Streamlining and automating business with Zoho CRM
Overview
Treet is a leading brand in the Indian sawn timber market, specialising in both importedand domestic timber. Based out of Kerala, the company is committed to delivering quality by sourcing premium timber and ensuring it is expertly treated and processed to withstand the Indian climate.As the scale of operations increased, managing these leads across different platforms became challenging and inefficient. To streamline lead handling, enhance customer engagement, and strengthen dealer coordination, Treet required a robust CRM system. This centralised platform would serve as the backbone for capturing inquiries, tracking interactions, monitoring sales activities, and supporting back-office processes
Treet is a leading brand in the Indian sawn timber market, specialising in both importedand domestic timber. Based out of Kerala, the company is committed to delivering quality by sourcing premium timber and ensuring it is expertly treated and processed to withstand the Indian climate.As the scale of operations increased, managing these leads across different platforms became challenging and inefficient. To streamline lead handling, enhance customer engagement, and strengthen dealer coordination, Treet required a robust CRM system. This centralised platform would serve as the backbone for capturing inquiries, tracking interactions, monitoring sales activities, and supporting back-office processes
Executive Summary
Treet, headquartered in Kerala, is a trusted brand in the Indian sawn timber industry, specialising in both imported and domestic timber products. Renowned for its commitment to quality, the company sources premium timber and processes it to with stand India’s diverse climatic conditions.
With a strong and growing dealer network, Treet generates leads through digital channels and direct inquiries. These leads are then distributed either to authorised dealers or managed internally by Treet’s sales team. While this model helped scale their reach, it also created operational complexities due to the reliance on scattered tools and manual tracking.
Recognising the need for centralised visibility and structured processes, Treet identified the importance of deploying a comprehensive CRM solution. This system would unify lead data, strengthen dealer coordination, improve sales monitoring, and support efficient customer engagement throughout the buying journey.
Problem Statement & Key Challenges
Despite its strong market position, Treet faced significant inefficiencies in managing its growing volume of leads and dealer interactions. Multiple digital channels generated inquiries, but the absence of a centralised tracking system resulted in inconsistent follow-ups, limited visibility, and fragmented communication.
Key challenges: - Unstructured Lead Management A lack of a centralised database, causing delays, missed opportunities, and difficulty in maintaining follow-up discipline.
- Limited Transparency in Dealer Interactions Lead allocation to dealers had no clear tracking mechanism, making it difficult to monitor dealer responsiveness, conversion performance, and customer updates.
- Inefficient Sales Activity Monitoring Without a unified system, Treet lacked real-time visibility into the pipeline, followup progress, and sales team performance.
- Disjointed Customer Engagement & Support Customer queries and service requests were not logged centrally, leading to slower responses and gaps in accountability.
- Lack of Actionable Insights Fragmented data prevented leadership from analysing trends, assessing channel effectiveness, and making informed decisions to improve operations.
These challenges collectively hindered productivity, reduced lead conversion efficiency, and created inconsistencies in customer experience, highlighting the need for a robust, scalable CRM solution.
Problem Statement & Key Challenges
Despite its strong market position, Treet faced significant inefficiencies in managing its growing volume of leads and dealer interactions. Multiple digital channels generated inquiries, but the absence of a centralised tracking system resulted in inconsistent follow-ups, limited visibility, and fragmented communication.
- Unstructured Lead Management A lack of a centralised database, causing delays, missed opportunities, and difficulty in maintaining follow-up discipline.
- Limited Transparency in Dealer Interactions Lead allocation to dealers had no clear tracking mechanism, making it difficult to monitor dealer responsiveness, conversion performance, and customer updates.
- Inefficient Sales Activity Monitoring Without a unified system, Treet lacked real-time visibility into the pipeline, followup progress, and sales team performance.
- Disjointed Customer Engagement & Support Customer queries and service requests were not logged centrally, leading to slower responses and gaps in accountability.
- Lack of Actionable Insights Fragmented data prevented leadership from analysing trends, assessing channel effectiveness, and making informed decisions to improve operations.
Evaluation of the Problem
To thoroughly understand Treet’s operational challenges and define a solution aligned with their business goals, our team conducted multiple discovery sessions with key stakeholders from both the internal sales team and dealer management network. These discussions helped uncover gaps in lead handling, follow-up processes, dealer coordination, and data visibility.
During these sessions, we analysed the existing workflows, the tools being used, and the pain points experienced by both front-end and back-office teams. Several rounds of meetings were held to refine the understanding of the problem areas and validate the information gathered. As the complexity of the requirements became clearer, multiple iterations of the Scope of Work (SOW) were created to ensure that every functional need was accurately captured and addressed.
This thorough evaluation process allowed us to map the operational bottlenecks clearly, identify the missing system capabilities, and design a CRM solution that fit Treet’s business model, dealer ecosystem, and long-term scalability needs.
Proposed Solution
The proposed solution is a Centralized CRM System designed to address Treet's key challenges by providing a single source of truth for all leads, dealer interactions, and sales activities, ensuring transparency, accountability, and ease of use.
1. Unified Lead Management (The Starting Point)
The system begins with the 'Lead' module, which serves as the central database for all incoming inquiries from multiple channels (website, digital ads, WhatsApp, etc.).
