Using a CRM solution that most closely mirrors real life

| By David Spark
2

With a 15-month ramp up time, Louise Vincent needed Zoho CRM to manage all her relationships from designing her products, producing them, to ultimately determining who would be her buyers.

Business: Natural Hero Ltd – High performance natural recovery products for sports and fitness.

The challenge: Managing parallel developments working with plant scientists, physiotherapists, and cosmetic specialists. Plus have to think about who will the business serve.

“It’s that juggle between moving that business forward and developing as a business whilst also keeping fairly on top of the key issues of the people you’re working with,” Vincent said.

They were looking for a solution that could handle their relations with trade, with suppliers, and with the outside world.…


Begin customer relations before your business is up and running

| By David Spark
1

Bernt Ruetzel is literally building a small business. It’s a rental home in Italy, an old rustic home called Bogata Roggio. As he’s waiting for permits to start building, Ruetzel has launched a website and began engaging with prospective customers.

Here’s the rundown:

Business: Vacation home in Italy, Bogata Roggio.

The challenge: Initiate customer relations before business begins operations. Add custom fields specific to the needs of his customers.

How discovered Zoho: Stumbled on Zoho at his large company that wanted to use a CRM solution just for their department. He began playing around with it and realized it would be perfect to use for his small business.

Competitive analysis of CRM tools: He looked at and compared many CRM products including Salesforce.com.…


Your contacts are the assets of your business – protect them

| By David Spark
1

Jody Johnson is the CEO of Action Coach in Miami, Florida. She needed a CRM solution not only for managing prospects but also for her work with her clients, business owners.

Business: Action Coach, Team Sage is a franchise member of a worldwide business coaching franchise with about 1,000 offices around the world. They help business owners fix their processes of time, team, and money.

The challenge: Keeping track and managing correspondence with all clients.

“The client and prospect base is the asset of most businesses. If you don’t have that documented somewhere that’s a huge asset that’s not accounted for in the business,” said Johnson.

How discovered Zoho: Learned about Zoho from the CEO of Action Coach of the Americas.…


Online CRM lets everyone have up-to-the-minute visibility into company wisdom

| By David Spark
1

For ten years Luis Gardolinski had been keeping tabs on his contacts. But it wasn’t easy. Managing them across his team and synchronizing them has always been a manual, delayed, and not always accessible process.

Business:

Luis Gardolinski is the CEO of Startrade, a company that builds software and equipment for logistics, specifically planning loads and new packages.

The Challenge:

Since 2001, Luis Gardolinksi always knew he needed some type of CRM solution. He spent so much time relying on paper and memory to manage clients and prospects.

Gardolinski’s first foray into contact management and CRM was the software package Act. While Act was useful, all the data was tied to a specific physical machine. In order to capture information in the company’s contact database, salespeople had to return to the office and recopy their day’s notes onto a computer that had Act installed.…


Do you adopt CRM or does CRM adopt you?

| By David Spark
1

As Philippe Bogard started growing his scientific consulting business, he began collecting thousands of leads. While he did a great job making first contact, he failed with the critical follow up. He struggled to find a solution to collect and manage those leads. He initially started with a Microsoft Access database, but he knew he needed a better solution.

Business:

Back in 2004, Philippe Bogard launched a consulting business, Proteomics Consult. Proteomics (check it out on Wikipedia) is the science of discovering proteins. If your genes are your body’s blueprint, then the proteins are the elements that travel across that blueprint.

The Challenge:

In the early days of his business, Bogard had only two major clients.…


The WSJ Interviews Sridhar Vembu

| By Arvind
2

At The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Jeremy Caplan has some good questions for Sridhar. Excerpts from the interview ‘Q&A: Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud‘:

Both Google and Microsoft have committed significant resources to building Web-based software. How can you compete?
The primary advantage Google and Microsoft have is their size and reach, which is a formidable advantage. Google’s product suite is limited to Mail & Office suite, while Zoho has a much broader product suite
targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. We integrate well with everyone, including with Google Apps.

Microsoft has formidable technology resources, but faces the economic challenge of transitioning their business model to the cloud, without sacrificing revenue in the process.


Sridhar Vembu on Mixergy

| By Arvind
2

Our CEO was interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

You can also view the interview and the transcript here . The related Hacker News thread is here .