Recently, while on the ground in Austin, Texas, attending ZohoDay 2026, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Vaibhav Dani, the CEO of Map Communications. In the enterprise software ecosystem, we talk endlessly about digital transformation, but it is always refreshing to ground those lofty concepts in reality by speaking directly with the leaders navigating these complex implementations.

Our conversation touched on a surprisingly common, yet notoriously difficult challenge: harmonizing a homegrown operational tech stack with off-the-shelf enterprise software. Map Communications’ journey with the Zoho ecosystem provides a masterclass in pragmatic architecture, the age-old "buy versus build" dilemma, and the foundational data hygiene required to actually make artificial intelligence work.

TL;DR  

If you do not want to read this, here’s the full length video interview.

Everybody else, please read on.

The Business Context: Bespoke Service at Scale  

To understand their technology strategy, you first have to understand their business. Map Communications is a nationwide, employee-owned (ESOP) virtual receptionist and bespoke answering service operating across the US, Canada, and the UK. They serve a wide array of clients, ranging from legal firms and SMBs to large enterprises in various industries.

Because their core service is highly specialized, Map relies on its own proprietary, homegrown software lineup to manage day-to-day operations and real-time answering services. However, when it comes to managing the customer lifecycle from the moment a prospect lands on their website to the execution of contracts and ongoing support, they rely on the Zoho suite.

The Age-Old Dilemma: Buy vs. Build  

As businesses grow and their processes add complexity, leadership is inevitably faced with a choice: do we build custom modules into our core software or do we buy an off-the-shelf solution?

Dani approaches this with a highly disciplined decision framework. Map evaluated their requirements and realized that building tools to manage vendor and customer contracts or constructing a native quoting tool that would expose their internal APIs simply wasn't a valuable use of their development capacity.

Instead, they followed the Pareto principle and applied an 80/20 rule. As Dani rightly pointed out, "If 80 percent of the requirements are met, we'll be fine because no system would have 100 percent software requirements". Chasing those elusive final 20 percent now often results in over-engineered, heavily customized systems that become a nightmare to manage and support later. By accepting the solid 80 percent requirements fit that tools like Zoho Contracts and Zoho CRM offered, Map Communications avoids unnecessary technical debt while keeping their internal developers focused on their core, proprietary service offerings, the very ones that differentiate Map Communications.

Decluttering the Stack and the "Evil" of Copy-Paste  

One of my core theses as an industry analyst and consultant is that the "copy and paste" of data is the root of all evil, well, at least much of it, in enterprise software. Dani wholeheartedly agrees. When data is manually moved or fragmented across multiple systems, automations break, billing mishaps occur, and the customer experience suffers.

Still, it is often necessary,

Map Communications deliberately architected a separation between their real-time operations and their CRM environment. They utilize Zoho Data Bridge to move data smoothly into Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, and Zoho Analytics asynchronously, ensuring they don't burden their live, day-to-day answering systems with heavy real-time external integration calls.

Furthermore, they are looking to Zoho Social to centralize their marketing technology, aggregating Google Ads, LinkedIn profiles, and Trustpilot reviews into a single pane of glass. The goal is clear: declutter the system. By minimizing the number of distinct data silos, Map establishes an authoritative data source, a single source of truth.

This isn't just about clean reporting. As Dani wisely noted, the highly anticipated "agentic AI" that every vendor is currently hyping is practically useless without properly governed, centralized data. If your AI doesn't know which system holds the truth, it cannot act effectively on your behalf.

Knowing When to Ask for Help  

Another trait of a mature organization is knowing when to raise a hand and ask for help. Map Communications’ journey with Zoho began around 2021, and they initially worked directly with Zoho's professional services teams, who worked tirelessly across time zones to pull off a complex legacy migration.

However, as they acquired more businesses and faced tighter integration timelines, they didn't hesitate to bring in specialized external implementation partners, like Workflow Academy, to accelerate the process.

As a consultant myself, I always appreciate a leader who recognizes the value of an outside perspective. External partners bring cross-platform experience. They have seen migrations from Salesforce, Zendesk, or Freshdesk, and can help organizations avoid costly architectural mistakes early on. At the end of the day, this is mostly cheaper than running into a sequence of snafus. The key, according to Dani, is ensuring that the vendor provides thorough documentation and cross-training so the internal team isn't left in the dark when it's time for the next iteration.

Past the Honeymoon Stage: Looking to the Future  

Map Communications is well past the "honeymoon stage" with their CRM vendor, entering that mature, long-term marriage phase where continuous improvement is the name of the game. And so far, this marriage seems to be a happy one.

But no software relationship is perfect. When asked for the one missing feature he desperately wants to get from Zoho, Dani didn't hesitate: a unified single sign-on that allows C-suite executives to toggle seamlessly between their multiple, distinct Zoho instances without having to constantly log in and out.

Consider the pressure publicly applied, Zoho!

Ultimately, Map Communications proves that a successful CRM strategy isn't about buying the most expensive system on the market. It’s about rigorous data governance, pragmatic vendor selection, avoiding scope creep, and relentlessly focusing on communicating value to the customer.

Three Key Takeaways for Pragmatic Tech Leaders  

As we wrap up this insightful conversation, a few core themes stand out that any organization evaluating their software architecture should take to heart.

Embrace the 80/20 Rule: Chasing a system that perfectly fulfills 100 percent of your business requirements will lead to over-engineering, scope creep, and bloated budgets. If an off-the-shelf solution meets 80 percent of your needs, accept it, work around the remaining 20 percent, and avoid building costly, complex custom systems on top of it.

Clean Data Precedes AI: The industry is still not stopping to buzz about agentic AI, but as Dani correctly highlighted, AI is completely dependent on having an authoritative, decluttered data source, a single source of truth. Eliminating manual workarounds because copy-pasting of data across systems is truly evil, and harmonizing your core tech stack are absolute prerequisites for any future AI success.

Demand Knowledge Transfer from Partners: Recognizing when you need external help for complex software migrations is a sign of mature leadership. It is a strength, not a weakness. However, when you do bring in outside consultants or vendor implementation teams, you must mandate thorough documentation and cross-training. Your internal team needs to be fully empowered to manage, fix, and iteratively improve the system long after the consultants have rolled off the project.I am already looking forward to checking back in with Dani in the course of the next year to see how Map Communication’s preparations for agentic AI going forward and eventually help the company.

During ZohoDay26, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down and talking CRM with Julie Lloyd from Acme Brick in beautiful Austin, Texas,. Naturally, the topic of the day was Acme Brick’s fascinating journey into the Zoho ecosystem.

