Case Study

Until recently, most technological innovation in the restaurant industry has taken place in the kitchen. But Silicon Valley tech startup E la Carte is changing that storyline with its innovative Presto Smart Dining System(TM) for use in full-service casual restaurants.

Their Presto restaurant tablet sits right on diners’ tabletops, providing everything from eye-catching images of menu selections to instant ordering and payment processing. The system is now in use at Applebee’s, Johnny Rockets, and Outback Steakhouse restaurants, to name just a few.

More than just ‘gee whiz’ technology that’s cool and cutting edge, the results of e la Carte’s in-depth research show that restaurants actually serve more patrons (more frequent table turns), waiters earn more tips, and customers walk away happier with their experience when using the Presto tablet. It’s what the company calls a win-win-win.

“Consider all the time patrons spend waiting for the check. If you solve that pain point alone, you can help casual dining adapt to a consumer’s needs in the 21st century,” says Mike Church, E la Carte’s CMO. “The benefits are massive in scale for everyone involved – the restaurant, the server, and the customer.”

The Problem

According to Mike, E la Carte needed to reinvent their sales processes in order to expand their business into new restaurant segments. “As a company founded by engineers, our early teams didn’t have the experience of taking new leads and prospects through a structured and scalable sales funnel,” he says. “A big part of the challenge was that every lead was treated as equal – whether it was a chain of 50 restaurants or a single standalone location. We needed a system in place to ensure our leads were qualified before passing them to the sales team and allocating scarce resources.” That’s when E la Carte turned to Zoho, a lightweight and easy-to-use CRM system that could scale with this growing company.

The Shortcoming In The Plan

While Zoho was easy enough to implement on their own, mapping functionality to their unique sales funnel and lead scoring process was another challenge. The core features and standard workflow in Zoho weren’t going to cut it. Mike realized, “We needed to bring in an expert who could get it customized quickly, rather than pulling focus away from our core business and spending weeks to do it ourselves. It isn’t the best use of our time.”

The Solution

E la Carte reached out to James Converse from ZBrains to lead and manage the project. Mike says, “To really unlock the power of Zoho, we needed the guidance of someone with experience in sales, marketing, and CRM software to maximize the benefit from our investment. And James is that guy.” James points out, “Implementing, using, and even adding custom fields to Zoho CRM is easy. But mapping that functionality and workflow to your sales process and understanding how long each stage is supposed to take – those things are independent of the software and that’s where we really add value.”

2-Day Turnaround

Since E la Carte was already using and relying on Zoho, James couldn’t just rip out and replace the software and start over from scratch. Furthermore, the work had to be done really fast to avoid significant disruption to E la Carte’s business.

Mike recalls, “I would describe the project as a sprint where James and our sales and marketing teams were locked in an office for some pretty hard-hitting sessions, hammering out all the additional requirements and refining our new multi-stage sales process and functional specification for the system.”

The Result

The sales process was redesigned, and then Zoho was rebuilt and up and running again in just 2 days.

James points out that a successful CRM implementation doesn’t need to be drawn out for weeks or months and that E la Carte played a huge role in the rapid turnaround. “They came to the table prepared,” James said.  “Mike’s team is highly skilled and experienced in defining stages of the sales cycle, determining the data to collect at each stage, and identifying triggers to move the process through. They did their homework and we were able to hit the ground running as soon as I arrived.”

Just What E la Carte Ordered

E la Carte’s Zoho system now identifies and escalates qualified prospects and drives the sales process with better resource allocation and efficiency. “Now, we’re able to focus on higher quality opportunities by scoring and qualifying the leads before passing them off to a more senior salesperson,” Mike notes. “We’ve gone from chasing opportunities that, in hindsight, wouldn’t have passed muster to a more reliable strategy that has shrunk our funnel and accelerated our sales process from months to just days.”

Mike and his entire team are generous with praise for James. “James was pretty unbelievable. To find one person who understands business, marketing, and technical coding in a single package is rare. The fact that he could consult on the details of our strategy and then turn around and customize Zoho to accomplish the objective was huge in getting this done so quickly. He’s truly a sales, marketing, and CRM ninja with a get-it-done skill set.”

Do business with certified Los Angeles CRM consulting

When picking someone to do business with – especially someone to handle something as important as your CRM implementation – you want to make sure you’re employing someone you can trust.  You’ll want someone well known in their technological circle, and someone well known in their locale, too.  ZBrains is happy to be in an elite group of Los Angeles CRM consulting firms; we’re an organization you can depend on for any type of job, be it implementation, training, support, or consulting for Zoho CRM and any of its additions (apps).  Furthermore, we offer coaching in sales, reviews of business processes, as well as specialized gap analysis for your complex systems.

Why choose ZBrains over anyone else?

