What you'll learn:
- Value of a complete SAAS suite solution offering
- Ideas to help you stay on top of industry trends and technical skills, keys to building strong client and vendor relationships
Transcription:
Chris (00:11):
All right. Hello, hello, hello. It is now 9:30 in the morning and that means it's time for our case study. Hello everyone. Good morning. Alright, so of course, do you as accountants want a multimillion dollar practice? Of course you do. Who doesn't? But there are lots and lots of different ways to approach this problem, and today we're going to discuss one possible path. Val Steed is the Director of Accountants at ZOHO, and Brett Martin is the President of Zenatta Consulting, and I shall now make myself scarce and let the people you really came to see take the stage.
Val Steed (00:52):
Thank you, Chris. We really appreciate it. Folks, a pleasure to be here and talk to you a little bit. I'm going to try to take care of the Zenatta or the ZOHO stuff quickly and get out of the way. So if we can get this slide moving. Hang on. There we go. There's Brett and there's myself, and I'll let Brett introduce himself. My background is an accounting finance CPA background, and I've been involved in this accounting tech industry for many years. As you'll see during the session, I'll kind of let you know why I left my prior business and believe in where ZOHO is going. I think you'll see that through the slides. Now, quickly, the number one question we get here in these type of events is what is a ZOHO? Okay? It really, the easiest way to say it is we're the largest technology company that you probably don't know about much because we haven't done a lot of marketing in the US until my team came along, especially to the accounting profession.
(01:48)
But we've been around 27 years, okay? 27 plus years. Let me tell you a little more about the company than what's on the slide. We have a sister company called Manage Engine. If you get your phones out and Google's out or whatever, you may want to look that one up because you will be stunned at the companies who they manage behind the curtains, who they manage their global network for. So we run on our sister company's global engine. There is no AWS, Amazon, Web Services, Google, Azure, anybody in our way. So we do all our pricing, all of our global stuff through our sister company. We're privately owned and we're publicly responsible, which means we're quite an unusual company. They have their chance to accept outside money and they never will. Okay? So we are headed a direction that we think we're going to win this whole game.
(02:37)
And what's the whole game? Hold on a second. I'll show you that the company has 13,000 employees. We say we have over 50 plus apps, okay? So we have quite a suite of applications more than we could talk about quickly. Even in a short session like this. It's just too much. We'll show you a little bit of it. We're in 150 plus countries. We currently, user count is 85 million, and our company or customer count is 625,000. So we are in a very unique position and because of that, privately owned and completely committed to the SaaS culture to be the operating suite, if you will, for business. So in all inclusive operating suite globally, we have servers, those little red dots, those are data server locations. The blue dots are offices and a little bit with our different suites. And these are just a few icons folks.
(03:37)
For example, my team is here mostly representing the finance suite, which has your books, your inventory, subscription, billing, wonderful expense product. Look, I'm, the Session's not about us, so I'm going to keep going here. I want to get to Brett and let him show a lot of his stuff because really that's what it's about. My last thing I will tell you, we have a site, you can come and find us. We love accountants. We're signing up a lot of firms, to be honest with you. If you just go to zoho.com/CPA. Now, if you're not a CPA, it's okay. We had to pick one acronym for the site. I picked the shortest zoho.com/CPA, bookkeepers, accountants, CPAs, everyone's welcome there. Welcome to join our program, and we'd love to have you. Here's the agenda where we're going. We're going to talk about who Sonata Keys to Success value, a complete SaaS thing, and build how you build a strong customer client relationship.
Brett Martin (04:35):
My turn. Your turn, bro. It is not a consulting. So we basically are a integration partner for ZOHO, but it's kind of interesting how we got there. Val said, what is a ZOHO? You hear that all the time. So my background is a little different. I actually was a channel partner engagement executive, so I would help build Cisco's channel program. So as they recruited all their partners, built McAfee's channel program was VP of Worldwide channels for Lexar Micron, basically doing nothing but building channels for companies. Then I decided I would move into a channel consulting role. And so I actually started working with companies consulting on how to build their channels. And every time you would go into any sort of tech company that had multi-channel relationships, their CRM was always a disaster. And so they were basically just set up so that their CRM could manage only their direct sales team, maybe it could manage their partners.
