Marketing conglomerate implements Zoho CRM to accommodate rapid growth and expansion

The company

PÜR Design is a standout in the realm of online marketing companies, driven by genuine care for and dedication to its clients. With a focus on custom business setup packages and advanced marketing strategies, clients receive personalized assistance from consulting specialists throughout their journey. For over a decade, PÜR Design has crafted countless user-friendly websites across various niches. Their consulting team, renowned for its charisma and expertise, offers tailored guidance to meet individual business needs. With a commitment to excellence, PÜR Design leads the industry with highly trained specialists, ensuring clients' success in the competitive online landscape.

The challenge

Until 2019, PÜR Design's parent company, Top Tier Marketing Academy, operated with a modest team of approximately seven individuals. During this period, their operational processes relied heavily on Google Sheets—a functional albeit simplistic method of tracking and managing client data and fulfillment procedures.

As their clientele expanded significantly over time—reaching a daily influx of 20 to 30 clients, in fact—the limitations of their initial systems became evident. Problems emerged: Clients weren't getting served properly and important sales and operational details were slipping through the cracks because the team—not specialized in administrative tasks—struggled to manage transference of data between systems.

The root of these issues lay in the company's rapid expansion. To efficiently handle their ever-growing workload and clientele, they knew they needed a better, more organized approach.

The solution

The right system, the wrong process

Dane Chebert, the Director at PÜR Design, was hired to help the company with their growing pains. Since he had worked with Zoho services in previous companies, he already had great ideas on how they could overcome this challenge.

Before Chebert came into the picture, Top Tier Marketing Academy, had already been using Zoho CRM to store client information in the Leads module—the sales team being the primary users. Then, their process involved transferring new client data from Zoho CRM to a shared sheet for fulfillment services—a manual process that left too much room for human error and led to customer complaints and financial consequences. Complications arose as different sales forces operated with independent Zoho accounts, each necessitating its own sheet. This multi-Zoho, multi-sheet approach became unwieldy, prompting the team to reevaluate and overhaul their system, says Rudi Kaiser, Chief of Operations, Launchpad Group, LLC - one of PÜR Design's sister companies.

Building success with Zoho's partner

In order to restructure their process and create a more cohesive and streamlined workflow that minimizes errors, enhances efficiency, and accommodates the expansion of their sales force, Kaiser and Chebert reached out to United Parts of Chicago, a Zoho Advanced Partner. They worked together with the partner to establish a unified CRM system for all the companies under Top Tier Marketing Academy, enabling them to work independently while maintaining data confidentiality. Although there's separation between their respective databases, fulfillment teams needed visibility into each one to track projects and monitor them thoroughly to prevent any from slipping through the cracks during fulfillment.

Efficient fulfillment achieved through automations and integrations

The company sources leads from a third-party firm and manually imports them into Zoho CRM. Successfully nurtured leads are then converted into contacts, and eventually deals. Subsequently, each deal proceeds through a nurturing pipeline, ultimately culminating in either a closed-won or closed-lost status. The automation component of this process is designed to swiftly transfer all pertinent information—including product and contact details—to Monday.com, a platform that serves as the primary pipeline for a dedicated fulfillment team consisting of 50 designers and coaches. Their workflow involves using Monday.com to manage clients, guide them through projects, and meticulously track the progress of their work.

After a deal is marked as closed, the system initiates marketing emails and text campaigns through Zoho Flow. If the client opts in for regular text messages, a six-week text campaign follows.The integration with Monday.com ensures that the team receives client data promptly and can then kickstart their projects or products. Project-related communications are initiated once the deal achieves a closed-won status.

Going the extra mile to tailor specific-needs

The team at United Parts of Chicago also designed a custom, advanced PHP-based application to ingest leads from third-party sources and import them into Zoho CRM.

This application resolves the conflicts between duplicate leads and contacts within the Leads and Contacts modules by employing a sophisticated deal record analysis and preventing the ingestion of new leads when contacts already exist within the system and have a first sale deal in any stage other than closed/lost.

This importer replaces the standard record import procedure, eliminating the tedious work of preparing the source files and controlling the import results. Another advantage of the custom importer is that it uses ManageEngine's Identity360 to control access to the importer directly from the Zoho One admin panel—greatly simplifying user management at the organizational level.

Streamlining communication and data management

One of the most impactful changes during their transition from the old system to the current setup was the incorporation of Zoho's messaging platform, Cliq, says Rudi Kaiser. In contrast to their previous third-party application, Cliq facilitates efficient data management via its seamless integration with Zoho CRM, which enables users to post notes directly into a contact record in the CRM from within the messaging platform. The ability to search for text across the entire chat system has proven instrumental in quickly accessing client information. Users can also effortlessly manage channel members and groups within the CRM, eliminating the need to switch between platforms.

Centralized customer insights

Integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Desk, has not only given PÜR Design's clients a stronger voice, but also provided valuable insights into their concerns. Additionally, it enables them to measure account managers' effectiveness, identify training needs, and address specific client pain points. For instance, these insights brought to light the need for after-care support and led the company to introduce targeted webinars on TrainerCentral to address client needs more effectively.

Orchestrating workflows by connecting multiple systems

PÜR Design has also successfully integrated Zoho Flow with TrainerCentral and RingCentral, which helped them overcome a major challenge related to inviting customers to the academy without having to track deals manually. Through their collaboration with United Parts of Chicago, they devised a workflow that automatically invites clients based on deal criteria by pulling information from Zoho CRM and adding clients to the academy with the correct invitation and course details.

Another integration involves an automated text campaign dispatched through RingCentral, which is triggered when a client reaches a specific point in the process. Upon triggering it, they receive weekly text messages that ensure a consistent and smooth client experience. The workflow also initiates a webhook that retrieves contact information from the CRM to determine the contact's status. Subsequently, it guides the customer through the TrainerCentral signup procedure for onboarding. Messages related to this process are handled by the process owner in Cliq, who then executes various conditions based on the deal amount. The Deals module essentially acts as the primary decision-maker for these operations.

Benefits

Since implementing Zoho CRM, the company has seen tremendous results. Whereas onboarding employees has always been a big hurdle for the team, onboarding times have significantly decreased from a month to two weeks, thanks to automations and the integration with Monday.com.

Apart from this, efficient data and finance management has prevented a lot of errors. Before establishing its foolproof process with United Parts of Chicago, the company was unfortunately prone to financial mishaps due to a lack of data administration. With Zoho CRM in place, the system leaves no room for errors.