CRM Zoho implementation Small Business

We want to configure our Zoho CRM to get the most out of the platform and reduce our operational workload. Who are we? Very small team, basically two people. We launched our brand in 2020. Limited experience in sales and business. We enjoy creative activities, but for several years now, operations have consumed most of our work time. For five years, we've the cliché of the mini-entrepreneur who does everything, works long hours qirh a long never ending list of tasks.. What do we do? We design and sell handcrafted furniture for contract use. This means our suppliers are workshops of highly talented but not fully professionalized artisans, and our clients are architecture and interior design firms that design hospitality spaces (hotels, restaurants, etc.) and luxury residences. We don't have our own workshops; we subcontract the production of parts. This means we follow partial production orders, which are then assembled in the final supplier's workshop or our warehouse/office (depending on the product). In short, we act as a proxy between a non-professionalized artisan workshop and a large hotel chain, providing the latter with high-quality products with authentic designs (we don't make copies), along with managing communication, invoicing, and all the details a company of this type requires. What do we hope to achieve with this service contract? We're looking for a management platform for our client relationships. For many years, we've managed this with disconnected tools, requiring a lot of time and effort on our part. We're looking for a platform that simplifies our work and allows us to delegate tasks like creating and sending quotes to someone here at Upwork. We already tested this delegation, and it worked, but we noticed that our process between Books and Bigin involved very manual steps that required meticulous attention to detail from the person responsible, as well as extensive training on our end. Therefore, we decided to pause the contract. Where are we in relation to Zoho? We've been using Zoho Books since the second week of January of this year. We had previously run tests and scheduled the implementation for the end of the year. Currently, in Books, we handle Estimates, Sales Orders, Invoices, and payment tracking, all exclusively for clients. In Books, we configure email templates and send emails from there, copying our company email to see the sent email in our Gmail. Last week, we configured Email Relay in Bigin with Google Workspace, only to realize belatedly that this method also fails to show the sent email in the SENT folder. In January, two weeks after implementing Books, we implemented Bigin without having given the CRM product any further review. We've been using Bigin for approximately four months. We liked the idea that Bigin is a simple platform, but now we feel there are things it doesn't do that we do ourselves, and it's more work to do them manually or constantly switch platforms. Regarding our subscription payment, we initially paid for Books alone. After the extended Bigin trial, we switched to Zoho One Essentials. The plan is to upgrade to Zoho Standard. For Zoho Standard, we don't have the problem of including "all our employees" because the company only has two employees, and on the contrary, we would use more memberships to hire part-time freelancers for specific help. Where are we in general? We urgently need to hire hourly help for our operations, but we're stuck because we lack comprehensive tools for delegation. We strongly believe in technology, and since 2020 we've been trying to build a company that relies on systems and not just the rigor and responsibility of a single employee. For the first year, we managed everything with Excel spreadsheets because sales were very low. In 2022, we considered implementing Zoho Suite, but we didn't (we regret it) and instead created a custom low-code system in Coda.io based on relational databases. It worked well for a long time, but we realized our mistake because it made us slaves to adding and maintaining functions. In 2024, we considered Zoho again, but we made the mistake of implementing Odoo. We were convinced by the multi-company functionality (we have two companies, one of which is a supplier to the other) and the parts management based on Bills of Materials (BOMs). From May 2024 to September 2025, we were stuck implementing Odoo, with some satisfactions and successful milestones, but also a lot of frustration using a system that isn't user-friendly and is very fragile in its operation. Why use a system that has one thing that almost no one else has (BOMs) but makes our lives impossible in everything else? After much exhaustion and sunk costs due to the time we invested, we decided to abandon the implementation plan and started looking at options, Zoho again. At the end of last year, we implemented purchase orders in Zoho Books for the second company, the one that supplies the main company, and that was our signal to move the main company to Zoho this year. Today we use Bigin and Zoho Books. Between the two, Books is the true source because we implemented it first and it worked better for us. For example, the email templates we send to clients are in Books, not Bigin. We're making progress, sometimes we feel like we're moving quickly, but we've been implementing systems since 2022 and we no longer have the same drive we had at the beginning to learn, test, implement, etc. What are our expectations? With Zoho CRM, we're looking for a platform that will be our core operation and make our lives easier. Right now, we want to start with CRM to make sales work as smooth as possible, but we'd like to discuss options with this person for implementing other areas and challenges we have, such as managing transactions for both companies, exploring the pros and cons of Zoho Inventory, etc. We're looking for someone to join us for 6-18 months to gradually implement Zoho Suite across different aspects of our operation. We want to leverage a consultant's experience to test fewer things and make more informed decisions that have a clear direction for the future. About our clients and business operations? Our main clients are architecture firms that frequently specify our furniture in their projects. Our products are not sold in bulk; they are pieces used as design accents to enhance the perceived value of a space. Our direct client is not the decision-maker; their client (the end customer) makes the decision. In that sense, our client is more of a sales agent who uses our catalog as a resource to enhance the perception of their service to their client. For this reason, we don't have an aggressive sales strategy. We have adopted the role of partner to our clients, helping them create unique spaces with our products. We strive to be a back office for our clients, answering their questions promptly so that our quote is available during the creative meeting where decisions are made, and our product is included in the initial 3D rendering presented to the client. Our primary communication channels are WhatsApp and email. Our main way of attracting new clients is through Instagram. Most of our product is made to order, because we have many variables and it's difficult to anticipate which color or variable to produce. We do have some finished product stock, but very little, only 8-15 pieces in rotation. Our sales orders remain open for an average of 9 weeks, from when the customer pays a 50% deposit until we deliver the finished product. We have almost no collection problems because we collect the final payment before shipping the product. During the time a sales order is open, we communicate very little with our customers. Now, with Books, we've added some templates to notify them that the order is progressing well and on time. This way, we have control over the communication flow and avoid customers contacting us via WhatsApp to ask about the order status, which increases our manual workload. Months ago, we implemented a chatbot quite quickly because we have a lot of documented information, but we didn't take the leap to implement it because we believe our clients value human interaction. The average ticket size is high, customer relationships are recurring, and since they "resell" our product, we believe it's important for them to feel that there's a person supporting everything. We're not closed to implementing a chatbot, but we're shifting our focus to having a robust back office that helps us provide that human customer service in an agile way, without the stress of using a thousand disconnected tools where we're the system's orchestrator. Zoho Today: Trial CRM Account Bigin-Books integration already removed. CRM-Books integration already activated. CRM-Bigin gave us an error during migration, so we didn't do it. Companies, contacts, and products in Bigin came from Books, so we migrated those from Books using the integration. We migrated Deals from Bigin in CSV format. Zoho CRM: Immediate Timeframe In the next few days, we want to move our daily operations from Bigin to CRM. We will continue using Zoho Books as before. Zoho CRM: Short Term We want to understand the system's capabilities and choose our first priorities, and that's where we need your help. What are the best configuration investments to see tangible benefits ASAP? What configurations should we consider for the future? Zoho: Medium Term Continue implementing "advanced" or "nice-to-have" features in CRM and explore integrations with other Zoho products such as Marketing, WhatsApp within CRM, Books, and Inventory. We are particularly interested in Inventory, but we are hesitant to proceed due to our negative experience with Odoo. However, we know we need to reconsider with a less ambitious plan than the multi-company Odoo setup, but one that will still be beneficial.