Managing complexity at scale: How Craftsman Automation built a trusted marketing engine with Zoho Campaigns

The Company

Established in 1986 in Coimbatore, Craftsman Automation has grown from a small-scale industry into a leading engineering organization. Built on decades of engineering expertise, the company operates through three major verticals—powertrain, aluminum, and industrial engineering—to deliver precision-engineered products backed by state-of-the-art technology, advanced automation, and rigorous process controls.

Craftsman Automation's global footprint is strengthened by a network of wholly owned subsidiaries and a joint venture:

• Craftsman Europe B.V. (Netherlands)
• DR Axion India Limited (Tiruvallur)
• Sunbeam Lightweighting Solutions Limited (Haryana)
• Craftsman Germany GmbH, along with its step-down subsidiaries, Craftsman Fronberg Guss GmbH and Craftsman Fronberg Guss Immobilien GmbH (both in Germany)
• Carl Stahl Craftsman Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. (a joint venture based in Coimbatore)

Together, this integrated structure reinforces Craftsman Automation's position as a benchmark-driven, innovation-led engineering powerhouse delivering reliable, high-quality manufacturing solutions.

This case study focuses on Craftsman Automation's Industrial Engineering division and its Carl Stahl joint venture. Both operate under distinct sales models and serve a wide spectrum of industrial customers across manufacturing, automotive, textiles, 3PL, solar, pharma, FMCG, FMCD, electronics, electrical, and many more sectors. Unlike the company's powertrain and aluminum businesses—which run on a small, concentrated base of long-term accounts—Industrial Engineering and Carl Stahl handle the largest and most complex volume of inquiries in the organization, often involving customized engineering solutions and extensive technical evaluation before a deal is won.

On the manufacturing side, this division holds a distinct edge:

• End-to-end, in-house capability: It's the only manufacturer in its storage solutions segment with genuinely end-to-end, in-house capability—from manual racking and shelving to fully automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS).
• Dedicated, certified plants: It has two dedicated plants in Coimbatore and Pune, with the Pune facility holding NABL accreditation and select product lines carrying CE certification.
• Indian and German standards: Manufacturing is aligned to both Indian and German standards, with Carl Stahl's German engineering heritage feeding directly into the joint venture's product line.

It's precisely this combination—high inquiry volume, long and technical sales cycles, and a distributed, pan-India sales team—that made a robust, centralized system essential for Craftsman Automation's Industrial Engineering business.

The challenge

Before adopting Zoho, Craftsman Automation's Industrial Engineering and Carl Stahl teams ran on a basic, locally built CRM. It stored customer details and order history, but had no concept of a sales process—no way to track a lead as it moved through qualification, design, approval, and order booking. This gap showed up across the business in several distinct ways:

• Fragmented data: Customer information, inquiry details, and design files were scattered across Excel spreadsheets maintained independently by a pan-India sales team.
• No process visibility: Leadership had no consistent way to track a lead from generation to billing, or to measure conversion and hit ratios.
• Siloed communication: The sales team and in-house design team, who translate a customer's floor plan into a storage system proposal, communicated almost entirely by email, with no shared, searchable records.
• Manual reporting: A routine request for a month's numbers meant waiting for a regional colleague to open a spreadsheet and manually build a pivot table.
• Attrition risk: In an industry with high sales staff turnover, customer relationships and history risked leaving the company along with departing employees.

The business objective was clear: Build a single, centralized system that could carry a customer and their inquiry from first contact to billing, enable the team to analyze lead stages and conversion rates, and give leadership a dashboard-driven way to review performance—replacing a process that, until then, was almost entirely manual.

The solution

Craftsman Automation evaluated Zoho against Salesforce over several rounds of discussion before choosing Zoho CRM Plus. Three factors drove the decision:

• Dedicated in-house implementation team - Small & Medium Business Solutions (SMBS): Zoho offered a direct internal implementation team (SMBS) that would remain accessible throughout the project—and even after go-live, for expansions or modifications. In contrast, Salesforce relied on third-party vendors, which created uncertainty about continuity. The team recognized that future re-implementation or enhancements would be far more seamless with a consistent, single point of contact—an advantage Zoho clearly provided.
• Long-term pricing: Zoho offered meaningful discounts along with a five-year commitment to hold per-user licensing costs steady, against Salesforce's higher, multi-tiered pricing with no similar guarantee.
• Enterprise support: This support tier was included as part of the Zoho package, whereas Salesforce didn't offer the same level of support.

Data security added further weight to the decision. Being fully cloud-based, Salesforce operated across only two to three data centers and couldn't offer Craftsman its own backups. Zoho, by contrast, committed to an annual backup that Craftsman's own IT team could access directly—a stronger stance on data ownership that mattered to a company protective of its customer records.

A sales process mapped end to end

With Zoho CRM Plus in place, Craftsman Automation's sales journey is now tracked as a single, continuous flow.

• Lead created and assigned: A lead is created in Zoho CRM and assigned to a salesperson based on region and product vertical.
• Lead qualified into an inquiry: The salesperson qualifies the lead and converts it into an inquiry, gathering the customer's floor or workshop layout.
• System design proposed: The requirement is handed to Craftsman's in-house design team, which returns a proposed system design covering dimensions, width, and pallet positions.
• Approval and negotiation: Sales coordinates customer approval of the design, then moves the deal into a commercial stage of proposal and negotiation.
• Order booked and handed to service: Once confirmed, the order is booked in the CRM, delivery and commissioning fullow, and the case is handed to the service team.

