Zoho One – The Operating System For Businesses Podcast Recap

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Zoho One is your one-stop-shop for all of your business needs. Zoho offers a suite of tools that allow you to streamline processes and save time, money, and hassle without buying multiple software packages from different providers.

You can create a free Zoho One account before our event by using this link: https://bit.ly/2T4Le0e

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Check out our other Small Business Squad podcasts HERE!

Transcript

00:00 Zoho One

Vincent Aguirre: All right. So hi, everyone. I'm excited to be presenting today on Zoho one, which is an all-encompassing Zoho platform that includes over 45 different tools to run your business. I've had some criticism of the title for being for small businesses. And before I begin, I do want to let everyone know that this is also enterprise-grade software. Although today I'm focusing on small businesses. Before I jump in, tell you all a little bit more about who I am. I graduated from DePauw in 2012, with a degree in computer science. Since then, I've done various degrees and certifications in marketing, to help Distinct grow and help serve our clients. We started serving clients in 2013, under a different name. In 2015, we became Distinct. In 2019, I was happily married to my wife, Shelby. And this December, we're actually expecting our firstborn. I spent a long time trying to pick the right picture. So a little bit about Distinct, we are primarily a web design a digital marketing business, we work with small businesses, and we pair them with a marketing advisor. We really want to focus on local businesses, independent businesses, and try to have someone in a community with the clients that we're working with. We want to focus on strategy and partnering with these businesses to help them be successful.

Vince: So my goal today, I want to present this to you in three photos. The first photo is where you may be right now, you may be comfortable in the systems that you're in, or maybe like our cat on the right, these are our cats, two of them. Maybe on the camera, right, you're a little cautious, you're not sure about the Zoho thing. But my goal halfway through this presentation is to help you see the light, get you engaged with what you're seeing a little interested, maybe you started googling Zoho. But then by the end, I want you to take the leap. And I'm here to hold you to make sure you can reach whatever you're reaching for. These are a couple of years old, I was going through photos trying to figure out like which ones I should use the one to use this analogy. And then these three just popped up and I was like, yeah, these are them. But that's Mojito. On the right, he has his own Instagram, check him out, slow-mo, what does it SlowMoMojito. And that's OC on the left. And like I said, I want to help you take that leap and reach that goal that you're saying. So kind of a hypothetical question unless anyone here wants to answer. But what would you do with more time, more money, easy access to all of your business information, all of your passwords being remembered for you with one username for everything you need in your business, for spending less time onboarding new employees and training them, and less time reviewing applications and scheduling interviews. Does that sound good to you? All those things you would like to spend less time on? Got some yeses, got some yeses, good. Well, I didn't even know I wanted to save time on those things until about 10 months ago, a team and I were looking at our CRM, we were using the main big-name brands CRM at the time. For those of you who may not know a CRM is a customer relationship management tool. It's the hub of all of your customer data. And I was looking at their pricing and what we needed to grow in the way we hope to grow in 2021. And it was terrifying. I couldn't there was no way I could have done it just couldn't have so we needed options. A team member of ours, Jacob said, Hey, what about Zoho and I said I've seen them for years. I don't know. It's they're confusing. I don't really understand what they do. But I looked into it.

03:53 How I found Zoho One

Vince: And it kind of led us to this time we are now. So yeah, it was just I was frantic. And I was looking at this screen. For everything, I wanted to do on our system. I needed this $4,000-month package per user. And there was this. No, couldn't. There's no way. I could have maybe done the $1,780 a month per user. But still, it would have I don't know we would have had to triple our prices. It just wasn't going to work. So I found Zoho One. And through a lot of self-education because, admittedly, it can be overwhelming to look at these products. I was able to learn to understand what they could do for me and my business.

04:31 Short History of Zoho

Vince: So a little bit about Zoho – Zoho was founded in 1996 and grew profitably to over 4,500 employees. Primarily they are based in India, but they have offices in Japan, China Singapore, somewhere in California, Austin Texas, Netherlands, and they're growing rapidly. And they offer different levels of products and services including marketing and sales, project management, collaboration, finance, and HR and business process intelligence. They have over 30 million users worldwide. They're growing rapidly. And they've worked with some of those businesses you see down below. And they really want to be the operating system for your business. They want to be what your business runs on all the tools you need. So what does that really mean helps you acquire and serve new customers, empower your new employees, run your operations, finance, human resources, assets, and also create differentiation. And you can even create custom business functions and applications.

