Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition @ SMB Price
ERP / CRM, Enterprise Software, SMB / SME, SaaS April 16th, 2008
This morning Zoho announced the Enterprise Edition of their CRM product. The key updates are:
- Profiles for managing CRM module-level permissions
- Roles for modeling organizational hierarchy and setting up data sharing rules
- Groups for sharing the data among various departments
- Field-level security for controlling the access rights (View or Edit) of fields in CRM modules
- Automatically update Stock information once the Purchase Order is approved
- Find and Merge the duplicate records in Vendors module
- Convert Quote to Sales Order or Invoice in a single click
- Convert Sales Order to Invoice in a single click
- Add account information automatically while creating quotes/orders/invoices from the potentials
The key in “going enterprise” is no doubt the new security/permissioning scheme. That said, Zoho CRM has already been functionally rich even before today’s upgrade. I’ve repeatedly stated that supporting business processes like Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing Zoho really has a mini-ERP system, under the disguise of the CRM label.
. In fact let’s just stop here for a minute.
Today’s announcement aside, I still consider Zoho’s primary focus to be the small business (SMB) market. As for CRM, it really comes down to the classic breadth vs. depth of functionality question. Zoho CRM’s breadth, along with the other productivity applications allows many SMB’s to use it as their single, only business application. The market leader in SaaS CRM, Salesforce.com clearly supports fewer business processes, offering more depth in each – probably a better fit for larger enterprises which likely run several applications anyway. This matrix provides an overview of Zoho CRM vs. Salesforce CRM Group and Professional Editions. (click on pic for detail)
Having done a functional comparison, a quick look at pricing demonstrates why Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu called Salesforce.com still very expensive:
No wonder Larry Dignan at ZDNet declares “Zoho aims to poach Salesforce.com customers.” But Larry (and Marc), you ain’t seen nothing yet… just wait till Zoho comes out with a Salesforce.com importer 
.
Clearly, Salesforce.com does keep a close eye on Zoho, otherwise why would they spend money on the Google Adword “Zoho CRM“?
But again, reality check: Salesforce.com does own the Enterprise space. For now.
Finally, a word about integration. After all, Zoho is known for their almost endless range of products, they should work together… Currently Zoho Sheet, the spreadsheet application is fully integrated with CRM – most data can be edited either inside CRM or in the spreadsheet format that many business users are more familiar with.
Zoho plans to integrate Writer, their word processor, Mail (still in private beta) as well as some of the business applications, namely recently released Invoice and People. When all that’s done, Zoho will have a more complete offering than two industry giants, Salesforce.com and Google together. I can’t wait…
(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. In fact with a pound of salt. Don’t believe a single word of mine about Zoho products: go ahead and check them out yourself).
Related posts: Zoho Blogs, CenterNetworks, VentureBeat, CNET News.com, Mashable!, Between the Lines, Web Worker Daily, Irregular Enterprise, InformationWeek,
Tags: crm, Enterprise Software, erp, On-Demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, small business software, smb, sme, zoho
Zoli Erdos
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Hi,
Nice article. I regularly follow your website and I always get good information from you and ERP site.
Thank you.
I am very familiar with Zoho and must say it is a great product. However, if you are looking for a simple solution to deploy and adopt with a greater focus on managing the sales process then SalesPush.com is one to look at – http://www.salespush.com
The object of CRM depends on the user. Senior company management want comprehensive sales financial reporting and to this end Salesforce.com is a winner (these are after all the people who buy CRM!). However sales people want a simple way to log and track their activities beyond simple task management. In this area Salesforce.com is a loser! Salesforce should have been called SalesForecasting. I am not familar with Zoho so cannot comment here.
Middle Sales Management want a solution which they can use to monitor:
1. Sales Relationship Progression (first call, meeting, presentation, proposal…)
2. Sales Performance Goals (qualtity of meetings, phone calls based on Relationship categories)
3. Sales Forecast
Most CRM targets point 3 only. A product we have reciently been trialing is http:\\www.micontacts.com which is great for sales people who want to log all activities and great for sales management who want to monitor thoes activities. However, whilst it offers basic forecasting it is not as comprehensive as Salesforce.
A key point is it is really cheap to use…worth a look if you are considering CRM to boost sales activity levels / performance.
I like ZohoCRM, and hope it ends my 5 year search for a CRM I can live with.
But I’m not going to give up using Google Apps, as my staff is just getting used to that the Suite.
So as a user I’d be pleased if Zoho opens up an API and plays together with G-Apps. That was I can rely Zoho for CRM needs, and life go on just as before with Apps, Gmail etc for us..
Ashant Chalasani