Sibedge switches from MS Dynamics to Zoho CRM for a more user-friendly experience

The company

Headquartered in Australia Sibedge is a globally distributed software engineering company with footprints across the United States, Cyprus, Armenia, and Turkey. With its teams of highly-trained engineers, Sibedge is capable of delivering high-value services to empower clients' digital transformation and strengthen software solutions.

Sibedge's service architecture includes five services:

• Agile software development
• Squads product development
• Technical support and DevOps
• Software testing and QA
• IT staff augmentation

Throughout their 15 years, Sibedge has successfully implemented over 350 projects for clients in more than 27 countries, including Australia, the United States, United Arab Emirates, Europe, Cyprus, countries in the MENA and APAC regions.

The challenge

CRM was not a new concept for Sibedge prior to switching to Zoho CRM. "We had been using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for almost three years and believed the plethora of functionalities—which were way too complex to implement—were overkill," says Andrey Podlesnykh, Head of Partnerships at Sibedge. "As we grew, customisation emerged as one of the major challenges. We were unable to customise our CRM based on our needs. We also faced issues with onboarding newcomers due to an overly complex UI and design interface, which resulted in a drop in CRM adoption rate within the team."

Why Zoho

After searching for a new CRM solution, Sibedge eventually came upon Zoho CRM and ultimately decided to go with it thanks to its user-friendly interface, smooth lead management capabilities, and flexible reporting.

The solution

Sibedge onboarded Zoho CRM in 2017. The data migration process from their old CRM to Zoho took almost a month, and involved a close partnership with Zoho's onboarding team. Sibedge is proud of the team's efforts, as well as those of their in-house Zoho CRM specialist, who takes care of all of the company's CRM operations and achieved the migration milestone in a matter of a few days.

Multiple teams have adopted Zoho CRM and use it on a daily basis, including marketing, lead generation, business development, pre-sales, and C-level executives.

Sibedge has used Zoho CRM to enhance the following processes:

Lead management

Like any other business, lead management is one of the most crucial business processes at Sibedge—and having multiple lead generation sources makes the process even more complex. Social media platforms like Meta and LinkedIn, email campaigns, online and offline conferences, and webinars are some of the lead generation channels that Sibedge has integrated directly into Zoho CRM, which has eliminated the manual effort involved in adding leads to the CRM. Zoho's lead scanner has helped the team collect leads at real-life events without having to note down manually all the details of each prospect they meet.

Simplifying sales process management

Sibedge has four departments that run its operations on Zoho CRM: marketing, sales, production, and C-level executives. Customers' entire journeys are mapped in the CRM using blueprint. With its salespeople spread across different continents, mapping the sales process helps the entire team stay on the same page and maintain consistency.

Once a lead is entered into Zoho CRM and qualified by the marketing team, they're moved to the business development team, which further qualifies the lead's interest and assigns them to the right pre-sales team. This entire process involves multiple follow-ups, and the team leverages workflow rules to ensure they follow up consistently and never miss an opportunity. Workflow rules have helped the team automatically create and assign tasks based on specific criteria, as well as automate email follow-ups, repetitive tasks, field updates, and more. Using automation in this way helps ensure that nothing falls through the cracks and that no time is wasted on mundane tasks.

The next stage involves the pre-sales analysts, who connect with potential clients and build a custom solution for them. This stage is paramount, and all the details of the communications with potential clients are recorded within the CRM. The entire team can therefore check any client's stage at any point in time—and from anywhere—by using the Zoho CRM mobile application.

Orchestrating the after-sales process

"Deal won" is not the end for Sibedge; the team is known for going above and beyond to maximise their clients' efficiencies further using account management. To ensure this, they track account activities within the CRM to help them plan their next course of action. The team also leverages CRM to learn about the clients' usage pattern and develop a plan for upselling.

"In my position as Head of Partnerships," Podlesnykh says, "my responsibility is to manage the entirety of sales at Sibedge, and I consistently stay apprised of all changes with leads and deals, and can support managers by tracking each opportunity they have in a sales pipeline. This is the power of Zoho CRM for me."

Intelligent reporting

Intelligent custom reports stand as the most useful feature for C-level executives at Sibedge. Zoho CRM enables the team to customise their reports based on their personal preferences.

"We customised our managers' reports and dashboard environments by using colour to highlight high-priority activities and fields for easy comprehension," says Podlesnykh. " The sales team also uses customised reports to keep track of upcoming activities and completed tasks"

Using integrations to achieve a comprehensive overview of business

A solution's effectiveness lies in its ability to provide a complete user experience, while also being flexible enough to integrate with legacy systems that have been a part of the business from the beginning. In Sibedge's case, they had multiple third-party applications they couldn't replace, and therefore required a CRM with flexible integration capabilities to eliminate data leakage or process breakage. Zoho CRM's native and API integrations have helped the team to retain their legacy systems, resulting in faster implementation and a better adoption rate.

These integrations include Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Teams, a telephony system Zadarma, an email delivery and tracking system Mailjet, to name just a few.

Benefits and ROI

Sibedge has successfully performed its sales functions using Zoho CRM for the past five years, and acknowledges the pivotal role the CRM tool has played in reducing the amount of time sales managers spend on CRM tasks by 15%. They attribute this achievement to Zoho CRM's user-friendly interface, and also highlight the following qualitative benefits:

• Better team collaboration between sales and marketing
• Unified business overview thanks to integration capabilities
• Creative and personalised reports and dashboards
• Automation of repetitive tasks
• Higher CRM adoption rate, resulting in better performance