05:29 Zoho Company & Culture

Vince: So this page really excites me. I loved Zoho products when we found them. But then I learned more about the company and the culture. And this might be hard to see, but on the left corner, there's an image. And what that talks about is the Zoho Farm. Zoho bought this giant puddle in Austin Texas, they wanted to build the next big tower to have their corporate headquarters, like a lot of tech players do. And they realized during the pandemic, that that's not them. They're private, they're not flashy, they don't need a big tower, they don't need an Apple campus. So what they did is there were some existing businesses on that on that plot of land. And the employees work in those, I'm sorry, some existing buildings, the employees work in those buildings. And the rest of it is an actual fully functioning farm. They've hired two people to manage that farm, any Zoho employee, your customer can go visit the camp, go farming, things like that on the land. On the right side, there's an image of pride these links afterward, where Zoho is envisioning a world where they have small communities of offices in rural areas, and their whole employee system will be distributed. So again, not these big towers, not these fancy campuses, but having 10 or 15 people in a place like Greencastle working in a small Zoho office that maybe connects to a slightly larger office in Indianapolis. And they're doing that now in Texas with the area around Texas and Mexico. They're having a bunch of small communities, I've actually been in touch with them to kind of push them to look at Putnam County and think of ways that they can do that here. And yeah, so the quote below, you may have already read it. But basically talking about those buildings in the space creating this organic farm and to Zoho employees now are just farmers there.

07:14 How you can save money using Zoho

Vince: So this is a really cool calculator that another company created. They're called the Workflow Academy. You can find this on their website. But this calculates how you can save money on Zoho by using Zoho based on a bunch of other tools. And what I did is I customized it to what I was looking at last year when I was making this plan. You'll see that HubSpot was a giant monthly investment, there's absolutely no way I could have done it for 11 users where we wanted to be at this time. And then some other tools we're using that can also be replaced by Zoho One. So this is drastic, right, I needed a very specific part of HubSpot, that was going to be very expensive. But other organizations might not save this much money, but still going to save some money. So you'll see here on the right side $44,000 per month was what I needed with HubSpot again, couldn't have done it, there was just no way. There's absolutely no way with Zoho for the same features and all the features of these other tools. We're at $330 per month for 11 users, just giant savings. And we're seeing savings, a significant savings of $500,000 a month for most businesses we're talking to. I think that's really impressive alone.

08:26 Zoho One – Ecosystem

Vince: So, there's no way I have the time to go into all the different tools, all the different offerings. But I want to just show some of them and help you all visualize the scope that is available within the suite. Some of the ones on this page that we use are CRM, Sales, Inbox, Sales IQ, Social Surveys, Marketing, Automation, Workdrive, and these replays a plethora of other services all within the ecosystem. There's a whole nother page of services, and they're adding constantly they just released a phone system, a VoIP system for Zoho that integrates with everything. Still pretty new, but it's coming out. And it's really exciting. So these are just some of them and I'll come back to this another point if you guys have any questions about different items. And here's some more. As I said, it's very robust. A lot of them overlap, they often merge or pull different services out. It's a very evolving ecosystem.

Vince: Before I go any further feel free at any time. For those of you here, just stop me if you do have any questions. If you're watching this online, I'm not looking at chat, but I'll get to that afterward. If there are any questions there.

Vince: Yes, so let me cover that. By default, most of the tools are different teams. That's one way the Zoho stays affordable. They don't have a lot of overlap. But they all have standards that they follow to be able to integrate. So some of them integrate right out of the box. Some of them you can do some tinkering with, spend 20-30 minutes or work with someone like me to connect them. They also have Zoho Flow, which is very similar to Zapier if you're familiar, but that can connect external apps and internal apps. And you can fully customize using a programming language they've created to really do anything you want. So there are levels of integration. But by default, most of them talk in some way that would be valuable to you. But if there's ever something you go, I wish this could do that. It's possible, it might just take a small investment one time. Yeah.

