Best Cloud CRM 2024: Guide for Small Businesses

One of the benefits of cloud CRMs is that you have all your data stored in a centralized location that you can access anywhere (with just an internet connection). 

Zoho provides this in a big way with its contact management capabilities. 

With Zoho, you can manage all your customer relationships, including the following:

• Contact information
• Communication history
• Associated deals with each client
• The entire customer cycle (from prospecting to post-sales)

To get started testing this feature (over six months), my team and I did the following:

1. Imported contacts with a CSV file
2. Manually added contacts in  

Here’s how the importing process looked (to give you a better idea).

We could transfer all of our data over to Zoho CRM in minutes!

However, to fully test the platform, we also wanted to manually add contacts.

Here’s how a “new contact” card looked (for context).

Within each card, we were able to easily edit the following information:

• Owner
• Name
• Account name
• Contact info
• Date of birth
• Vendor name
• Notes
• Tags

This comprehensive approach to contact management (along with the ability to easily add and edit information) makes it easy for sales teams to stay organized and on top of client relationships.

Well, Zoho CRM really blew us away with its automation capabilities. 

Think of all the repetitive tasks you do on a day-to-day basis (from sending follow-up emails to updating deal stages). 

Zoho takes care of all these with its three types of automation: 

• Workflow Automation: The silent hero of your sales team. With it, Zoho will automatically execute your predefined actions whenever certain triggers or conditions are met. So, for example, when a deal reaches a certain stage, an email can be automatically sent to the client.
• Sales Automation: Zoho’s sales automation is designed to eliminate manual errors and speed up your sales process. It does all the heavy lifting, like tracking every interaction with a customer. Plus, you can automate tasks for each deal stage. 
• Marketing Automation: Zoho CRM helps you streamline your marketing efforts with marketing automation. For example, automatically sending personalized emails to leads (based on their behavior or scheduling social media posts). Basically, it’s your in-house digital marketing agency.

We created many different automations using Zoho CRM during our six months of testing. 

One simple but super effective automation we set up was a notification to our team whenever a new deal was created. 

Here’s a snapshot of our creation process.

It was as easy as pie to create, keeping everyone in the loop (without any extra effort). Talk about a win!

With Zoho CRM’s automation capabilities, you’re working smarter and giving your team more time to focus on what matters—building relationships and closing deals.

Managing your deals effectively is crucial to scaling your SMB to new heights. 

Thankfully, Zoho CRM delivers fantastic pipeline management, guaranteed to help your sales teams succeed.

With Zoho, you can easily do the following:

• Create custom deal stages
• Add notes and reminders
• Assign deals to team members
• Track deal progress
• Access previous customer interactions 
• View potential revenue from each deal

And that’s just scratching the surface. The best part? Everything is customizable to fit your specific business needs.

My team and I tested this feature by creating (and customizing) a pipeline for our affiliate marketing deals at Small Business Bonfire. 

We just dove into the settings, hit “create pipeline” (as you can see below), and boom, we were in business. 

We named our new pipeline “Affiliate Partnerships” and easily customized each pipeline stage.

Then, we added a new deal with a simple click and filled in some details. 

Here’s how each “new deal” card looked from our vantage point. 

We were able to easily edit the following information within each deal card:

• Deal owner 
• Deal name
• Type
• Lead source
• Contact name
• Amount
• Closing date
• Associated pipeline
• Probability
• Expected revenue 
• Campaign Source
• Custom fields

We loved how much info we could customize within each card (without it looking too cluttered). 

Once we had everything put in and customized to our liking, we got a top-down view of our sales cycle with the pipeline dashboard (picture below).

From this dashboard, we could easily drag and drop our deals into the appropriate pipeline stages. 

This helped our team to work more efficiently and stay on top of our sales process (from prospecting to post-sales).

In a nutshell, deal management in Zoho is a total boss! Its sleek interface and customization choices make it a real game-changer in the CRM field.