As a CRM analyst and consultant, I've seen countless software deployments crash and burn because organizations focus entirely on the technology rather than the people actually using it. That is why talking with Julie was such a breath of fresh air; her focus is entirely on the human element of Acme Brick’s digital transformation. For those who aren't familiar, Acme Brick isn't just any company; they are the largest US-owned manufacturer of brick. They deal in a wide gamut of materials, including manufactured block, stone, tile, and various other wall cladding. It is a sizeable operation with around 1,700 employees spread across 13 states.

This coming April, Acme Brick is celebrating a its 135th birthday. When a company with that much history decides to overhaul its CRM technology, you know there’s a good story behind it. Even more so, if it is a system replacement story, Julie has been with Acme Brick for two years, and what keeps her up at night is CRM training and ensuring user adoption.

TL;DR

If you do not want to read, here’s the full video interview.

For everyone else, read on.

Having said all this, let's dive into why they made the switch and how they are making it work this time.

The Square Peg, Round Hole CRM Disaster

Before migrating to Zoho, Acme Brick used another CRM system. We won't name names here, but in spite of it coming from a highly reputable vendor, it was a very clunky implementation. Julie described it as a "square peg, round hole" situation. While the tool was a powerful one, it simply did not match their specific business needs and therefore suffered from poor user adoption.

Why? Because it was incredibly click-heavy. A sales rep might have to click 27 times just to input some data or view a specific field. That is simply not tenable. You cannot ask busy sales professionals to spend their precious time working a complicated system. They have better things to do than inputting data while not getting much out of it. Ultimately, the goal of a CRM system is transparency and accountability. Management needs to see what quotes are out there so they can adjust manufacturing or stocking speeds accordingly. But you won't get that transparency if the reps refuse to touch the software.

The Three Traits That Make a CRM a Treat

In my experience, systems either enforce behavior or encourage it. As Julie rightly pointed out, nobody likes to be forced, although imo there is something to be said against using a reasonable carrot and stick approach. She outlined three essential traits that turned their CRM rollout from a nightmare into a treat.

Customizability: Acme Brick is not a tech company; their sales are deeply relational and heavily focused on account management rather than a rigid, step-by-step process. The CRM had to adapt to their relationship-building style, not the other way around.

Intuitive Design: They have highly seasoned reps. Some who have been selling brick at Acme for 35 years or more. While some of them are tech-savvy, others are rather paper-based and cautious about adopting new technology. The Zoho interface won them over because, as Julie said, if you can order from Amazon, you can point and click your way through Zoho.

Management Buy-in: This one is an absolute must. From the executive VP all the way down, management has bought into the system. They are leading discussions, sending messages directly within the tool, and are pulling their own reports instead of demanding standalone spreadsheets from their teams.

Tuning Into Radio Station WIIFM (What's In It For Me?)

Many CRM implementations fail because they are designed to exclusively benefit management. When that happens, not only seasoned salespeople immediately tune into their favorite radio station: WIIFM (what's in it for me?).

Julie’s philosophy here is incredibly pragmatic. A CRM shouldn't just be a strict mandate where reps are threatened with, "If it's not in the CRM, you don't get paid". She actually believes reps shouldn't waste their time tracking tiny, insignificant deals that turn into an administrative time suck. Instead, the real value of the CRM is preventing important details from falling through the cracks. It saves reps from spending 20 minutes hunting through a physical notebook for a three-week-old detail. With Zoho, they can send emails directly from the tool, keeping all correspondence cleanly logged under the relevant opportunity, which is a clear time-saver.

A True IT Partnership

When selecting Zoho from a crowded market, cost was certainly a factor, but a major differentiator was the ability to work directly with Zoho's Enterprise Business Solutions (EBS) team. Acme’s IT department had a bad taste in its mouth from their previous CRM, having dealt with three different implementation partners who had no "skin in the game" and left them with a "take it or leave it" implementation.

With Zoho, the team that implemented Acme’s system is the exact same team providing daily support. Julie noted that they are yet to hear the word "no" from Zoho yet; instead, they get invitations to be beta testers, or "guinea pigs". Currently, they are beta-testing the Graph API integration for Microsoft Outlook. They've also successfully integrated Power BI and industry-specific permitting services that handle commercial and residential builds.

Crawl Before You Run

The system is still very young; Acme Brick is only about two or three months in. They are very much in the "crawl" phase of a "crawl, walk, run" strategy. Julie and two IT staff members serve as the system admins. Julie is happily able to make some system changes herself, like updating drop-down menus, without constantly relying on IT. This shortens turnaround times and has a positive impact on user happiness and adoption.

Looking ahead, Acme is evaluating the Zoho Marketing module. The goal is to capture leads directly from their brick.com website and seamlessly import them into the CRM without incurring massive new implementation costs.

The Honeymoon Phase

Like any relationship, vendor-buyer relationships are much like a marriage; you hope they last a long time. Right now, Acme Brick and Zoho are still in the honeymoon phase. I pushed Julie to tell me the system's biggest flaw or what they didn't get from Zoho to give us a real challenge to discuss.

Her answer? She simply hasn't found the weak link yet. While I always hope for a little dramatic friction to analyze, her confidence that Zoho will handle any future bumps in the road smoothly is unwavering and speaks volumes. As I joked at the end of our chat, hallucinations are for LLMs, not for CRM analysts. I'll take her honest, positive experience at face value and do not doubt it, looking at my own experience with Zoho.

Three Learnings for CRM Success

Looking back at my conversation with Julie, there are three universal lessons any organization should apply to their CRM strategy.

User Adoption Trumps Raw Power: It does not matter how robust a system is or how great the reputation of its vendor is, if your sales team refuses to use it. Acme Brick learned the hard way that a "click-heavy" platform built for a prescriptive sales process is a recipe for failure in a relationship-driven business. A tool must be highly customizable and as intuitive as ordering from Amazon to truly stick.

Always Tune Into "WIIFM": A CRM cannot simply be a mandate or a surveillance tool for management. To win over the users, you have to prove it makes their lives easier. Like preventing vital deal details from falling through the cracks and eliminating 20-minute searches for old notebook scribbles.

True Partnership Beats Transactional Implementation: The difference between a mere vendor and a true partner is ongoing accountability. By working with an implementation team that has "skin in the game" and remains on board for daily support, Acme Brick successfully avoided the frustrating "take it or leave it" trap that plagues so many software rollouts.

