Zoho CRM today launched MailMagnet, a smart email filtering that gives sales staff a quick view of correspondence with prospects, integration with location-aware apps, and a new document-management system.
Email filtering and document management may seem as dull as a bunch of middle-aged PC journos and aging execs at CES partying under fluorescent lights. But really, Zoho’s new features are actually far more interesting than some gray-haired dude’s story about flying to Vegas so he can walk the show floor and pretend to listen to the woman in the bikini describing a detachable tablet. Oh, please.
MailMagnet filters email based on the active deals that the salesperson has in Zoho CRM. The new mobile app update allows field sales people to locate customers and leads close to them. With the filtering, you can see a contact page from the CRM system and the email exchange related to that individual. The new service also allows for users to share email exchanges with specific customers.
Writing about document management systems is something I try to avoid. But it’s always about the context. A document management system is not supposed to be sexy. It’s just supposed to work so that a saleswoman can get that contract from her colleague in Cleveland and compare it to the deal she is working on. With the new Zoho CRM document management system, she can upload files in multiple formats and then mail them directly from the document. It’s built into the Zoho Office Suite and comes with 250 megabytes of free storage per user. Enterprise users get 500MB of free storage per user.
The new Zoho features are bread-and-butter stuff that just help sales people get their work done - and the company has 7 million customers to prove it.
Zoho’s continuous addition of new features all add up. Pay attention to Zoho this year. They’re one of the companies I will watch, especially as it quietly continues to compete effectively against companies like Google and Salesforce.com.
One critique — Zoho needs to bust out of its humble shell. Its services are solid but its visibility is still pretty low-key. This is the year it can break out. We’ll see what happens.
(Image source: Saturday Night Live “Middle-Aged Man.”)
