During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Graham Dallas, business development manager of the ABL Group. Graham was responsible for the implementation of ABL Group's new CRM system.

ABL Group is the result of a 2020 merger of AqualisBraemar ASA and the LOC Group. It is a 400+ person global energy and marine consultancy that helps companies around the world transition toward offshore renewable energy sources, clean shipping, and sustainable marine practices.

Formerly Microsoft Dynamics users, ABL Group first began working with Zoho in 2021 via an implementation partner, and they collaborated on a design and build of a customized CRM solution for their business. Soon, the second phase of implementation will begin, which then includes integration with Oracle NetSuite. One of the main challenges facing ABL Group was the integration of two different businesses, one of them already using a "chunky" CRM solution and the other one not having a system.

if you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here.

The challenge to address was that ABL Group, also because of the recent merger has a lot of differing business structures that shall be supported via one single system. Luckily, the structures weren't necessarily complex - the business just has a lot of different requirements due to the different regions and lines of business.

ABL Group started with a small team of experienced persons who went into this implementation projects with open eyes and some ideas. They assembled a list of 6 candidates that they narrowed down into three with Zoho being the winner after a series of in-depth conversations and discovery sessions with the vendors and their implementation partners. The team members independently assessed the vendors and came to the same conclusion.

The main reasons for this decision have obviously been functional fit and a commercially very competitive offer. But, as importantly, ABL had a good feeling about Zoho's company culture and was able to quickly build a trust-based relationship with the implementation partner.

Although coming in with a clear understanding of how they do their business, this level led to taking a good look at how processes are modeled in Zoho to challenge the own understanding. Consequently, the implementation did not just force existing processes and procedures into the system but instead think about the "why". Why is ABL Group doing things as they are done? Are there better ways? Normally, there are.

The result was an adaptation on both sides, processes changed and the system itself was enhanced to fulfil all requirements. That way, and in constant exchange with the business users, a system that has a high adoption rate was stood up quickly, in spite of push-back from users with bad previous experiences. Key was the ability to easily and quickly adapt the system to requirements, with the ability to prove that things work for the users - and that better than what they are doing at the moment.

It is noteworthy that ABL Group concentrated on the users first, not on management!

 If you can measure it, you can improve it 

The next step then was reporting. Once the data was in the system and the system in use, it became possible to create meaningful reports, reports that actually help the users to track their opportunities and to be able to improve their status. This is what gives users that the system is working for them and is not just a tool to control them and to take "their" contacts and "their" connections away. Instead, it helps the users to perform sales as the team sport that it is.

Of course, management needs data for decision-making, too. This is achieved with real-time dashboards, something that wasn't possible with the old solutions. Instead of being confronted with PowerPoint presentations or spreadsheets, managers now have the ability to see live KPIs at a fingertip and to drill into the live data, to get the answers that they need.

 The biggest challenge? 

Introduction - or replacement of a CRM software is always a challenge, but what is the biggest one? Is it the remodeling of the processes, containing the implementation effort, or something else?

Consistent with what I hear from many other Zoho customers, it is the people. Graham says "I guess it's just people don't like change, I understand. The new way isn't like the way they do things. Another thing that I've seen before in previous companies when we've got integrated CRM systems is that there is a little bit of 'these are my contacts and these are my connections and these are the people I deal with' whereas a CRM system in its core is a collaborative effort and there's no secrets and everybody is open".

 So, what is next? 

After the project is before the project. This is particularly true in an agile project environment. Obviously, there is some continuous improvement. But then in general, it is about integrating Zoho with more business systems, in particular the Netsuite ERP and the web site for lead generation, which requires the activation of some marketing tools. An implementation of Zoho Desk will help streamlining the internal support. And having a Zoho CRM + subscription, there are many more apps that Graham is "dying to try".

 Anything Zoho doesn't deliver? 