During the recent ZohoDay 2025, I had the pleasure of talking to Jaroslaw Pietraszko, CIO for IFFCO Group, about what IFFCO is doing with Zoho, why, and what the outcomes of their Zoho implementation are.

IFFCO is a privately held multinational company that is active in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector that also has some beauty business and is active in packaging and transportation. The company has its headquarters in Dubai, UAE and has operations in 50+ countries on five continents. The company has more than fifteen thousand employees.

Due to its distributed nature and also multiple ERP systems in the back end, IFFCO – and in particular also IFFCO’s employees – suffered from slow, inconsistent and regularly manual expense management process. This also caused a policy adherence and compliance problem, as reporting was virtually impossible. Only two countries used an Intranet based digital process that still was cumbersome due to the company’s matrix organization. “It was completely manual process. So just imagine that someone from the one category of the businesses has some marketing spend in Indonesia. Line manager sometimes is not aware because it's a matrix reporting. They need to exchange multiple emails between the Indonesia then the finance and the potential marketing from UAE to get this approval and that you can proceed and claim this expense. So, it was very inefficient process. It could take between two to three weeks to get this something approved.”

So, there was very clearly a need for a streamlined solution that could be rolled out globally and that ultimately could cover travel, expenses, and petty cash transactions.

Here you can watch the full conversation with Jarek.

IFFCO ultimately chose Zoho Expense because of its easy-to-use user interface, its adaptability and ability to integrate into the company’s backend systems and Zoho’s motivation to involve itself. With IFFCO being an early enterprise customer, Zoho showed a strong interest in making the project successful.

The initial implementation with a focus on travel and employee expenses happened in the UAE and took around three months. It was followed by a six-month roll-out into the other countries. Due to their higher complexity, petty cash processes were added at a later stage.

The whole process was supported by formulating a new expense management policy that, with some localization, is applicable worldwide. It was a cross-functional project with involvement of HR, finance, and IT. As a rare positive of the pandemic, Covid 19 became an unexpected catalyst for the rollout. It accelerated adoption, facilitated a natural transition to digital processes, and provided a smoother initial implementation phase due to reduced travel volumes.

Overall, the implementation process went pretty smooth. The main challenges were less of technical nature but rather the change management itself plus data accuracy. According to Jarek, “Now the rollout was not the technical challenge; it was change management challenge because at the same time we were introducing the new policy, which sometimes had to be localized.”

Still, some technical challenges, mainly on the interface side, needed to be overcome as well. “We had a bit of hiccups at the beginning with the interfaces to the ERP whenever we are talking about the mainly sending the Pos for through the creation of the Pos and then sending this information to the travel agency but yeah after some time we stabilized it and the inter vendor and inter SI cooperation worked smooth as well”.

However, the main hurdle was and is an operational one: data accuracy in the HR system, as the expense system depends on it. Jarek maintains that “the biggest challenge even which we are facing today is to keep the data updated in the in the primary HR system so if the people are for example shifting between or they are changing the grade whatever is happening with them it should reflect in SuccessFactors as quickly as possible because if Zoho doesn't know this because it's not entered anywhere then the people used to come okay it went for the approval to the to the wrong person.”

But what about outcomes?

Implementing a central expense tool led to significant time and effort savings due to a high degree of automation. The effort went down from half an hour to about two minutes while the collection schedule of the shared service went away totally. “Now just to understand also the benefits even for UAE the people used to for example I'm getting back from the travel. I take my bills; I scan one by one; I'm sending them to my mailbox. Then I need to open the new folder. I need to save each of them and renaming at that point of time from the scan to specific bill, I don't know, taxi, food, whatever. Then I had to open this expense. I had to itemize my expenses, attaching the right expenses, the right attachments, print the report after submission, clap all this together, and put that into the cabinet. And every two weeks, the shared services used to collect that, and only then the reimbursement was happening. Nowadays the people used to travel, they’re taking the photos on the spot on the go when they are in travel, and when they reach the, you know, the home location, they just mark this, this, this, this against this trip. Thank you. So, you do everything in an electronic format. So, reduction even for the business expense got from half an hour to two minutes.”

This results in much faster reimbursements with its obvious impact on employee satisfaction, which is something that Jarek is quite passionate about. “So, this is the massive benefit, and we have to also keep in mind that when the people used to spend their own money, we are not holding them right now for two weeks or something like that. When they claim and it's approved, then everything afterwards happens automatically. The booking in the downstream system happens automatically. The request for to the bank for the payment reimbursement happens automatically. When the confirmation of the reimbursement comes to the one of our ERPs, we are also sending this information back to Zoho. So, the people who are claiming, they don't have to be users in one of those ERPs. They use Expense, and they have a full visibility what's happening.”

In addition, there is better compliance “obviously when you don't have that in a digital format, how you can ensure that the policy is deployed, how that the particular country is compliant”.

The necessary harmonization of the spend categories brought better data visibility into the process. Spend categories are held in Zoho Expense, which also reduces the complexity of the ERP interfaces. This, quite naturally, led to the use of Zoho Analytics, which helps in identifying spending patterns.

The success of the project has brought it considerable internal recognition. “Zoho Expense has been, this implementation was cross functional effort between the HR, finance, it was the project which was identified as the biggest innovation delivered in 21/22, I think for IFFCO group as general”.

Key takeaways

IFFCOs transition from a manual to a globally harmonized process with Zoho Expense resulted in a significantly reduced user effort and a dramatically reduced overall processing time.

The user-friendly system and automated processes that allow for easy compliance and fast reimbursements should have a positive impact on employee satisfaction and it improves productivity.

Implementing Zoho Expense increased IFFCOs ability to deploy and enforce company-wide expense policies while the digital process enables better monitoring and control of expenses for all parties.

During ZohoDay2025 I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Udit Pahwa, CIO of Blue Star Ltd. Blue Star is a nearly 80-year-old company, based in India, which is a leader in cooling solutions for both the residential and commercial market. The company offers a variety of cooling products, including deep freezers, air conditioners, and chillers. Solutions are provided through direct sales, channel sales, or a combination of both.

Blue Star went through a series of five CRM proof of concepts, evaluations and implementation attempts with limited success before settling on Zoho CRM. Blue Star certainly has been a “burnt child” at that time.

The main reason for Blue Star deciding for going with Zoho CRM is that Blue Star did not want to go for what Pahwa calls a canned solution. Zoho offered the willingness and ability to co-create a solution that is tailored to Blue Star’s needs. “They're ready to tailor it for us. That was a big advantage” he says.