(05:33)
God forbid they were in distribution and they had multi-channel going on. Nothing was ever set up properly. So we would go in, we didn't want to become basically CRM specialists, but we would have to go in and start setting up their CRMs. And at the time, most of the time we would do Salesforce. If you go, I could date myself and Steve. We started with goldmine back in the day, and then we would do Salesforce and we would move on. And then one day I happened to stumble a company called ZOHO, and I said, wow, this is quite a unique experience there. It's a huge product offering, and it does pretty much everything that everyone else does for a fraction of the cost. They have 50% of the cost. And so we started playing with that, and then we started doing ZOHO for some of our channel engagements that we were working with.
(06:19)
And then I just made a pivot. I basically said, okay, I'm going to shut down the channel consulting side of things and just focus on ZOHO. Now, why did I choose ZOHO? Oftentimes if you look at there, you're looking for a product that you want to represent and you want to build a successful consulting agency or a success successful implementation agency. It's really nice to go into a space that isn't that crowded and that people don't know ZOHO, but it's 85 million users, it's 13,000 employees. It's a real company. And I will go to dinner parties all the time and people ask me, what do you do? And I say, I'm a ZOHO consultant. And they're like, I have no idea what that is. And I say, salesforce.com. They go, oh yeah, I go just like that. 85 million users. The whole numbers game. And they're like, I had no idea.
(07:07)
And that was kind of the key as we went through. So as I made this decision, I kind of looked at the overall marketplace and there is a massive opportunity in that product offering. And there are others that are out there as well. I mean, you will find underserved markets where basically they're underserved from a consulting side because everybody's basically gone to the 800 pound gorilla and they're kind of servicing those. So that's how Sonata Consulting was born. And it started off with just me. I basically gutted the whole thing, started from scratch, decided we're going to do that, and then we built it up over the last six years. So I'm not sure where we're.
Val Steed (07:45):
We do have the video. It's hiding there somewhere. Let's see if we got it.
Brett Martin (07:48):
There we go. Yeah. This tells you about us.
Presentation Video (07:50):
ZOHO premium partner in the Americas, consisting of a diverse team of 20 plus employees who are experts in over 40 plus Soho applications, including CRM projects, desk campaigns, analytics, sales, IQ books, inventory, and more. Our team of experts also specializes in custom creator applications, custom web and marketing solutions, and the ZOHO Finance suite. But most importantly, we understand how all of this ties into our client's business needs. We have over 500 plus clients across dozens of industries, ranging from a few employees to hundreds with over three new clients onboarded every week. And boy, do these clients love what we did for them, but that's not all. Without missing a beat, we create new content every week for our YouTube channel, from ZOHO product tutorials to custom solutions to full product overview webinars, we are committed to growing and delivering the latest and most relevant content in the world of ZOHO.
(08:47)
Oh, and did we mention the CRM Zen Show, which is a weekly podcast where we cover all the latest news events, implementations, tips more? And if that's not enough, we have AZAAZ Ask Zenatta anything about ZOHO, another weekly video series where our team answers all of our community's questions with in-depth explanations and screen share tutorials. We have a newsletter that drops every Monday, which covers everything from the weekly show and more. Plus Club Zenatta, which is a free community where ZOHO users, partners, enthusiasts, can all come together and share news codes, findings, events, ask questions and more. And let's not forget about our CRM team training course, the number one ZOHO CRM training course designed to train your entire team in just seven days. We have a weekly blog tying in some of the industry trends with the world of ZOHO. And to make life easier, we've compiled all of our content into one easy to navigate ultimate ZOHO resource library that lives inside zenatta.com. So who is Zenatta? We are the experts who understand business needs and can help with everything ZOHO..
Brett Martin (09:55):
Wow.
