"Zoho made our business viable right from the start and allowed us to make money early on. It allowed me to be a small business owner and still provide for my family."

At first, Dave and Bob decided to run their business using Hubspot, but ended up having numerous problems. "The biggest issue I had with Hubspot was the cost and the integrations. It was very complicated to make changes," said Bob. Not only that, but when Bob and Dave looked deeper, they found that 75% of their client fee was going toward paying for their Hubspot licenses. This was a clear indicator that what they really needed was software that could scale to fit their needs quickly and integrated with other tools easily. Bob said, "we needed software that was flexible, something that had consistent updates and feature releases, good customer support, and wasn't restrictive with email marketing, all while being a good value for the cost."

Bob and Dave did a thorough search for the perfect tools to fit their specific requirements and help them improve efficiency. "One of our main needs was to be able to see all our clients' data as administrators, while making sure clients couldn't see each other's data to ensure their privacy. Unfortunately, this feature wasn't included with big player companies like Marketo, Salesforce, and Oracle," Bob said.

Bob and Dave weren't having any luck finding a fitting solution until Bob's uncle, a professional marketer, told him to check out Zoho. Bob then found out there was a free Zoho One Seminar coming up in Austin and attended to see what Zoho was all about. After the seminar, Bob took his uncle's advice and started his 30-day free trial. In less than a week, they converted both MedSpa Marketing Solutions and AUSTEX Wellness over to Zoho. First, Bob and Dave input a sales process for their clients in combination with Zoho on the back-end. "Zoho hardwires that process so [our clients] can't screw up. Doing this added 15-20% revenue per month by applying our process with Zoho driving it," said Dave.

Once they set up Zoho CRM, they quickly realized the breadth of Zoho's functionality and began expanding their use of Zoho beyond CRM. They implemented Zoho Books for their accounting, Zoho Sign for e-signatures, and more. "Most of our clients start on Wordpress and we move them to Zoho Sites. Their meeting system could be Zoom and we can now have them on Zoho Meetings. We move them from Docusign to Zoho Sign. We're providing savings for ourselves and an additional value add for our clients," Bob said. Bob and Dave also depend on Zoho's contextual integrations to help their clients. "Integrations have empowered our different business clients. Even though the apps work on their own, they're easily integrated. And for anything that's not built-in, using Zoho Flow to connect all the pieces has really helped our customer journey," Bob said.

When Bob and Dave started MedSpa Marketing Solutions, they were using four Zoho apps. Currently Bob and Dave are using 20 Zoho apps to help them run Medspa Marketing Solutions, including CRM, Campaigns, Social, SalesIQ, PageSense, Sites, Marketing Automation, Bookings, Desk, Survey, and Sign to manage customer interactions and Analytics, Meeting, Workdrive, Show, ShowTime, Writer, Sheet, Creator, Vault, Flow, Cliq, Books, Mail, and Projects to help optimize back-end operations.

Using Zoho Analytics, Bob and Dave have been able to figure out what works and capitalize on it. "We were able to pull all Dave's point-of-sales tickets and analyze them to see which ones originated from a digital lead at Zoho. Using this, we have found that Dave's spa [AUSTEX Wellness] generated $250,000 dollars additional revenue over the last year solely by utilizing Zoho and the sales process we have developed," said Bob. By using Zoho Analytics and CRM integrated, they were able to see that clients whose front desk staff called leads quicker (sometimes within minutes of the lead submitting an online form) had drastically increased revenue. So in order to make this foolproof for clients, they set up reminders in CRM, by email, and even by text so front desk staff are reminded to contact leads as soon as possible.

A critical step for MedSpa Marketing solutions was to take time figuring out what they needed to migrate over and really focusing on their core requirements. One of the most important requirements was having a robust CRM. Before Zoho, AUSTEX's front staff would have to enter everything manually and it took a lot of time, not to mention risked human error. Once they set up Zoho CRM, the spa staff was able to enroll customers and launch email sequences with a click of a button. "Zoho allows us to do things like blueprints and workflows so that if a user doesn't have to get involved, you don't have to get them involved. Adding this gave us an extra two hours a day to spend time with our family," Bob said.