Before embarking into this sixth implementation, Blue Star performed what Pahwa calls an introspection to find out why there was no adoption but, in fact, resistance. He says that “what we came to know is any CRM for a sales guy is looked upon as moral policing”.

This is not terribly uncommon and can be addressed. Blue Star chose to work with a comprehensive set of three levers to drive adoption.

Here you can watch the full conversation with Udit Pahwa,

The company started with executive sponsorship and a top-down approach in a division that had what Pahwa calls a “visionary leader who was also a technology enthusiast. This leader set a goal to eliminate spreadsheets and to only use a digital platform, which helped drive user adoption of Zoho CRM within that division.” This sent the clear message that the implementation is not yet another implementation that doesn’t matter but that it is important for the company. In addition, this strategy facilitates doing a further roll-out on the back of a successful implementation (or limits the losses in case of a failure).

Second, Blue Star answered the important question “what is in it for me” that the sales reps have. The sales teams’ concerns were mitigated by explaining and later showing how unproductive time would be reduced by the CRM via eliminating spreadsheets and significantly simplifying visit reports. This way, sales reps spend less time with administrative parts and instead can do more of what they really want – spend time in the field with their customers. “So, no more filling out of spreadsheets, no more creation of visit reports, uh all the manual stuff which they used to get into. We said you don't need to do part of it will be done on by the app and part of it you will have to do it on the app, and it will format everything for a review.”

The sales teams seem to have understood and believed this. What also helped was that the new system was no more referred to as a CRM system but as a “sales organizer”. This contributed to positioning the system as a helper instead of a monitoring tool.

“So I think they realized that as we are growing their unproductive workload is going to grow even further and here is a tool which will help me reduce my unproductive time so that I have more time to spend in the market with the customer and I don't have to worry about all the administrative tasks which I need to do in the back end.”

Instead, the system digitalized a good part of the workload. The system minimizes the need for input into a visit report to five or six structured fields, automates the summarization, reporting and analysis, helping both, the sales reps and back-office staff who are relieved of the cumbersome consolidation of reports that came in via Excel spreadsheets. In addition, this enables the system to draft a route plan for the sales reps, facilitating their planning. In Pahwa’s words “that took out a sizable chunk of admin work for the users as well as the supporting staff who were attached to the users”. And this is also where Blue Star sees the way ahead with the sales organizer. Next steps include the evaluation of AI powered speech to text technologies to further reduce efforts. Instead of typing, sales reps will then be able to dictate visit summaries etc. This input then shall be converted to text and then automatically populate the CRM.

Of course, users have to pay a price for this, which is mandatory use of the system. Managers won’t accept reports in the form of spreadsheets anymore and require that all pertinent data is entered into the sales organizer. Basically, the approach is that “if it ain’t in the system, it doesn’t exist”. This again is facilitated by offering all sales reps and managers personalized dashboards that give real-time insight into budget vs. actual sales, also thanks to an integration into the SAP ERP system.

One could say that this is a kind of a carrot and stick approach, however one with a considerably sized carrot and a fairly small, yet effective, stick. Especially since Blue Star plans to make work with the system even easier and more beneficial for the sales reps.

The result? Success. “… this worked well and we had near 100% adoption with that business division so much so that their pipeline of leads I think went up by about 35% and they were able to attract a larger business you know under their fold because for us in the in the commercial air conditioning segment the more leads you have the more chances are for the conversion and growth of business. So that worked well for them.”

This, in turn, caused the other divisions to get on board, or as Pahwa says “When this was a success in one business division it started having a rub-off effect across the organization and as we speak today the entire sales organization is live and 100% adopting the my sales organizer which is the Zoho CRM.”

In summary, Blue Star worked with a smart combination of decisions that turned out to be a winning strategy to achieve the goal of 100% user adoption and to drive business through it.

• With Zoho CRM, Blue Star chose a flexible tool.
• With Zoho, Blue Star found a partner that was willing to co-create a solution with them.
• Blue Star promised and delivered significant value for the sales reps and not only for their managers.
• Blue Star moved away from the term CRM, which was a burnt and positioned the tool as a helper, naming it sales organizer.
• There is executive buy in to the solution with not only sales reps being mandated to use it but also managers and executives wanting to use a system.

ZohoDay 2025 offered the possibility for some good conversations with Zoho enterprise customers about their journey with Zoho. Another in-depth conversation I had during this event was with Adrian Castellanos of Selectra.

Selectra is a French company that was founded in 2007. It specializes in helping customers, mainly consumers, compare and move between energy providers. From this segment, the company has expanded into other segments, with the mission to make the managing of utility bills simpler, cheaper, and greener. The company has more than 2,000 employees and is active in 17 countries across Europe, APAC and America.

As Selectra’s business model is highly digital and fast moving, it requires strong, ideally real-time analytics capabilities to provide its services. Due to operating in different countries and different verticals, reporting processes have been based on Microsoft Excel, with these Excels differing across countries and even across verticals.

Castellanos says that Selectra had “3 different countries, each one with several verticals. And the reporting was Excel. We had Excel for everything. Each department had their own Excels, their own reports. And you had managers spending two, three hours each week to update all their reporting. If they had to create a new one, they could spend one week doing only that. People that were more valuable doing their actual managers roles or if they were working with interns. Okay, it was the intern. But the interns need to learn the real work and not just the reporting. So, we require something. Hey, let's automatize this. We are losing too much time. We are losing uh work hours uh each week just to keep up and it's not even that good because at the end you do it once a week.”

In short, Selectra urgently required an analytics solution to automate the reporting requirements.

Here, you can watch the complete conversation with Adrian.

Selectra investigated a number of possible solutions including Power BI, Tableau and Metabase. Being a Zoho CRM customer the company ultimately settled on Zoho Analytics as it is well integrated and offers an easy-to-understand UI. In Castellanos words, “We had different options PowerBI, Tableau; we were already using a little bit of Metabase the open-source BI tool. The engineers love it in the company, but it requires a lot of knowledge, and we choose Zoho for two reasons. First, the native integration with CRM, which has been our CRM since 2015 and was where the big majority of our data was stored. Well, the having a native integration with it made it great. It was one headache less and making transition really fast and implementation super-fast. And the second one was that the UI is not simple, but easy to understand. Drag and drop. Take it, put it, you have it everything.”

The positive working relationship with Zoho helped to make this decision, too. “We have always had the feeling that they hear our feedback, and they implement solutions for that, or in case they couldn't implement it because maybe it was too specific or whatever. At least they were interested in looking for workarounds and other options.”