We clearly see a raving customer. But is there anything that is amiss? The answer is clear: "I struggle to come up with anything that we haven't managed to get. We've come up with some crazy ideas. Can we do this, this and this? And the answer is usually yes. Or it's let's go have a think about it. And we'll consult with Zoho, have a chat and then usually a couple of days later we've got some suggestions what we can do. We haven't had to really compromise on anything and we've been quite demanding".

 My PoV and analysis 

Of course, ABL Group, like all the other customers I talked to during Zohoday 2022, have been reference customers. The replies to this question are amazingly similar, and need to be taken with a grain of salt. All the customers I talked to extended their implementation out from an existing scope and did not tap too deep into the ERP arena, if at all. Still, this is testament to the breadth and width of the functionality that is offered by Zoho. And this is even more interesting as Zoho's churn rate continues to fall from an already low level, while the number of used Zoho apps is going up. This means that Zoho managed to nail its target market pretty well. Add to that, that the customers chose Zoho after executing a software selection process that often included tier one vendors.

The combination of functional fit, knowledgeable implementation partners, very competitive pricing and a unique corporate culture is hard to beat.

During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Adi Mula, founder and CEO of Foodhub.

If you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here.

Similar to GrubHub and DoorDash, Foodhub allows residents of the UK, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia, the US and some more countries to order food to be delivered from a variety of local restaurants; unlike those other sites, Foodhub does not charge service fees. Foodhub currently has about 1,100 employees. Most of them are using Zoho products in one way or another and many use multiple Zoho products.

Foodhub started its Zoho journey with the goal of simplifying processes and to be able to provide every team with simple and easy to use tools that will help them do their jobs.  Originally, Foodhub worked with a set of interconnected, yet overly complicated applications. This journey started with implementing Zoho CRM because this was where the pain was biggest in this area. 

The sales teams in the various countries have different needs, yet the business needs them use a common foundation. The old solution did not support this. One of the problems that were caused by this was that Foodhub used huge Excel sheets to support its sales process. Besides the obvious complexity, this also caused a GDPR risk, as these sheets contained lots of personal data that could have easily be shared online.

Moving to Zoho CRM immediately solved this problem by enabling model processes that solved the needs of the different regions while implementing an adequate security and permission model.

Migrating to Zoho has caused Foodhub surprisingly few issues. The main reasons for this are that there is always good enough out of the box functionality that supports the business, in combination with a now rush implementation approach that rolls out new functionality in a gradual way instead of going for a big bang. Foodhub moves fast, yet in an iterative way, refining the implementation until it is in a shape that is good enough to take the next steps. In doing so, the team was able to overcome the natural change management challenge that every company faces: People do not want change.

This also helps Foodhub cover all bases. No one can think of everything beforehand, and then one can find needful features in the applications, too. Adi observes that "about the time you get to a certain stage halfway or even more through the implementation, you've covered most of the essential things". 

The third success factor is that Zoho is easy to implement and that, whenever there is a need for support, Zoho itself and a good implementation partner are very beneficial in the rare cases the internal team gets stuck or when speed needed to be prioritized higher.

Case in point is Foodhub's migration of all its 1,100 employees from GMail to Zoho Mail. This is an endeavor that is daunting at best and has the potential of seriously disrupting any business. Adi says "I worried about that. I thought it was going to go horribly wrong because it was a big task to move 1,100 people over. I was concerned, to day the least".

In the end, the migration went very smoothly, with the help of Zoho and the implementation partner. The biggest problem was making sure that all employees remembered their passwords. In Adi's assessment Zoho mail is not far from GMail; it essentially does everything that Google does, and he sees GMail as a leader. In his eyes, this migration pays certainly off for a bigger company that already has a Zoho subscription. Mail is also part of an integrated ecosystem. He doesn't need to leave mail to accomplish tasks in this ecosystem. Like, approving an expense report. That works right out of the mail. 

Similarly, Cliq, which in his eyes combines the best from Slack and Whatsapp.

All this sounds almost too good to be true. Foodhub is obviously a demanding, yet very happy client.

That means, I really needed to dig hard to learn about things that do not work for Foodhub. 

