Relay's Remarkable Ride: Harnessing Zoho's Tech for 4,000% Business Growth and Industry Disruption

Unlock the secrets to astronomical business growth as Relay's platform evangelist, Sean, joins us to share their astounding 4,000% expansion tale. This episode peels back the layers of how a humble startup, once crafting communication devices for kids, catapulted into the B2B sector's spotlight, revolutionizing communication in industries like hospitality. We'll navigate the twists and turns of Relay's meteoric rise, including their pivot amidst the pandemic and the strategic moves that turned Zoho One into the operational backbone of their success. With Sean's firsthand account, get ready to be inspired by a journey that's as much about innovation as it is about adaptability in the face of uncertainty.

Zoom in on the tech empowering this story of growth—Zoho's suite of apps—through the expert insights of Rakib, who unveils the intricate dance of flawless integration and unparalleled security. Find out how these tools not only keep the gears of hospitals and Fortune 500 companies turning but also set the pace for the industry with features like Virtual Private Cloud and embedded artificial intelligence. Whether you're eyeing up marketing automation to capture lead flow or are curious about the trade show buzz, this episode will quench your thirst for technological advancements and operational harmony, no matter if your business is planting its first flag or scaling new heights. Join us for a conversation that's as enlightening as it is a testament to savvy business strategies and cutting-edge tech.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

over here. So yeah, we're keeping. We're just kind of seeing the format the way we're moving these. It's just like conversation style, so you're just looking at each other, you're talking to each other. You don't need to look into the lens, unless you're like doing the intro to the show or something. Then you would look into this one. Let me actually move this light a little bit for the back and I think we'll be ready to go. Yeah, that looks better. All right, whenever you're ready, evan.

Speaker 3 0:37

Super excited to be here for Zoho Day 24 with a couple of new friends. Let's start with some introductions. Sean from Relay, really fascinating company right in my alley of wireless and the Internet of Things Tell us what Relay does, what you do.

Speaker 4 0:53

So I am a platform evangelist, so my job is to talk about Relay and to actually bring in integration companies and stuff like that to integrate with our products. So we basically make a hardware device, an Internet of Things device, an IoT device that communicates, allows businesses, frontline teams, the people that lift stuff right, active workers, to be able to communicate with knowledge workers or communicate with each other in their businesses. So similar to a walkie-talkie in that sense, but very different. It's cellular based, so there's no range limitations, wi-fi connected, capable of gathering data and presenting data and giving really good workforce information, handling panics and incident management. So a lot of really cool things for the hospitality industry. We work a lot with hospitals as well and with golf courses, large facilities, large management and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 1:48

Yeah, it's fantastic. You guys are like a Star Trek communicator for the hospitality and industrial world. It's fantastic to chat. You've been on a massive growth trajectory, starting from a few people to 150. Yeah, tell us about that journey and some of the challenges that you've faced along that journey and your work with Zoho to kind of enable your success.

Speaker 4 2:12

So we started in 2019 with a children's actually we started in 2018 with a children's product, so building a screenless phone for children. And that quickly I mean almost immediately we started seeing people coming in buying 30, 40 devices and we were pretty sure they weren't families. So we kind of looked at that and said, okay, how can we attack and put a really good solution for the B2B community? And we really didn't know if it was something that would that had some minor interest or if it was, we had no idea. We were completely naive as to what to expect. We had some B2B experience, but most of our experience had been in the recent in recent history had been consumer. So to try and understand the B2B community we wanted, we had to build everything out from scratch. We had no CRM. We had a small intercom deployment for our support. So we really didn't have anything and we had no idea of what to expect or what we needed.

Speaker 4 3:08

So Zoho 1 was really brought in because of the breadth of the product offering. Since we didn't know what we needed, we decided to get a platform that was integrated, that had all the different kinds of tools that we could possibly need. Mostly, it was just from lack of knowing what we would need and having something that ready made day one, we could have what we need. So we started at the time, with 19 people carved off from our larger organization, to start going after this B2B mission. How could we get companies to do it?