Although the integration with Zoho CRM made the initial implementation easy and fast, Selectra encountered and overcame a number of issues during and after the implementation project. It was far from a slam dunk. Specifically, the replication of the CRM data into Zoho Analytics and the recreation of the existing reports took considerable time, which partly had to do with a lack of data standardization. This lack of standards became apparent during the recreation of the reports, when the team found out that different countries and verticals measured KPIs differently, which led to inconsistencies in the reporting. “When I started migrating reports and getting the external reports and trying to replicate them into Zoho, I failed terribly doing that because I was not matching the same data that those reports were providing and I realized that that was just because we didn't have a standard, we didn't have a standardization of KPIs and how to measure things, and each vertical each country was measuring in their own way. We had to actively establish the standard.”

Of course, this also led to trust issues, in addition to resistance to change. Overcoming them took some effort for training and documentation and, most of all, transparency and continuous communication.

The biggest problem emerged after about a year. With increasing reporting requirements, it became clear that the CRM data structures didn’t give the necessary granularity of data. “And what happened afterwards, like one year after, is that no one in the company was happy with Zoho. It was not providing the data that they required. We realized that our CRM data structure was really bare bones, and we needed something more. So, we went through this process of transformation; we are still in that process of transformation in some verticals because it's really difficult. It's a big project.”

Lastly, the increased use of Zoho Analytics showed that the management of the solution became an issue. With approximately 150 dashboards with between three and twenty different reports, it became difficult to maintain control over the workspace. This has been addressed with Zoho and is being solved.

The outcomes

Zoho Analytics is well in use now, in spite of its initial and ongoing challenges. The time to create new reports has gone down considerably and Selectra achieved a near-time reporting. This allows for faster and better decision making.

Due to the initial scope of the project, Selectra also gained an additional benefit due to the need of KPI standardization across regions. Zoho Analytics has become the single source of truth for Selectra.

Key takeaways

Selectra successfully transferred its reporting requirements from Excel to Zoho Analytics. Thanks to its native integration into Zoho CRM, the initial setup went fast.

It is important to plan and prepare the setup of an analytics solution very carefully, to ensure company-wide definitions of KPIs.

Analytics is only as good as the underlying data. An analytics project has an impact on the source systems. Increasing reporting requirements can make it necessary to have more complex source data structures.

Change management and user training are key activities. Constant communication, documentation, and user involvement are important for project success.

Zoho is well-known as a technology vendor for the SMB market. The company has products that support the whole range from single proprietors to larger companies. This range in itself is remarkable. For some time now, the company is diligently working on moving upmarket and to also support enterprises. This is not in the least, as with a growing customer base, more and more existing customers grow into the enterprise segment.

The transition from SMB to enterprise is far from trivial. Sales models change, messaging, consulting approaches, support infrastructure, even the demand for the size and structure of the ecosystem are different in the enterprise sector.

So, how does Zoho fare? To find out, I had a conversation with Parl Johnson, “Chief Nerd” at Nuvia Smiles. You can find our complete conversation on YouTube.

Nuvia Smiles is a dental implant company and currently has 1,500 Zoho seats. The company has more than 30 locations across the United States. Its specialty is to provide a 24-hour turnaround time to get permanent teeth into the patient’s mouth. This way, they do not have to wait long periods of time to get dental replacements. This requires a very rigorous process and having a lab at every location. Decision making is highly decentralized to support this fast process. The challenge with this degree of decentralization is that there are many disconnected applications and with that also very decentralized data. Nuvia Smiles identified 80 different applications with a scope of consolidation across the 30 locations. While this initially facilitates fast growth, it can become a liability once a certain company size has been reached. Applications and especially data become too siloed to be helpful anymore. Sooner or later, every company needs to establish a central governance framework to be able to ensure compliance and coordinated growth, even the ability to work effectively, or  negotiate favorable prices – in summary, to leverage the economies of scale that being a large company offers.

This need for consolidation across a variety of different applications is what brought Nuvia Smiles to Zoho, after looking at Salesforce and finding that it didn’t meet Nuvia Smile’s requirements or fit into the company’s budget.

The broad implementation scope and the need for fast results that Nuvia Smiles looked at, made it important to work with a partner. This is where a good ecosystem with different partners that have different skill sets – and the possibility to identify them – comes into the picture. Nuvia Smiles identified its first partner during a regional user group event and subsequently another one that could help out with more specialized knowledge via the partner marketplace.

One way to achieve the first successes fast is a focus on data and analytics. It didn’t take Nuvia Smiles long to see first benefits. In the words of Parl Johnson: “I would say it's because of Zoho Analytics and as soon as we started feeding some key metrics into Zoho Analytics, getting results was almost immediate from an analytics perspective. So, we got some benefit out of that right out of the gate and then some of the other benefits were bringing in some less important data, I guess, into Zoho where we can play around with it, where it had previously just been in spreadsheets or other things. And so, you know, we kind of picked off the lowest hanging fruits right out of the gate.”

How to go on from there? One thing that surely is important beyond measure is including the users. Says Johnson “I would say our first attempt at core a process was an absolute failure, and it was largely related to that. the users was a big failure on our part because we came in with a development mentality. We were using an agile methodology. We were using sprint cycles and we were developing but we were developing to the software we were trying to replace, instead of to the actual user experience. We were so focused on the technical parts though that we ended up failing miserably on the user experience.” The team learned from the experience and very successfully started to migrate and consolidate patient processes and the internal communications platform from Slack to Cliq. The latter he considers a big win “because Cliq has a lot more HIPAA-compliance relevant elements to it that helps us be HIPAA compliant in all of our conversations.”

OK, but how about integration? In significant projects and especially in bigger companies, new software finds a lot of legacy software that is needed to perform business processes. While Zoho offers integration and workflow tools, moving away from legacy integrations fast is not always possible. “We knew right off that we needed to have some element of control in the middle between Zoho and many of the apps that we're using. And so, we went ahead and decided we were going to invest in at least a cloud service that would be in charge of doing all that handshaking where it's necessary. Sometimes there are some data that's just simple enough we can just stick it into Zoho, and we're done with it. But a lot of the baggage that came with some of the old systems are things like Zapier and you know "zapping" some data into Zoho and then zapping some data back and there is a lot of moving parts and we're trying to figure out how to migrate those into workflows or Flow itself so we can get off that platform .”

This, in turn, might require quite some documentation and support. Documentation is readily available, but sometimes confusing. Support initially ran into some hiccups but improved as well. Both strike me as ubiquitous challenges across all vendors.