Val Steed (09:57):
Brett, I've got to really compliment you guys, even before you came up with this new video and your other new AZAAZ and things folks, these guys have a very deep library of training that they allowed just the public to come read and study and whatever. I think it's a very smart move on your part, thanks to not only educate the public and help us greatly, but also I think what that does is people see a lot of that information and then they're like, wow, these are the guys I want to have working for me because they look like they know what they're doing kind of thing. So thanks.
Brett Martin (10:27):
So that didn't happen overnight. So how do you build a multimillion dollar consulting agency piece by piece by piece by piece by piece? I hired, so everybody, Marcus Lemonis know who he is, ever heard of him, right? Marcus Lemonis on CNBC has a show called the Profit spelled profit, kind of clever good show. But he has three principles, which are people, process and product. And I think, and I've kind of followed those my entire career as to how that breaks down and how you get to where you want to be. So it all starts with the people.
(11:05)
Each single hire is so critical in the early stages of building out a consulting, one bad hire can tank your entire company. It's just absolutely brutal how the amount of money it can cost you, the reputational damage it can cost you if you hire a bad person. So we always start with the people, and initially it was I just had to get those first two good hires. I really couldn't do anything more than train myself, build them myself. As we ended up ballooning the team, the 27 people, we actually brought in culture coaches and we do culture surveys and the three sixties and all of those kind of things, we actually make everybody take what's called a Berkman test, which is a personality profile. Not to determine whether or not we're going to hire them or not, but just to understand what their trigger points are, what their reward points are, how they're going to with other people, and how we're going to do those kind of things.
(11:56)
But that that's kind of down the road as you get to that point. I would recommend there are a lot of things you can do as you get there, but when you start off, it was just those people and getting those things in place. Then as we kind of built the team, and I want to say by the time we got around five or six people, we realized we really need to focus on process at that point in time, and that's where we really, really dove in and said, okay, what kind of Amy was just spot on. What customers do we want? Who do we need to fire? Yeah, that's hard too. Brutal boy. And we have kind of a no bad person rule. There are other words for those people in our agency, which is if someone screams, if someone is just unreasonable, then we kind of have to immediately terminate that relationship.
(12:44)
But I think you guys all know it too. You're talking to a client on the phone, you can instantly get a feeling. Your spidey senses are tingling. This person is going to cause me pain and suffering down the road. I think everybody's had those engagements where you just know what's going to happen, and those are the ones you've just got to say, no, Hey, you know what? You're not for us. You're not for us, and you kind of got to move on. So we would develop our process. What's the best way to manage, make sure we stayed in constant communication. We worked on all those. On the back end, at the beginning of that video, it said ZOHO creator application. ZOHO creator is a low code environment that allows you to build massive custom applications. And one of the things that we were able to do with that was build an application that talks to ZOHO books and talks to analytics and talks to CRM and basically talks to ZOHO projects and can kind of be this central place that manages all of our stuff in one location.
(13:37)
And that kind of became key for building that up. So once you got those pieces, then it was product and product is two things. Product is the ZOHO product, but product is also our work product and what we're going to deliver and to truly hone in on what those engagements would look like. And then really from there, we felt we were kind of in a place where we could actually start making decisions. Now from a marketing perspective and growing the entire thing, you saw all those little assets pop up there. We started with the CRM Zen show, which was originally called ZOHO Zen, and ZOHO sent me a cease and desist letter and said, you can't do that, or was this weekend in ZOHO? I said, okay, we'll back off of that. I used the ZOHO name in there. So we changed it to CRM in and what we've done with that, that was a podcast.
(14:24)
It was horrible. It was just awful. But we recorded this audio podcast and we went out and did it. Then I said, Hey, you know what? We need to go on YouTube. And I was told, that's crazy. No one will want to foster YouTube. Let's just do it. Those, if you go watch, I think episode 55 out of, we're up to, I don't know, we're in the two almost. We're up coming up on five years. So right around the one year point we went on YouTube. Awful, awful. It's, it's like a really bad zoom recording. There's no flow, there's no anything to it, but you've got to do it. You've got to just go out and do it. And I will tell you that the key to building the agency was always around relevant content, relevant content with consistency.
