Koho qualifies 40% more leads and completes 60% more follow-ups with Zoho
The company
Koho Infra Private Limited is a real estate brokerage firm that works with both property developers and property buyers, facilitating transactions between the two parties throughout the property buying journey. Primarily dealing with residential properties in Kolkata, the company has a total of 10 employees, consisting of six salespeople and the CRM team, who are responsible for campaign-calling customers. They also work with channel partners who help them find the right properties and developers to add to their property inventory.
The challenge
Working with both developers and buyers, Koho Infra Private Limited had a unique set of challenges spread across their operations. They needed to:
- Capture leads from their website, walk-ins, digital ad services like Google and Meta, and property listing sites like 99acres—all into a single location.
- Capture post-call interactions with customers and developers.
- Automate and streamline post-call activities like scheduling follow-up calls and alerts.
- Integrate with WhatsApp Business messaging to instantly share new property updates and coordinate site visits.
- Maintain an inventory of publicly-listed and exclusive properties available for sale.
- Eliminate the manual, spreadsheet-based process of matching buyers with properties based on their preferences.
The solution
Before adopting Zoho Real Estate CRM, Koho Infra Private Limited was using NeoDove CRM, which, while adequate for tele-calling, failed to help them with the post-call sales process, such as qualifying leads, setting up reminders for further follow-ups, and creating follow-ups leading up to site visits. After much deliberation among different CRM vendors, the team chose Zoho for two reasons: It fit all their requirements and was customizable.
The Zoho difference
Adopting Zoho's Real Estate CRM enables the Koho team to manage their end-to-end real estate sales operations—from lead generation to deal closure—without switching between multiple apps or tabs. Let's explore the stage-specific benefits of using the CRM:
Single source of truth for leads
Zoho's Real Estate CRM automatically consolidates leads from all sources. LeadChain imports leads from Meta Ads, webforms capture walk-in lead details, and the 99acres integration imports leads directly from the property platform. That means leads from multiple sources are available in a single location and ready for the team to start campaign calling.
One-stop lead qualification
At Koho, each member of the sales team calls nearly 200 leads per day and qualifies the most promising ones. Qualified leads used to be marked on a spreadsheet or jotted down in notes, which was a cumbersome process; property requirements discussed during the call were often not recorded adequately, and sometimes even promised follow-ups were missed.
With Zoho, sales agents can update leads' statuses immediately after calls and set up tasks, follow-ups, meetings, or site visits, and convert leads into deals via dedicated fields and automated workflows. Using the readily-available mobile version of the app, even field sales reps are now able to update lead details and conversation history in seconds. As a result, every lead record has rich information about conversation history and planned follow-ups.
"From a management perspective," says Srikant Singh, Senior Vice President of Operations, Marketing, and Analytics at Koho, "we can easily see how many calls were completed by an agent, how many of those qualified, and how many of those leads made it to a site visit. And if we notice a drop in qualified leads, we can immediately dig into what's wrong with our lead data, and set out to fix it. We could also set up reminders for leads who want us to call them up after a month or so. We don't even miss a single lead anymore. Thanks to this, our lead qualification rate is up by 40% and our follow-ups are up by 60%."
Smart property listing
Before Zoho, the team at Koho used to maintain two sets of property listings; one was a list of publicly-listed properties, usually listed on 99acres, and the other was a list of premium properties maintained exclusively on a spreadsheet.
Singh had to strike a balance between providing sales agents access to this spreadsheet while also maintaining its exclusivity status. Maintaining property listing on spreadsheets also meant that critical details such as floor plans, photos, documents, and videos of the property couldn't be added; and often, properties lacked critical information.
Another challenge was that any time a sales agent came across a premium property available for sale, they couldn't add it to the spreadsheet right away; they had to send a WhatsApp message to their manager to add the new property to the spreadsheet.
With Zoho CRM, everyone can easily view available properties and add new properties, as well as related documents and pictures. And exclusive properties can easily be earmarked so everyone is aware of its exclusive status. A centralized property listing system makes it easier to track available properties while giving the team visibility into the number of site visits planned and completed for each property.
Interestingly enough, soon after they started tracking the site visits completed for each property, the Koho team, noticed that some properties were getting more site visits and closing sooner. This helped them understand their clients better and identify hot properties just by looking at a report.
Matching buyers with their dream properties
A comprehensive lead record and a detailed property inventory automatically translates to easier matching of buyers with their dream properties for their sales agents.
"With Zoho's Real Estate CRM," Singh says, "we have a detailed history of every lead, including requirements, interaction history, and follow-ups; likewise, we also have a detailed property inventory of publicly-listed and exclusive properties. With minimal human effort and a little bit of automation, our sales agents can easily match buyers with their dream properties easily."
Sharing property updates automatically via WhatsApp also helps buyers get instant notifications of available properties, book site visits, and commit to a property they like quickly.
Monitoring and measuring activities got easier
Tracking key metrics is critical for Singh's role. Using Zoho Real Estate CRM's analytical capabilities, he now tracks core metrics such as agent performance, popular properties, popular regions, and day-to-day operational metrics such as the number of incoming leads, qualified leads, calls made, and site visits completed.
Singh shares an interesting anecdote: "While tracking site visits, we noticed one customer had actually visited 10 properties, but hadn't purchased yet. So we looked into his feedback collected from each of the sites he visited. We noticed his requirements constantly evolved during his buying journey. This helped us understand the customer better, and we put together a presentation to show him properties that are most suitable for him."
The Zoho support experience
Speaking of the Zoho support experience, Singh says that the more he explores the application, the more questions he has for the support team. He also stated that Zoho's support is readily available to handle technical concerns and solves most of his tickets within 24 hours. He says, "Zoho's support is really great. Even if I need a niche functionality, the team can come up with a workaround and customize the application to suit our business requirements."
- CompanyKoho Infra Private Limited
- TYPEReal Estate
- NO OF EMPLOYEES0-50
- REGIONKolkatta, India