Zoho CRM Professional Edition

Zoho's suite of full-featured, online collaboration tools has matured quite a bit over the past several years. The service rivals Google Docs in its power and sophistication. The company's foray into CRM (customer relationship management) software is slightly less successful, as I found in my tests. Even so, the service offers a highly functional system at a very low price, and is particularly effective for existing Zoho users as well as current Google Apps customers.

Editions and Pricing
Zoho offers three basic CRM packages.
The free edition comes with basic sales force, marketing, and customer support automation with reporting, forecasting, and Web forms (which I'll get to below). The Professional edition costs $12 per user per month, and adds inventory management, plus custom data, security, and workflow management. The top-level Enterprise edition costs $25 per user per month; it provides group chat, Web tabs, auto-responders, case escalation rules, and some additional data manipulation tools.

Overall, the Professional version seems to be the best value for most SMBs, while the Enterprise edition's extra support-related features are good for vendors needing that extra capability. On top of those costs, separate Zoho Mail, Outlook, and Office plug-ins cost extra; pricing for those ranges from $3 to $5 per user per month, depending on the package you've signed up for. Unlike Sugar Professional 6 (Beta) ($0.00-$60.00 Direct), Zoho CRM is a pay-as-you-go service; you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time. While the costs can add up, Zoho Professional doesn't come close to approaching those of our current favorite CRM app, Salesforce.com Professional Edition ($0.00-$250.00 Direct), which will run you $30 per user per month.

Interface, Leads, and Workflow
Zoho CRM's layout looks pedestrian, but it's also straightforward and easy to understand. For example, the Home page is rather drab looking, but it's also completely customizable; you can place modules showing specific data sets anywhere. Zoho CRM comes with plenty of pre-built dashboards that you can set to appear on the home page. The three Potential Dashboards in particular are useful, because they show you at-a-glance how close you are to closing specific deals. Overall, it's a workable arrangement, but its stock views lean a little too close toward "individual windows full of text" rather than the slicing and dicing of sales data you get with Salesforce.com and SugarCRM's Sugar Professional 6, or the robust social network monitoring and hand-holding you get with BatchBlue Software's BatchBook RoyalBlue Edition ($9.95-$99.95).

You can set up individual accounts for customers, and assign multiple contacts to each account as you meet more people at a particular organization. Zoho CRM tracks contacts and leads separately, though the overview pages are fairly static and don't present you with a lot of useful information at first glance. For example, the Leads overview page lacks a status field, though you could move things around and add it. In fact, one persistent issue I noticed throughout the various tabs is that Zoho CRM requires quite a bit of customization to get the most out of it. To some extent, that's true of all the major CRM packages I've tested recently, but Zoho seems to require it even at the very beginning. Without spending some time and really digging in right at the start, Zoho CRM feels a bit too much like Act! By Sage 2010 ($299 direct).

Digging deeper into the program, I found that Zoho excels at managing leads and contacts, particularly among multiple salespeople. To populate the system with data, Zoho can import Excel, CSV, and VCF data and convert it into active leads or other information. Each edition of the product has a different maximum number per batch, though even the Free edition is probably enough for many SMBs (in this regard at least). One big plus, introduced in March 2010, is a Google tie-in that lets Google Apps customers access Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects from within Google Apps.

Web Forms, E-mail Marketing, and Conclusions
Zoho's support for integrating Web-based forms in your company's Web site is particularly compelling. Here's how it works: a customer can input a name, address, and other key info on your Web site. Once they submit the details, everything transfers to a Zoho CRM contact. You can create these forms within CRM: Web to Lead. You can also choose a return URL (such as a "Thank you" page), or assign new contacts secured in this fashion to sales reps around the country, based on location. And since everything is cloud-based, you just embed the form as HTML code in a Web site. The same method works for creating customer support forms and trouble tickets.

For campaigns, you can set up basic e-mail marketing templates. You can also pull fields from your contact and lead databases and insert them as variables. While Zoho CRM hooks into external pieces for e-mail, support tickets, and other tasks, they're still Zoho products, and share the same look, feel, and overall user interface. To cite one example, Zoho has integrated its Meeting product into CRM, letting users send a screen to multiple customers, or take over a customer's screen using remote assistance for troubleshooting issues. On the mobile side, Zoho has an iPhone and Android-formatted site available at mobile.zoho.com/crm; the company is currently beta testing a BlackBerry version as well.

In the end, Zoho still has a ways to go before it approaches the level of sophistication Salesforce.com and SugarCRM offer; fortunately, Zoho is cheaper than those two services, though Zoho's Enterprise suite comes close to the SugarCRM's similarly-featured $30 tier. Zoho's design is also not as inspired as BatchBlue Software's BatchBook, which emphasizes social networking and includes an entrepreneur-focused interface that almost seems to walk you through the process of populating your CRM database. Zoho doesn't include any social media tracking at all. Still, Zoho CRM's database-like, left-brained interface could be just the thing for detail-oriented business owners looking to empower their salespeople.