My analysis and point of view

Given all this, one can say that Zoho is well on the way to be a strong enterprise player. For sure, there are things that can be improved, like documentation or the support infrastructure. But then, this is nothing unusual and a challenge that every contender has as well. Is this an excuse? Certainly not! And, judging by what we hear from Nuvia Smiles, Zoho is actively addressing weaknesses, which is also in line with the principles that Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu laid out during the recent Zoholics event in Austin:

• Invest into a full product portfolio with breadth and depth
• Offer attractive bundles that have deep value
• Invest into exceptional service and support
• Improve interoperability with more prebuilt integrations
• Get close to the customer with a strong local partner ecosystem

From a Nuvia Smiles perspective, it appears that Zoho offers a portfolio with more than sufficient breadth and depth, with attractive bundles and a strong local partner ecosystem. Given, that Nuvia Smiles opted for investing into what Parl names “middleman software”, there appears to be scope for additional prebuilt integrations and flows. The other topic that initially seems to have been a cause of frustration for Nuvia Smiles is support. This improved with the growth of Nuvia Smiles’ Zoho footprint. This is a mixed message, as Zoho is still predominantly an SMB player.

So, back to the original question: How does Zoho fare on its way to be a strong player in the enterprise market?

As measured by the own aspirations and the Nuvia Smiles experience, the company is on a good way. Some principles show a high degree of maturity, others are addressed. Something that Parl did not talk about, but which is worthwhile looking at, is the value of the combination of product (bundles) and implementation effort with its consulting rates. I do not say that SIs overcharge – none that I know does – but bigger implementation projects can cause high efforts and cost. These can increase the time to value for customers considerably. This is certainly a dilemma. Still, it is in the best interest of Zoho and its implementation partners, to find a solution out of it. Preconfigured (industry) bundles and so-called consulting solutions may be part of this way. The solution for the deep value challenge may very well lie in the partner ecosystem principle.

In summary: No one is perfect, but it seems that Zoho fares better than many and is certainly ready for enterprise prime time.

About two years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Elie Katz of National Retail Solutions, NRS, about how he and his team “zohotized” NRS. During this year’s ZohoDay24, I was happy enough to continue this conversation with Rene Selemi, director of retail operations at IDT Corporation, the parent corporation of NRS. IDT is a global provider of communications and payment services, headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The company employs around 1,700 people.

You prefer to watch the interview? You can do it right from here.

IDT started to use Zoho around 7 years ago for its internal startup NRS. The scope was customer care with the objective of enabling the business to respond to quick and effectively to customers. IDT and NRS originally settled on Salesforce but after using it for about a year decided to move away in favor of Zoho as it was a better fit and faster to implement. Says Selemi “We had Salesforce for a while for about a year, but at the end we decided to go away from Salesforce and actually implemented Zoho. It was a better fit it was quick to implement. That was number one. We did it when minimum resources and we did it very fast.” This is very much in line with what Elie Katz told me two years ago: “the other implementation still did not yield results for his business in spite of mounting bills”. The two main criteria that IDT worked and works on, are functional fit and cost.

What started as a point solution has become the backbone for NRS since then and now covers processes “from the application process and approval all the way down to the credit application approval as well. The Next Step will be the implementation on the operation side and the last one is the selection process, shipping the equipment sending the equipment to the customers.”

As one can imagine, not every step of the implementation process went without a glitch. Interestingly, the biggest ones were not related to the implementation team nor technology or implementation process but found in the fourth category: people. Process and technology knowledge was readily available via the previous implementation and some very knowledgeable developer. Rene maintains that “some of the knowledge that I got from trying to implement Salesforce actually helped me when it came to Zoho. I think that one of the key things for you to actually Implement any CRM is organization, you have to be well organized, you have to be able, you have to know what you want to do, what you want to build; you want to know what is the goal”. He continues that “one of the biggest challenges was again people. They never used CRM before, so the users were a challenge, you know.” According to him, the solution to this challenge is threefold: Making things simple, so that people get comfortable fast, training, and key users who help optimizing the implemented solution. In IDT’s case, these key users have been recruited from the NRS business. “The NRS team became ambassadors for Zoho.”

Running it all out of one system helps NRS create effective and efficient processes for both, the sales, and the fulfillment organizations. But IDT is not yet fully there. NRS is “zohotized” and now the idea is to “zohotize” the complete company. “We want basically a one-pager, you know, people to go to one place, all the APIs, everything else connected behind it, whatever it's not ready in Zoho, but basically have people you know in one place because it makes it simple.”

So, everything is hunky-dory?

Not quite. As I said and wrote in other places, a vendor-client-partnership is sometimes like a marriage. There are difficulties. The one thing that IDT really wishes to get would be an improved mobile app that better fits their needs. “There's combination of a lot of different things, you know, offline, improvement of the field of the page, you know, something as simple as that, you know, we're doing something called single sign-on. We want to be able to fit it right on the on the actual application”.

My point of view

This is a prime example for the values of long-term vendor-buyer relations where both parties invest and of tightly integrated suites.

Tightly integrated suites that are built on one single stack allow for fast and easy implementation cycles with small teams. This way the business achieves fast time to value and can concentrate on outcomes rather than managing a complicated integration process. Especially in times of SaaS, a short time to value becomes increasingly important, also for the vendors. They do not offer it at their own peril – as the case of IDT moving away from one vendor (which admittedly has a great product) to another one that proved to have a much faster return on investment.

The mutual investment is shown by Zoho’s by three things. First, by reasonable subscriptions that are combined with smart bundles. This, especially the latter, is something that many vendors can do, and do. Second, there is a significant investment into the implementation process. Other vendors offer a discount on the subscription fee for some time. Third, by listening to customers and make customer requirements part of their roadmap. This, again, is something that most vendors do. And, not to be misunderstood, it is extremely hard to do. No vendor can satisfy all customers at the same time.

I just love the term of “zohotizing” the business. It is a direct translation of Zoho positioning the prime bundle Zoho One as the “operating system for the business”. It also shows an emotional bonding of IDT personnel to Zoho. And, as I said and wrote before, tying positive emotions to one’s brand is extremely powerful.  Positive emotions create a lock in. A lock in that is not based on erecting exit barriers (or entry barriers for competitors) but on the feeling and knowledge that one is in the right partnership. A good part of creating this good feeling is to co-invest into the implementation instead of temporarily subsidizing the subscription fee.

Or in brief: It is better to make customers want to stay with a vendor instead of them feeling forced to stay because leaving prohibitively “expensive”.