Speaker 4 3:38

And Zoho 1 really just helped us understand what was going on. Our first goal was just how do we make it so that everybody in our organization can come in every day and do their work? And if we did that really, really well and made it very easy for them to do their job, that really good data would come from that, and then that data we could use to find out if we're doing good things or doing bad things. So we launched our B2B organization in January of 2020. So you can imagine if we were selling hotels, golf courses, large stadiums was another big one for us.

Speaker 4 4:17

All of that closed down during the pandemic and it actually was a difficult time, but it gave us time to really start analyzing and talking to companies. And then, when hotels started opening back up, they had a huge problem and the problem was that they had less people. They came back with less people. They were closing off entire floors and their people were spread out really far and communication became a dire need for them to be able to communicate with everybody and we really resonated at that point. So just in that first year I think about September of 2020, everything started picking back up and we just exploded. I mean, it was just amazing.

Speaker 4 4:58

And without Zoho, without a CRM to understand it and understand what was working and the many things that didn't, because we failed a lot it really helped us grow 4,000% our first year. So from about 30 business customers and it went 4,000%. So just a huge growth. And then we've grown ever since. So we've tripled. I think our second year doubled last year in size. So as we get bigger, it gets harder, but we continue to grow and from two salespeople to, I think, 25 now in our inside sales department. So it's a pretty big growth.

Speaker 3 5:33

What a journey. I mean, it's an amazing startup, a journey success story. And Rajiv, you hear this again and again. Maybe introduce yourself to the folks watching. But also talk about this journey. You help these small and medium-sized enterprises, who are in high growth mode, really scale. And support their customers as they grow 4,000%. Maybe talk a little bit about that, because that's been a big theme here, sure thing.

Speaker 2 6:02

So, hey, I'm Rakib, so I lead marketing strategy for the workplace suite of products which is our collaboration products, your productivity, communication and all those products. A lot of the things that I do is talk to customers, understand what they want and then take it back to the product team, help them build those solutions so that we can help companies here right on point, like a lot of things that we do here at Zoho, we call ourselves as a partner for companies growths, so as a partner, not as it like a reseller, but a partner where it is a long-term game. Right, we saw Shreya they're talking about the long game and things like that yesterday. We've seen a lot of customers where they start with probably one or two apps with like 5, 10 employees and then they, as they grow, they can kind of keep adding more of those services on to Zoho and then just can. It's a no-brainer For them, right? They don't have to keep thinking about their tech stack anymore because everything is there within Zoho and these talk to each other as well.

Speaker 2 6:58

You're not actually going to another implementation partner or an integration partner you like. See, I have these two apps. Help me connect those those apps. You don't really need that. All you probably need is like an in-person support or things like that, where we have a partner Ecosystem as well, which is growing really well inside of the in the US as well. But yeah, so we've had stories where a lot of these customers they start small but as they grow they keep adding more stuff, like in Sean's case. Right, he started off with CRM. Now he's into work drive, he's using you know, he's using some of our communication apps. Now he's also trying to build some of the integrations with third-party apps within Zoho. So we've been speaking about that yesterday, so I'll take it back to my product team. We actually spoke to the product manager yesterday, so we'll take it back to the product team. We'll build those integrations out of the box so that he can scale up as well.

Speaker 3 7:45

That's really a win-win kind of partnership and you know, with as you know better than I, with high-growth startups and companies, you don't have big IT and support teams. Maybe you have a person or two dedicated to these functions and everyone else is either making the product or selling the product. You know you don't have, like, a big IT staff. What was that like? You know, scaling up all the support, the customer support, customer service, with, you know, minimal Resources, personnel wise yeah, it was.

Speaker 4 8:15

It was challenging. I mean definitely a challenge that we had. We. You know A small company grows by division, right? We all start wearing many hats.

Speaker 4 8:23

So I ran sales and was selling, built the CRM, built our ticketing, migrated and did all the the ticketing work, our phone system, pretty much everything. So I, along with we have a two-person IT team that helped as well, but they're mostly doing networking and things like that. So they were a help and and it was really a community a lot of people stepped in and helped. We had Smeas that were in different organizations that kind of helped us with different parts of the CRM or different parts of the systems. And now we have a decent sized team Devoted kind of to our third-party applications and not our, not the ones that we build for our own self, but for anything that we purchase and we and we use that. This team does that of about five people that manage all of that. So that's helpful today, but back then it was. It was definitely a whirlwind to try and build out everything that we needed in order and and still be taking demo calls, closing, sending out contracts, getting them signed.

