iLEAD Et Al Podcast: Navigating CRM Systems: An Interview With Paul Wilson, Technical Director Of DSL Telecom

21.02.25 10:00 AM - By Kim

In this Mastering Digital podcast, Nadine Swart, Business Development Consultant Of iLEAD et al welcomes her guest, Paul Wilson. Paul is the Technical Director of DSL Telecom, an award-winning Zoho Premium Partner in South Africa.

Nadine: Welcome to the Mastering Digital podcast hosted by iLEAD et al.

A challenge faced by many growing businesses is managing customer relationships effectively, and streamlining business operations becomes a crucial aspect of scaling the business. An effective CRM system can do just that. Joining us today is Paul Wilson from DSL Telecom, who will be guiding us through the intricacies of CRM systems. We will explore what they are, why they are essential in today's business landscape, and gain practical insights on choosing, implementing, and maximising their potential.

Welcome, Paul.

Paul: Hi Nadine, thanks for having me.

You can tune in the the complete podcast episode here!

An Introduction To Zoho CRM And Zoho One

Nadine: So Paul, you specifically specialise in a CRM system called Zoho One. I have personally used Zoho's various features like Zoho Invoicing, Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, and I know there are many more. Can I please ask you to just start by giving us some context on Zoho One, exactly what it is and what it includes?

Paul: Sure, no problem. Zoho One is a product launched by Zoho, probably about five years ago - Zoho being a software company based out of India.

The way we see Zoho One, is it's a basket of products. So it's a suite for businesses to utilise, to run any sort of digital application. With Zoho, CRM was always the flagship product. And then Zoho launched Zoho One which houses 70 plus applications, ranging from invoicing, finance, inventory, CRM, and online chat systems - a full suite of applications that really integrate tightly into each other.

Nadine: I've recently started playing around with Zoho One, here and there with a few products available, with my husband's business. And for exactly this purpose, it's gotten to a point where it's really needed to start automating things and start streamlining operations. And I've just been dipping into it a little bit and obviously exploring different options.

We've decided on Zoho's suite of products, and just starting to roll that out one after the other, and I have been extremely impressed with the capabilities of these products. So excited to be chatting to you today.

Paul: Fantastic. And obviously, we've been doing this for 13 years. We've seen how these systems have evolved in that time. And it's very exciting to see, and it's very exciting to see where it's going.

Nadine: So Paul, you have the benefit of working with various businesses and assessing exactly what they require for a more customised solution. And therefore, I think that you have keen insight into the CRM market. So, can you tell us, when choosing a CRM system, what are the fundamental features that businesses should look out for?

Paul: So when choosing a CRM system, all businesses are slightly different, but CRM systems as a whole focus on contact management. We look at the contact interaction and life cycle. We look at marketing automation, sales automation, and at really understanding the customers.

What we ideally want to get out of a CRM system is a 360 degree view of the customer. So that is being able to manage customers at scale. So if we have a customer in our system, we want to be able to see when last this person was contacted? What are the deals that they've got in the system? What are the deals that they didn't purchase? What are the deals that are still open? What was the last email? What was the last phone call? When last did they visit our website? All of these things are very important in contact management and the contact lifecycle, and allowing us to really understand the customer and therefore market to them effectively, and help the customer, nurture the customer down the pipeline.

Zoho CRM Customisation And Onboarding

Nadine: So I think as a business for iLead, we've been looking into CRM systems and we're actually busy onboarding with Zoho One at the moment and it's been quite a journey and it's quite a lot of work that needs to go in before the process even starts to make sure, because if you're onboard with the system that doesn't necessarily support everything you needed to support for your business, somewhere down the line deciding to move, it's a very big schlep. So it's very important to do your homework ahead of time.

And I've personally been involved in research in quite a few of these systems. And something that I've just found also is that there are two reasons that we have decided to stay away from certain systems. The one being customisation, its ability to customise, which I think is exceptionally important for most businesses because a lot of these off-the-shelf products.

It's very, very hard to take that into just seamlessly integrated with any business because every single business operates differently. It has a different business model. And what we really love about Zoho Suite and Zoho One specifically, is the customisation and its ability to be customised to suit your business specifically.

