Our Story
We laid the foundation of our small (so far ) business a year ago right in the middle of the pandemic outbreak. Atul, my co-founder, and I both come from a large corporate background.
After dwelling on mighty things like strategy and what problems we wanted to solve, our immediate attention was drawn to set of mundane decisions pertaining to software applications! Neither of us had really done this before. In our corporate ivory towers, we were more used to criticising whichever apps IT chose for us rather than make the call.
The Applications’ Khichdi gets cooked
We didn’t give it much thought initially and took rapid decisions one after the other to get IT out of the way. Each ball was played on its merit without much consideration of how many more business software applications’ balls were there to play. We quickly blocked our domain on the least cost available domain registrar. Then we bought email boxes, from Google of course. Because we wanted to get started fast and knew that our services and communication would evolve with time, we decided to do a DIY website. As we started engaging with customers, though it was just Atul and me, we decided we wanted to maintain the discipline of recording all customer engagements so that when we have a sales team, we can easily transfer these relationships to our future team members. So, we bought licenses on a CRM meant for small businesses. We outsourced accounting on Tally. When we hired Manthan, our digital marketing pro, we started investing in licenses for email campaigns, database generation and validation, keyword analysis etc.
As you can imagine, in less than 9 months, we were looking like cluttered kitchen drawer full of knives and forks that one would dread putting his hand into.
Enter Zoho One
That was when thanks to our partnership with Zoho, we came across Zoho One.
It is a suite of more than 40 business software solutions that is perfect for small businesses and start-ups like ours. It includes everything you need from email, accounting, recruitment, HR, CRM, chatproject management, social marketing, marketing campaigns, shared drive and a lot lot more. There is a mobile app version as well so multi-tasking start-up workforce needn’t be glued to their desk. The applications sync beautifully with Gmail, Slack, Twilio, Facebook etc so you are not shut out from the external eco-system. Furthermore, Zoho has built some great capabilities to automate repetitive tasks, something that helps companies stay lean and employees productive. Besides, their AI powered analytics is cool and promises to be super powerful going forward.
A Ready Tool-kit for Technology Adoption @ Small Businesses
As entrepreneurs, you want to grow your business. Yet, every modern business needs to adopt technology for efficiency and business enablement. A single suite of interconnected apps is the best way to solve this problem at once. Having an app ready in your kitty for every aspect of your business, automatically enhances adoption of technology and brings a process orientation very early in the life of your business. We learnt this, ironically, while implementing Zoho One for one of our clients in the investment banking business.
Zoho One Pricing – Value and Flexibility
The problem with most bundles is that it forces you to pay for things you don’t need, right? We have all been sold combo meals when all we wanted was a burger! Zoho One pricing philosophy recognises this. Therefore, they offer 2 variants – flexible user plan and an all-employee plan. Either way, the cost of licenses is well recovered just by a few core applications that any organisation would need to run their business efficiently. The powerful specialised applications come virtually free!
Zoho Implementation & Support
While Zoho One is quite user friendly, it does need some assistance to set-up and configure for the specific needs of an organisation. However, this can easily be done by oneself or by an authorised Zoho implementation partner within a few days and doesn’t require any coding skills. At Axon Networks, we offer a customised implementation and support service for companies which want to use technology to grow their business but don’t want to entangle themselves with running the apps.
So, if you are a small business or start-up, consider investments in business software applications as a major growth enabler and choose a strategy that helps you focus and truly enables every aspect of your business.
Our Plug!
If you know someone who can benefit from a well thought out and cost effective technology adoption in their business, please do refer them to contact@axonnetworks.in or visit this page.