Val Steed (15:08):
My content wins everything out there. Everything, everything. Even in your LinkedIn presence or your tweets or your other places, your social media, everything you're using, great content wins a day.
Brett Martin (15:19):
And so no matter what you're doing, if you commit to a really good content schedule, and you never, ever, ever miss a day, I mean never miss a day. So the CRM Zen Show is recorded every Friday morning at 10:00 AM and it's live at 10:00 AM It was always been live, and we've never ever missed a single show. And people expect that our newsletter that we put together drops every Monday morning at 6:00 AM Pacific time, and if it doesn't go out at 6:00 AM Pacific time, we've reached the point where people email me and complain because I didn't get your newsletter on time. And every year what we do is we kind of have this executive team meeting where we get together and we say, what are we going to do next? What do we need to do to drive our outbound reach? Because basically what we want is we want all inbound leads the best.
(16:13)
And so if you can build up a presence, by the time people actually get on the phone and call you, they already know who you are. You get this magic, oh my gosh, it's you and I've watched all your videos and you really helped me and I read your newsletter. And so you're basically making, you're setting yourself up to be that expert in the field, and anybody can do it. It is just not that hard. You've got a certain product that you're selling or a certain thing in your organization that is special. And if you just go to this commitment of quality content and no garbage, do you hate it when you go to a YouTube video and the first five minutes? Oh yeah, nothing, just
Val Steed (16:52):
We're not getting anywhere.
Brett Martin (16:54):
Nothing is coming up off. Yeah, it is just completely, all I want to do is I want to learn how to want to know
Val Steed (16:59):
Fix
Brett Martin (17:00):
This widget. And you don't get to the fix the widget till seven or eight minutes into the video. You can't do that. It's just got to be straight dedicated content. Don't care about monetization, don't care any about that, just do it. So all of those assets just kind of came about. So every year we wanted to increase our customer engagement. We wanted to increase the other engagement, and everything was free. So we started with the CRM end show. We had the newsletter, then we committed to weekly blogs, and nothing worse than going to a website and clicks on blogs. And the last one was 2017, right? Four
Val Steed (17:32):
Blogs, old data. Right,
Brett Martin (17:33):
Right. It is kind of there. You're like, well, are they even in business? So they doing anything anymore? So if you've got that blog on your website, take it down. Unless you're going to kind of do some, you have to commit to that schedule. It's okay if you go there and it's a monthly blog and you've committed to that and you can see that they've got one blog a month. But basically it just without beating a dead horse here, you have to commit quality content and you can never miss a deadline as you roll that out. And then you kind of also have to think, what's next? What can I do that's different? So we said an online community would be good. So we launched an online community. That was two years ago, and then we decided we want to do AZAAZ, which was a crazy story.
(18:18)
So the CRM Zen Show at the end of the CRM Zen Show, we would answer questions at the end. And the show started bloating to 45 minutes and it got to be ridiculous. And I felt like we were giving short shift shrift to the ZOHO questions. So I'm in the shower one morning and I'm saying, Hmm, ask Sonata anything about ZOHO. I came out of this shower screaming Azaaz Azaaz. My wife thought I was crazy, and I said, Hey, I think we've got a new show. And we just rolled that thing out and that then became a thing where we're telling everybody, give us all your questions. So we are waiting through 30, 40, 50 questions now every week that we have to pare down to 14 or 15 relative ones to answer, and people want to see that content. So I say this because this started from zero. This started from a garbage 15 minute this week in ZOHO, which became the CRM Zen Show, which was a podcast. But we just kept going, and as we just kept going, you just get better and better.
Val Steed (19:22):
You have to make a mistake to figure out well, how to do it right.