Speaker 3 9:24

It was a very good engine, as you're flying the airplane never an easy proposition.

Speaker 4 9:27

No, no, it was. Yeah, we. We definitely always say that we we run with scissors. We just hope not to hold it too close to our jugular as we're doing it, just try not to fall. So, yeah, it was. It was definitely challenging, but we we were able to do it, and I don't wear as many hats as we used to, that's. That's the thing is, all the people who wore a lot of hats Split into into different roles, so we had different people and those people became managers and they had teams. Now their teams of people doing those things. It's a it's amazing to watch a company go from small, but this is like the third time. Our leadership and our team has done this in different, different organizations. So it's not new to us the ambiguity of it, but it's different every time.

Speaker 3 10:04

Yeah, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2 10:06

Probably, if I can add to something.

Speaker 2 10:08

So a lot of people talk about Cost savings.

Speaker 2 10:10

Like you talk about Zoho, you switch to Zoho, you have a lot of cost savings and things like that.

Speaker 2 10:14

But the real value here is in what people are doing with the amount of cost they're saving on the technology right, like in Sean's case itself, he was able to scale. We have a lot of other customers here who's come for the event, who can, who's able to scale up their operations like worry less about the technology part, spend like 60% or 50% less on your annual technology buildings but put that money into your actual business and then focus on that. So that's kind of the value that we've always been very proud of at Zoho and we're happy that we're able to kind of keep doing this despite the company growing at you know, zoho itself growing at a really good pace. We have a lot of enterprise customers now. We have a lot of upmarket momentum happening and things like that. But we are something that we are always proud of is that we're able to give this kind of value to businesses and then help them focus on or grow their own teams using the value that kind of saved when they moved to Zoho.

Speaker 3 11:10

Yeah, we're in this new era of efficiency and more with less, and that seems to be a common theme I hear is yeah, we have one or two administrators who are managing all of our Zoho solutions and they're able to really work pretty effectively with all the different products which have a lot of pre-integration and interworking, exactly so.

Speaker 2 11:33

We have these apps that, of course, talk to each other out of the box because it's built on the same tic stack, right, everything is built from Zoho by Zoho. There's no backdoor at mergers and acquisitions that you're not aware of, so everything is built from the office right there. But also we have these developer tools We'll be hearing about that more in the upcoming days as well where we have our own custom functions. You can build up across all these apps. You can create workflows that connect some of these apps into tailoring how you want them, or you also can connect it with a third party and then kind of you have something called Zoho Flow, which kind of builds or connects these apps in how ever you want. All you have to do is just draw these workflows and it's going to happen, and those workflows are there in all of these products as well.

Speaker 2 12:15

So you have the Zoho apps and you have these developer platforms that kind of connect or bridge the gap in however you want. You can also create an entire app. There's something called Zoho Creator, which kind of helps you create an entire app as well. So imagine, right, you have the email and collaboration products here, you have your CRM or your sales products, which again. So we have collaboration products that talk to the business products, and the business products also integrate with the custom development products, and I'm not sure if there is, like quite many other vendors, who does this kind of a flexibility or this kind of things at this broader scale than I can't think of any, and I've been in the industry for 30 years, so it is a unique value proposition, exactly, and also what's interesting is the focus on reliability, security, compliance.

Speaker 3 12:59

These aren't just after thoughts at Zoho. That must have been a really high priority item for you when you're dealing with mission critical environments hospitals, support in hotels and stadiums and so talk about your requirements there, because you're a service provider.

Speaker 4 13:20

Yeah, we definitely. There's always the tension when you have a large development organization like we are, that build this, build that Internally just right, yeah, there's always that there's the safe harbor of going with the biggest and there's the kind of thinking that I would call best of breed thinking and sometimes that can cause other problems because then you've got a different tool from multiple different companies and it's not the tool themselves that may be insecure, it's how you connect them all together, and so that's always a challenge for us is looking at that, and Zoho kind of took that challenge away from us. We don't have to worry about that as much. But we work with some really big you know Fortune 5. So some big customers that we have today that have serious requirements on us and serious things that we need to have happening.