And then further is of course, integration. I've had many integration issues with other systems before, you know, like integrating with your accounting systems and so forth. And it's very important also, choose a product that has integration with the most popular systems and stuff that the business essentially used just to make it easier for yourself. So I think obviously when onboarding also, can you shine some lights on some of the challenges business face when implementing a CRM system and how they can be overcome? Because I think we've also run into quite a few of them, not just implementing it for ourselves, but also having clients as an advertising agency also onboarded with some of these systems and seeing some of the challenges that they have faced?

Paul: Sure. Look, when onboarding a CRM system, there's one major challenge that we face, and sort of nine out of ten failed CRM implementations always come down to the same thing, and that's change management. Change management and getting the users to effectively use the system. Remember, if the system's not used properly, it's useless. Right? So garbage in, garbage out is the term we use. And if we can't get the people to really understand why we need to input information.

So in marketing, we talk about return on investment. When we implement CRM, we often talk about a return on time. So when people utilise systems, often we see with salespeople and certain people that aren't admin, they don't like to get into the admin side of things. They say it's a waste of time, it takes too much time. But if we teach them that there's a return on that time, so inputting data now saves an exponential amount of time later, right? They really understand the power, and they start to like and advocate the system. And that's very powerful in the change management side of things.

Other ways we try to work with this is to get the users involved early on in the implementation. So while we're scoping, typically we work with the managers or we work with the heads of department or we work with directors.

They want their system to work in a specific way. And while that's very important from a business perspective, it's also important to hear what the users want, hear what the users want, and let their voice be heard. One, it gives them the buy-in, so they feel invested from day one, right? When it comes to saying now that they need to use the system, they're really pre-invested in it, and they're now excited and they advocate the system. And this, if we can get that right, typically we have a successful implementation.

When it comes down to the nitty-gritty and the technical, you know, these systems are really flexible. We can do so much. We can do so much really cool stuff, but if the users don't use it, won't work and never will work, so we always try to focus on change management and the user experience. We often get so fixated on the customer experience, which, don't get me wrong, is extremely important; that's why we implement CRM Systems, but we should never forget about the user experience. And that's the users that are actually operating the system and working on the system. We take that into account, typically. we have a much higher success rate in the implementation.

Also, then with Zoho One, because it's such a big system, we're talking about 70 plus applications. You know, Rome wasn't built in a day. Let's not try and do everything at once. Let's try and get the fundamentals. What is the need? What is the absolute need? What is the minimum viable product to get going for a business to start operating effectively and allow that to evolve?

These systems, firstly, when we implement them, they're not a single once off implementation. All these systems are living evolutionary systems that work with a business. Businesses change at a rapid rate. We saw during COVID, businesses had to change immediately. On the spot, things changed, and the systems needed to evolve with them.

Nadine: Exactly, yeah. So I just want to go back to two because you made two very, very good points now. And that's something that I've also experienced myself is change management. And I think, yeah, for most employees, it's a bit of extra effort. But what I've found is also, it's very important. In most of these cases, I find that kind of management makes a decision and is involved in setting up the system and all of that. And it's also very hard for employees to use a system where they don't really understand the bigger picture, they don't understand the why. And I think there comes the buy-in that you were talking about.

You really need someone to understand why we are doing this. How does it fit in with the bigger picture? What will we be using the data for at a later stage? Because I think that also goes a long way in situating the concept mentally for the people who are actually going to be using the system. It's very hard to use the system and to use it effectively if you don't really understand why you're doing what you're doing.

And the other thing is when it comes to scoping, I think that's a really good way to get people involved, to get that buy-in, and get them involved earlier. But the other reason for that is I have also dealt with businesses that have gone on this massive journey of onboarding a CRM system. And then only later on when the system's actually being used, realised that it's actually not set up as effectively as it should be because the people on the ground who use the system every single day were not consulted and were not involved in that process. So I think those were two very, very good points.

Measuring Zoho CRM's Effectiveness

Nadine: Can you tell us how businesses can actually measure the effectiveness of the CRM system once it's been implemented?

