Global water company sees sales expand and increase after switching to Zoho CRM

Founded in 1962, Amiad Water Systems has long been a leading global producer of automatic, self-cleaning water treatment and filtration solutions. From major irrigation systems, massive industrial and municipal installations to sturdy home landscaping filters, Amiad has created environmentally-sustainable solutions that provide various entities, companies, organizations and people in more than 80 countries with clean water.

Marina Steinberg and Shahar Nuriel, managers of Amiad's IT and Marketing departments, were both key members in changing the way Amiad managed customer relationships by implementing Zoho CRM.

The Business

Access to clean water is one of the world's greatest challenges - for drinking, industry and irrigation. For more than 50 years, Amiad has helped meet this vital need by providing outstanding filtration technology to industrial, municipal, and irrigation users around the world. Steinberg, Amiad's IT manager, began searching for a more cost-effective CRM system that fit their unique business and eventually decided on Zoho.

The Challenge

Having the sales team adopt the new product

Steinberg was impressed with Zoho’s user friendly interface, noting, "The screen is not overloaded with unnecessary details for the task being performed. Less is more which is better for us." According to Steinberg, Zoho's simpler interface allowed her to, "easily train people to take on the admin side of the CRM." The icing on the cake was that Zoho had a local representative to help her along the way.

After deciding to adopt Zoho CRM, Amiad had to train its employees on the new platform. Like with any change, there was some initial resistance to trying something new. Nuriel, head of the Marketing department, led the way to get everyone on board. He persuaded them to try Zoho by explaining that the new platform was chosen for their benefit, not the management's.

"Once the sales team realized that Zoho CRM helped them increase sales and close more deals, they were fully onboard." Nuriel said. He and the managers were pleased with the new platform because, "It helps all of us know what is going on with our business all over the world."

Implementing Zoho CRM

There's always a learning curve when Implementing a new application. However, with a little help from Zoho Partner Holistic CRM, Nuriel soon realized that implementing Zoho CRM wasn't as complex as he initially thought.

"We used a local integrator for the initial implementation data migration and training. Holistic already knew Zoho CRM inside and out and was a tremendous help with migrating our data over to Zoho and getting us up and running as quickly as possible. With their help and having a user friendly and intuitive system, by the end of the process, we found that we were able to be more and more independent."

Steinberg had a similar opinion on the implementation of Zoho CRM as well as Holistic.

“We brought in Holistic to assist in the data migration because we had a large volume of data, and they made our transition into getting up and running on Zoho CRM nearly seamless. If you keep an open mind you can become an expert in less than two months," she said. "The learning curve was very small."

Life after implementing Zoho CRM

"Our sales team finds it easier to use” Steinberg said. "The system delivers exactly what we need."

Using Zoho enabled the company to better understand its current situation Nuriel said. "We know our sales numbers and have a better way to predict future outcomes which has resulted in a considerable efficiency increase."

"Zoho CRM has allowed us to easily reach out to customers that we sold to in previous years and even the people we didn't end up selling to. Not every lead becomes a sale, however we can now go back and see exactly what happened and adjust our strategy for leads we lost."