What it does: Hey, it’s CRM. It’s got all the features you’d expect in a world-class CRM product, including marekting campaigns, lead management, sales pipeline, forecasts, etc. You can track customers email correspondence, synchronizing CRM contacts with your email system, and even complete the post-sales activities with an integrated inventory management system. You can even analyze sales and marketing trends with various reports and dashboards.
How it helps you sell: Well, it’s CRM, so it doesn’t really help you sell. But it does take care of the busy work of tracking your pipeline and keeping all your accounts moving forward. And while many CRM packages have some kind of trial usage, Zoho is the only one (of which I am aware) that allows you to have three full licenses for free, before hitting you up for the full product.
What’s the downside: A major reason so many companies are gravitating to salesforce.com is the hundreds of force.com applications that (more or less) plug right into that environment. While Zoho has some powerful tools in its extensive toolkit, it’s probably never going to be anywhere as huge as salesforce.com when it comes to powerful add-on programs.
Why it’s free: They’re hoping you’ll sign up all your sales team (and hoping that it’s more than 3 people).