Design files and revisions are stored in a structured, tree-like hierarchy inside Zoho WorkDrive, integrated directly with the CRM record—replacing the old system of shared mailboxes and manual access requests. The company has also mapped its customer accounts into a tree-like hierarchy inside the CRM, so that when a contact moves from one company to another, that relationship history is preserved rather than lost.

The journey to Zoho Campaigns

Craftsman Automation's digital marketing effort started later than its competitors'. The company didn't have a website until around 2018 and only began investing in digital marketing once that site was in place—by which time competing brands already had an established social following and strong search visibility.

Its path to Zoho Campaigns had its own detour. Initial conversations with Zoho about an email marketing tool began in 2022 but stalled over communication gaps, and the company adopted a paid Mailchimp subscription instead. Mailchimp, however, developed serious deliverability problems: spam scores above 2.0 meant campaign emails routinely landed in spam folders or failed to arrive at all, at one point even failing to reach the company's own managing director.

In 2023, a new addition to the marketing team who had used Zoho Campaigns extensively at a previous organization reintroduced the platform internally. A demo from Zoho's implementation team late that year, followed by a successful trial campaign, led Craftsman to move off Mailchimp entirely—a switch the team says resolved its deliverability issues almost immediately.

Zoho Campaigns: Key features in use

• Monthly company-wide newsletter: Launched roughly a year before the publication of this case study, the newsletter now reaches more than 8,000 subscribers, with updates spanning the whole company to encourage cross-segment interest.
• Exhibition follow-up sequences: Structured introduction, thank-you, and follow-up emails are built around leads captured through Zoho Forms at events.
• Product and content campaigns: Product announcements, seasonal mailers, case studies, and blog distribution all go out through Zoho Campaigns.
• Click-tracking for re-targeting: The team identifies genuinely engaged recipients—including people who received a forwarded email rather than the original—and adds them back into the subscriber list for re-targeting.
• Drag-and-drop email builder: Campaigns can be drafted and sent without any coding knowledge, while still going out looking professional.

One gap the team has flagged to the implementation team: Zoho Campaigns currently has no way to group several contacts at the same company into a single, coordinated send when a campaign is meant to reach multiple stakeholders there—a feature request still pending development.

Benefits and ROI

Craftsman Automation is candid that it can't yet point to a hard, quantified return-on-investment figure, since payment and order booking data still sit outside Zoho in the company's Oracle ERP and a separate payment system, due to a deliberate management decision. What the team can point to are concrete, if directional, operational gains:

• Higher process efficiency: An estimated 50% improvement in process efficiency compared with the fully manual era before Zoho.
• Automated weekly reporting: A weekly report summarizing team-level productivity is sent to decision-makers every Friday.
• Better data accuracy and visibility: Materially better data accuracy and performance visibility across a pan-India sales team.
• Faster access to history: Customer and design history can now be retrieved quickly and easily from one place, rather than searched for across spreadsheets and mailboxes.

On the marketing side, Zoho Campaigns delivered benefits that go beyond simply fixing deliverability:

• Campaign-by-campaign visibility: A level of insight that never existed with Outlook and Excel—the team can now see exactly how many contacts a given exhibition or newsletter reached, how many engaged, and what follow-up remains outstanding.
• A growing, self-reinforcing subscriber base: Built in part through click-tracking that captures and re-adds engaged forwarded-email recipients.
• Tighter marketing and sales alignment: Campaign contacts are tied back into the CRM's contact hierarchy.

Adoption has not been without friction. Employees who had worked with manual processes for two decades or more found the shift to a CRM-driven workflow genuinely difficult, and Craftsman has responded by gathering structured feedback from every end-user group—sales, design, marketing, and service—to shape a second phase of usability improvements. The team rates the implementation experience highly overall, singling out the implementation team's responsiveness—including building a fully custom employee-attendance widget roughly twenty days into the rollout—as a high point of the partnership.

Looking forward​

Craftsman Automation has laid out a clear second-phase roadmap to build on its Zoho CRM Plus and Zoho Campaigns foundation.

"Whatever inputs we've given, the team has implemented for us. But usability is a big question; our people want to work the way they always have, just inside the system now. That's the flavor we've asked for in the second phase, so it becomes something people are comfortable using every single day." — Aneesh Kumar C, Head of Marketing, Craftsman Automation

Phase 2 roadmap

• Zoho Forms integration: Automated lead capture from the website and events, removing manual, error-prone tagging of lead sources.
• Email system integration: Customer replies automatically populate the CRM instead of living in inboxes.
• Zoho Projects adoption: Replacing the current tab-based design collaboration with a single, continuous, chronological record between sales and design teams.
• Order booking in the CRM: Extending the tracked sales journey all the way through to won or lost.

Operational improvements on the list

• Mobile experience: A mobile interface better suited to regional managers working from the field on weak connections.
• Notification reliability: Addressing workflow-driven email notifications, such as lead-assignment alerts, that fail intermittently.
• Automation reliability: Resolving scheduled automations that have occasionally stopped mid-run, on one occasion disrupting two full days of work and requiring the team to manually reconcile roughly 200 inquiries.
• WorkDrive permissions: Removing the need for a fresh, file-by-file access request every time an inquiry changes ownership.
• Self-service reporting: Simplifying Zoho Reports so the team can use it without IT support.

With its Phase 2 roadmap addressing today's friction points and a growing appetite for smarter, trend-aware analytics, Craftsman Automation is positioning Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns as long-term infrastructure for a sales and marketing operation built to handle real complexity at scale.

To learn more about Craftsman Automation, visit their website.