Brett Martin (19:24):
That's exactly right. So you're just really, so then once you get this, hone this marketing aspect down, you kind of want to then look at what you can add to your organization. The great thing about ZOHO is we weren't a finance company. We started off doing CRM and basically campaigns, which the marketing side of things and those kind of things. But then we'd have more and more people saying, I'm on QuickBooks, I'm on zero, I'm on stage, I'm on this, I'm on that. Whatever. We have the ZOHO suite, so I'd really like to use ZOHO books. Well, it's kind of dangerous if you're not an accountant to start talking about people's books and doing migrations. So we ended up hiring accountants to work for us and built out an entire little finance organization within Zenatta so that now we actually can provide that service. I think for most people in this room, it would go the opposite direction. You guys have all of the finance background and you can do all of that. So you could start with the finance suite, throw in ZOHO Analytics on top of it, and then you'll find that these other things will kind of grow out of it because there's so many, I mean, Val said 50 plus apps. I think it's 60 apps or something.
Val Steed (20:39):
We're trying to keep it at 50 plus apps. Yeah, folks, we have a lot. It's a lot. Yeah, a lot. How do you feel about Niche is too, because I think an niche is a great place for people to focus their attention, get a niche market going, and I think they can really become experts in that niche and just really clean up.
Brett Martin (20:57):
I think there are some other very successful ZOHO partners who totally focus on new markets and we've, there's one up in Canada that has just totally cornered the mortgage market with ZOHO. They've completely customized something around mortgage and they're doing it that way. We have not really focused on that. We have ended up with really bizarre niche markets. They've just kind of come to us over time. We had a life coaches, so we had a life coach, we got this one life coach, and then evidently there's a whole community of life coaches and they all talk to each other. And I think we've ended up with 15 or 20 life coaches now where we're actually managing their stuff. They're all talking to them. Everybody says, you can do real estate, but I've never met a real estate agent that wants to do something the same way as the other person did it.
(21:43)
So all of theirs end up completely customized across the board. But you can look at those. And sometimes the beautiful thing about ZOHO two as well, they have a thing called copy customization. So if you do the life coach one's a great example of that. You get a life coach. We spent built out their CRM and their implementation the way they wanted it, and they said to another life Coach, we want it just like that. And they said, you have my permission, and you push a button and it gives them an exact duplicate, which is a nice thing there, but there's a whole bunch of value in having this whole SaaS portfolio. And it really, really worked for us because had I made a different decision and had I gone with say, Monday CRM or I'd gone with Salesforce, you end up then having to cut relationships with seven or eight or nine or 10 different vendors to pull your whole overall portfolio together. And this is, we've just got one vendor we can go to. Yes, they've got different teams. I mean, the finance teams, different teams, they're great. So they got different teams to support you in these areas, but you can pretty much get anywhere with them. And they have a product that kind of fits any need. You think people say, oh, we use Slack internally. Well, ZOHO has click, which is a exceptionally good clone of that, I guess, for lack of a better word.
Val Steed (23:08):
Communication tool.
Brett Martin (23:09):
It's kind of gone a lot further though. I mean, it's actually an amazing application. People are like, oh, we're on MailChimp in Constant Contact. Oh, that's okay. You've got ZOHO campaigns and you just plug in ZOHO campaigns to that. So it just opens things up for you and fairly easy to help your client.
Val Steed (23:29):
Yeah. Well, interesting thing. My prior business, our first ZOHO app was campaigns. My partner wanted a better tool than we were doing with MailChimp's, some other things, and he was so enamored with that. Then we started looking at other apps that it just kept going that that's one thing we noticed is once you get one, you want to keep going in the suite. And I think that's what your customers do a lot of, once you get a few things going right.
Brett Martin (23:51):
Absolutely. So building a strong vendor client relationship, that's kind of the key to the whole thing. It is. And it's nice that you're able to do that in this environment. I will say that taking this kind of a different way, our client relationships are something that we are constantly monitoring and constantly working on and trying to understand where we're going to extract proper value for that client. And that that's kind of a key mantra we have internally. One of the interesting things when let's say we get a finance customer, they come in and we set up books and they want analytics, and then they want to move, they're like, we really want some crazy automation around this. We have this process where we do this and an invoice is created and we want to send four notifications out and we want to send an email to a customer and we automatically want to have a follow up.