Vince: So this is an example of their analytics dashboard. And just a quick example of some of the things you could do. Right out of the box. This is pulling from the CRM, from accounting from their bookkeeping, tool, invoicing, their deal pipeline, all in one dashboard. And it can pull from external tools as well. QuickBooks is one I've worked with Socials, I'll show later too. And Analytics does come with Zoho One subscription. This was a GIF. But in turning this into a PDF, I realized the gift was not going to play. But it's an example. And I'll show you a real-life example here in a minute of the search functionality across all the apps and how it can be searched in one location and pulled from everywhere. So one example is a contact that you want to find all their files, all the times you've mentioned their name in your internal chat, the documents, maybe their invoices, things like that. And you can integrate the search across other third-party platforms as well. So I see box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, there are other options, you can pull it all into that search.

11:56 Zoho One – Zia Search

Vince: So, with some integrations, you can pull from this. Let me just jump to now and show you a real-life example. This is called Zia Search. It is their exact representation of Siri, you can talk to things like that. And by searching in this toolbar, it will search across the entire network of connected apps to pull up information. So here, this is a Tensor Hub. I'm picking on Brian Cox a lot today. So I typed in Brian Cox's name, I'll see all of his information, the CRM, some recent invoices for his membership, and email marketing campaigns we sent to Brian. The Notebook — Notebook is a lot like OneNote. So it's here in the corner, I can pull this up from any app and take notes. So I'll see call Brian, call Brian. I don't know if it's easy enough to read. But in here, I created a note that says Brian Cox in attendance saves into buying a donut. And he's not here. So I'll buy someone else a donut. But so this can be integrated with all of these tools as well, to have the single search for everything across your applications.

Vince: That's a great question, I've never tried that. Not look like you can reference in the notebook. Now within the CRM, you could I could reference clients, tickets, things like that. Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure this is solely plain text. Yeah. And this is a very like, basic notebook tool. They have more robust, like project management tools, you want to use those. You can even create tasks in the CRM. Could replace your post its? And then yes, and then you could search them all from right here.

Vince: So the one thing I want to caution everyone as I said, that first picture of the cat, the reason I brought that up, is because there's so much you can do so much I like to do that it can be overwhelming quickly. So to answer that, like, I would probably create notes in the CRM, and then you can reference them directly to the client into the company, but still find them here as well. But maybe for you using the Notepad is perfect, and that works also. So it's all about customizing to your needs. And out of the box, there are going to be three or four options for anything you'd want to do and it's just finding what works best for your workflow. I like the notes a lot though. And our own internal one I have all kinds of notes there that I just jot down throughout the day and then I add them to the other places that I like to manage my projects from and whatnot.

Vince: Yeah, that's how I use it. Yeah, just get down quick. Most if not all Zoho apps we're looking at have a mobile app as well. I love their notebook mobile app. So that's what I'll typically do pull it out, dump it in there. I can access it from here. And then when I'm ready to make it more actionable, I move it. Most of them do. Yeah. Which is a blessing and a curse. Yeah, I think 15 Zoho apps. But they all like I said, all the teams are siloed. So it'd be a really bulky app if it could have everything. But with Zoho One, you can't have the Zoho One app. And it links to other apps helps you figure out which ones you want to install or not install. But you still have to have multiple apps. Yeah, yes, the app management app. Like I said, cats in the box. And now maybe you're kind of looking out and you're getting a little comfortable. I think yeah, especially if you have different team members doing different things. I think it may be very specific issue to me since I'm kind of touching all departments and all areas. But yeah, the CRM, the CRM app is fantastic. I like the app better than the desktop version, to be honest. It's less intimidating. But yeah, if you're just financing, you have the books app. And that's all you need. It pulls information syncs all across, so it's really all you need. So speaking openly, honestly, I have not set up integrations to search from external tools. But when I found this, I wanted to include it, because I really want to do that.

Vince: Yeah, Zoho also has what they call Zoho Work drive. I'm the biggest ally of Google and Google Workspace, I've been a reseller for years, I love it. But work drive is very polished for business process. In a way, I've never seen Google Drive work. So as far as permissions and drafts settings, it's really awesome. But yeah, so this would pull if you were using Google Drive or another tool, just to pull all that in and make it indexable and searchable. I don't know how it relates to customer records. But if you're taking the customer name, and the names of documents, that'll pull up.

17:37 Zoho One – No More Application Spaghetti

Vince: So their goal is no more ‘Application Spaghetti'. So you have all these different applications that maybe talk to each other, maybe don't, you're popping in between all these different things. So their goal is to have you be in one place with all these internal tools. And still, if you need an external tool, pull in. I borrowed this graphic from the Zoho marketing document. And I just absolutely love it, because we all can relate to that.