Paul: So measurement typically comes out of reporting. So when scoping and then building systems, especially from dealing with management, we always work backwards. So what do we want to get out of the system? What do we want to visualise in the system?

And typically, what we want to see is we want to see sales conversion. We want to see marketing. Where's our marketing being spent? Where is it being, where's it most effective? So we can actually track through the system where the leads are coming from and then how those leads are converted, which will show us our marketing.

And then customer sentiment. I think customer sentiment is something that's new, and it's coming more and more and more as we get more into the world of AI.

I'm not a big fan of the term AI, but we are seeing it more and more and more. And customer sentiment, we're able to see that in systems now because we've got a 360 degree view. So we're looking at phone calls, we're looking at support tickets, we're looking at emails, and with AI, they're able to understand the content of these and understand the customer sentiment. So we can actually know if a customer is happy, are they neutral, or are they unhappy, who needs the attention, are our sales effective. So, what is the conversion rate? Is that conversion rate increasing?

And this is how we manage the effectiveness of a CRM system. It really is through reporting and seeing how things are scaling. Before implementing CRMs, everyone uses a CRM in some other way, right? It could be a diary that they write in. It could be an Excel spreadsheet. But with modern day CRMs like Zoho CRM, we're really able to scale. So, you know, in a diary, you can maybe keep track of five customers. And with something like Zoho CRM, we can keep track of thousands of customers easily because it's so streamlined. And if we reporting on it properly, we can see how things are growing and how that scaling is happening.

Zoho CRM's Integration Capabilities

Nadine: So I know that a CRM system, most CRM systems, don't begin and end with customer relationship management. And something that I'm particularly excited about when it comes to these systems is their capabilities and abilities to integrate with whatever advertising you're busy with. So what role does a CRM system like Zoho One play from an advertising perspective and maximising advertising investments?

Paul: Firstly, the CRM system; we thought of one as a whole. I want to focus on the CRM system because that's where typically we, our data enters the system. That's where we manage our customer database. From a perspective of CRM, because leads are our marketing leads, and our marketing spend is entering the system, we can understand exactly where these leads are coming from. So we've got to track things like lead source. We can integrate back into platforms like Google AdWords. We can integrate back into Google Analytics.

So we're able to target our spend better because we've got this information. And if we're able to target our spend better, we're able to nurture better. So now that we've got customers sitting on our pipeline, we understand the pipeline, and working back with our marketing team, we can help move those customers down the pipeline. So we use things like email marketing, website pop-ups, and this can all be very specific to the contact or the lead that sits in the CRM and based on where they are in the buying cycle.

Nadine: That's so powerful.

Paul: It is powerful. And with Zoho One, that's just what we do with CRM. But now there's Zoho Social, which is social media marketing. We can manage the social media better. We've got Zoho Marketing Automation, which we can use to set goals on our website to understand our customers: we can understand if they're online, and we can start to set goals to say if they visit this page more than three times in a week, then deliver them content X or Y. So it gives us a very, very, very strong contextual awareness of where our customers are at and the marketing team, the ability to talk with them better.

An Industry Use Case

Nadine: That's such an incredible way just to consolidate everything because I think something that I've also seen happen so many times is such effective marketing strategies, but yet very disjointed.

Like each platform and each channel that advertising spans are being put on are kind of being managed in isolation. And I know that everyone knows that they should be looking at it as a bigger picture because the one does influence the other at the end of the day. And they can also be very effective in working together towards a common goal. But I do think it begs the question of how to do this because I do know a lot of people get stuck there, and this is just such an effective way of actually consolidating all of your advertising into one place and essentially making them work for you.

So I really, really like this feature. Paul, can you share a practical example of how a business has used the CRM system before? I'm sure that you guys have many case studies.

Paul: Well, we've got so many, and on our website, you can see we've actually got some case studies that we've published. But if I think back, instead of focusing on a specific customer, I'm gonna focus on an industry, an industry that we've worked quite a lot with, and we've worked with a fair amount of customers in this space, and that's the solar industry.