Surely you have a large pool of consultants to choose from in LA – what makes us better Los Angeles CRM consultants than anyone else?  We like to let our Zoho accreditation speak for itself.  As a Zoho Premium Partner and Zoho Certified Consultant, we’re one of Zoho’s trusted few when it comes to CRM implementation and consulting.  As well, we take Zoho a step further by employing a Development Team that builds custom integrations from Zoho CRM to popular platforms like QuickBooks and many others.  What’s more is we even have you covered for custom apps.  In fact, we’ve built a whole suite of ERP apps on Zoho Creator called FieldTech.  It plugs right into Zoho, and it’s only offered by us.

Put your business where you want it to be with expert coaching

Have you imagined walking into an office where everyone knew what they were supposed to do, no one wasted any time with needless or repetitive tasks, and revenue was at an all-time high as a result?  Let us take a look at your whole business in a Business Process Analysis.  In a BPA, we examine not only your workers’ respective tasks within your CRM, but your CRM’s place in your business as a whole.  From there, we recommend best practices based on your unique situation.  No two businesses are built alike; don’t trust something you read online that may not even be germane to your business.  Let one of the best Los Angeles CRM consulting firms show you exactly what you can do.

Why go with someone here in LA?

Being based in Los Angeles is almost like being in Silicon Valley; it means we keep abreast of all the latest tech happenings.  We work in downtown Pasadena with a handful of other technology-minded businesses around us.

And, it’s not just about contributing to the local economy.  Personal touches make everything better. And, what could be better than having someone assist you in setting up your CRM live and in person?  Anyone can direct you over the phone, but only a local firm can get a feel for how you work in person.  That extra bit of perception makes all the difference in offering better consulting for your business.  And, it never hurts to put faces to the names and voices you hear every day.

Call (888) 207-4111 or contact us and we’ll show you exactly what a Los Angeles CRM consulting expert can do for you and your business with service that’s absolutely personalized.

Do you really need Marketing Automation and Social Integration in order to excel in business?

Chances are if you’re reading this blog post, the answer in your mind is a resounding yes.  But, the answer isn’t as intuitive to everyone. That includes owners of very small companies, very traditionally sales-oriented companies, and others who have simply never known the power of CRM automation.  And, I write this in hopes that someone reading this gains a bit of insight.

I decided to write this as a followup to a prior post where we compared Zoho CRM to Method:CRM.  The problem I noticed is that while Zoho CRM allows users to set up automated marketing and social media campaigns, Method:CRM doesn’t provide users a way to carry out those seemingly fundamental tasks.  And, I have a feeling it’s because of the mindset that marketing automation just doesn’t matter, or that a business can get by with a simple contact management system and an integration with QuickBooks.

So, for those skeptical folks among us, what does marketing automation do for you?  It’s more than meets the eye.

Increase engagement by promoting via email

Obviously, drumming up business is never a bad thing.  So, what do you do when contacts and leads fall by the wayside and you haven’t reached out to them in months?

Just like in world of social interaction, engaging someone who’s gone cold can prove tricky.  But, you shouldn’t use that as an excuse not to try it.  Chances are if you got someone’s contact info, that someone was engaged enough at one point and just got sidetracked.  Or you got too busy, or life just happened, as it often does.

With marketing automation, you have the opportunity to re-engage that person – and perhaps countless others.  You could even land a big deal that was a long time coming. Use anything of these excuses to send a message:

1. A change of seasons
2. The beginning of the month
3. An approaching holiday
4. Anything else you can think of!

Note that no one ever gets 100% engagement in an email campaign.  But, if the product you pitch generates enough revenue, you’ll win with just one sale anyway.

Does chat really help?

When thinking about whether or not installing a chat box on your website will really help customer engagement, it’s easy to think of it as too invasive.  For example, just think of that annoying kid who comes up to you in Target when you’re just trying to find anything.  No, of course you don’t need any help!  But, being accosted in a department store is much different than receiving a chat message from someone when you’re on an unfamiliar site, perhaps unsure of how to proceed after landing on the home page…  You could be under a tremendous time crunch and need help finding information quickly.  Or, you may not even know if you’ve hit the right site at all.

The truth is chat really does help.  People who you engage via chat are more likely to trust you.  This makes them more likely to buy from you in the long run.  By communicating with visitors on your website, you’re able to find out a good deal about them: why they’re visiting, what their respective companies do, their level of authority…as well as more personal things, as often happens over chat.  You can use the information you get from your prospects to simply follow up with them in the future, or even research them more in depth later.  But, no matter what, you’ll have them in your own CRM in a flash.  And, that’s miles better than either double-entering the lead into your database manually or not having the lead to begin with.

What are you missing without marketing and social automation?

Well…kind of a lot.

