A closer look at the new Bigin—The CRM that works with other business apps!

How many apps do you use on an average day at work? We're not sure of the exact number, but we're willing to bet it's more than one. We all use a range of applications for different purposes as part of our day-to-day business operations. And let's face it, switching between all these apps can be a real pain. What if we told you that all your apps could be integrated with one system? Does it sound too good to be true? With Bigin, it's not just true, it's also super easy! (Read about our new features here, if you haven’t had a chance too!)

Bigin has always offered integration with a range of apps, but this year our goal is to make Bigin more extensible than ever. We want to add more integrations that help our customers do their business better. We've been listening to the feedback our customers give to help us better understand their needs, and there was one request that popped up countless times—an integration with Zoho Books/Invoice!

The most common problem for small business owners is managing sales and finances together. Manually making entries and managing accounting with spreadsheets, along with monitoring the sales funnel, is a substantial amount of work, and it can quickly get out of hand! One of our customers also told us how difficult he finds it to manually create invoices, estimates, and sales orders related to customers from his Bigin account and that an integration with Zoho Books/Invoice would be a huge help. At Bigin, our customers' wishes are our command!

Sales and finance go hand in hand, and now they can in Bigin!

With our new Zoho Books/Invoice integration, you don't have to worry about switching between Bigin and other financial apps. With sales and finance information available in the same application, you can create estimates, sales orders, and invoices effortlessly right from Bigin. Zoho Books for Bigin also allows you to keep all the contacts, companies, and product information in your Bigin account in sync with the customers and items in Zoho Books/Invoice. This is a two-way sync, so if you're worried about data duplication, we already took care of that.

We launched an early access version of Bigin and here's what Luison, a customer of Bigin right from day 1 of early access, had to say:

Along with Zoho Books, we have other new integrations that we've built over the past few months to streamline your day-to-day business activities.

Mailchimp + Bigin

Running email campaigns can help you reach hundreds of prospects in one go and is probably the most tried and tested way to get the word out about your new business. But what matters most is sending the right message to the right audience and managing follow-ups to nurture them to buy your product or service. That's where a CRM like Bigin comes into the picture. With Mailchimp integrated with Bigin, you'll be able to send mass emails to your Bigin contacts from Mailchimp thanks to our two-way data sync, track the entire customer journey across multiple pipelines, and finally say those two magical words "Done deal!". So, while Bigin takes care of sales, Mailchimp can help you market your business! Doesn't it sound like the perfect small business growth story?

Zoho Sites + Bigin 

Nowadays, the bare minimum for any small business is to have a website. Collecting information from your website visitors manually can be a long process. Adding a webform to your website is often a complex task, you have to design the webform, embed the code on your site, align the form with your website design Zoho Sites for Bigin makes the whole process straightforward. You can create webforms and easily embed them into your website to monitor traffic. And your website visitors' information goes directly into your Bigin account. All this with no codding required!

Zoho CRM + Bigin

You may wonder why you would want to integrate a CRM with another CRM. The simple answer is that some users in your organization may work better with a less complex CRM because they only need to perform basic CRM operations that don't require the more advanced features of a more powerful solution like Zoho CRM. That's when you might choose the Zoho CRM integration for Bigin. This integration helps you sync your Zoho CRM and Bigin records, making data sharing easier. You can keep your Zoho CRM account exclusively for core users, while people who rarely use CRM stick to Bigin. And all your data is still kept fully protected, thanks to our business culture that puts privacy and security first.

Zoho Forms + Bigin

Zoho Forms is a popular online form builder that is used by tens of thousands of small businesses worldwide. Some of our users reported that they found it hard to push information from Zoho Forms to Bigin manually, so we came up with the perfect solution. The Zoho Forms integration for Bigin lets you transfer data from your forms to any module in your Bigin account. Through this integration, you can automatically create a new record in Bigin whenever an entry is submitted in Zoho Forms. With the information you collect in Bigin, you can automate a variety of customer-facing operations such as following up with leads, getting feedback from users, encouraging signups for exclusive programs, and a whole lot more, all with no coding needed!

 PhoneBridge Marketplace + Bigin

In addition to our built-in telephony, you can also choose to integrate Bigin with any of the 85 cloud telephony systems available in Zoho's PhoneBridge Marketplace including Ringcentral, Amazon Connect, Knowlarity, Justcall, and Telus Business Connect.

 What if we don't have an integration with the app you're looking for? 

We still have you covered. It's important that your CRM works with the other third-party applications in your business ecosystem. With our developer API, you can now build your own connection to any app of your choice. Our highly secure APIs extend Bigin to meet your most specific needs by integrating with any third-party app that your business uses. And did we mention our integrations with Zapier and Zoho Flow? They allow you to connect to more than 2000+ apps with just a click of a button. So you can bid goodbye to toggling back and forth between apps and say hello to improved productivity.

With the new Bigin, you'll never run out of ways to integrate your CRM with the other apps your business relies on. It's as simple as that!

More apps to integrate with, because the more the merrier!

_________________________________________________________________________ 

This blog is part of our “One year of Bigin: More features, more power to small businesses.” series. If you'd like to close deals from wherever you are, the next blog is for you. So don't worry, we have a solution for you.