zoho CRM? A plain-language guide for business owners

What it does, in plain words

Instead of leads living in inboxes, spreadsheets and people's heads, a CRM gives the whole team one record of each prospect and customer and helps you act on it. Zoho's own feature pages group the product into sales force automation, lead management, process automation, customization and business intelligence.

Source: Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM features

The main building blocks

• Leads, contacts and deals: Zoho's lead management covers capturing, enriching and nurturing leads. A deal is a sales opportunity record that tracks a prospect through the sales cycle from early identification to won or lost, including quotations and negotiations.
• Pipelines: Zoho lists pipelines among its sales force automation features, and the Standard edition adds multiple sales pipelines. In practice a pipeline is the series of stages a deal moves through (practical explanation).
• Automation: Zoho lists workflows, cadences (sequences of follow-ups that react to a lead's responses) and Blueprint (structured sales processes). Workflow automation is included even in the Free edition.
• Analytics: Zoho lists dashboards, report generation and anomaly detection under business intelligence. Dashboards are built in the Analytics tab from charts, KPIs and other components and can be shared with all users or specific users, roles or groups.
• Integrations: Zoho says CRM integrates with 1,000+ applications, available through Zoho Marketplace.
• Mobile: there is an app for Android and iOS, and Zoho says you can update information offline and sync later.

Source: Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM pricing, Zoho CRM features, Zoho Help: Dashboards, Zoho CRM mobile apps

What it needs from you to work (practical advice)

Software does not fix an undefined sales process. It needs a decision on your sales stages, one owner who keeps the setup tidy, clean data to start with, and a team that actually logs activity in it.

Who it suits

Zoho says CRM serves businesses of all kinds, points a very small home business to the free edition (up to 3 users), and points small businesses and freelancers to a separate product, Bigin. Whether it fits you depends on how many people sell and how structured your process is (practical advice).

Source: Zoho CRM