Introduction

Zoho has just announced a raft of new CRM functionality (the full report can be found here). This is the first upgrade since the new user interface was rolled out 7 months ago. To help you make sense of this, here is Bernard McLeod's (a Zoho Partner and Prodigm Associate) take on what you need to know. 

We’ve also noted which features require which (minimum) edition of Zoho CRM.

The usual disclaimer applies - these are our opinions and not necessarily those of Zoho Corporation. As always, if you have further questions or would like to learn more just let us know.

Scoring Rules (Standard Edition)

This is a simple but hugely useful addition - particularly when applied to Leads and Opportunities. In essence it allows you to define rules to add or subtract “score points”. For instance, if the lead source is a personal referral, the lead has an approved project and is operating in the financial services sector, then you might add 10 points to that Lead’s score. Conversely if an opportunity has been stalled for 6 months and is worth less than $1,000 you might deduct 8 points. Scoring Rules are a powerful tool to sort and prioritize large numbers of Leads or Opportunities and thus pursue those that are likely to yield the best outcomes.

This is a major CRM interface enhancement - designed to remove clutter and hide distraction. You can now build layout rules that determine when record sections / fields are visible and which fields are mandatory.

For example - say you sell insurance. The CRM Insurance Module would display as a spartan page, with a single Select Insurance Type field. If you select “Car Insurance” multiple fields appear - requesting vehicle type, vehicle age, etc. However if you select Travel Insurance you instead see fields related to destination, medical condition and so on. 

Also if you state that you are married than the Spouse Name field becomes mandatory. This is a big productivity boost and there are any number of scenarios where this becomes valuable.

Blueprint is a game changer that is relatively unique in the CRM world. Zoho believes that this will become a key product differentiator.

Blueprint is used to control workflows and information capture through any CRM process. We expect it will be used primarily for sales processes but it is available for all standard and custom modules.

Consider how sales pipelines work today. If you have an opportunity tracking process with 6 stages (e.g. New, Qualification, Quotation, Negotiation, Won and Lost) - there is nothing to prevent the opportunity owner changing the opportunity stage from “New” to “Won” or to “Lost” with little explanation. So what just happened?

Using Blueprint you can now enforce a repeatable sales process. You map out the transition between each stage and the requirements that must be met in order to transition. For instance you are only permitted to move from Qualification to Quotation (not jump to Won), you are not permitted to offer a discount of more than 10%, a deal worth $10k+ must be approved by person x. You can also mandate which contextual information is captured each time the opportunity advances through the workflow. To set all of this up Zoho has built an intuitive drag and drop interface.

The Blueprint feature will become increasingly important as organizations grow or when teams are geographically dispersed. It enforces best practices and provides the necessary management controls.

Slack Integration (Standard Edition)

Not a major change but Slack (the popular business messaging and collaboration platform) can now integrate with Zoho CRM. You can share reports, dashboards and other information via a Slack channel.

Office 365 Integration

Office 365 Integration (Standard Edition) to sync users / contacts / calendar / email etc. with Microsoft’s Office 365 service.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so - Mark Twain

We hear a lot of comments during the planning sessions for an implementation process:

“Harold will never agree to that...”

“Our sales team is too busy to do that....”

“We won't use the task manager, it's too much fiddling around...”

Well, change can be a challenge. But we know that once the change is established as a real time-saver, a process that creates more sales with less effort, leads to less personal embarrassment about dropped balls and unfulfilled promises, and less time wasted in unnecessary meetings. The attitudes change.

When a company has established processes over a long period of time it is sometimes hard to recognize opportunities for business process improvements. But typically those old procedures were established in the distant past, where only the largest companies were able to afford integrated modern software.​