Besides adding savings for their clients, Bob and Dave have also streamlined processes and now have insight to help them measure success. "We have peer-to-peer comparisons with the way our dashboard is set up. We can show our clients a spa that called [a new lead] in 20 minutes and one that didn't, and the resulting revenue," Dave said. "Our clients get to see how all of their marketing campaigns are performing. And each month we can pinpoint the exact return on investment through Zoho Analytics," Bob said.

Additionally, Bob and Dave are using Zoho Analytics to help pull in data from various Zoho products including CRM, Social, Books, Campaigns, and Survey. "We also pull in data from outside sources including Facebook Ads, Facebook Pages, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Stripe. We have multiple of each of these connections for all our clients. On top of that, we have custom data tables that we import," said Bob. This means Bob and Dave can create comprehensive client dashboards that deliver the right information to each stake holder while respecting privacy. "We now also have dashboards embedded into the CRM. All our client data goes into one Analytics account. The user filtering allows us to create a report where we can monitor across clients, while the clients can only see their data," said Bob. This solved Bob and Dave's original problem with Hubspot and has ensured each client's privacy. They also now have all their accounting running on Zoho Books. "All the account data from the CRM automatically flows into Books. We setup clients on auto-pay and Books automatically calculates things like referral fees related to our partners," said Bob. Not only are Bob and Dave saving their company money, but they found they're saving their clients' money, too. Besides providing marketing consulting services to help medspas generate revenue, they're also now also providing medspas tons of savings on their software costs. "We added around 15-20% to their client's revenue by applying their processes and having Zoho drive it on the back-end," said Dave. With Zoho, they're now able to drill down further and provide analytics and insight. "Zoho is very data oriented...you can see what you're doing and the impact it makes all the way down to the revenue stream, especially for our clients," said Bob. "The value for the cost is off the charts for what you get with the Zoho One license. We save hundreds of dollars a month that we didn't even anticipate. Every week we're migrating something to Zoho and saving cost," said Dave.

"It's made our business viable right from the start and allowed us to make money early on. It allowed me to be a small business owner and still provide for my family," Bob said. Not only that, but Bob and Dave's business optimization through Zoho has taken a lot off their plates. They no longer have to spend time manually inputting contacts because they have CRM blueprints to take care of that, and they've gained an hour back into each day just from that change alone.

Dave and Bob have also gained more than revenue and optimization—they've gained back time. With the help of Zoho, "on average it gave us an extra two hours a day to spend time with our family," Bob said. And for someone like Bob, who has a newborn daughter and wife at home, that time is invaluable. "The ability to make more time for family has really changed my life and career path," said Bob. Along with time, Zoho has added flexibility so that Bob can work from any location. "We own an RV motorhome, so we like to take work trip as a family to meet with clients throughout the US. We actually use that as our mobile base of operations," said Bob. Having this freedom and time back into their lives has allowed Bob and Dave to run their business the way they envision, by focusing on each individual client. "Every decision I make can be for the benefit of the client. I don't have share holders I have to worry about or any other competing priorities," Bob said.

Moving forward, Bob and Dave's goal is to have a variety of clients on their platform in the next five years, and based on what they've done so far, they feel good about meeting that goal. With MedSpa Marketing Solutions' revenue growing quickly, Bob and Dave realized that they could expand their business to help other verticals of business. Because of Zoho's versatility and customization for different business types, they can now explore new areas. They want to grow their business in a way thats different from the corporate culture they left. They don't want a massive company with tons of employees to manage, but want to keep things on the smaller side so they can dedicate personalized time with each client. And it's important for MedSpa Marketing Solutions to make sure they continue to focus on automating as much as possible so that they can have a life outside of work, and so their clients can, too. In gaining the time, flexibility, and freedom to run their business how they want, and knowing what they're doing is working, Zoho empowers MedSpa Marketing Solutions to do more, grow faster and bigger, achieve their business goals, and more, even from an RV.