At the end of the day, there are a few topics - need to be. This is not surprising, as every software is a continuous work in progress and Zoho cannot be the one-for-all for everyone (yet?), even with the objective of becoming the operating system for businesses. And Zoho's core market is not the enterprise although the company certainly moves upmarket.

Adis biggest functional concern is currently the finance module. This is where he sees most upside for his own business. Currently looking at Zoho's subscription and invoicing functionalities, he sees that he "could do a lot more on the finance side". The modules are there, but in his opinion not yet mature enough to support a business with Foodhub's international footprint. But then again, Adi maintains that "they seem to be doing good on what they plan to release". The calendar. Same thing. In his eyes, "it needs a bit of work" but then this is already in progress with him getting a preview soon. 

Another bug bear is actually Zoho's conference solution. Why? Because Foodhub is a very distributed organization. And because it is not as good as Zoom This is quite a tall order to achieve. After all, Zoom is the industry gold standard. 

Lastly, Adi wishes to have more opportunities to talk to developers, product managers and fellow customers to learn and exchange information. While there are such events, they are still too far in between. 

I wouldn't be surprised if this topic is already on the roadmap, too.

During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Elie Katz, founder and CEO of National Retail Solutions, NRS.

if you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here.

NRS was founded in 2015 and has  since then grown its customer base to more than 17,000 retail stores across the United States. NRS is a part of IDT, a provider of communications and payment services to individuals and businesses. The business provides POS and payment processing software, focusing on small, independent retailers, who want to not only survive but also thrive in a big box environment.

The NRS POS system is built to help stores organize, attract customers and increase revenue; it includes a loyalty coupon program and other bells and whistles.

An important point is the NRS outside-in philosophy, which is defining its own success as a result of making its customers successful by being able to address their needs.

The challenge that Elie, his business, as well as the parent company, needed to support requires quite sophisticated own customer service and sales software; there is a widespread salesforce to be supported along with a good number of very different customers with disparate needs and service requests. The team learned early on that it needed a CRM system.

This system was originally supposed to be implemented on a well-known platform - that remains unnamed here. The reason being that it was already being implemented at another branch of IDT. This system needed many third party tools and consequently the implementation dragged along at considerable cost, without showing adequate progress nor success, although it was continuously worked upon. In essence, Elie and his team were not able to run their business adequately. 

Entrance Zoho, after doing a little own research, a then not so well-known vendor.

This was five years ago and, according to Elie, not an easy change to ask from his management although the other implementation still did not yield results for his business in spite of mounting bills. Being an intrapreneur, he took up the responsibility for his business and started with a point solution to support customer service. 

Since then, he has been on an ongoing journey to "zohomatize" his business, the first four years "playing catch up" with the existing needs and pain points, initially with the help of only one intern. In the meantime, NRS and IDT are able to leverage the breadth and width of Zoho's offering, with an internal team of 6 people, as opposed to working with an external consultancy.

For both, Zoho has become the vendor of choice for any issue to be addressed, either directly or via partner solutions or even custom development. Within five years, NRS and IDT have made Zoho the operating system of their businesses. All applications are either Zoho, or integrated with Zoho, be them internal applications, partner applications or custom applications. Although there are still a lot of custom solutions and integrations, Zoho is coming up with a Zoho solution to new requirements, or with a partner solution right out of their ecosystem. All of this, while keeping the cost reasonably low, even though there are more than 700 people using the system now - 300 salespeople and more than 400 independent distributors. In Elie's words: "I am very comfortable". 

What NRS and IDT have achieved is digitalize their business. The companies have removed all non digital customer-facing processes and moved all main processes to a Zoho backbone. This includes integrating a sophisticated custom internal accounting process. Another example of valuable integration and automation includes a voice bot that allows NRS to trigger different actions from making sure that issues got handled successfully, via incentivizing service employees via customer feedback, general customer satisfaction right through enabling cross-selling capabilities via simple four simple questions. Responses are routed to the appropriate Zoho system, tickets are created and routed as necessary to the sales and service teams. Employees can get rewarded via a gamified rewarding system that is based on the responses given by the customers. 

