SHARC Energy uses Zoho Flow to save over 400 hours a year by connecting sales to service

About the company

SHARC Energy is a Canadian manufacturer of a sustainable heating and cooling technology that recovers wasted energy from city and district wastewater, reducing CO2 emissions, energy costs, and fresh water consumption. They sell globally, with a focus on Canada and the US, and the equipment they install is serviced on an ongoing schedule after commissioning.

Automating the sales-to-service handover

SHARC Energy doesn’t just sell equipment, they also provide service for that equipment on a recurring schedule. Once a system is installed and commissioned, the same equipment is serviced on a recurring schedule; quarterly for some units and annually for others. When a new deal is won by the sales team, they need to share comprehensive details of the deal to the service team to ensure they carrying all of the equipment to the site.

As volume grew, the sales-to-service handover became the natural next thing to streamline. Details lived in the CRM, and sales passed them to service by email and phone; service then created job orders by hand. It worked, but it added touchpoints between the sale and the start of work—and every extra touchpoint is another place for timing and detail to drift. The data was already there; it just wasn’t flowing automatically into service. Closing that gap meant faster job-order creation and a cleaner starting point for every service team.

Working with their implementation partner, Spikra , SHARC built the handover on Zoho Flow. When a deal is closed and ready for installation, the service team completes a Zoho onboarding form that Zoho Flow pre-fills using a webhook. Once the form is submitted, a custom function gathers the equipment prerequisites, the assets to be installed, the site address, and the manufacturing details, and creates a work order on the deal in Zoho CRM. The flow then creates the matching service appointment and asset in Zoho FSM, and closes out the onboarding stages there. The onboarding form also sets up the recurring quarterly and annual service work orders, so those are no longer created by hand either.

”We knew we needed to communicate that information from one place to the other without sending emails, and without the service team chasing down information.”

Brett Stewart, Senior Project Manager,SHARC Energy

Syncing their sales and operations teams

Nurturing what SHARC calls technically qualified leads depends on the sales and operations teams agreeing on what a lead’s project actually requires. The relevant factors are technical data points like the volume of wastewater available, its temperature, and the flow rate. The operations team uses Zoho Projects and Zoho CRM to assess and scope the lead, and sales then updates the quote based on that assessment.

The two teams went back and forth on every lead to qualify the details. That dragged the process out and left information sitting in separate places, which created room for error and made specific details hard to find. Their sales team works almost entirely in Zoho CRM, while the technical equipment selection and engineering team works in Zoho Projects.

”Our sales and operation teams would go back and forth on leads to qualify the details of a project. This dragged things out and created separate islands of information, making it hard to track down details. As SHARC Energy expanded, the existing process would became unmanageable at scale or under high demand and had to be fixed."

Brett Stewart, Senior Project Manager,SHARC Energy

Spikra started by building a blueprint in Zoho CRM to map the journey from prospect to technically qualified lead. When a lead reaches technical qualification status, a webhook trigger starts the flow. It waits a few minutes for the record to settle, fetches it, then routes the data based on the country of delivery across Canada, the US, and Australia to create the matching project in Zoho Projects. Finally Zoho Flow emails Brett and the other team leads when a new project is created.

A second function then fetches any attachments from the records when a lead reaches the technical qualification status and uploads them into the project’s Documents tab, so the engineering team has the customer’s files without anyone moving them. Finally, the flow writes a tracking record into a dedicated CRM module and surfaces it in a related list, so the project status is visible from the CRM side without the sales team needing access to Zoho Projects.

Optimizing their sales outreach to a lead

SHARC Energy generates leads from several sources, with its website being the largest. They use Zoho Forms to capture inquiries, and wanted follow-up communication and delegation to reflect what the lead had actually asked about.

”We wanted a system that would do more than just create a lead in CRM. We wanted to automate communication and follow-up delegation based on the leads’ interests and requirements."

Brett Stewart, Senior Project Manager,SHARC Energy

Spikra’s product consultant connected Zoho Forms to Zoho CRM. When a lead submits a form, custom functions analyze their requirements and Zoho Flow creates the lead in the Leads module. A decision step verifies that the lead and its details have been recorded, and Zoho Flow’s send email action notifies the sales team.

Setting up a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy

SHARC Energy’s clean energy solutions apply across a wide range of customers and markets. A large campus district energy project and a commercial laundry facility need different approaches to everything from qualification through to nurturing.

”We offer wastewater clean-energy solutions for different markets and applications, so it’s important that we’re able to individually nurture those leads using their specific value propositions. We wanted to filter the leads and add them to the right bucket based on their market segment to be nurtured accordingly.”

Brett Stewart, Senior Project Manager,SHARC Energy

Spikra connected Zoho CRM to Zoho Marketing Automation. Based on each lead’s recorded interests in Zoho CRM, Zoho Marketing Automation assigns them to the applicable journey and mailing lists, so a lead is nurtured against the proposition relevant to their segment.

Applying the right currency to every quote

SHARC Energy quotes each project in its local currency. American projects need US dollar quotes, Canadian projects need Canadian dollars. Getting this wrong was easy. A quote would be ready to send, and a final check would show that the default currency had been applied instead of the correct one.

A flow in Zoho Flow sets the currency automatically. Based on the country on the record, it updates the currency field across the relevant modules, including deals, leads, and quotes. It’s a small automation the team clones and reuses often, and it removes both a recurring correction and a source of error from every quote they send.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Flow has given SHARC Energy a single connected system across sales, operations, and service. Information is shared between modules automatically, so different departments stay aligned without anyone passing details from one place to another, and the team has auditable records of what is happening with business that they can troubleshoot visually.

”Using Zoho Flow, we’re able to tie together different Zoho applications into a cohesive and sophisticated system. It has also enabled SHARC to avoid messy external solutions, like Zapier, that can be a struggle to maintain and create more costs. Zoho Flow directly saved over 400 hours/year of the staff’s time from having to input or interact with the system unnecessarily, and improved accuracy by reducing human error.”

Brett Stewart, Senior Project Manager,SHARC Energy

SHARC Energy has created over 40 flows between Zoho apps and third-party apps, with over 80% of their integration needs being handled by Zoho Flow. On the service side, the onboarding flow saves over 400 hours a year, and it frees service technicians to spend their time on service work rather than organizing tasks at a desk.

Moving forward

With the help of Spikra, they’re evaluating multiple products and technologies available in the market. They’re looking forward to integrating them using Zoho Flow.