Danton HR & Training manages leads, clients, projects, contracts, and associates using Zoho One

The challenge

When the business was first established, spreadsheets were its go-to resource for capturing leads, managing activities, and tracking project progress. Looking for something more structured, Trello was implemented to organise the workload into tasks and improve collaboration across its colleagues.

"Trello helped us to a point. But very quickly, we found, when trying to support clients from a communication perspective, and tracking multiple projects at the same time, that we outgrew Trello."

Nicola Roke Managing Director, Danton HR & Training

Additionally, many of Danton's projects required the team to track not just deliverables, but time expenditure. Some of its client agreements are based on set numbers of billable hours, which need to be invoiced regularly, and this was also a point of friction. "We had a separate system that tracked our time against the project tracker, and that felt a bit clunky," explains Nicola.

Danton's team also had no central place to store, view, and act on client data. "It was in spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, emails, and we'd ask, 'Where's somebody's phone number?' and 'Who are the key people that we need to be talking to?'," Nicola recalls. Lacking a core database, the firm was struggling to keep its clients notified of key updates and sector-specific information, such as employment law changes.

The final challenge surrounded Danton's fluctuating workforce. During busy periods, the business uses a network of experienced and trusted associates to support its clients' needs. However, Nicola was concerned about exposing client data to external associates working on unrelated cases.

It was clear that Danton needed a more robust, secure, tightly integrated, and flexible software stack that could not only alleviate these pain points but also actively help the business grow and thrive.

"We found that Zoho was the solution that we were looking for."

Nicola Roke Managing Director, Danton HR & Training

The solution

After some considered research, during which Nicola discounted Monday.com and Microsoft, the Zoho One bundle of 45+ business applications was onboarded into the business. "We were looking for an integrated solution that helped the client CRM side, the project management side, and time tracking...it just felt right to try and bring everything together," Nicola reveals.

Zoho One's flexible nature makes it the ideal platform for Danton. Its team can use as many — or as few — of the included applications as required, and where alternative software remains in use, the team have easily synced them with Zoho. Nicola enjoys the flow of data across all of Zoho's native platforms and how seamlessly she can toggle between them. "The system is very accessible — we can switch between the different modules very, very easily."

Financially, Zoho One offers major benefits too. This is especially pertinent in light of Danton's changing volumes of associate consultants. "We have an annualised subscription model. Where we flex our users, that works really well for us, and we can subscribe people partway through the year. We have an employed team, and we operate with associates...as we ebb and flow with the associates, that works well," Nicola explains.

When external associates are added to Danton's Zoho environment, the team can restrict their profiles to see only specific records. This protects Danton's wider client data and confidentiality, ensuring that information is only accessed on a need-to-know basis.

"Going to a trusted provider, where, from a data integrity perspective, we've got full confidence in it, was absolutely brilliant."

Nicola Roke Managing Director, Danton HR & Training

Danton HR & Training's core Zoho stack includes:

Zoho CRM: All of Danton's onboarded clients sit within Zoho CRM, whereby consultants can view every touchpoint, contact details, contracts, and notes in one space. It's also used to track new opportunities that arise, with Nicola explaining: "Any opportunities where we can add more value, we include that information in the CRM. We can see from a pipeline perspective what's coming down the line with our existing clients." Zoho CRM is also used to effortlessly send email correspondence to clients, with mass mails keeping them informed of topical HR, employment, and training updates.

Bigin: Danton's new leads are captured inside Bigin, Zoho's simplified CRM platform — "splitting the CRM function just works for our business," says Nicola. Bigin makes it easy for the team to ring-fence and nurture new potential clients, as well as build out a pipeline of new opportunities. Once new leads are ready to be converted, they are seamlessly pushed into Zoho CRM, ready for Danton's Business Development Manager to commence an onboarding workflow. "It offers a seamless feel for our clients and a seamless feel for our consultants as well," she adds. As many HR requirements can be very urgent, the ability to kick-start the onboarding process in this way is critical, with Nicola estimating that within an hour of a new client "pressing the button", the team is ready to assist.

Zoho Projects: Orchestrating hundreds of active projects, Zoho Projects is a staple app in Danton's day-to-day toolkit. It's used to manage client projects, sometimes two or three per client, as well as internal, operational projects — breaking down complex tasks into bite-sized actions and shared milestones. The embedded time-tracker functionality, which Nicola calls "game-changing", enables Danton's consultants to log the time spent on each project for invoicing purposes. Tracking the time spent offers full transparency to Danton's clients, as well as giving its finance team insights into the profitability of certain projects.

Zoho Sign: Used to send out all of Danton's engagement letters and contracts for digital signing, Zoho Sign has now replaced DocuSign within the business, which "only limited people had access to", recalls Nicola. Zoho Sign makes it simple for the team's consultants to check contract terms and conditions on the fly, which is especially useful during the client onboarding process.

Looking forward with Zoho One

Nicola and her team have come a long way from the early days of spreadsheets and task boards — but have their sights set on further development with Zoho. "We're keeping a beady eye on Zoho Books and Zoho People, which we're not quite ready to go to yet... but they're coming down the line because we know they offer a better way of doing things," Nicola shares.

Where the firm is still mid-contract with products from alternative software vendors, there are further opportunities to leverage equivalent apps already available to them within the Zoho One suite. "We're still using some other systems, but it's our plan to bring those to an end, and actually have Zoho across all of our internal systems," she adds.

Whatever the future holds for Danton HR & Training, it's clear that the partnership with Zoho is built for the long term. "I'd definitely recommend Zoho One," says Nicola, "given that it cuts across so many different elements of our business — it works so seamlessly across all the modules!"