Here we have a customer that wants to stay.

As part of my series of customer interviews, I recently had the chance of speaking with Keith Cooper, vice president of customer experience at Bergen Logistics.

Bergen Logistics is a global third party logistics provider, based in North Bergen, New Jersey. It primarily serves the luxury fashion and home goods segments but is available in other verticals, too. In Keith’s words “When you order something from a company's website online, the order comes to us. We pull the order, we pack the order, we ship the order, and it arrives to you in most cases the next day.”

If you prefer to watch the interview, you can do so here.

Bergen Logistics started to search for a CRM solution with the original focus on the-lead-to-order process. The trigger was the owner of the company inquiring for the status of a lead that he had given to sales a while ago – because the prospect was inquiring. At that time, “there was a belief that it was okay to take three or four days to respond to a client when they wanted to talk to us because we're very bespoke; the salespeople sort of have this view that they would wait.” Not only did this risk the company reputation but additionally, available data showed that 40 percent of the prospects didn’t want to wait that long. They were trying to resolve a business issue. This translated into loss of business.

The company did research and narrowed down the competition to Salesforce and Zoho. They did an in-depth analysis and went for Zoho. “Between Zoho and Salesforce when I looked at the value proposition primarily the cost and what does one do that the other doesn't do, Zoho CRM did everything Salesforce did at a better value proposition.”

After the implementation of Zoho CRM, Bergen Logistics had the ability to measure and optimize its sales process. The company gained “the ability to timestamp all of the activities of a lead through its journey into qualifying as an opportunity. And then once it's qualified as an opportunity looking at getting the proposals done getting the pricing done and then going to closing so we were able to start measuring the time between stages.”

The result is a far faster and more defined sales process that quickly confirmed the working theory that a fast sales process in fact does matter. “Within two years, we tripled our sales production or annual sales production from the sales team and have a much more defined sales process.”

In addition, being able to measure the process enables Bergen Logistics to identify problems with the sales process itself to fix them and to coach the sales team towards becoming more successful. As Keith says, “having those KPIs allows us to help triage if there's a problem we can see where leads are if they're leaking out or if we have one particular salesperson who's not performing, we can see within the within the funnel where their performance misses. And then coach to that activity.”

Since then, Bergen Logistics added considerably to this footprint, using Desk including a customer facing self-service portal, Analytics, Forms and Social, with a phone integration and an ABM solution being in the works. But what is interesting for Keith Cooper is the broad scope of Zoho One that offers the ability to consolidate when and as needed. “You know, it's not what that's not one we're using yet but a lot of times it's it's knowing that we have these applications available that can replace what somebody's using should we need to or should we want to there's some other things that are more firmly embedded and might take a little longer to get them forked out.”

But how difficult was the implementation?

Bergen has a DIY attitude, so they did a lot on their own.

Which brought them quite far, although, unsurprisingly, this also led to making mistakes – which is not a problem in itself. Implementing a system is always also a learning process and then it is interesting to see how much of a partner the vendor is. Says Cooper “And so, we made mistakes along the way, there were things that we can figure out, things that we built wrong the first time and the support team was always very helpful in helping us understand why the Frankenstein that we built was never going to walk and that if we made these changes how we could get it off the ground.”

It turned out that some of the “troubles” were caused by the license type. Even here, the Zoho team showed flexibility although at one point it was obviously necessary to step up to the license that covered Bergen’s requirements.

It also turned out that at some point the required knowledge was too much to be covered by the in-house team. For Bergen, this point is reached where CRM and Desk shall be integrated into the phone system.

In the meantime, Bergen went up to 250 seats of Zoho One and sees considerable exposure to Elanders Group, its parent company, due to the success of its implementation, so that the ‘regional’ implementation becomes a group-wide one.

Asked about complaints, there aren’t really any.

My point of view

Many find it surprising to hear (or read) a statement as bold as “Zoho CRM did everything Salesforce did at a better value proposition”, in particular the first half of it. After all, Salesforce is the undisputed 800-pound gorilla in the CRM game. However, this impressively reconfirms a point that I make for quite some time, namely that the capabilities of Zoho CRM are somewhat of a better kept secret, especially outside the core SMB market. It is not surprising that Zoho has a very interesting price point; this has to do with the company’s overall philosophy of not pursuing an extractive form of capitalism and of considering its success as a consequence of making the surrounding ecosystem – and with that, the customers – successful.

Integration is usually one of the biggest cost drivers in an enterprise software project. Well-engineered suites offer fast and easy integrations between its various subsystems or applications, ideally even work on the same data without moving it back and forth.

The possibility to get quite far with an implementation without the help of an implementation partner is not something that is possible with all systems that offer a similarly broad and rich set of capabilities. That Bergen requires SI help only at a stage where the phone system shall be integrated into CRM and Desk shows how integration in a suite should be and how easy configuration and customization can and should work.

Lastly, we see the validation of how Zoho does provide customer value through guided choice and flexibility.

Bergen moved up from a single solution to Zoho One, while not leveraging all of the 50+ applications this subscription contains, although now, of course, paying for the premier product. Instead, Bergen Logistics chooses to implement additional applications on a need base and to mix and match with other applications, e.g., the G-Suite. This shows that the full subscription is advantageous to the menu approach.

These are quite some points that more enterprise vendors could have a look at.

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers.

Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the company could actually create a triple-win situation, benefitting the employees, customers, and the company. also following the top management’s motto “if you take care of your people, and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself.” The thought behind this is “that providing a mechanism for people to be more efficient, because everybody wants to come to work and do a good job. Nobody wants to do mundane tasks that don't add value. And so, if you can provide a mechanism to do that, it enables our employees to then take better care of our customers.”

Being tasked with implementing it, Melissa started off with a software selection process. This process included integration into CRM, a feature analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. At the end of this process, Tidal Basin selected Zoho Projects “because the cost of the system and the value and the tools that we needed really did win out against the alternative options.”

 The implementation was fairly small and, most of all, painless, although the company chose to implement its own way of doing project management, based on principles that are applicable across different sizes of projects, allowing their tailoring according to the needs of the project by means of templates. Tidal Basin initially saw a limited adoption, as they did not immediately enforce the use but went for an organic approach. Still, since there is some adoption, the company sees better visibility into and tracking of projects. In Melissa’s word, what Tidal Basin also sees is “that our PMs, are spending less time trying to aggregate information when they're having their meetings; they're easily able to go in and kind of follow up on the things that, you know, should have been done between the last meeting and this one. And then the people who are doing those tasks can also be a collaborator. And they're providing those updates. So, you can also eliminate unnecessary meetings, if both parties know that the work has been done; and there's no need for a follow up. There's also the mechanism, being able to tag things and tag people, if you have questions. That kind of helps facilitate communication about a specific task within a project that you don't necessarily have if you, know, you're managing via email, for lack of a better way of saying it.”

