Overview
Zoho recently gathered industry analysts and influencers together in Texas for a “ZohoDay” to discuss the future vision of the company. While there was not a lot of talk about specific product ‘features’ (i.e., the company’s “Zoholics” event is more product roadmap focused), there was a lot of focused discussion around how the company is building out its SaaS/cloud infrastructure.
The headline is that Zoho is taking a key step towards better supporting and scaling enterprise GTM deployments. An enhanced delivery, performance and data management network is being constructed to better handle the types of data and uptime needs of larger GTM teams. In addition, the company has ported all of its core GTM applications inside its “Zoho One” bundle on to a single data model and backend platform. This will improve the automation of key GTM processes, drive deeper insights from more aggregated data sets from various GTM applications, and drive user productivity as the companies AI enhancements will benefit from a more consolidated and unified data set. More importantly, it allows Zoho users to achieve a more unified, multi-channel and multi-stage orchestration of customer engagements in support of a Converged Growth mindset.
GTM Implications
After spending a lot of time with Zoho’s product team at their ZohoDay event, we came away surprised there was not a lot of new GTM or even general CRM announcements to be heard, as we had seen in recent Zoholics events. For the company, ZohoDay is more a chance for the company to outline high-level vision and momentum for analysts and influencers.
- Enterprise-class Infrastructure
Therefore, the company focused more on its infrastructure investments, and noted that it now has more data centers across the world, and has new Zoho Application network (ZAN) Edges – twelve in total – that boost performance and reliability for Zoho user deployments at scale.
The company is setting the stage to handle large enterprise-scale deployments for GTM teams, and will position the company as a viable alternative to far more premium-priced CRM and GTM tech offerings. In fact, the company already supports more than 100 million users on its platform, and is already landing very large deployments (think seven figure user counts) that would place it as one of the most utilized application software providers on the market.
- Unified Platform to Support Orchestrated Engagement
Behind the scenes, the company recently completed porting all of its applications onto a singular data model and application platform. This means that users of the “Zoho One” product line can take advantage of numerous pre-integrated data and workflows out of the box. (Zoho notes that 60% of its Zoho One users access at least 20 total Zoho applications.) As more GTM teams look at a Converged Growth model that incorporates engagement across pre- and post-sales, this is important. GTM teams can now better orchestrate customer engagements across multiple touchpints and across both pre-and-post sale stages of the demand experience.
Many enterprise vendor’s GTM tech portfolios are still less integrated than their marketing might imply. For mid-to-large GTM teams that have yet to standardize on a core GTM tech stack, Zoho One is quickly becoming a compelling, cost-effective tool for managing email marketing, lead scoring, as well as some AI-driven GTM use cases.
- Multi-Model AI for GTM Use Cases
The company did reveal additional vision around its AI developments for GTM use cases. While ZIA (the company’s conversational AI platform) and other GenAI tools are meeting typical demand for content-creation and curation use cases, Zoho is thinking long-term. Evolving from the current “bolt on” GenAI prompt-based tools, the company is looking to offer more seamless, embedded AI capabilities that drive more insightful actions. As the company describes it in equation form: AI+BI+CI=DI (Artificial Intelligence + Business Insights + Customer Insights = Decision Intelligence). It’s about contextual intelligence that helps users at the right moments, and also helps automate out the mundane tasks of daily work life.
An example given was Zoho’s ZIA Insights – an AI-powered BI tool that offers up not just ‘reporting’ capabilities but also more actionable data in the form of callouts and other highlights, such as pointing out the deltas in sales and conversion rates, diagnosing the driving factors based on large data analysis and then recommending corrective action.
The company says it is looking to continue investing in multi-model AI. This means offering up AI tools that leverage small language models (for example, auto-translation and transcription); medium language models (use cases include document analysis, and better intelligence and summarization of transcripts); and traditional large language models for typical content creation and other use cases. Zoho says users will be able to build and train models on its platform, which is important as more and more GTM teams are looking to keep their differentiated content, and of course customer data, outside of public large language models like OpenAI.
Landscape Implications
Of course, Zoho is a lower-priced alternative to nearly every GTM technology provider on the market. Pricing ranges from as low as $37 per user/per month (if ALL employees are using Zoho One), up to $90 per user/per month (for departmental deployments). When one considers that this includes access to up to 50 applications (including HCM and other key applications), the cost-to-benefit ratio is incredibly high.
Salesforce is the competitor that must contend with this value-offering the most. While other GTM and CRM providers have either solid niche market traction, or a strong brand recognition in core GTM (read: Adobe/Marketo and Hubspot), Salesforce is perhaps the company most in need of continued strong net new customer acquisition. As Zoho expands it own GTM efforts across the globe, it continues to serve both regions and smaller markets that Salesforce has not mastered. And this growing base creates a benevolent cycle – strong profitable revenue that supports an ongoing upmarket climb in key markets like North America and EMEA. In short, Zoho is both growing “around” Salesforce’s beach heads, but also doing the work of eroding some of Salesforce’s market as well.
The Takeaway
Zoho has already fleshed out a somewhat impressive GTM application stack. The Marketing Plus product line covers the gamut of GTM use cases, and has been slowly adding some notable AI-driven functionality, which we expect to rapidly increase in the next few quarters as the race to embed AI in everything only gets more competitive.
What used to be an issue for Zoho – the scalability and reliability of its proprietary SaaS/cloud platform, seems to be a non-issue. The company has done the hard work of building a global, scalable delivery infrastructure that rivals (if not exceeds) those of legacy SaaS CRM providers. So for midsize and even larger GTM teams, Zoho should definitely make a short list if a migration or new install decision is being made.
The one caveat, and it is a small one, is that we still see Zoho needing to build out a more complete delivery partner network in key geographies. It has made significant progress over the past year, but very large organizations may need to work directly with Zoho’s services teams and smaller organizations should be sure there is available partner expertise in their region.