Vince: So this is just a quick example, if you have an intranet, you can tie into your own databases, things like that, again, more complex, you probably want to work with a consulting partner. But you can pull in from really any database that you build a connection for. So this is an example of an intranet that has a fourth-floor plan in their internal intranet, and you can pull that up.

18:25 What Applications can Zoho One Replace?

Vince: So what can you replace Zoho One? Answers a lot of things. I'm sure I know there are more. But these are some of the most common tools you might be using, that can fully be replaced by using Zoho One Suite. And I was using a lot of these. And just to kind of show Zoho is growing rapidly. Zoho One product launched in 2017. And they had about 5,000 users or customers at that point, as of 2019 is the most recent definition, they're pushing 22,000. And it's just skyrocketing. They're really growing out their partner program people like myself because they don't really do much marketing on their own. They don't spend millions of dollars on marketing. That's how they can keep things affordable.

19:19 Why Should I Use Zoho One?

Vince: So should you use Zoho One? I think yes if you'd like to save time or money, if you don't like searching everywhere, if you value collaborating and integrations and if you value customization, but if you like spending more money on things and you like that the tools you're using have a tower downtown with their name on it, then that's a reason not to use though. They're not going to have a tower downtown. If you love searching across multiple tools, if you love remembering all your passwords, or you hate when your tools can really be customized to your needs, then no you shouldn't use Zoho. But all jokes aside, I know it can be really intimidating looking into a new tool like this so, Zoho partners with people like Distinct and myself, who are passionate about the product and love to help you make decisions and figure out the integrations for you. So all jokes aside, when I was looking at this last year, it was very intimidating, trying to figure it all out on their website wasn't very helpful. I didn't have a partner guiding me. But I'm the type to dive in and just learn things, I was able to understand the ecosystem. But really, for me, I think it's really beneficial for someone to talk through and understand the products more in-depth. So this is the end of the formal presentation. But I wanted to walk through some of the tools we're using for the Tenzer Hub, and then opened up any questions because, again, I could do a lunch and learn every day for the rest of the year, and probably not cover everything that could be covered. So before I guess I'll open up any questions now before I go through some of the Tenzer Hub tools.

Vince: So as strong as any other tool I've used, there's a lot of seamless integration through pre-built apps, that you just push a button and they work. Just like authenticating your email with different tools, then using Zoho Flow opens it up to a whole nother realm of just drag and drop integrations that are really robust. And then.. this is a little off your question. But then again, with custom programming, it's really straightforward to build deeper integrations. But out of the box, you can integrate with all the major players, QuickBooks, Google, Microsoft, anything you typically integrate with online is out of the box. Specifically for the CRM and some of the other mainstream tools, analytics as well analytics can pull in LinkedIn, Facebook, social media, Google, or QuickBooks, Google Drive, work drive all those different things.

Vince: So yeah, no, I agree. Like, I won't switch us from G Suite or Google workplace. But it integrates really deeply with both Outlook and Google. What I have pulled up here is Sales Inbox, which is pulling straight from my Gmail, I can go to Gmail and send an email right now. But it also pulls all my emails into the CRM to keep records there. So I don't have to use this as my primary. I just wanted to show this as an example. But I for myself, and for Tenzer, I still use Gmail, but everything is pulled right into the CRM seamlessly. You can, I do not, but you can. And it's really, I wish I did, but I just, I'm the stubborn old guy with my Google and I love my Gmail. But like this tool pulls right in, it shows your contacts and leads, it shows people not in the CRM anymore with a Tenzer Hub email address shown here. And if I compose something, it has a lot of a suite of tools there and it goes through my email, I'll still be able to see it in my Gmail. So there's a lot of integration. I do not do that in Zoho. But you also could you can add multiple domains. I can schedule this to send it has, email intelligence to know when the person responds, the person receiving the email will be most likely to respond. Yeah. Well, right now it thinks noon. And I just had this up today, and I haven't emailed most of you. I don't know. It might be everything might be just noon. When I see. Yeah, doesn't even give me an option like that. Yeah. But so this tool adds these like, you can add a task, add a note or add a response watch. If he doesn't respond within one day. This is just one of the tools again, I could go into tools for hours for each individual. Nice. So just sent it. Where do you see the pipeline view? Or just in the CRM? Yeah, okay. So fully customizable, but here, this is Brian's record. On the left side, you have all the related apps and lists that you work on. So here's an attachment, which was his review of the Tenzer Hub. Emails I've sent to him. Here's a lunch and learn email asking if he was going to come, marketing emails that I've sent to him.