The success of the Zoho Projects implementation led to the adoption of additional products, particularly Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk, to fulfill requirements of public programs. An example that Melissa Gordon brings, is “grant programs require a mechanism for the general public to notify the grantee if there is the potential for fraud, waste, and abuse. And so, we were able to take Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk to build out a reporting form for fraud, waste, and abuse, tie it to a help desk, that we were then able to manage the monitoring and review of those reports that were coming in, and then also aggregate and report that back to the client as part of one of our deliverables.”

From here on, it was a natural extension to also use Zoho Desk for employee support. It, since has been rolled out to nearly every department. This, in combination with the embedded analytics provides the visibility that is necessary to improve the employee experience further by not only enabling fast and efficient problem resolution but, moreover, giving the opportunity to identify address areas that can get systematically improved. “You are only as good as your customer remembers” says Ms. Gordon.

And this customer may very well be your own employee! And helping the employee ultimately benefits the customer, is a belief at Tidal Basin.

Being asked what’s next, Ms. Gordon elaborates that Tidal Basin now has a good number of Zoho app in use and people see the value. So, they are preparing for a full-fledged roll out of Zoho One.

Still, a vendor-buyer relationship is comparable to a marriage. There is no eternal honeymoon. Asked for where she sees scope for improvement, she mentions two. Documentation is not always up to the speed of delivery of new functionality. This is something that gets mostly covered by Zoho’s support organization. However, Ms. Gordon regards this as a price to pay for the pace of innovation that she sees. The second one would be the process of becoming a partner. Tidal Basin sees Zoho as an opportunity to provide even more value to their clients and feels that it is somewhat hard to become a partner. Everything else is pretty much business as usual, there is always one or another feature or improvement request, and Tidal Basins regularly sees solutions to them appear in the software.

My point of view

This is an interesting journey of a company that has an outside-in view on its processes and apparently some out-of-the norm values, which I mean in a very positive way. You do not hear statements like “if you take care of your people and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself” or “you are only as good as your customer remembers” – and that they are not lip service.

It also shows the power of a highly integrated suite of independent applications that can get bundled. It enables the implementation of various applications to improve employee- and customer experience at the customers’ own pace. And this, even though not every piece of the software seems to work seamlessly with the other ones.

Still, companies see the value offered by being able to flexibly choose what they need and want and to add on when they realize the value of their current implementation.

May more vendors pursue this path.

The other day, I had a look at my blog, checking the articles that resonated with you most in 2023.

Today, I'd like to do the same for my YouTube channel, CRMKonvos. Shameless plug - any new subscriber is cordially welcomed - it means a lot to us. "Us" means my colleagues Ralf Korb and Marshall Lager, and I. We run this channel as a joint endeavor.

CRMKonvos are all about fun and friendly one hour conversations with one or more live expert guest about a topic in the wider area of - you guessed correctly - CRM. Of course, this includes related topics, e.g., it is virtually impossible to talk CRM or CX without touching AI. They are streamed to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X. In addition, we actively encourage our audience to engage with our guest and us. Again, any new subscriber is more than appreciated. If I am not totally off, you can subscribe by just clicking this link.

But now, what are the CRMKonvos that resonated most with you? Which ones received the most views? 

Of course, we do not want to get the beans spilled immediately, so let's start with the fifth place.

Culture is the most enduring form of capital.

This is a conversation I had with Zoho's Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram about why a great corporate culture makes all the difference, how it contributes to success and why and how Zoho's culture is different from that of most other companies.

The fourth place is taken by an ISP's journey with Zoho One.

This is an interview with Amit Rai, Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber. Amit has overseen the implementation of Zoho One at Tata Fiber right from its beginning. He relates the interesting journey the company had and also relays obstacles that he needed to overcome. Moving up the leaderboard, we reach the bronze medalist.

Ulaa, Zoho's new privacy oriented browser is about why a privacy oriented browser is important, especially for businesses.

Tejas Gadhia of Zoho tells us about Ulaa and what sets this browser apart from the pack and gives us an idea of what lies ahead. Ulaa itself is a Chromium based browser that Zoho "de-Googled". If you want to venture a guess how long it took to remove all ET-like behavior ("calling home") from the Chromium engine, add a comment.

Moving on to the runner up. This video is different from the first three in two respects. First, it is a 2021 video. Second, it does not involve Zoho. We asked "What is customer journey orchestration"? Ray Gerber gave us a succinct answer.

This is an important question and who is in a better position to answer it than Ray Gerber, the mastermind behind Thunderhead (n.b., Thunderhead got acquired by Medallia in early 2022 and Ray moved on to Qualtrics).

Which leaves us with the CRMKonvo that caught your interest most in 2023. It is an atypical one. Atypical in the sense that it is not directly about business but about how and why a business set up a school in a very rural area in southern India. We spoke with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam about why doing good is good for business.

Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam is a school established by Zoho in a rural area near Tenkasi. Due to its wild success, it also serves Zoho as a template for further education centers.

This was a fascinating conversation with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam, diving into the school's origin, mission, future, and how it benefits the community as well as Zoho.

To close, let's briefly give a honorable mention to our videos that came up place six to ten:

Adi Mula, CEO of Foodhub relays his journey with Zoho  during ZohoDay 2022. Yes, another video from an earlier year makes it into the top ten.

Prashanth V K talks about how Zoho steadily moves upmarket from the SMB- into the enterprise market and what their strategy is.

You think that AI companies are only founded in the USA (and India and China)? AI made in Germany, winning hedgehog style tells how a German company leverages AI to create a real-time predictive customer view.

In the state of SaaS adoption in the current economy, we discuss how SaaS companies can and do thrive in a post Covid economy that is also plagued by inflation with two SaaS executives.

Last but not least, we assembled a panel of AR pros to discuss how great analyst relations should look like. And by pros, I mean PROs. With Sarita Kincaid, Sandy Lo, Trish Harman and Ludovic Leforestier we got some of the best talking out of the book.

All in all, you guys seem to have a healthy interest in Zoho.

Thanks again for viewing our videos and let me know via the comments if there are other CRM/CX related topics that you would like us to cover.

All the best for 2024.