Speaker 4 14:09

SLAs and all kinds of Just SLAs, but security SLAs. I mean they want us to be as secure as possible. We have work, data and things like that, so it's pretty important for us from our own product that the security is paramount for us. But then we have our ticketing right. We're talking to customers about issues they may be having or things that they're trying to accomplish, where we're doing video meetings with people a lot. So it's very important for us to be able to store all of that in a safe environment and to be able to make them feel comfortable about it, and Zoho makes that very easy.

Speaker 3 14:43

Yeah, and Zoho is known as a sweet spot in the SME area, but you deal with banks and insurance companies and financial verticals of all kinds, so you're used to sort of demanding requirements from government Exactly To talk about that and the diversity of your customers. Zoho, it really is interesting.

Speaker 2 15:01

So one thing that we often hear these days is that Zoho is a company that listens Like a lot of like, especially banks who've come to us and they've told us, like I had all of these requirements, I went to vendor X or vendor Y. They were not open to kind of making these flexibilities for me, but Zoho doesn't seem to work that way. So that's another thing that we focus on as well. So when we're working on larger customers, we put in a lot of efforts to kind of help them. Like I said, we are a partner on to the growth. We even have something called a virtual private cloud that we announced yesterday, where larger companies can have their own data centers if they want. They don't want to be in like any of the Zoho other data centers. They want their own data center which is not be shared or be shared with only a few vendors. They can do that as well.

Speaker 2 15:46

So this includes additional security layers that they want. They can connect it with any of the gateways. For example, we have an email gateway that is built out of Zoho, but if you want to, you know, if you want to use your own email gateway, you can do that. Dlp will have your archival backups and things like that. Sso, everything is built out of Zoho, but if you want to connect it on to your own you know on-prem system or your existing system, that is also available. So we are open to do that.

Speaker 2 16:11

So, like I said, technologically we're very strong because we've been at this for almost 25 years. So the teams that have worked on Zoho Mail, for example, just finished 15 years recently. The teams that have worked on Zoho Mail from day one is still the team that is working on Zoho Mail. So imagine the kind of knowledge that they would have acquired in the last 15 years. So I can proudly say, without any other considerations, I can say that Zoho's team probably knows the best thing about email than any of the other vendors out there. So we're using that kind of knowledge that we have to help both SMBs and like. We have SMBs, of course, ready to use products, but we also have higher scalability options for your banks and your larger enterprises as well.

Speaker 3 16:56

Yeah, it's been high opening this week at Zoho Day just all the different use cases and customers. So what are you excited about this year on the business side? We were chatting about Barcelona Mobile World Congress. You're selling globally.

Speaker 4 17:08

Not globally yet. So US and US and Canada, we're getting pulled in lots of directions. There's a lot of people, there's golf courses and hotels and hospitals, I think in every country. So there's always that possibility, but right now it's just US and Canada. We keep it close to home so that we can understand. We sell direct so most of the time.

Speaker 3 17:29

So that's so that we can understand what the phone works and you must have a list of requirements out the door in terms of new features and functionalities, form factors, different ways to wear your devices. Probably a lot you can't talk about, but what's on your roadmap on the IT side? What sort of initiatives or plans are you looking at for 2024?

Speaker 4 17:50

So the next big movement for us, especially with Zoho, is marketing automation. So marketing is our next big kind of migration. We haven't had the focus on a lot of marketing automation because we've been doing the kinds of things that we've just been swamped with business, which is great. But we know that that time is coming and we need to start actually doing more with our marketing email marketing as well as marketing automation. We've been kind of patiently I don't know if Zoho thinks it's patient, but we've been patiently waiting for marketing automation 2.0 to be added to Zoho 1. So as soon as we get migrated to that in about a week or so, we'll start making the move over to them for marketing, which will really help us. Having a really tight integration with your marketing automation is really key to understanding your inbound lead flow.

