How the streaming network achieved automation without loopholes with Zoho CRM Blueprint

About The Streaming Network

The Streaming Network was founded approximately ten years ago, ahead of its time in terms of the business value they provide: a powerful platform for creating webinars, including studio and production. They also enable other businesses to ramp up their marketing efforts by organizing and creating virtual events including job fairs, town halls, webinars, and webcasts on their behalf. Now that webinars and virtual events are the new normal, The Streaming Network is quickly gaining momentum.

About BluRoot

BlueRoot is a Zoho Advanced partner based in Toronto, Canada. Our youngest partner worldwide, they have created a niche for them in the financial sector and have helped many businesses learn about and implement Zoho products including Zoho CRM and Zoho One.

The challenges

Existing tool did not meet changing business requirements.

The Streaming Network is a rapidly growing business that needs to manage at least 100 virtual events per week.

With rapid growth through acquisitions and a quickly growing market for their services (going from five to 10 million in two years), came the need for a customizable and powerful tool to handle day-to-day business in one centralized place. "We were doing a lot of things in a very old-fashioned way." says Matthew Ley, President and Co-founder of The Streaming Network. At first, they were using a project management and team communication tool, Basecamp. But as they grew, they learned they needed more than just that.

As a multifaceted business, The Streaming Network needed a centralized place for all their data. Apart from their different service offerings, they also have to collaborate with outbound business development teams and remote employees across Canada and the USA. They needed a place where everyone could collaborate, all tasks could be tracked and automated.

Lack of automation and unification of different aspects of business.

Before Zoho, the client's remote BDR (business development representative) team had a "seven touch" approach, which involved calling and emailing prospects seven times in just over a month. To track this process, the team had to use excel sheets with thousands of names on it, which made it hard to find client details and keep track of communication. There was no central place for all the data, it was difficult to track the progress of the remote team on a day to day basis.

When The Streaming Network found Zoho, they were in the process of a few acquisitions, which led to many challenges including transferring data from Salesforce to Zoho CRM.

The companies they acquired were also using a variety of other systems, which meant The Streaming Network had many different customer bases that needed to be brought under one centralized ticketing system so their team wouldn't confuse accounts. Otherwise, following up on tickets from different customer segments was proved to be a time-consuming affair.

The same was the case with different invoices. As there are five companies under The Wish Group, they needed different invoicing option for their customers to keep clarity.

The solution

Discovering Zoho CRM for business development.

The Streaming Network first learned about Zoho when they were looking for a project management tool and found Zoho Projects. They then learned that Zoho doesn't just do project management, but has a whole ecosystem of apps that could fit their needs better. Zoho partner BluRoot helped with their implementation and understanding of Zoho. From there, The Streaming Network was able to quickly and successfully implement the changes they had hoped for, including the migration of data from Salesforce to Zoho CRM.

Complete integration of remote teams with Zoho CRM.

The outbound business development team, in-house production team, and several employees from various acquisitions are now working on one unified platform.

The Streaming Network's sales team was able to create segments and groups of actively engaging customers from different verticals. Segmenting leads and prospects makes it easier to reach out to people because similar industry types have similar needs. Their sales team is now better equipped to present solutions based on specific customer needs. They also use a "hot leads report" that pulls data from the email campaigns they send from Zoho CRM. Email campaigns from Zoho are CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation) compliant, which was a major requirement since The Streaming Network is based in Canada.

Benefits and ROI

Now they can see all tickets raised by a particular customer in their CRM account record, as well as all the open or previous closed tickets. Since they previously had to go through all related files for each particular customer, this made a massive difference in their operations.

With Zoho's centralized invoice system, they have reduced their DSO (days sales outstanding) drastically.

Zoho CRM allows them to click on an account name and see the communication status, saving time and effort. And with less clicks per prospect, their follow-up improved to 80-100 people per day.