Vince: Yeah, so you can customize a deal pipeline. And you can add labels and things like that. Through all the contacts through all the different main tabs, there's really robust filtering, too. So like chats, attended browser page visits. They have a tool called sales IQ. It goes on your website, it tracks activity on your website. So that can all be pulled into here as well. You can set custom scoring. So if someone's been on your website for four hours, and they've visited 50 pages, you can make them a hot lead or soccer. I have Eventbrite tied in so we can see people who have attended Eventbrite events and how many they've attended. All right here. For Tenzer, we use Zoho Subscriptions, this is off because we just switched this month, not everyone's been billed. But it will show subscriptions per day, if we lose members will show when they're leaving, we can track all those different churn rates, any reasons or problems that are causing people to leave. And this all integrates the other. So within Brian's account, right here, I can go in and see a subscription, make sure he's still subscribed to being a member here at the hub, and really follow a holistic view of everything that he's done. I have too many tabs right now everything's going crazy. So subscriptions are gonna be down here. And there I can see he's a regular member, he pays whatever member pays. And it's right there. And I can click on that dive deeper top. One tool we integrate with Distinct is their Zoho Desk. It's a robust help desk tool. And you can have emails, text messages, social media, comments, social media messages all being pulled into there and have different teams that can access different parts of that and respond, comment. And again, that would pull it right into these records. It would, it would say Zoho Desk right here. And then I can see all the records for that right there.

Vince: That slide of the Zoho marketing slide. And what I have to assume they're saying is by using Zoho Social, you don't have to be active on LinkedIn. Because those so social both lets you schedule outposts, but also create tasks if people are commenting on posts. You can do some automation, some RSS feeds are scanning different social networks to see if you're being mentioned for keywords, things like that. So that's my best guess of what their meaning there. We don't use Zoho Social for ourselves right now only because it has a limitation on how many accounts you can post to at once. So for us, we post Distinct, Vince Aguirre, Shanon Detro, Joe Bottom, all those Facebook accounts, that get most of our posts. With Zoho Social, you can only post one LinkedIn profile at a time on one social, one Facebook, things like that. But they are working on improving that. It's some legacy code that 15 years ago, they can't maybe 10 years ago, they can't improve. But what it's really nice for if you struggling to manage your comments and responses, messages, things like that, Socials really good place because it can create tasks and tickets in your Zoho Desk, so that you can know if someone comments, ‘Hey, I, in your case, hey, I'm looking for an executive-level position. Can you help me?' You may never see that if you don't if you have 100 comments, but if you have these tasks being created on keywords, you'll be triggered and know like, ‘Oh, I need to respond to this person.' So that's my best guess is it's mostly social posting is how it's going to replace.

Vince: I'm gonna pull up the chat, see if there are any comments. Is there a nonprofit option? So yes, they do offer nonprofit discounts. I haven't experienced them directly yet. But I do know all their tools have educational nonprofit options. Sarah, I can try to find some information and provide that to you. And we did actually just implement an online donation page for a nonprofit using Zoho Check Out. So really simple, one page, they can click donation amount, make it recurring, fill out their information and go. That's you know, you can buy all these tools separately, I failed to mention that. They all have separate pricing if you wanted one or two tools, but for me, the Zoho one bundle is really nice because it's one price for all these tools. And the pricing is pretty straightforward. If you buy the license for everyone in your organization, it's $45 per month. And if you buy a license for just a few people in the organization, it's $95 per month. So they incentivize getting your whole organization on board. I have asked them how do they check that you've signed an agreement when you sign up, but basically they said like, it's trust. And also along with that, if you have an organization that maybe has some employees that don't need these tools, right, maybe they're cleaning the office space, and they don't need to check a CRM, they do not have to be on for the full employee licensing. So you can get the $45 per month rate for just a select few a few more for your workforce that needs the tools.

Vince: No, the Zoho One, it's mostly all-inclusive. If you're buying things separately, there is a lot of scaling. There's something I think API calls you pay for if you get to a certain threshold, but for any small business, you're not going to reach any of these thresholds.