● Centralized Intake: All inquiries are logged here, eliminating fragmented data storage.
● Source Tracking: Each lead is marked with its individual source for effective channel performance analysis.
● Easy Segregation: Leads are easily classified and marked as Customer, Dealer, or Influencer for tailored follow-up strategies.
● Follow-up Discipline: Users can create follow-up tasks directly within the lead record and receive automatic notifications to ensure timely engagement.
2. Lead Nurture and Sales Pipeline Tracking
The CRM is designed to track the entire lead nurture process and manage business proceedings through dedicated records.
● Conversion to Records: Interested prospects are converted into two distinct records:
■ Contact Record: Stores individual contact details.
■ Deal Record: This is the core record for tracking all business proceedings and is used to manage the sales pipeline.
● Dealer Allocation & Tracking:
■ The system pre-stores Dealer information(with the option to add more Dealers).
■ Deals can be easily marked against a specific dealer (in required cases), providing immediate and clear accountability for monitoring their responsiveness and performance.
3. Comprehensive Sales Activity Monitoring
All critical stages of the sales cycle are tracked within the 'Deal' record, providing realtime visibility into the pipeline.
● Quotation Creation: The system provides the facility to create Quotations directly against a Deal record.
● End-to-End Tracking: All stages, from Quotation Negotiation through to Sales Order creation, are comprehensively tracked within the Deal record.
● Conversion Flexibility: Quotations can be easily converted into a Sales Order or an Invoice as required.
● Follow-up Tasks: Users can create follow-up tasks with ease at any point within the sales cycle tracking process.
4. Seamless Digital Channel Integration
The CRM is built for connectivity, ensuring that lead data and communication from key digital channels are captured directly within the system.
● Social Media Integration (via Zoho Leadchain): The CRM can be connected with Zoho Leadchain to automatically enable the collection of lead inquiries generated from social media forms.
● WhatsApp Communication Tracking: Integration with authorized WhatsApp vendors allows for tracking and managing WhatsApp communication directly from within the CRM, centralizing customer support and engagement history. This robust architecture ensures that Treet gains real-time visibility into its sales efforts, improves lead conversion efficiency, and establishes a foundation for actionable business insights.
Implementation
1. Requirement Planning
Following multiple discovery sessions with Treet’s sales team, telecallers, management, and dealer coordinators, the gathered requirements were consolidated and transformed into a detailed implementation plan.
This planning phase included:
● Translating business workflows (B2C, Dealer, and Internal Sales) into actionable CRM processes
● Defining lead source categorisation, qualification rules, and assignment logic
● Structuring quotation, deal sharing, and SO creation workflows
● Identifying operational inefficiencies caused by the absence of a prior CRM system
● Outlining approval hierarchies and data dependencies
2. Solution Design
A modular CRM architecture was designed to cover both Retail and Dealer operations. This included:
● A structured lead management framework
● Seamless dealer onboarding workflow
● Automated territory and lead assignment mechanisms
● Deal-sharing automation with assigned dealers
● Quotation and Sales Order workflows
● Inclusion of a Warranty Management module (introduced during deviation handling)
Clear role-based access, approval processes, and automation sequences were mapped to ensure scalability and compliance with Treet’s processes.
3. Development
The CRM was built using customised fields, layouts, automation, and workflows that fully digitised Treet’s sales and dealer management processes.
Development highlights:
● Automated lead assignment and follow-up reminders
● WhatsApp-based deal information sharing
● Quotation and Sales Order creation workflows
● Full-fledged Warranty Module
● Dashboards for lead performance, sales tracking, dealer activities, and warranty metrics
4. Integration To ensure seamless connectivity and lead capture:
● Facebook Lead Ads integration via Zoho Lead Chain
● WhatsApp integration through a third-party provider
● Website enquiry sync and Warranty Registration via Zoho Forms
5. Testing (UAT) Comprehensive User Acceptance Testing was carried out to validate:
● Lead assignment logic
● Dealer sharing workflows
● Quotation and SO processes
● Warranty Module performance Feedback from the UAT session were used to further optimise the system.
6. Training Team-wide training sessions were conducted, covering:
● Lead management
● Deal updates
● Quotation and SO handling
● Check-in management
● Warranty workflows
7. Deployment
Post-training, the CRM was deployed in a controlled, phased rollout. A 2-week hyper-care period was provided to support user adoption and resolve any issues encountered.
Additional Requirement / Deviation Handling
During implementation, a significant new requirement emerged:
Warranty Module Addition
A dedicated Warranty module was created to handle the warranties issued out for the purchases. Making use of Zoho Form, individual warranty registration process was handled. Warranty card creation was approved for approved warranty applications.
Implementation Summary
The structured approach ensured the successful rollout of a fully customised Zoho CRM for Treet.
The solution digitised:
● B2C and Dealer sales processes
● Lead management and follow-up
● Quotation and order workflows
● Warranty operations
● Multi-channel lead integrations
The project enabled Treet to shift from manual, disjointed operations to a robust, centralised system that strengthens sales efficiency, dealer coordination, and customer engagement.
Result