Funding Strategies – Finance Services
Discover how Funding Strategies enhanced efficiency and growth by implementing Zoho CRM Plus.
“The resulting improvement in communications with clients and greater efficiency of their staff has provided growth to Funding Strategies that would have otherwise been throttled.”
Executive Summary
Funding Strategies is an Australian capital markets firm providing venture capital and finance services to small businesses and companies seeking equity capital and finance for growth and expansion in the unlisted, pre-IPO markets.
Funding Strategies specializes in creating and implementing successful funding and capital-raising strategies. The team serves predominately private and public companies, and sophisticated investors, with a broad range of services. After considering various CRM providers they selected Zoho CRM Plus, and with the help of IWT Consulting implemented 10 licenses for their team in Brisbane.
Introduction
For some years Funding Strategies attempted to use an EDM product as their quasi CRM, along with a host of large and complex spreadsheets. It was understood that using such rudimentary systems was holding back growth and resulted in the visibility of progress for their projects for both clients and within their own business being minimal or non-existent.
The Business
Funding Strategies has been in business since 2012 and has 10 Brisbane team members. They raise capital for Australian companies that tend to be high-tech, with the main throttle to their businesses being the lack of capital that is required for expansion. The need Funding Strategies fills is to link potential investors with those companies and to arrange the documents required to formalize arrangements.
The Challenge
With approximately 65,000 potential investors and clients in their database, Funding Strategies had to link clients seeking funding with investors interested in providing funding. Before implementing Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, and Zoho Reports, all of this had to be carried out using large Excel spreadsheets.
This often meant duplication, as there was a separate spreadsheet for each investment, and resulting in no 360-degree view of clients and investors, and their histories. Keeping investors and clients informed about progress and results was very difficult.
Finding a Solution
Funding Strategies considered a number of online CRMs but found that others were much too expensive while offering similar or less functionality. Zoho’s pricing was reasonable and still provided the capability to be configured and customized to exactly suit their needs.
IWT Consulting was chosen to do the Zoho customization, providing the link between capital-raising clients and potential investors. The Advanced Zoho Partner demonstrated an excellent understanding of Funding Strategies’ business needs, while still being able to translate those needs to the required technical solutions.
Implementation and Results
The initial replacement of the third-party EDM and numerous spreadsheets took about three months while connecting potential investors with clients took another two months.
The resulting improvement in communications with clients and greater efficiency of their staff has provided growth to Funding Strategies that would have otherwise been throttled. Examples created in Zoho Analytics of the dashboards that are available to clients are used in sales presentations, demonstrating the professionalism and point of difference that Funding Strategies offers its clients. Rather than taking significant time in preparing reports, these are available to clients via a link at any time, updating overnight every night, so they are always fully informed regarding the progress of their funding.
Not only was IWT Consulting closely involved in these first steps, but the next step was a move to Zoho One and a more fully-integrated web presence as the front-end of client and investor inquiries.
Thoughts about Zoho?
Zoho represents an unbelievable suite of products: full functionality and an unbeatable price. As an Advanced Zoho Partner, IWT Consulting has proven to be not only knowledgeable about a wide range of these products but able to understand and implement complex customer requirements.
About IWT Consulting
IWT Consulting are business consulting experts that sell, support, train, and customize a wide range of Zoho products, including CRM, Desk, Analytics, Campaigns, Recruit, Social, and Projects, to mention just a few.