So far, the only requirement that could not yet be fulfilled is a commission handling that supports the different sales channels, which is something that NRS is told that Zoho is working on. The accounting is still custom and will likely stay custom. 

Asked for next steps, Elie maintains that as long as he continues to get the service levels that he experiences, he will continue to "zohomatize" his business. "Finding a cheap CRM is no good, right? If it's just a cheap CRM that doesn't address your needs, you need to do something else". He feels good with Zoho and will continue to address his needs one by one by collaboratively working with Zoho in order to make sure that his customers' needs are addressed optimally. He wants to continue to make sure that excellent customer service and care is given to every single customer and prospect. 

After spending two days in Austin, TX, attending the ZohoDay 2022, it is time for a little recap of this interesting event. 

We were 99 analysts and 24 customers and plenty of knowledgeable Zoho personnel. The incredible Sandra Lo and her team organized the event around open and transparent communication. So, there was plenty of access for us to customers and the Zoho team. 

Which was very important, as already the keynote session by founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu was quite hardcore. Vembu talked about how strategy and culture need to be one, how culture needs to be the root of strategy, and how Zoho implements this. The Zoho strategy lies on three main pillars

• Transnational localism, a unique concept that in its essence is about embedding a company into a local community by not only selling into it but also by investing into it. This investment is e.g., by offering high paying jobs in areas where these are scarce, by fostering local education, but also by own local sourcing including local materials and using sustainable practices when building. That way, these communities become self-reliant. Zoho first introduced this concept in 2020. In essence, Zoho sets up shop outside of centers, in rural areas, in a hub and spoke model. 
• Tightly integrated products that together form a powerful platform to run a complete business. This is counterintuitive to the thought of apps using a common platform to deliver their services.
• Privacy as a core part of all applications and services, born out of the idea that the need for free flow of data needs to be governed by privacy. 

This is a great strategy, and it is important that a CEO articulates it and that the executive team and the business fully support it, live it. Especially, since at least two of its parts are far from mainstream with transnational localism being the 800-pound gorilla. The cynic bunch that analysts are, it is even better if one can talk to customers and see some evidence.

Zoho delivered on both accounts; but let me start with the simpler parts of the strategy.

Tightly integrated business applications

Since its origin, Zoho is building applications using one single own stack; no acquisitions. This way, Zoho is able to build applications on a stable infrastructure and to reuse a lot of parts. A result is a pretty consistent user interface and then the ability to have a strong data integration. What this also allows for, is the ability to blur the boundaries between apps, or using a contemporary term, making them composable. This works with the help of the strong no code and low code abilities that Zoho offers. 

The idea of removing the boundaries between apps is similar to Microsoft’s strategy of exposing all apps from within MS Teams, therefore bringing them into one frame. As Raju Vegesna maintains, the “market is littered with features masquerading as products, and products masquerading as companies. Disappearing boundaries between apps is something we will increasingly see within our offerings”.

More short-term, and in line with the mantra of not being a costly input oneself, Zoho increasingly offers industry solutions, either built by Zoho, or built by Zoho partners.

Privacy at the core

Being a German, privacy is something that I value very much. 

So does Zoho. The company regards privacy as the foundation for integration and bases this on the realization that the need for privacy is a consequence of the need for data to flow across applications. True collaboration can only happen when privacy is upheld. Zoho is committed to its prospects’, customers’, employees’, and users’ privacy. All its applications and the complete corporate infrastructure, including an increasing number of own data centers are built having this in mind.  And there is even better news in the pipeline.

This does not mean that the software is unbreakable, still what sets Zoho apart is the commitment to privacy that is followed up by action.

Transnational localism

These are the times of businesses touting their corporate purpose, which is often not more than greenwashing or lip service.

Not in this case!

