Valenta, a Digital Transformation Service company, optimizes business processes using Zoho CRM

The company

Founded in 2014, Valenta helps organizations increase profitability via process optimization, digital transformation, staff augmentation, and learning. The local managing partners work closely with businesses to understand their needs, identify pain points, and implement the right mix of customized solutions that results in simpler and more efficient business processes.

Valenta prides itself on the ability to understand the process dynamics of every business size and put together a specific solution that meets its customers' growth objectives.

The challenge

The team at Valenta started their customer relationship management journey using Microsoft Excel, but soon realized they needed a scalable business solution to help manage their rapidly growing business. It was paramount that they find a tool that could manage their growing customer base and help the sales team work more efficiently. After a lot of rigorous research, they narrowed it down to Zoho, Salesforce, and SAP, but through this research it became clear that their business could use more than just one tool to help sales; other teams could benefit from an entire business suite as well, such as management, support, marketing, HR, and more.

Valenta's requirements were simple, but the impact the solution would have on business was expected to be huge. The team chose to move ahead with Zoho because of its comprehensive suite of solutions, cost efficiency, and impeccable customization capabilities. They started with Zoho CRM and Zoho People, but today they also enjoy using Zoho Recruit, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Forms, Zoho Subscriptions and Zoho Sign.

The team believes implementation is an ongoing journey and that utilizing the capabilities of Zoho's services to optimize their business processes requires constant effort and learning. Valenta's initial setup required two months, but today the company has happily completed its sixth year with Zoho.

The solution

Optimizing the sales process using blueprints and workflow rules

The sales process at Valenta is divided into four primary stages. In the first stage, the sales team reaches out to prospects to inquire about their requirements and determine their validity as clients. Once that validity is confirmed, leads are added to Zoho CRM, which marks the beginning of the lead journey.

Leads then go through several stages, such as contacts, accounts, and deals. Once a deal is created, it goes through various stages based upon its service line. Every service line has custom stages which have been enabled using Zoho CRM's Blueprint feature. Further workflow rules are configured to automate the sales team's tasks and reduce manual work, thereby enabling them to focus on more important business activities. The Activities module within Zoho CRM helps the team stay on top of all their tasks and calls and never miss an opportunity.

The next stage begins when a deal's likelihood of closing increases and is handled by the operations team, who uses CRM to plan the resources and infrastructure needed per the deal's requirements. The requirements are mapped in the Deals module so that the team can plan and ensure the services are delivered efficiently after a deal is closed won.

The contracts team handles the third stage of the sales process—also called the issue agreement stage. They prepare contracts for customers using the Zoho CRM and Zoho Sign integration, which helps them map the contract details stored within Zoho CRM with their respective deals for easy access by different teams. This centralized data storage helps management avoid data loss.

Finance management using CRM data

The fourth stage of the sales process is managed by the finance team, which uses Zoho CRM to fetch deal details and ensure payment is collected from customers without any delays. The tool also helps the team calculate commissions for the sales team accurately and fairly.

"We have all that information within the CRM that's required to calculate commissions for our teams, and it also enables us to cap all the commissions," says Kasim.

A global view for management using reports and dashboards

The management team at Valenta is result-oriented, so staying apprised of all the deals won and lost is of utmost importance. Focused on its objective of providing the best service possible to optimize its customers' profits, Valenta makes sure to lead by example. Management uses reports to keep a track of various activities performed by different teams across the organization and never miss any anomalies. Teams and individuals alike also use reports to keep an eye on their performance and keep a record of their activities.

Valenta's management team uses dashboards to get a quick look at crucial activities and business numbers in just a few seconds. Users also create their private and shareable dashboards to check their numbers at the beginning of each day, which helps them plan their days accordingly.

"CRM dashboards help us track our lead sources, number of deals won, which service lines deals come from, which locations deals come from, current month deals, deals for the next, and so on," says Kasim. "We also have a target tracker set up which helps us track the deals we have closed and compare how we are doing against our target."

Checking customer data on the go with the Zoho CRM mobile app

Valenta's teams use the Zoho CRM mobile application to track sales activities and customer updates, which empowers them to fetch customer data and update fields from anywhere.

Integrating Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics to analyze business conditions

At Valenta, Zoho Analytics is integrated with Zoho CRM and other internal tools, such as Xero, their accounting software. This integration helps give the team a complete picture of the business.

"The data from the CRM and other sources allows us to view the complete picture of our total revenue versus actual revenue collected, the amount collected to date, the amount that remains to be collected in the month, resource capacity, infrastructure information, and so on," says Kasim. "This information helps our team track the current status of our business and plan accordingly."