Cloven vs Zoho CRM

It’s no secret that Cloven is built on the Zoho platform. In fact, we have many financial advisor clients who used to use Zoho CRM, before switching over to Cloven.

What did these clients consider in order to make the switch?

In this blog, we’ll review the differences between the two platforms, and the important factors to consider when evaluating the two.

Customer Success

Both Cloven and Zoho CRM have a locally-based sales team. After the sales process, Cloven keeps their customer success local, whereas Zoho CRM leans on overseas support- which can cause time-zone and language-related issues.

The Zoho CRM support team is excellent with technical issues, as they have direct access to the Zoho development team. Cloven excels with advisor-specific issues and best practices since they work within the industry all-day, everyday.

Zoho CRM offers an import tool for systems such as ACT!, Salesforce and Maximizer, and Cloven expands this list to Wealthbox, Equisoft and RedTail. For all migrations, Cloven provides hands-on support.

If we had to pick a winner for this category, it would be Cloven given the local, industry-specific support, and the fact that with Cloven you get access to BOTH support teams.

Customizations

To start, Zoho CRM is a blank canvas for every type of business. It offers easy-to-use customizations to enable advisors to fine-tune the CRM to their practice. This process can take up to 6 months– depending on business’ complexity and your tech-savvyness.

Cloven provides a “shortcut” to this by providing industry best-practices in an out-of-the-box solution. This will get you 80% of the way there, with the last 20% being tweaks to your specific practice (all Zoho customization tools are still available).

Cloven also provides add-on widgets like the Relationship Tracker and Note Template to enhance Zoho CRM, specifically for advisors.

If we had to pick a winner for this category, it would again be Cloven given that you don’t need to “reinvent the wheel” with industry best practices already built-in.

Zoho One

Zoho CRM is a best-in-class CRM that competes globally with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.. But did you know that Zoho also offers 50+ other applications?

Cloven is built on Zoho One, which is a bundle of all these applications. That means great tools such as online forms, calendar bookings, website tracking, and more- all at no extra cost and fully integrated with the CRM.

Cloven also provides industry-specific training on how top advisors use the different tools together to maximize their productivity.

This category is pretty close to a “tie”, since a Zoho CRM can easily upgrade to Zoho One. With that said, the “tie breaker” would be Cloven’s industry-specific training.

Pricing

Cloven costs $75USD/user/month, whereas Zoho CRM costs $40USD/user/month.

The start-up costs for Zoho CRM are consistently higher than Cloven- since you don’t get the “shortcut” (discussed in Customizations). How much higher depends on the complexity of your business and your own tech-savvyness.

If we had to pick a winner for this category, it would be Zoho CRM given the lower ongoing costs.

Conclusion

When it comes down to it, we’ve seen advisors implement both Cloven and Zoho CRM with success. If ongoing costs is your #1 concern, then Zoho CRM will work well for you. If you don’t have the time to build a CRM, you value industry best practices, or you prefer local support– Cloven is going to be your best bet.