Zoho’s new US HQ is outside Austin, on a farm. And there is not only IT business going on there, but also actual farming by Zoho’s employees. As far as offices go, it is small, following the corporate concept of being distributed, but considering that it has 350 acres of land, there is some scope for becoming bigger without harassing the farm itself, as the farm continues to serve its purpose as a farm.

Zoho US relocated there from Pleasonton, CA. And, similarly, Zoho opened 59 of these hub-and-spoke offices in rural areas and smaller cities over the past two years. The company clearly walks the talk.

Part of the idea behind this concept is also that it reduces inequalities, which increases the community’s ability to grow, and with it, Zoho’s ability to grow. Another part is the extension of the thought that SaaS companies rely on costly inputs – data centers, education, real estate, energy, etc. – while their output – SaaS applications – is more and more commoditized. 

So far, the theory.

What do the customers say?

Now, in events like this, customers are selected. Which is fine. They, however, did not wear a muzzle or were elsewise prohibited from giving honest answers or asking executives tough questions in the plenum.

Still, they are a very happy bunch. They are getting what they need. The degree of happiness is immense, and the data proves it. Zoho has an attrition rate that is extremely low (we were presented with the numbers but cannot relay them – so you need to trust me). This attrition rate is compounded by a year-over-year growth of 38 percent with now more than 80 million global users (unpaid and paid).

All of them were staggered by the breadth of the offering with them being offered solutions for challenges that they encountered running Zoho – out of the existing solution stack, oftentimes already licensed by them.

What all of them consistently said is that there is a lot of value for their money, that pricing is very reasonable and that they were able to cut cost by moving other services to Zoho. 

Now, there has been criticism, too, which started from some applications not being equal to the category leaders or it sometimes being difficult to get support, if one isn’t networked in the organization, the latter being something that I have also heard from other customers. Surprisingly, given the breadth and width of Zoho’s offerings, there was the occasional word of missing functionality.

However, according to Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram, and Raju Vegesna, these are addressed and will improve.

But, does it pay out?

As Zoho co-founder Tony Thomas explained me, CEO Sridhar Vembu is a man who has many grand ideas but is also a “very hard-nosed business guy, very conservative about running the business and, you know, preparing for a rainy day as well. So the company has always been run very conservatively”. He continues “So at some level taking care of business, making sure we are profitable and, you know, live to fight another day has been the ethos from the start and so that continues. Even now we run the company very conservatively, despite doing too many things, as I often say. But the, you know, making sure that the Tony: The macroeconomics for the company works has been his obsession for the being. So, he always looks long term. What is the strategic business advantage we can bring in any market, we go into?”.

And Zoho has been profitable every single year since the company was founded, and the company is growing strongly.

My Point of View

With being in place for about two years now, it may be a little early to judge the success of the transnational localism strategy, but what is for sure is that Zoho is about as far away from the currently dominant variety of predatory capitalism as one can be – being a capitalist.

Instead, Zoho successfully runs a stakeholder capitalism that bases on the ideas of not being part of the costly input and that the community is stronger than the individuum. In a business sense this means that it is better to not squeeze out the customers and that, if every part of the ecosystem contributes to the ecosystem, success will be the natural consequence.

Privacy is the third point that supports this. If there is no need to gather data, don’t gather it. And don’t sell it. This builds trust, and trust is one of the biggest assets that a software vendor can have.

Last, but not least, I am a suite guy. I am convinced that a family of apps that works seamlessly, is vastly superior to a pureplay best-of-breed strategy. The cost of implementing and maintaining a family of applications – a suite – is significantly smaller than the cost of running best-of-breed. There is a reason that not only Zoho follows this strategy.

The proof for this lies in the numbers: More than 80 million users, 26 years of profitability since inception, a year-over-year growth of 38 percent in a challenging environment.

This, as well as the loyalty that the company showed to customers and employees alike, is mainly possible because the company is not buying growth on cost of profitability and not depending on the financial markets. It, therefore, is in control of its own fate.

I embrace this strategy, fully support it and hope that more businesses achieve this level of wisdom.