Speaker 3 18:37

Yeah, no, it's all about the lead, so it's an opportunity for Zoho. It's also must be a bit of a challenge. You have such a diverse portfolio, so many applications and suites. How do new customers sort of dive in and discover all that goodness is just go to the website? Is it watch some videos on YouTube? Because there's so much to explore. Even as like a tech like me, it's like oh, you do this and you do this, but there's so much opportunity for customers to take advantage of.

Speaker 2 19:04

Exactly so. We usually ask our customers to start small. You start with one or two apps. Don't start with 20 apps at once. You go crazy. So you start with one or two apps. Figure out what's working for you.

Speaker 2 19:16

There's so many options. There are also similar options where you know. For example, there's Zoho forms versus Zoho surveys. If you're into surveying aspect, you have a specific product just for that, but if you just want a generic form, there is Zoho forms as well. Right, so you understand the differences between these. Of course, all of these apps go very deep as well, but there's something that we're working on. You would have seen the demos yesterday. That something we have a unified interface itself coming in for Zoho, one where you actually don't realize that these are different apps that you're working in. Even in like five seconds, without switching any of the tabs or windows on your browser, you can switch between 10 different apps. So it all comes in contextually when you need it. You have different aspects for your personal productivity, for your company productivity, for your HR, for your finance. We will sort that out for you. We will categorize it and put it out there contextually for you so that you don't actually realize that you're using so many different apps, so that's the goal for that.

Speaker 3 20:12

It's a suite, right, I mean, you were the first movers in this approach to building a suite of integrated services, and now we have Uber one and Google one, and everyone sort of followed in your footsteps. What's next? What are you excited about for the rest of the year? Into Zoholex, which is in June, and the rest of the year? Yeah, it's coming.

Speaker 2 20:32

Yeah, like I said, meeting customers is always the real deal, right? You think so many things, you've built a lot of products, but you meet a customer and they're like, no, it doesn't work this way, doesn't need, they have to do it this way. That's kind of an eye-opener for a lot of us. But I'm really excited about all of these unified interfaces that we're putting up. So that's. I think I was messaging someone yesterday from my company. I was telling this it's probably the iPhone moment in software once we unveil that, because it's magical, right. So you go from one app to another without realizing it. Also, the third party apps that come in through the SSO, right. So you actually can bring in something like an atlashy or not like a third party app into the Zoho system and then you don't have to like have separate logins for that. So who will take care of your logins? Because we have Zoho one app as well. So all of these connecting seamlessly, I think that's the future and that's really what we're really excited about.

Speaker 3 21:27

We haven't even started getting into AI and Gen AI. You have some of it going on there. We'll save that for another discussion because that's like two hours.

Speaker 2 21:34

Exactly Like I think. Like Raju said yesterday, the real power of AI is when people don't realize that it's AI. So that's what we'll see in our products as well.

Speaker 3 21:44

Fantastic. And John, what are you excited about the next couple of months? That relay any trips, travel or events coming up.

Speaker 4 21:49

You're focused on that. Well, we're kind of getting into the season of all the trade shows and conferences that are going on in the industries that we sell to, so it's nice to come out to industries like this where we can kind of hear what's coming in new and other people have to deliver on that. We'll go to our own where we'll have to talk about what we're delivering, and that's always an exciting time for us to do that. So this season is really great. This year is going to be incredible and as we build additional new relays and new hardware and new software capabilities, it's just going to get more and more fun to talk about those things.

Speaker 3 22:25

And you guys must have fun at events where you can demo the wearable walkie talkie and show how it works. Yeah, it's going to be pretty eye-opening when people see the product in action.

Speaker 4 22:34

Well, first time I went to a trade show and was showing it and saying this is how big they pick it up and then go walk over to the radio ones and pick up these giant radios and we were like, no, no, ours does more than that, but it's this big. And then we started playing catch with it, like throwing it, and we had a cor. I think we had set up a cornhole thing. It was like throwing it, tossing it, because just to show how durable it was Right, and we had a walkie talkie there which you could throw, and that thing wasn't in one piece by the end of the show.

Speaker 3 22:59

Yeah, good times. Well, thanks, guys. Thanks so much for taking time out of the solo day.

Speaker 2 23:02

Congrats on the 4,000% increase.

Speaker 3 23:05

Thank you, yeah, Brilliant. Thanks everyone for watching. Thank you All right.