Zoho Customer Story: How Minor Hotels Replaced Spreadsheets with CRM to Scale Global B2B Sales

MINOR HOTELS

CLIENT NAME:
MINOR HOTELS

INDUSTRY

500+ employees, Hospitality

COMPANY SIZE

500+ employees, Hospitality

Type of business

Privately held

APPLICATIONS USED

Zoho CRM

Key CRM features

Workflow, Reports, Dashboards, Mobile Application.

An international hotel group Minor Hotels runs global sales on Zoho CRM

“We found Zoho to be one of the most comprehensive solutions. It has a suite of applications that we use to manage our sales operations. Most of the other offerings demanded an additional cost for different functions, which is not the case with Zoho.”

Olga Kovshanova

SR. Director Loyalty & Partnership and B2B Digital Sales, Minor Hotels

APPLICATIONS USED

The company

Minor Hotels owns, manages, and operates a diverse portfolio of over 530 hotels, resorts, and serviced suites under brand names like Anantara, Avani, Elewana, Oaks, NH Hotels, NH Collection, nhow, TIVOLI Marriott, Four Seasons, St. Regis, Radisson Blu, and Minor International. The portfolio spans 55 countries in the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Europe, and the Americas. It also derives growth through a collection of related hospitality businesses and strategic partnerships with other leading hotel brands worldwide.

Minor Hotels’ customers include consumers, travel agencies, wholesalers, banks, government organizations, corporates, MICE partners, airlines, and many more. It also operates shopping plazas, entertainment venues, residential properties, and a point-based vacation club. Minor Hotels is a part of publicly listed Minor International (MINT) company—one of the largest hospitality and leisure companies in the Asia-Pacific region.

The challenge

Minor Hotels’ global sales office had been using spreadsheets to manage its sales. Handling the ever-growing business and customer data became so difficult to manage that the team decided to look for a customer relationship management tool. The idea was to use it to organize the organization’s sales processes and manage customer data diligently. Security and privacy were paramount while searching for a solution. Since Minor Hotels has a diverse range of customers, the priority was to roll out the new CRM system for B2B sales first.

The team wanted an easy-to-use solution that could handle huge amounts of customer data, organize its sales process so as to enhance the sales team’s efficiency, and help management by proving clear visibility into the team’s efforts.

Why Zoho

Minor Hotels evaluated several tools and narrowed them down to Zoho, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. Management ultimately decided on Zoho, as the Zoho One suite not only addressed its sales team requirements, but also several other teams, including marketing, finance, and management. It also had the most competitive cost. The team loved the idea that they could use the suite of products for several other teams without having to pay an extra dollar every time.

Other supporting reasons for choosing Zoho were its ease of use, recommendations from trusted people, and excellent privacy policies. The team believes Zoho is easy to implement and use. “From an administrative perspective,” Kovshanova adds, “Zoho is easy to implement—even if none of us has the technical background knowledge.”

“Privacy and security are essential for us, and Zoho addressed it all. This was a game-changer. We have a whole department dedicated to security and privacy who are responsible for GPDR and checking legal compliance. Before we chose Zoho, we checked with our legal department to ensure Zoho meets our organizational requirements, and it was a yes from them, too.”
Olga Kovshanova
SR. Director Loyalty & Partnership and B2B Digital Sales, Minor Hotels

The solution

Minor Hotels uses Zoho CRM to manage its B2B sales process. As the first phase of implementation, the primary goal is to have a centralized repository of data, improved reporting, and better visibility into sales activities.

- Improving the sales process

The global sales team at Minor Hotels uses Zoho CRM to record all the leads, deals, and partners they handle. Once a lead is added to the CRM, a series of follow-ups are automatically scheduled using workflow rules. This helps to minimize manual effort, which frees the sales team to spend more time focusing on more important tasks. Every detail of the conversations associated with a deal is recorded in the CRM, which provides better visibility for the entire team and avoids dependency on any single individual. The Activities modules helps the team avoid missing any follow-ups, which in turn increases the conversation rate.

“Zoho CRM helped us automate our processes after we implemented workflow rules. The system helps the team send automated email notifications so they can focus on relationship building.”

Olga Kovshanova
SR. Director Loyalty & Partnership and B2B Digital Sales, Minor Hotels

- Better visibility for management

The management team uses Zoho CRM to track all of the team’s sales activities, to keep a constant eye on business conditions, and to make informed and data-driven decisions about the future. Zoho CRM’s reports and dashboards have enabled the team to achieve these goals. One of the most common reports Minor Hotels uses details the sales team’s activities and helps them keep track of who is performing which actions for each specific deal and partner.

The CRM has also provided management with a centralized data management system, which enables them to share data within the entire global sales team and not just within one team using spreadsheets.

- Mobile applications for all

Minor Hotels’ nature as a business demands that sales reps are often on the go. Having a CRM mobile application helps them record every detail without having to log into the system from their desktop. The entire global sales office uses the mobile app, which helps ensure they never forget to enter details into CRM and keep it updated.

Looking forward

After successfully implementing Zoho CRM for the global sales office in the first phase, Minor Hotels plans to roll it out for the global hotel offices in the next phase.

“We will start with the hotels in our region of Asia, Middle-East, and Africa, where we have more than 80 hotels across all our different brands,” says Kovshanova. “This rollout will be a big project for us.”

Currently, Minor Hotels uses Zoho CRM, Zoho Expense, Zoho Campaigns, and Zoho Sign within the Zoho One suite, and plans to explore other applications to equip the sales team further. The team also looks forward to using Zoho Analytics to enhance its analysis of CRM’s reports and dashboards.

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