Improve sales and marketing teams' efficiency with our Zoho CRM integration connector

Zoho CRM is one of the flagship software product from Zoho Corporation and arguably, one of the most popular customer relationship management apps out there. Thousands of small and medium-sized businesses around the world use Zoho CRM to streamline their sales processes. One of the indisputable strengths of this product is that it is a part of a very large family of Zoho business apps for any activity related to contact management, invoicing, project management, and much more.

Zoho CRM has a number of productivity and collaboration apps and add-ons that help sales and marketing teams be more efficient in the sales, customer acquisition, customer management as well customer retention activities. Zoho Marketplace helps connect to other Zoho products such as Zoho Mail, Zoho Campaigns, and Zoho Projects and a variety of integrations aimed specifically at both regular Google account users and Google Apps customers. In addition to that, there is a number of automations for selected third-party apps as well. However, many of these are offered outside the Zoho environment, so that you may end up with 5-6 different service providers in order to connect your Zoho apps with other business apps. On elastic.io, you have it all in one place.

About elastic.io’s Zoho CRM integration connector

This is a proprietary connector that allows you to leverage customer and sales data from your Zoho CRM and effectively use it with other business applications. It was built exclusively for the elastic.io platform and comes pre-installed with the other available connectors.

The Zoho CRM integration connector supports both triggers and actions. This means you can use it to either initiate or respond to a specific event. The connector, when used as a trigger, allows you to poll new and updated objects such as Account, Contacts, Calls, and so on. This way you can, for example, define that as soon as a new lead is created in Zoho CRM, the email address of this lead shall be synced to a specific MailChimp audience.

You can also use the Zoho CRM connector as an action to create, update, look up, and delete various objects such as contacts or accounts, or make the so-called raw request. More information on each trigger and action can be found on the connector’s documentation page, which may be accessed by clicking the link above.

Our Zoho CRM connector is under the proprietary license, which means you can’t change or extend it. Please send our pre-sales team an email at ps[@]elastic.io to discuss the details if you require extra triggers and/or actions for your integrations.

PLEASE NOTE: You must first register an account on the elastic.io platform in order to utilize the Zoho CRM integration connector in your projects. Here is where you can sign up for a free 14-day trial.

How to add Zoho CRM integrations on elastic.io

As a trigger:

Step 1

Go to the Dashboard or Flows and click “Add new Flow” to select Zoho CRM from the list of the available triggers on the elastic.io platform. All connectors are sorted alphabetically, so either scroll down to the bottom or use the search bar to find the Zoho CRM connector.

Step 2

After you’ve selected the connector, the available trigger function “Get New and Updated Objects” will be selected by default and you’ll be prompted to add new credentials to authenticate yourself.

For that, you’ll need to create a new Auth Client in your Zoho developer account and provide your Client ID and Client Secret as well as the Authorisation and Token Endpoints on our platform. More details on the authentication procedure can be found in our documentation following the link above.

Step 3

Once authenticated, you can select the object type you plan to work with (you can choose between Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Calls and Deals), whether you want to emit them individually or page-wise, and select from a dropdown the fields you would like to poll (New Objects or Modified Objects). In addition to that, you can define if you want to receive only datasets starting from a specific date as well as configure a few other optional filters.

Step 4

After that, you’ll be invited to request a sample of the records so you can double-check your Zoho CRM connector configuration, and then you’re done.

OUR TIP: Syncing this connection with our Email connector — for example, to give yourself an overview of a certain contact – is the simplest way to test it as a trigger in a real flow. In a real project, you’ll of course opt for a system that is closer to the actual business processes you want to automate, like Shopify to automate new contact creation, or MailChimp to sync contacts email address with respective audiences.

As an action:

Using Zoho CRM as an action means that it is used in conjunction with another application in a workflow. Aside from that, the process will be similar: choose Zoho CRM from the list of accessible applications, select a function, and use the existing our create new credentials to verify your Zoho CRM account on our platform.

When it comes to functions, you have a lot of options. You can look for objects such as Deals and Campaigns, as well as create or update Contacts, Invoices, Leads, Deals, or Account datasets. You can also make a so-called Raw Request and use any of the GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE methods to call any Zoho CRM REST API endpoint.

OUR TIP: You can start your test flow with our Simple Trigger connector in order to quickly review Zoho CRM settings as an action connector. However, please keep in mind that Simple Trigger is not suitable to actually test how Zoho CRM connector receives datasets from another systems, since it lacks any CRM-related datasets such as contacts or lead information to sync.

Popular Zoho CRM automation scenarios

Zoho CRM is a powerful tool to manage company’s customer and contacts data and support a variety of sales and marketing activities including lead management, newsletter communication, sales reporting, customer relationships management, and much more.

While Zoho does offer its own marketplace to allow developers to connect with various business systems and apps, many of these connection endpoints are provided by different agencies and partners. If you would like to have and maintain all your integrations in one place, try the elastic.io iPaaS.

Some of the most popular systems that integrations developers use together with our Zoho CRM connector so far are:

Zoho CRM and Zoho Subscriptions

To enable automated subscription information checks, subscription creation, as well as recurring billing.

Zoho CRM and Quickbooks

To eliminate the necessity to double-enter data in both systems and sync every bit of required information between the two systems

Zoho CRM and DocuSign

To help their company’s sales and marketing teams create documents and get them signed quickly and conveniently

Zoho CRM and Google Spreadsheets

To automatically add new rows to a Google Spreadsheet as soon as a new entry is created in Zoho CRM or export any required data from Zoho CRM to Google Sheets

… and many more.

Learn about all of the applications and systems you can connect Zoho CRM with to help your marketing and sales teams excel at what they do. Get your free 14-day demo now, no strings attached.