Vince: As far as I've seen, with all the business I'm working with and working for ourselves. I have not run into those limits. With Zoho One it's very open. What I would say is I can look at the Zoho campaign's pricing. Zoho Campaigns is the email platform. They do have tiers there. And then typically, I can find any additional tiers for Zoho One, but they really opened it up, they really opened up.

Vince: Zoho Vault can store all of your passwords and share them across different permissions. One thing I failed to mention is that permission settings are really robust. So you can have permissions based on roles based on titles, you can have shared permissions. With us, we have a team of two people who work together and they can see each other's contacts, they can see each other's notes, things like that. But then not see another person maybe not on their team's information. So that can be very customizable. If you have someone who's just a part-time contractor doing one specific task, you can give them the small amount they need. And you can set it all up to automate. When you onboard someone, they get the tools that they need. Zoho people have a learning management system, they just rolled out. And that allows you to create classes and have your employees take these courses, take these training, and then as they advance to them get permission to the tools that they need, which is really nice to be able to build that out similar tools so that I was looking at some and those end up being $100 per person per month. Again, that's all included. Yeah, so there's, there are two ways to go about it. You can go through all the different app supports, they all have different support teams, each app has a little different CRM, and Books have very robust, very fast support. Things like analytics, which isn't as big of an emergency need. It's a little slower. And then you can also work with someone like the Distinct where we provide support, in addition to the support they have in the apps, but I've really loved the CRM and the books and invoice and subscription support. They've been really quick to jump on a video share and things like that because those are more mission-critical. That email chat support phone support for some tools. And you can also there's partner support with a dedicated partner team through Zoho that's what we use, they kind of onboard you. Concentrating, that's an additional fee if you want that like hand-holding. I think you can even do that if you're working with someone like Distinct although I don't know what the cost-benefit would be. But yeah, it really depends on the tools that can be robust support. I've only really used support for a handful of I've used it for Sales IQ. That was really good.

Vince: That's a great question. I've never set up a call I'm sure I can. Typically I gathered information via email, talk with that partner support channel and then educate myself. I want to have a very robust level of knowledge for all the different tools even if we're not using them, but I can try to set up a call as well. Yeah, that'd be great

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. Sure. No, absolutely. I think that's, that's a great idea.

Woman 35:09

What are your thoughts? So as I've been putting a toe to the Zoho water. I've spent the money… [inaudible] my biggest question like if you being a pro. The thing that we need to integrate is Projects. And I'm having a hard time figuring out how to invest the time to make that project dashboard-like work for us. And this is, I know that you are like, very good at moving through software's like, you're good at understanding a software. I'm good. Like, I have my Gmail and I have my whiteboard. In my Gmail, it's like unread emails mean, I need to do something. Now I have like, I started starting then if I need to do in that day, and then I have all these post-it notes of things I had to do on Monday, but the post is still there. So I have this, system that works for me, but it's not really working for me. But it's also like to get it all into a project that seems so overwhelming when there's already all the work that needs to be done. For like normal work. And so what is kind of your, I don't know, what are your thoughts on how best to manage that particular problem of like, now I want to adopt Zoho, but to adapt in itself is hugely time-consuming.

Vincent Aguirre 36:36

So the answer is going to depend a lot on your preference, I've kind of thrown it back to you, right? One option is to find someone like Distinct to kind of sit with you understand your needs, take everything, and just give it right. Much like, sure some of your clients just like, ‘Hey, just do the thing. I don't really know what the thing is, but do it and tell me what you need me to do.' But then, alternatively, it's really just jumping in, right, like, saying, ‘Okay, here's what I currently do, how can I currently do it the same way in projects, and then figure out how to optimize things later.' That's the approach I ended up taking because I didn't even know the partner ecosystem existed when I was learning. So I just kind of took everything, put it in, get some onboarding calls, and then ‘Oh, wow, I can do this!' So that I tinkered. But if there's no time for that, then working with someone like Distinct just to sit down and listen, understand, and then help us build it out to your specifications. Could be a good option.

Woman: What kind of pricing like for Distinct, like what, like you were talking about some of the more advanced codings, and I know you had some recommending for that, too, like, what is kind of that like, price point to get that?