Now in South Africa, obviously with load shedding, there was this need for renewable energy and for PV systems and in houses. And this happened at scale. This was something that happened, probably started happening about eight years ago, but about five years ago, this really started scaling. And what we saw as we helped a lot of these businesses on board with systems, with the Zoho One suite, especially, it allowed them to scale and allowed them to scale quickly. So we were able to create a strong connection between the office and the guys on the road. The guys on the road that bring the surveys, go to the houses, and give the quotes, were able to build systems that they could get out there. They could have tablets, they could have phones, they could take pictures, and they could effectively quote very quickly, right? Without the need to take notes, come back, get on a computer. Yeah, that manual process. 100%. And we saw this, and it really streamlined the way they did things.

Along with allowing them to, you know, there's a lot of calculations and a lot of elements that go into a quote, you know, how many kilowatts do you need and how many, how many cells and how many photovoltaics. Like I'm not a solar guy, so it's not my forte, but there's a lot of calculations and formulas in place, and we can do this in the system automatically. So they go in and they say, this is the roof space, this is how many panels, and it can spit out how many inverters they need, how many, how much kilowatts it should spit out, and I can do that almost instantly. That allowed these businesses to scale and allowed them to operate quicker and effectively get more customers.

Zoho CRM Trends

Nadine: So there are obviously a lot of changes and a lot of evolution happening within the technological environment. So with that happening, what trends in CRM systems do you believe will have the most impact on businesses in the future? You mentioned AI earlier, so I'm interested to hear whether that's one of your points.

Paul: I think you know, I mentioned it earlier that I'm not a big fan of AI.

Nadine: I'd like to ask why.

Paul: So I am a big fan, just to get this clear, I am a big fan of AI. I'm just not a big fan of the term AI just because I feel it's been way overutilised. I think, you know, people throw the word AI on any product. What does it really mean?

Nadine: I think it has become a bit of a buzzword.

Paul: It's a bit of a buzzword and I feel it's been overutilised. But I've seen what they're bringing in, especially what Zoho is bringing to the market in terms of AI, and it's powerful. It's extremely powerful, and it's to a point, it's a bit scary, you know? But it's exciting, and we've got to embrace it. So the trends are definitely going to be AI, 100% AI is where things are going. My opinion, AI will have as big, if not bigger, impact on business and the way we do things than what the internet did in the early 90s.

If we look at how internet revolutionised business in the early 90s, email and just completely new way of doing things, I think AI will have as big, if not even a bigger impact. It's exciting.

Zoho's got in the suite of apps that we get in Zoho one, there's a product called Zoho Creator which is a low-code platform allows us to build apps. We can go and spin up any app that we want. If we talk about Zoho one being powerful because there's 70 plus apps. We just look at the Creator app, this fills the gap for anything in between that we don't have available. So from its perspective, as a one, it's the only suite that businesses need. There's quite a lot of customisation and Creator is a bit more pro. But what we're seeing with this AI trend is we're able to contextually talk to it and say, I need an app that does X, Y, and Z, and the system will go and build and code in the back.

And it's exciting. It's still got a way to go, but we've seen it. We've seen it in operation, and it's very exciting.

Nadine: That's incredible, but I think just the fact that the foundation is there already, I can only imagine where this could potentially grow to.

Paul: 100%. And the second part of AI that is gonna be, in my opinion, super powerful is things like support and sales. We see these chatbots a lot. And I know that some people find it frustrating doing these chatbots. It is very early days, but if we understand the power of what a contextually aware AI system can do.

If we really train it correctly and we give it the power to be able to support our customers, this is something that's got extreme knowledge or contextual knowledge on the business, and it's available 24 hours a day, and it doesn't complain and it just operates. It doesn't replace; we must never see AI as a replacement, we must see it as a tool to provide better service. So it's exciting; it's super super exciting.

It's scary in many ways because we don't know what to expect. I think we're really just at the tip of the iceberg, but I'm super excited to see what's going to come and especially what Zoho is going to bring to the market.

Nadine: Incredible. Paul, it has been immensely insightful talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Paul: Thank you Nadine. Always a pleasure.