Without marketing automation, you probably have a way to contact your leads through your CRM… But, you likely have a limited number of email templates to choose from.  And, you definitely won’t have any way of keeping track of who actually opens and clicks on your emails.

One of the greatest things about a social plugin for your website is the notion that visitors have a way of reaching you from the comfort of their chairs.  This means no picking up a phone or even using their voices!  By using chat, you’ll engage people whose attention you simply may never have garnered before. This leads to sales you never would have had, and relationships that never could have been possible.

And, another thing: chat makes users more likely to engage you themselves.  On a website with chat enabled, customers or prospects usually face three possible contact options:

1. Send an email (and, it could take hours or even days to get a response)
2. Pick up the phone (where you could get a voicemail or thrown on hold indefinitely)
3. Chat (where you know someone’s waiting at their desk to service your request)

It’s easy to see why someone might pick the chat option.  No long wait time, no pressure to articulate thoughts correctly the first time (because of your backspace key).  And, of course, the knowledge that someone is waiting to help you.  (As long as the box says they’re available, of course.)

Without chat, you’re quite limited.  Customers and potential customers can only reach you if they pick up the phone, send you an email, or fill out a form.  And, some of your potential customers will certainly do that.  But, I would guess many more will opt for chat for the reasons aforementioned.

Zoho gives you an edge with marketing automation and social integrations

Zoho has a good deal of clout just from its CRM, but the addition of marketing and social apps like Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Social make its offering of apps much more enticing.  SalesIQ rounds it out with a great website chat feature, too.  All of their social and marketing apps integrate with the CRM, so you won’t need to manually copy information from app to app.  And, the addition of Zoho MarketingHub to its arsenal further expands Zoho’s marketing sphere, putting it in the same realm as a HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  Futhermore, all of these apps are available in Zoho One, which is Zoho’s entire family of apps bundled together for a fairly low price.  With that kind of offering, there’s never been a better time to take your first steps into Zoho.

This post is admittedly lengthy, but, I hope you gain at least one bit of valuable knowledge from it.  Marketing automation and social integration really do help boost overall engagement by giving you insight into your customers’ behavior patterns.  And, if you have a choice between picking a CRM with marketing tools and one without…go with the one that includes them!

Gap Analysis for Businesses

If you’re like most business owners, you’ve probably spent a long time getting your business systems in place. You’ve developed the perfect combination of procedures and programs to achieve your business’ goals, and have trained your team on those systems.  Sometimes, you happen upon the perfect systemic combination. Other times…you don’t. That’s called a gap between expectation and reality in your systems’ collective performance, hence the expression gap analysis.

Can you recognize when you don’t have a perfect combination of programs and systems – and, if so, what to do about it?

This is where ZBrains can help.

Start Your Gap Analysis Consulting

Here’s How Gap Analysis Works

The term gap analysis from a business standpoint really just means taking an in-depth look at your business’ procedures and systems. Followed by an examination of their purposes, then identifying any weaknesses. That is, find the places where the results fall short of your desire – and determine a way (or ways) to fix them.

Gap Analysis Example

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you own a toy store you’re certain needs some gap analysis.  You’d go through similar steps in order to determine what to do to improve your business:

1. Identify the current process: Sell toys at the brick-and-mortar store
2. Identify the current outcome: Sell 20 toys per day
3. Select a goal you hope to achieve: Sell 100 toys per day
4. Define a new process that would help reach that goal: Implement or improve the toy store’s website to be more customer-friendly, or implement paid search results, or…
5. Identify the gap…

Undoubtedly, your own processes are much more complex than simply selling toys (without regard to the kind of toy, your stock of toys on hand, your website’s performance, and other such variables).  This is where ZBrains gap analysis experts can come and do the heavy lifting for you.

Call our consultancy line at (888) 207-4111 if this is the type of gap analysis you need for your business, or if you have any questions about how our analysis process works.

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Gap Analysis to compare two sets of business processes

Another way to use this kind of analysis is to compare two sets of your own business’ processes.

For example, say you have a set of computer systems that perform tasks A, B, C, and D.  You’ve just bought another, more comprehensive system that can perform tasks A, B, and C…but, not D.  (And, in reality, there would likely be other tasks the two opposing programs would perform, and in different ways, requiring a sub-analysis to account for those).

Our gap analysis experts scrutinize and compare your two systems’ capabilities. We determine where their true differences lie, and in turn answer the question of whether or not it benefits you, or is possible, to:

• Delegate a task previously fulfilled by your old system to the new one
• Improve the old system so as to render the new one obsolete
• Adopt an entirely new system
• Fuse bits of systems 1 and 2 to create something new

It’s our expertise, and we’d love to connect and determine if a gap analysis can help streamline new aspects of your business.

Call (888) 207-4111 if this is the type of Gap Analysis you need for your business, or if you have any questions about how our own analysis process works.

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