Zoho Outage on Monday, June 11th

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On Monday June 11th all of our services experienced an outage that lasted slightly over half an hour. As of 2:13 pm Pacific all of our services are back up and running. If you are still having any issues, please hit refresh in your browser.

As always, you can get the latest status of our services, get help and contact us at twitter.com/zoho and at facebook.com/zoho.

We apologize for this outage. We know it’s Monday and you just want to get your week up and running. For the technically-inclined, we’ll follow-up soon with an update about the causes of this service interruption.

### 6/14 Update
After doing some digging around, and then some more digging, our operations team gave us an update about the service interruption. It was due to a flood of abnormal traffic directed at one of our services. As a (planned) reaction to this, our firewalls performed as expected and dropped this traffic from getting into our data center.…


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Market Dojo found the smart way of managing customer details – Zoho CRM for Google Apps

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Market Dojo is one of the pioneering e-Sourcing software providers. They are a UK based company and formed in August 2010. The founders have many years of experience in software, procurement and consultancy. They pondered over developing a SaaS product that would simplify buying and selling of goods and services, looking at a paradigm shift in the market, ultimately bringing sourcing software in house. And as a result Market Dojo was born. This software has the capability to help the procurement professionals run eRFQ’s, RFI’s, questionnaires and both Forward and Reverse auctions. The users can go out to the market, analyze conditions, collate prices and negotiate with the sellers. They also have new capabilities such as an innovation tool where you can asses supplier ideas outside of price.

Challenge:
Market Dojo is an organization with 3 employees all working virtually.…


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Key to Customer Engagement is To Make the Customer Feel Valued

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Don’t confuse hammering your audience with marketing messages with customer engagement. You can’t force customers to engage with you. It has to be a decision the customer makes to want to interact with you in whatever manner they wish to engage, said Paul Greenberg, Principal of The 56 Group, at Zoholics, the Zoho user conference.

That engagement can be intense, casual, occasional, and/or frequent. And at any time that engagement level can change to any of the other states. Your job as a company is to provide customers with channels and capabilities to want to connect with you. If you get the customer in that state of mind, that’s engagement, Greenberg said.

Greenberg offered up the example of a company sending customers a coupon for 20 percent off every month for six months. They don’t expect each customer to actually come in and make a purchase every month, but the company is giving their customers the opportunity to make the choice to engage.…


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Customer Spotlight – Brandography loves the efficient Zoho Invoice

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Four year old Brandography is bringing in a scientific approach to web marketing. Website marketing has been synonymous to creativity for a very long time and still is. A while ago, we had a chat with Jason Dailey, founder of Brandography, a long time customer of Zoho Invoice.

He says,

Effectively managing someone’s website necessitates a blend of scientific experiments to determine what works best and requires commitment to continue striving to achieve new (and greater) levels of success metrics.

With a 11 member team, Brandography achieves a gargantuan task of creating, executing and managing online marketing campaigns for several of their customers. Time is of essence here and Jason says,

“As a business owner, Zoho has saved me a lot of time, headaches and the need to hire additional staff.”

Jason has been using our online invoice software for a very long time now.…


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Just In: Advanced Analytics for your Zoho CRM Data​ – Powered by Zoho Reports

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We’re thrilled to announce the Zoho CRM – Reports integration, an important new update that gives access to a host of advanced analytics features to Zoho CRM users. These are features that enable you to be on the top of your CRM data and help you make better, informed business decisions.

 

Seamless Integration
Typically, CRM software providers depend on third-party BI vendors to provide plug-ins. The obvious issues with this model being the users now have to use two different systems, and such BI connectors can be cost prohibitive too. With this add-on, Zoho becomes a unique vendor who not only does both CRM and business intelligence, but also offers a seamless CRM/BI solution.

Advanced Analytics
Zoho Reports being a full-fledged business intelligence and reporting tool, makes it easy to ‘slice and dice’ your CRM data.…


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Leveraging your Staff’s Strengths for a Better Business

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This is a guest post by Shabana Shiliwala, who owns The Financial Sort, a financial planning company based in Austin, Texas.

As a small business owner with a limited number of staff, you have to make the most of each employee to run your business–the receptionist also does marketing activities, the accountant also does event planning, etc. So if there’s a part of your business that isn’t running as well as it should, maybe it’s because you don’t have the right person doing it.

“What are your strengths and weaknesses?” is a question you most likely asked each of your employees during their job interviews. Now that you know them better, were their self- assessments accurate? What makes each of them tick? Observing their talents and strengths is the first step in understanding how to delegate tasks to the best person for the job.…


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Looking to Expand your Business?

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This is a guest post by Craig Keolanui of SmBizSuccessTeam. To read more from Craig, visit his blog.

The slowly expanding economy has many business owners wondering about their next step. For some businesses that next step might be hiring another employee or leasing some extra space next door, but for others that might mean adding an additional location. Another way to expand is to license your original business model/concept to others or even consider going the route of franchising.

Many business owners view expansion as additional sales and minimized potential costs. For example, hiring additional employees or leasing adjoining office spaces are low risk moves that can be easily reversed.

1. Opening up an additional location offers great rewards, but higher risk.
If you are looking to open up a new location, you will bear many start-up costs that you might not have realized opening the original location.…


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