For individuals in commercial real estate who are weighing the pros and cons of Salesforce vs Zoho, we’ve developed this guide to help go below the surface of both companies and see what they have to offer. As you prioritize customer relationships you will grow your business. At Platinum Cubed we’re here to support you in whichever choice you make to help implement solutions today.
Key Features Comparison
| Salesforce | Zoho |
|---|---|
| Commercial Property Management: Salesforce’s flexibility allows real estate firms to track property listings, leases, tenant information, and transactions. | Client and Property Management: Users can store customer profiles, manage property listings, and track sales or leasing transactions. |
| Financial Services Cloud: Helps CRE firms manage client relationships, lending, and financing for property deals. | Automation: Zoho provides workflow automation for follow-ups, contract management, and marketing campaigns, saving time and reducing manual tasks. |
| Deal and Pipeline Management: Real estate firms can track deals, manage property listings, and forecast sales through custom workflows and dashboards. | Custom Modules for Real Estate: With Zoho’s flexibility, you can create custom modules to manage specific real estate needs like property listings, leasing details, and client management. |
| Integration with Third-Party Apps: Salesforce integrates seamlessly with tools like DocuSign (for contracts), property management tools, and financial platforms. | Integration with Other Zoho Tools: Seamless integration with other tools in the Zoho ecosystem (e.g., Zoho Books for accounting or Zoho Projects for project management). |
| Collaboration and Automation: Salesforce provides robust collaboration tools for teams (via Chatter) and automates repetitive tasks, such as sending follow-ups or reminders for property deals. | Lead Management and Marketing: Helps CRE firms capture leads from websites, social media, or emails and follow up with clients through built-in email marketing features. |
| AI & Analytics: With Einstein AI, commercial real estate firms can gain insights into market trends, forecast property demand, and assess client behavior to improve decision-making. | Affordability: Zoho CRM is known for being more affordable compared to platforms like Salesforce, making it an attractive option for small and mid-sized firms. |
Strengths
| Salesforce | Zoho |
|---|---|
| Extremely flexible and scalable, with industry-specific tools. | Affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized real estate firms. |
| Rich integration ecosystem, offering CRE-specific third-party apps. | Simple to set up and customize with essential CRM functions. |
| Strong reporting and analytics for deal forecasting and market analysis. | Integrates with the Zoho ecosystem for additional business management tools. |
Weaknesses
| Salesforce | Zoho |
|---|---|
| Expensive, especially for small or medium-sized CRE firms. | Limited compared to Salesforce in terms of advanced features for larger CRE firms. |
| Requires customization and development to tailor to CRE-specific needs. | Fewer industry-specific capabilities for commercial real estate compared to dedicated CRE solutions. |
Salesforce
Commercial Real Estate Features of Salesforce
Salesforce is a powerful leader in the real estate CRM space, such that most every CRM currently used for large scale commercial real estate is built on Salesforce including: AscendixRE, PropertyBase, Apto, REthink, and Main REI. Industry professionals in commercial real estate rely on Salesforce. It almost needs no introduction, it’s just that powerful and popular.
Salesforce’s flexibility allows real estate firms to track property listings, leases, tenant information, and transactions seamlessly. Financial Services Cloud helps CRE firms manage lending and financing for all property deals. Financial Services Cloud for Commercial Real Estate streamlines deal management, investor relationships, and portfolio tracking by providing a unified view of financial data, client interactions, and property assets. Its automation, AI-driven insights, and compliance tools help firms enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, and strengthen client trust.
Salesforce offers strong analytics reporting over a slew of categories for deal forecasting and market analysis. Furthermore, Salesforce customization and development capabilities allow for tailoring it to CRE firm specific needs.
Ease of Implementation
The full power of Salesforce you can tap into will correspond directly to the level of expert guidance you receive from trusted advisors. The truth is every CRM needs some level of training but with a machine titan like Salesforce, successful businesses often delegate the change management and training.
Zoho
Commercial Real Estate Features of Zoho
Client management and property management is simple to implement using Zoho’s array of features to store customer profiles, manage property and track leasing transactions. Zoho provides workflow automation for follow-ups, contract management, and marketing campaigns as well, which effectively reduces manual tasks.
The affordability of Zoho is its greatest feature. Known for innovation and supple flexibility, Zoho has positioned itself well to serve small businesses with their standard monthly plan.
Aspects of Zoho are not nearly as cohesive as Salesforce. The parameters or look of each app have a slightly different feel and may need expert IT assistance to utilize correctly. It becomes obvious that the ecosystem is being developed by different teams who are running at different speeds and have multiple designs being implemented.
Often Zoho releases features that haven’t been through the real world crucible of user testing. For example, their drop-down picklist field for selecting contacts or leads in the CRM had a bug which would only display first or last names. In fairness, Zoho responded quickly to update it after around 3 months but these sorts of things happen because they add new features which aren’t always ready for the public.
Furthermore, Zoho fails to support the additional complexity of CRE parameters like multiple business entities, different mailing addresses, and multiple to multiple properties to businesses to contacts.
Ease of Implementation
Zoho’s onboarding program is not stellar. The technological focus can be confusing. While they do offer a walkthrough for the migration process, they do not fit your specific business to the CRM or offer additional consultation. You’ll have to puzzle through that alone, train internally to make it fit your office, or seek outside help for high-level implementation.
Conclusion
Although this review was only a 20,000ft view, here at Platinum Cubed we’ve invested years comparing Salesforce to other CRMs like Zoho because we help our customers adapt and integrate technology to thrust their business forward.
In summary, we strongly support Salesforce because of its expansive capabilities in the real estate industry.
Our team can make the switch to Salesforce a smooth process for you.
We offer tailored solutions to your Salesforce CRM needs. Schedule your free consultation with an experienced Salesforce professional.