Greenspire

Greenspire’s Success Story: Scaling with Zoho Consulting Partnership

Greenspire is a national residential savings program specialist, based in Southern California. Greenspire works directly with the local utilities, communications, and lending companies, facilitating multiple home savings programs. The company offers a wide variety of incentive- driven programs so that customers typically pay no money out of pocket. In February 2015, Greenspire approached James Converse from ZBrains, a Zoho consulting partner, to help grow the company by providing business process consulting and tools from Zoho. By deploying a combination of Zoho CRM, Creator, and Motivator and implementing an overhaul in the company’s approach to sales and service, Greenspire grew from humble beginnings with two founders to a workforce of over 150 employees.

The Business

Greenspire opened its doors in 2012 in Los Angeles. Apart from its headquarters, the company boasts five satellite offices and hundreds of marketing and sales representatives that span both the California and Arizona markets. David Murray, CEO of Greenspire, took an idea – that people were paying too much for their utilities – and turned it into the booming business he oversees today, in just three years.

Introduction

In 2013, Greenspire CEO David Murray had a fledgling financial services business with an aggressive vision for growth, but no customers and no system in place to manage them as they began to roll in. Fortunately, the company’s primary services offering to utility companies resonated well with homeowners and business owners, and sales streamed in quickly. The new business fit Murray’s vision, but he swiftly noticed an obvious pain point: no process to manage any part of the business in a cost-effective, scalable manner.

The Challenge

Before Greenspire implemented a customized version of Zoho CRM, the company had no system in place to track and analyze their sales process and its efficacy. How long does it take to close a deal from inbound lead inquiry to signing a contract? Who are the most profitable customers? Which salespeople are most effective and diligent in following up on leads? Nobody knew…

“We needed a way to improve our KPIs as much as possible by tracking, managing and analyzing the volume of new data coming in.” explained Murray about the business. Of course, with no way to analyze that information, Murray knew it would be impossible to make informed business decisions, especially given the business’ rapid expansion.

It was time to do something about it.

Greenspire needed a system that could handle day-to-day sales operations with a growing sales staff – already over 30 at that point. The company also required a powerful, intuitive analytics component that could scale as their business continued to grow. Lacking both CRM experts and anyone with substantial data analysis experience, it was essential the system be easy to implement, use, and grow with the company over time.

Finding A Solution

Before deciding to implement Zoho CRM, Greenspire seriously considered a few different options, including Zoho competitors Salesforce and Quickbase. Price factored heavily into Murray’s decision because Zoho offered nearly all of the same features of Salesforce at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately what enticed Murray even more than the price difference was Zoho’s attractive user interface. Murray found the UI easy to use and appreciated that it allowed for simple field changes and customizations. Perhaps best of all, Zoho enabled Greenspire to do all of this without needing to call a Salesforce consultant – or worse, a programmer! Murray was also impressed with the depth of the application and its many integration points with other Zoho applications. In a nutshell, the team at Greenspire recognized that Zoho CRM would allow them to evolve their skills and scale the system as needed.

Murray chose ZBrains to lead the implementation because of a strong endorsement from Zoho, plus the consultant’s “quick start” program that allowed for inexpensive deployment based on a flat fee. Murray needed something quick and turnkey, but knew that more services would be needed down the road as their use of the system expanded.

Implementation & Results

“As the business continues its rapid growth, Zoho has become instrumental to Greenspire’s success. It will clearly play a crucial role in our future,” said Murray. The initial phase of the CRM implementation took a scant two weeks – an impressive timeline given the urgency and amount of data they were utilizing. “ZBrains and James Converse in particular really impressed us with his knowledge of not only Zoho, but our business and how Zoho could fit into the big picture,” Murray commented. He admitted, “However, were still learning our business at the time, so we didn’t realize the true usefulness of Zoho until later.” Subsequently, as the business scaled up in the months that followed, ZBrains introduced Greenspire to different Zoho apps (Zoho Creator, Zoho Reports, and Zoho Motivator), as well as their own SmartScheduler – all of which tremendously streamlined their sales process.

“Zoho allows us to manage people remotely,” stated David Murray, elaborating on how Zoho has grown with his company and complemented his business model. “90% of our staff is outside our office; Zoho allows us to plug in to what they’re doing at any time and gives us ways to optimize their results. It’s a huge value proposition to us.”

"It's an inexpensive solution to help manage different parts of a business. As for whether or not I'd recommend using Zoho, it depends on the company, but yes. If you mean a high user count company, then absolutely."

Greenspire’s Success Story: Scaling with Zoho Consulting Partnership

David Murray

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