Customer Spotlight: After Long CRM Search, Stott Marketing Finds Success with Zoho CRM’s Ease of Use

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Arun

Six months ago Ed Stott, founder and CEO of Stott Marketing decided it was time to migrate his company from PCs over to Macintosh use. For the past four years, Stott Marketing has been steadily growing, and with this growth, Ed Stott found it necessary to make the change. However, he faced one major hurdle. Their current CRM software was not compatible with the Mac Operation System. Stott scrambled to find a replacement but was dissatisfied with the other options until he found Zoho CRM.

The Business

Stott Marketing Group is a marketing consultancy that specializes in working with small to medium size companies to help them gain visibility and clientele. As a small marketing consulting firm, Stott Marketing typically tries work with four to five clients at a time in order to deliver maximum attention to each client. As part of their efforts to deliver optimum quality marketing consulting to clients, Stott Marketing decided that the Macintosh platform better suited both their client’s needs as well as their own.…

Zoholics: Add to your Business Toolbox this May

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Darice

Want to know how to better manage your business? Whether you’re getting started with using Zoho or want more out of your Zoho apps, the second annual Zoho User Conference held on May 29th-31st in San Francisco has you covered with over 55 sessions.

In addition to providing general workshops, there will be tracks specifically designed for those who are already well-acquainted with Zoho products or want to explore other tools that can help make managing a business more efficient.

The conference will feature well–known speakers in the tech industry like Ray Wang, Brent Leary, Doug Sleeter, and also Robert Scoble, who will be hosting a fireside chat with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho.

To find out what you can learn from the conference, answer some of the questions in the graphic below or view the conference’s full agenda here. Don’t forget to download our updated Zoholics iPhone app that will give you details about the event on the go.…

Email With CRM inside; A Must Have For Sales People Who Live In Email

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Hari Murali

So you managed to set up this fantastic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, which is without a doubt helping your sales team close more deals faster. But then, it dawns on you that some of your sales people are still obsessed with using Email for exchanging messages.

The more you notice them spending time in keeping the two tools in sync, you get this nagging feeling that maybe your Email service and CRM should interact with each other?

Let’s face it. It is an irrefutable fact that we are all still obsessed with checking and responding through Email even amidst the burst of social media channels. You simply cannot write it off, particularly as a communication medium for business. Trying to treat CRM and Email as two exclusive tools, is probably not too prudent.

In our view, as a provider of online business apps that include an award winning CRM and ads-free business email service, the stance to take is not CRM or Email, it is CRM and Email, integrated with each other.…

McDonald’s customer service problem

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Austin Talbert

In a surprise to absolutely no one who has ever spent more than a minute inside one of their 34,000 restaurants, McDonald’s has begun admitting after a string of missed expectations that even in the world of fast food, being cheap and tasty isn’t actually everything—customer service matters.

Ronald, in the face of news that could make anyone Grimace, has finally learned what we—the customers—always knew: customer service, or the lack there-of in this case, makes up a huge part of the combo meal we are looking for in a place to eat (or from any business for that matter).

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported on a webcast that Mickey-D’s executives had with franchise owners, in which the company said 1 in 5 customer complaints are related to “friendliness issues, ‘and it’s increasing.’” According to the presentation, the top complaint from customers: “rude or unprofessional employees.”

Executives admitted that “service is broken,” and cited that customers find their service chaotic.…

Investing Your Tax Refund into Your Small Business

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Austin Ries

The April 15th deadline for filing your taxes has come and gone and you survived (hopefully). More importantly, if you’re expecting a tax refund, you’ve probably already starting thinking about ways to spend the money — especially considering the average refund is almost $3,000.

There is, of course, the responsible route. You could put your refund in a savings account in case of an emergency, pay off high-interest personal credit card debt or even invest in the stock market.

On the other hand, you could also have some fun with the extra cash. Maybe it’s finally starting that home improvement project, taking a much-needed vacation or even splurging on something you’ve had your eye on for quite some time like a new car. In fact, according to a recent poll by Travel Leaders Group, 43 percent of people plan on spending their tax refund on traveling while another study by eBay found that 33 percent of Americans will spend their refund on a new vehicle.…

Poll: What’s the ratio of support reps to sales reps in your business?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Prashanth V K

Businesses come in various shapes and sizes. Some can generate a lot of new business with a small sales team, but will need a much bigger customer happiness team to support customers. Other businesses might need a large sales to scale new business quickly and can do with a small team for customer support.

Either way, an interesting metric to look at is the ratio of support reps to sales reps in any business. It allows a bird’s eye look at whether a business is sales-intensive or service-intensive. So, that’s the question we’re asking on our poll this week: What’s the ratio of support reps to sales reps in your business?

One support rep for many sales reps

Typically, this is for businesses where sales is driven by a lot of human interactions and post-sales support is only for a small set of issues. For example, businesses that sell simple-but-indispensable products can thrive on this model.…

Results: Facebook is the most used platform for community

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Prashanth V K

In a bid to understand how businesses build communities, we had asked a question last week on our poll. We were eager to see what platforms were preferred by businesses to build a community. At the same time, we also wanted to see how much the idea of a building a community had permeated.

As it turns out, Facebook was voted as the most popular platform for building a community. About 23% of all respondents had chosen Facebook as their preference (or one of their preferences). This is fairly straightforward. Facebook has a really large user base and has a simple user experience. It takes very little time to start a community and grow it via Facebook.

LinkedIn comes a close second, with about 20% of respondents choosing the professional networking platform. As a more serious alternative, LinkedIn has several business communities that attract significant participation from members.…

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