Get your startup started right—three free tool from Zoho

Anyone who tells you that all you need is a good idea, has almost certainly never tried to launch a startup before. It’s a lot of work! From finding investors, to choosing a color scheme for your UI, there are a million and one things to do. So why not get a little help where you can? With three great free products from Zoho, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble so you can concentrate on all the big, and little things you need to do to get up and running quicker and smarter.

We can think of businesses as composed of a two part dichotomy—a yin and yang if you will. I’m talking about customers and employees, and if you learn to manage well these two groups from the start, you’ll be sure to get off on the right foot. Let’s start by having a look at customers.

In order to successfully manage your relationships with your customers, you’re going to need some quality Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. CRM software is a basic, yet critical component of any modern business, and as such there are a plethora of options available in the market today. All this competition means business owners can find high quality software for very cheap or even free! A great example of this is Zoho CRM.

Zoho’s CRM gives you a ton of great features—from all the basics of organizing and tracking your customers to more advance and cutting edge options. It gives you a variety of ways to connect to customers directly from the CRM. You can call, set up live chats, or even get notified when a lead is browsing your site, reading a campaign email, or engaging with your brand on social media. And Zoho’s advanced AI system can do some pretty amazing things too: predicting sales trends, analyzing email sentiment, or giving you the optimal time to contact customers.

Further Zoho CRM offers many automation capabilities including automatic lead assignment, creating macros for routine tasks, and more. And don’t forget about analytics. With Zoho you’ll get easy to use forecasting, territory management, and other analytic and reporting tools.

But as great as the reporting is in the CRM, you may find you need reporting for all aspects of your business. For this you can easily integrate Zoho Reports. To get started, Zoho Reports easily gathers all of your data that is scattered around (on different databases, different machines, or even on various cloud storage sites) and centralizes it for you. Import a wide array of files types like CSV, TSV, XLS, XLSX and HTML, or add data manually using an intuitive spreadsheet style interface.

Once all your data is gathered, organized, and ready to go, you’ll experience one of the best features. Zoho Reports will evaluate all the data you’ve given it, and create reports that you are likely to require based on that data. This is a great feature and a huge time saver for those who don’t have time to invest in creating custom reports. You can get great results right away, and with almost no effort.

Of course for those with more demanding requirements, you’ll have access to a wide range of charts, widgets, pivot tables, and tabular view components, all on an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. Further, you’ll be able to wield powerful data analysis tools with prebuilt and custom functions and formulas. You can easily manipulate data, add a wide range of filters, and run your own custom SQL queries.

Once all your reports are ready, take advantage of the excellent collaboration and sharing features. Publish reports and add login requirements as needed, or embed reports directly into websites and applications. And of course you can use typical export options such as email or printing. With Zoho Reports as part of your business tool kit, you’ll be ready to keep your growing team informed and up to data.

While we’re talking about your ever expanding team, let’s figure how to add the best of the best of the talent pool to it. No surprise, Zoho offers an excellent solution for all you staffing and recruiting needs—Zoho Recruit. With Zoho Recruit, you get an end-to-end applicant tracking system that is easy to learn, easy to use, and loaded with many helpful features. With it, you’ll be able to streamline and organize the entire recruitment process from start to finish, from initial search to hire.

And using Zoho Recruit couldn’t be easier. To get started, easily integrate the software with email, LinkedIn, Career websites, and Google apps, then source and import candidates directly from social networks and job boards. To make life extra easy, use the resume extractor to parse resumes directly from your email, Dropbox or google drive.

Like all Zoho products, the UI is intuitive and easy to navigate. You can customize the home screen with widgets such as upcoming interviews, job openings, to-do lists, and more. Easily create new jobs, post to job boards and social media, schedule interviews, and create reports.

So once you’ve recruited the best team, organized your customer relations, and are keeping track of everything with awesome reports, you’ll be on your way to startup success.

Still not convinced? Try them out for free! (Links)