While upselling Zoho One and maintaining focus on SMBs, Zoho taps into enterprises as its portfolio matures

Zoho integrates enterprise capabilities into Zoho One and pushes upmarket

While new enterprise customers are more likely to utilize apps from multiple vendors, Zoho has been successfully upselling Zoho One to customers, such as IIFL, that start with smaller product suites like CRM Plus. Zoho One includes Zoho’s bundled offerings for CRM, finance, human resources, collaboration and commerce, and is more cost-effective than buying the offerings individually. Enterprises that purchase Zoho One subscriptions for a select number of employees pay $75 per user, per month. However, enterprises that go all-in on Zoho One pay $30 per user, per month.

Despite the lower revenue per user, the enterprise pricing model requires a subscription for all employees within the customer’s organization, likely increasing the number of user subscriptions. TBR expects that Zoho will leverage this strategy to drive upmarket, using CRM Plus as a common inroad to enterprise customers, then using the CRM Plus pre-integrations with the vendor’s broader portfolio as a selling point for Zoho One.

Zoho’s journey upmarket is impressive as the company thus far has managed to penetrate an increasing number of enterprise accounts while holding true to its vision. One has to wonder, however, what is next and how Zoho will adapt to its own growth if the journey upmarket continues. Will Zoho continue to grow by word of mouth and fly under the radar with a portfolio of almost altruistically priced applications? Or is there an identity crisis looming on the horizon whereby philosophy, market dynamics and ambition may come to a crossroads? TBR will continue to monitor Zoho’s growth, customer acquisition and geographic expansion as a potential market gamechanger who flies under the radar – and is happy to do so.

Proprietary IT stack enables Zoho to quickly develop new apps alongside new AI, analytics and developer tools

Zoho is able to maintain lower-cost products by utilizing its own data centers, rather than hosting on external infrastructures such as those provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to avoiding high storage and compute costs from a third-party vendor, owning and developing the entire technology stack also simplifies the app development process. Part of the reason for this is that the infrastructure layer, platform layer and database models are uniform throughout Zoho’s technology stack, rather than cobbled together through acquisitions. This decreases the development life cycle, enabling Zoho developers to quickly move from product idea to product release, while ensuring a more seamless integration across the portfolio.

At ZohoDay 2020, about 60 analysts attended a series of interactive presentations in a relatively intimate forum that highlighted Zoho’s unique journey and industry-divergent principles. Zoho senior executives interacted with analysts one-on-one, and clients spoke about their “voice of the customer” experiences.