Vince: Yeah, so everyone's gonna be different. We're still exploring our pricing, to be honest. Right now, for smaller projects, I want to just do them. I wanted to make it affordable for clients so we can get that experience doing it. And we can get clients for case studies, we're actually hoping to work with the Chamber of Commerce on a case study of using Zoho for the Chamber. So a lot of heavy lifting with no investment there. But partners I've worked with are ranging anywhere from $50 for someone $50 an hour for someone not very experienced, or just kind of on their own, to some of the agencies are a couple $100 an hour, you know, pay for the experience. And if they can get it done in half the time Sure. It's worth it. For Distinct, we really haven't settled on pricing yet again, we were building out systems for ourselves. We want to build out some systems for people we trust in people that will give us referrals. So we're trying to figure that out. Yeah, it's a wide variety. And for the custom coding, most agencies, even Distinct partner with people who can do that kind of bundling it all in for making those robust systems.

Vince: Any other questions? Yep, it's included. Recruit alone is, I think, $45 a month for some other things $2,550 and $75 if you're just buying Recruit. So most of the tools are pricing away if you buy two or three, you might as well buy Zoho One. Just to get you into the ecosystem. We're using Recruit for Distinct for when we're looking for new talent, and then rolling that out for the Chamber of Commerce as well to create a job board for the community. So really, really robust. And sign you can do all your document signing. Yeah, that's included. We have some automation setup, when a new client joins, they get a document. It's a kind of boilerplate fills in their information, send it to them, sign it, saves it to their profile.

Woman: You're using Zoho Books. Does it tie to your bank account to where your bank is like feeding in all transactions that are in there?

Vince: It does. Currently, we're only using it for invoicing. We wanted to take this year to still do expenses in QuickBooks. January 1st, we're going to move fully to Zoho Books. And it does bank integration, uses Plad or whatever popular bank integration tools.

Woman: Do they have anything for Expense Management?

Vince: They do. Yeah. So I guess, let me ask when you say expense management.

Woman: Like something like Tiger Point has three people with credit cards, and we need them to like, tell us what your credit.. [inaudible]

Vince: So, I do not know they have Zoho Expense. I think that does it. But I have not even opened Zoho Expense. So I cannot tell you. I know there's a podcast I listened to. They're a consulting company that does Zoho work. And I think they're building out some really cool custom stuff for inventory and expense to make a robust tool. And I think they've mentioned expense in the way that is expense management, but I don't know.

Vince: Now I'm curious, I want to look into the Expense and see exactly how that works. But just to wrap up, kind of going back to the slides. So in the room, a lot of people started to like this out a little interested. Maybe they want to make the jump. Or maybe you're back in the box, and you're like, I don't know, guys, this is a lot of different tools. I'm overwhelmed. But regardless of where you are, in the process of mindset, I'm happy to talk. Right now, as I said, we're not even we're not charging anyone for brainstorming. We're not charging anyone for building out scopes of projects, I'm using it as a learning experience. If the work is a big project, maybe some billing is involved for that. But if I can use it to sharpen our saw, then I'm happy to explore things with anyone who's interested. Because we really love this platform. It's helped us a lot. I don't know what we'd be doing. If we had to try to spend $44,000 a month or whatever that was. I don't know what tool we're using probably Excel. If I didn't find Zoho, it's really changed the way we can serve our clients. And I think it's really a great tool for small businesses in particular. So yeah, there are no more questions. I'm gonna shut down this live stream and.. yeah, so I know there are trials, how long how was your trial? I know you're upgrading, but…

Woman: Yeah, it was a 30-day trial. And I was trying to get some kind of access to Analytics. And I don't know if I just misunderstood. I knew at that point, I was gonna like buy it anyway. So I was like, went ahead and made the purchase because it seemed like I couldn't quite get a good understanding of the Analytics piece without being scrapped number, but that could have been a lack of understanding on my part.

Vince: And we do have a free trial link, if you want to use it going through our kind of pairs you with us as an advisor. It's on Eventbrite and it's on Facebook for anyone who's not here. But I also send that to you, Casey. And, yeah, I think all the tools have some kind of free trial and a large amount of access. For you, in particular, anyone who reaches out to me, we can create full sandboxes for you to test out. The only problem with that is there's no way to migrate from the sandbox to a live environment. So if you spent a lot of time building it out, you got to do it again. But if you just want to test some things, and you're like, maybe my 30-day trial isn't enough. We could afford that too. I'm going to shut down the live stream. I don't see any more questions coming in.

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