(24:46)
Our job is really to sit down and work with them and make sure that they're going to get a proper ROI out of everything and really kind of recommend the things that are going to be best for them. Sometimes we have clients that come to us and they want to do automations, and they're just nonsensical. They're going to spend $20,000 for an automation and they're going to get their payback on that in the year 21, 21 kind of thing. So it's just never going to happen. But really we find that just kind of constantly working with our clients. And by the way, all of the altruistic content and everything that goes out, it just leads to more and more and more business because you basically are putting a piece of content. We have a piece of content that goes out every week called the implementation of the week, and it's some cool little implementation we did. And what that drives is probably a dozen phone calls inbound every week saying We want that. And so it we're putting out great content, letting people know what they can do, but it's just driving business because they're basically seeing these different pieces of content, you know, could do this. It does that. Did you know, can run these reports? Did you know analytics can do that? And by constantly pushing this information out, it just kind of leads to more business down the road as well, all inbounds.
Val Steed (26:03):
Right. Have you ever had to fire a client, by the way? Yes. Yes. And when I was in public practice, we had one that was both engaged with us on accounting tax and also we had a system implementation going for him. And we finally realized smartest thing my other partners learned was sometimes you just got to cut that thing loose. Yeah. And the stunning part was a month or two later, one of our other clients came to us and said, oh, you could guys finally wised up and cut those guys loose. By the way, the whole time they were with you, they were badmouthing you anyway, so yeah, it's tough, but you need to do it.
Brett Martin (26:37):
Yeah, had a couple screamers. Anybody have a screamer old client that screams it? You screamed, it's over. It's been great, but it's kind of, but yes, we have. But back to the people part of this, yes, love to. I don't know how big your agencies are as you grow them, but I want to make that 0.1 more time about one bad hire can just destroy you and it cost you so much money. We can never invest enough in our culture at the company. We can never invest much in constantly taking the pulse of everybody getting an overall culture survey twice a year, having all the employees do three sixties and all the executives in the company to see how they feel about them. And we started that when we were like 10 people and it really paid off it. It really pointed out some areas where we were struggling and our employees weren't happy that you had no idea about, because oftentimes they suffer in silence or Right.
Val Steed (27:35):
Oh, absolutely.
Brett Martin (27:36):
It's just this slow burn. So I would highly recommend also that you just constantly engaging with your employees, monitoring them, finding out how they're really feeling, not in a bad way, just so you can correct things before they get out of hand.
Val Steed (27:50):
Yeah, a lot of times they're sitting back and they're in a panic that if they complained or came to you about something that they feel is bothering them or making, they really are worried about the job. And I understand that. And if they're given the right environment, they will talk about it. So that's a very good point, Brad. Absolutely.
Brett Martin (28:06):
And I watched Amy's presentation and pretty much everything Amy said as well. I mean, that was just spot on the money. Yeah, she was kind of going through those things. So I mean that they all go together. So anyway, thank you.
Val Steed (28:20):
Thank you. I thought we'd leave a few minutes just to see if we had any hands or questions for Brett. If you have questions for us, we'll be in the hallway for the next day or two so you can catch us out there. But I wanted to see if anybody, Brett will be hanging around a little bit and we're happy to take questions or talk to you folks. We really do appreciate you being here and hopefully you get a chance to come learn a little bit more about what is a ZOHO.
Brett Martin (28:44):
Thank you.
Val Steed (28:45):
Thank you.
Chris (28:46):
Alright, great, great. Thank you so much for your presentation and also thank you for all being a great audience. So I am supposed to let you know that there's now going to be a networking break just around the floor till about 10:30. And after 10:30 we'll have our breakout sessions, various mention what they are. Okay, great. It's be Jeezy crazy. These are the things that happens sometimes, but it's about, one is going to be about using tax credits, one's going to be about change management, and one is going to be about innovation. Thank goodness I got that. Anyway, thank you all again and I'll hopefully see you at the sessions.