The pressure to optimize every stage of the customer journey is critical, especially for companies selling high-value products with lengthy sales cycles. Whether your business makes luxury items or develops enterprise software, you face a common set of challenges to increase sales, improve marketing performance, boost operational efficiency, and eliminate silos across departments.
In today’s economic climate, where buyers are more cautious and competition is fierce, the efficient management of the sales funnel, especially in capturing, qualifying and converting leads, is key.
The Business Challenge: Complexity, Hesitation, and Fragmentation
Business often rely on relationship-driven sales processes that span weeks or months. But fragmented systems, disconnected teams, and limited visibility into customer behaviour can stall momentum as marketing teams struggle to deliver qualified leads, sales reps lack real-time insights, operations teams plod through manual workflows, and leadership looks for data to make informed decisions.
This type of fragmented system was a challenge for Arctic Spas, which is Canada's largest manufacturer of hot tubs with retail stores worldwide. For more than 30 years, the company has manufactured and sold energy-efficient hot tubs and all-weather pools, built specifically to withstand extreme weather while prioritizing innovation and sustainability.
The company previously relied on a patchwork of apps that couldn't manage projects efficiently or collect and synthesize data analytics. Resulting in the over-allocation of sales team resources and limiting the visibility needed to identify issues and inform course-correction strategies. Marketing efforts were also difficult to coordinate, and customer service suffered.
According to Phil Edey, General Manager 2 at Arctic Spas, "It was difficult to align departments and employees to ensure geographically appropriate leads across our dealer network."
Time was of the essence as well since sales leads need to be contacted within the first hour of expressed interest, or they'll move on.
Arctic Spas needed a unified, intelligent system that could connect the dots across the organization. It needed a suite of AI-powered tools designed to align sales, marketing, and operations and turn complexity into opportunity with measurable improvements.
An Integrated AI and CRM Ecosystem
Enter Zoho, which is a leading business software provider of integrated CRM, sales, marketing, and business intelligence apps that harness AI to provide visibility and interoperability to each department based on specific needs.
For instance, Zoho Analytics allowed Arctic Spas to drill into sales data to determine trends by region, time period, and external factors like tariffs. The analytics and business intelligence helped double click-through rates in campaigns and enabled proactive adjustments to shifting market conditions.
The sales process also benefited from the software's automation capabilities that allowed team members to offload routine, tedious tasks and focus on making sales.
Marketing, sales, and support teams used the all-in-one digital customer engagement and analytics platform to proactively communicate with every site visitor at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
The marketing team also implemented a unified email and SMS system to run automated, value-focused campaigns that emphasized customer-benefit messages and engagement.
This integrated CRM ecosystem is powered by a generative AI tool, Zia Insights, which examines all data points and deploys advanced analytical methods and machine learning algorithms to bring out insights. Marketing ROI became easier to quantify, and customer service improved dramatically thanks to end-to-end visibility across touch points.
Additionally, the unified software system enables anyone within the organization to check project statuses and see updates in real-time to quantify marketing ROI across initiatives.
A customer journey may start through marketing campaigns or webforms, with CRM capturing that data into one record that any team can access to get any information about the customer. Over time, this CRM also connects to any support-related information coming from the customer service team.
Edey says that the software helps with slicing and dicing data for whomever it's required. "Since salespeople, marketers and managers need to focus on different metrics, and each region contains its own idiosyncrasies, we needed the interoperability and visibility of an integrated CRM system. The unification between apps has unlocked new functionality and methods for acquiring customers."
For companies navigating long sales cycles and high customer expectations, the message is clear: unified, intelligent systems aren’t just a nice-to-have, they’re a competitive advantage.
The ability to offer faster service and quickly field inquiries, maintaining end-to-end visibility into customer interactions, has improved sales and customer experience.
"The great thing about Zoho is that it allows us to do so much," Edey says. "It gives us a better picture of our customers and has allowed us to open all sorts of avenues to create metrics to see how we are doing."
In markets defined by cautious buyers, intense competition and economic uncertainties, success demands precision. By optimizing every stage of the customer journey, businesses can transform fragmented processes into unified actions that lead to growth.