Primate Technologies

Primate Technologies builds visualization software for utility control rooms, an information processor that aggregates operational data onto large-scale displays for the operators watching the grid. The company sells to utilities, whose security requirements are severe, and it was heading into a transition, with founding owners retiring, new hires coming in, and years of customer knowledge living in the retirees' heads, spreadsheets, and inboxes. A Zoho CRM had been used up to 2018 and then allowed to lapse. Since then, sales lived in notes and spreadsheets, support ran entirely over email with no ticketing at all, and project tracking had only recently started, ad hoc. Asked on the onboarding form what problems they were solving, they wrote "lack of all of the above."

A Zoho One deployment across the business, starting with a consultation in late 2024 and moving into implementation through 2025.

In Zoho CRM we set up pipelines for the three ways this company actually sells (new customers, upsells, renewals), lead workflows routed by source and industry, and a cleanup of the 2018 database that preserved the historical record (companies, contacts, correspondence) while flagging dormant leads and stale opportunities instead of deleting anything. Segmentation by industry, deal value, and sale type feeds both outreach and reporting, and a role hierarchy gives sales and marketing their own views with management roll-ups above them.

In Zoho Projects there is a project per customer, with change orders and upsell scoping as sub-projects so original scope and added work stay distinguishable, templates for the recurring project types, timesheets the team already understood, and actual-versus-forecast hours tracking to support milestone-based billing. Zoho Analytics sits across CRM and Projects for the reporting both modules lack on their own, including the historical comparisons Projects does not retain by itself.

In Zoho Desk the support email is connected so every customer email becomes a numbered ticket with its full thread, categories and keyword rules assigning tickets to the right person, private internal threads invisible to the customer, and a knowledge base for repeat questions.

One design constraint ran through all of it. Because their customers are utilities, sensitive operational data stays out of the system entirely. Project milestones are tracked, but how a utility actually works is not stored.

The company went from no pipeline, no ticketing, and no project tool to one platform covering sales, delivery, and support. Renewals and upsells, which had lived in spreadsheets and memory, became pipeline stages with owners and close dates. Customer history that would have retired with the founders was captured in records a new hire can search. Support gained ticket numbers, assignment, and history. The engagement's documents run from the October 2024 onboarding through spring 2025.

Given the same situation now, we would weigh a custom, client-owned system against the Zoho suite from the start. For a utilities vendor whose customers impose strict security terms, owning the codebase and hosting under your own accounts is itself a selling point, and per-seat licensing sits awkwardly with a company planning to double its headcount. The Zoho One deployment fits how they work and covers the whole business. An owned build would add outright control, which in their market is not a luxury.