Zoho CRM delivers 70% ROI and 100% increase in productivity to software company MicroCAD

The company

Established in 1987 and headquartered in Boston, MA, MicroCAD Training & Consulting is an Autodesk Gold Partner, Autodesk Authorized Training Center, and HP Gold Partner. For over 30 years, the company has helped its clients in the AEC and manufacturing industries to adopt new technologies, increase productivity, and meet project goals. Its services include consulting, project management, rendering and modeling services, Autodesk software and training courses, and HP plotter services and supplies.

MicroCAD works with clients at all stages of the project lifecycle to provide tailored, flexible, and effective solutions. It's proud to serve its 4,000 active customers from different parts of the United States and has an annual revenue of $25 million.

MicroCAD operates out of several offices in New York, New England, the West Coast, and the Mid-Atlantic region.

The challenge

The primary driver behind MicroCAD's search for a new solution was a need for a cloud-based solution that could integrate all the different applications used across the organization. MicroCAD had different tools for different processes which didn't communicate with each other and required a lot of manual effort—hampering the team's productivity and diverting their focus from primary business goals.

MicroCAD addressed its teams' various challenges by adopting Zoho One's bundle of applications. Sales process alignment and measuring ROI for marketing activities were the two most prominent challenges that Zoho CRM addressed.

"We were coming from a solution called Act!, which we used for several years. It had multiple limitations in terms of integration with APIs," says Agustin Fernandez, Founder & CEO at MicroCAD. "Today, integration is the backbone of our CRM and we have a very well-integrated system than what we had earlier."

Why Zoho?

Fernandez evaluated various options, such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, but finally moved ahead with Zoho CRM for its excellent integration capabilities with third-party applications that MicroCAD was already using. The company was also impressed by Zoho's cost per license, which was the lowest among all other options they looked at.

Today MicroCAD not only uses Zoho CRM, but also Zoho Desk, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Social, Zoho Workdrive, Zoho Analytics, SalesIQ, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Meetings, Zoho People, and Zoho Forms.

Implementation

MicroCAD switched from Act! to the Zoho One suite, which offered the business 50+ applications. They had the whole process running in parallel for a period, until finally they implemented it into the production environment. It took a month to make a complete switch and MicroCAD now has a 100% Zoho CRM adoption rate.

The solution

Managing lead flow

The sales process at MicroCAD starts with collecting leads from different sources, such as Google search, social media, events, Google ads, AdRoll, websites, and so on. All of these sources use Zoho Forms to collect prospects' data and push it to Zoho CRM. This integration automatically populates the prospect's data into Zoho CRM, which helps the sales team avoid the hassle of manually entering details; instead, they now have a centralized view of all prospect details coming from different sources.

Integrations and dashboards to measure ROI for different lead-generating sources

The marketing team at MicroCAD uses various sources to bring in a pool of leads for the business. The more sources they have, the more they need to measure every source's effectiveness and contribution to the business. The team's primary objective was to find a tool to measure the ROI of their various sources and to plan investments accordingly. After implementing Zoho One, MicroCAD adopted Zoho CRM to measure the effectiveness of these sources and eliminate the extra costs of using HubSpot.

Today, all lead-generating sources such as Google Accounts, social media, campaign models, and URLs are integrated with Zoho CRM. This enables the team to analyze the ROI of each source and plan their investments. They use reports and dashboards to keep a track of all the leads coming in from different sources and their conversion rates. Some of these dashboards include the number of leads converted into contacts from every source, the number of leads converted into deals won from every source, and the number of leads converted into deals lost from every source. All these reports are generated on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, and allow the team to stay on top of the numbers.

"I always follow up on the total number of leads that have been converted to contacts and closed-won and keep the conversion rate at my fingertips. Zoho CRM ensures that I have these numbers on a single console in just a few clicks," says Lorenza Martínez, Senior Marketing Manager at MicroCAD. "I now have the sales funnel for every lead source to identify the total number of leads, leads converted, deals won, and deals lost. This empowers us with the information required to measure the ROI for all these sources, and especially the ones for which we pay to analyze what is working and what is not."

Workflows and blueprints to streamline the sales process

Upon successful lead creation in Zoho CRM, an internal team member qualifies the lead and assigns it to a sales representative. Every follow-up detail is documented within the CRM to maintain a central repository of all customer data and to avoid dependencies on any individual sales rep.

After the first follow-up, the sales team sends quotes to prospects using the CPQ tool QuoteWerks, which is integrated with Zoho CRM. Once the quote is created, QuoteWerks creates a deal in Zoho CRM. If the customer accepts the quote, the deal automatically moves to the closed-won stage; if it's rejected, it moves to the closed-lost. All of these processes are automated using workflow rules and blueprints, which has enabled MicroCAD's team to build a seamless sales process with minimal manual effort. They also have different stages mapped within Zoho CRM, like active evaluation, discussion, closed lost, closed-won, needs to meet, and opportunity created. All these stages have various activities that sales reps need to perform, which are automatically assigned to them using workflows.

Once a deal is won, a contract is created in Zoho CRM and integrated with the vendor's portal. This integration helps by notifying sales reps of subscription failures and enabling them to plan their actions accordingly. They can also gauge the percentage of subscriptions lost to competition.

Alerts to enhance the follow-up process

MicroCAD usually deals with one-year or three-year contracts, and therefore needs to keep track of all these contracts and their renewals. Once a deal is closed, workflow rules create tasks for all necessary activities after-sales, pre-renewal, and on the renewal date.

Examples of these activities might be sending an email after the deal is closed-won with a welcome kit and all necessary information for a newly onboarded customer to get started, or a follow-up task to remind the customer about their renewal cycle. Alerts are created for sales reps when renewal contracts fail. This triggers the sales rep to take action and analyze the cause of the failure. All of these automatic scheduled actions help the sales team avoid missing any important follow-ups and enhance their productivity.

The MicroCAD team is proud to have achieved a 100% increase in productivity using Zoho CRM.

Customizable fields and reports for better visibility

MicroCAD's marketing team uses Zoho CRM to acquire higher-quality leads across their different sources. They have separate fields within the CRM, such as lead source (to identify the lead quality from different sources), email opt-out (to eliminate the lead from any email campaigns), click type, ad network, ad campaign, keywords, device type, and visit summary. These fields help the marketing team pull the necessary reports to analyze lead quality and plan their spending accordingly.

The integration of different lead sources into Zoho CRM provides the marketing team with a 360-degree view of customers' activities across different channels like social media, Google, external websites, and more. This has also enhanced the follow-up process by empowering marketing and sales with all the information required to strike meaningful conversations with leads.

Dashboards for better performance tracking

Zoho CRM has also empowered the team to track performance more effectively. Calls made by sales reps using Jive, as well as the entire email history of a lead, are all recorded and stored within Zoho CRM, which provides management with better visibility into everyone's performance. Dashboards help present this data to management in just a few clicks, enabling them to stay on top of developments, analyze the business's health, and evaluate the team's performance.

Templates for enhanced email communication

The marketing team at MicroCAD is a big fan of templates. They believe it's helped their sales team send much cleaner emails to customers—thereby making conversations more efficient—and that it's also enhanced their productivity by reducing time spent writing long emails. The open rate feature within templates enables the team to analyze which templates work best and to tweak them accordingly.

The team also uses templates to send mass emails using Zoho CRM. They believe that sending mass emails using the CRM is more targeted and personalized since the sender email addresses belong to respective sales reps—which also increases the open rate.

Enterprise support

MicroCAD has subscribed to Zoho's enterprise support plan and is glad to have made this decision. The plan provides 24x7 support for the 7 days of the week and also assigns a dedicated technical account manager.

"Zoho's enterprise support has a huge impact on creating a great experience for us," Martínez says. "Our dedicated point of contact has helped us sort things out quickly and efficiently. The team knows the answers to everything and has a very friendly approach to addressing all our needs. We are glad to have the premium support plan—a big thumbs up to this."

"We have found great support from Zoho's enterprise support service and we are glad we paid for it," Fernandez adds. "We are certain that the total cost of Zoho and its enterprise support is way less than any other tool."