Preface
Zoho CRM is one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market, with millions of users worldwide. You should think of Zoho CRM as a platform upon which you can configure your own CRM solution that is tailored specifically to your business. Established in 2006, Zoho continually develops new features, new designs, and new applications every year, which means it is a mature and stable yet innovative and future-proof system. Developed as a native cloud solution with multiple mobile applications available, with Zoho, you and your team can access, update, and review data from any place using any device at any time.
Having helped over 300 businesses implement Zoho in the last few years, I felt compelled to write this book to help others benefit from the journey that my clients and I have been on. I wanted to share the experience, lessons learned, and best practice so that you can make a great start to your Zoho journey and experience accelerated success.
I truly believe that implementing the processes and techniques in this book will be of tremendous benefit to you, and in doing so, you will develop a CRM solution for your business that is fit for the next 10 years of business growth.
Who this book is for
If you're a business manager or a business owner interested in discovering how the Zoho platform can help transform your business, and are looking to gain a practical understanding of how to choose an app from the vast array of Zoho products, then this book is for you. Whether you're new to Zoho, or have basic experience and want to learn about its features and apps, this book can help you. Expert Zoho users who want to develop custom solutions for their business will also find this book helpful. Foundational knowledge of CRM concepts is expected to get the most out of this book.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Foundation Modules – Understanding the Building Blocks of Success, will take you through the journey of building a successful CRM. Before you begin, you must decide on a destination by defining your why. In this chapter, you will learn how to define your why and will get a basic understanding of the foundation (or core) modules of Zoho CRM. Understanding these modules, the relationships between them, and their functionality will get you a huge step closer to realizing a successful solution. Getting this correctly aligned with your why gives you a solid foundation to build on.
Chapter 2, Leads – Getting It Right the First Time, will help you to understand which of the system fields you should keep, which ones you can lose, how to best define the picklists, and which custom fields you should add. A strong, well-defined Leads module sets you off on the best foot possible and sets the tone for how your team will use the system from here onward.
Chapter 3, Deals – Sales Funnels to Fuel Your Business Growth, will explore the singular most important module of Zoho CRM: Deals. This is your sales pipeline. It is the focus of most of your business development activities and the way that you build and use this module will have a huge impact not only on how successful you are with the system, but also on the future growth of your business.
Chapter 4, Accounts and Contacts – The Beating Heart of Your CRM, will give you an understanding of which fields you must have in these modules and how you will use them to interact with the rest of the system and also other Zoho and third-party systems. Whether you supply products/services to the general public, businesses, or both, the practical use cases in this chapter will help you understand how these modules should be optimized.
Chapter 5, Working with Other System and Custom Modules, will take you through the remaining system modules, including how and when they should be used and how to set them up. You will learn how to develop additional modules that will streamline further business processes, improve internal and external communication, and involve more departments of your organization within the system.
Chapter 6, Game-Changing Workflows and Automations, will provide you with powerful insights and knowledge of arguably the most valuable aspect of Zoho CRM. Used well and often, the workflows in Zoho will greatly improve your efficiency time and again, and will really help take your CRM to the next level and get your users and team excited about how it can help them become more efficient and successful. We will go through some useful examples, such as notifying the sales team about a lead and assigning a task to give you a hands-on learning experience and to help you proactively manage opportunities and clients much more effectively.
Chapter 7, Essential Systems Administration, will explore the setup area of Zoho CRM. Everything within this area will help you service and maintain the CRM right from the initial build and throughout all the time you and your team use Zoho. Your business will evolve, the software will evolves your people will come/go and evolve. In this chapter, you will learn to use the core elements within the setup area correctly to allow you to tweak the system and adapt to changes. You will also go through some practical scenarios to jumpstart your CRM journey with the degree of security and flexibility required to suit your business.
Chapter 8, Supercharge CRM with Marketplace Extensions, Custom Functions, and Integrations, will give you an understanding of some of the best ways to supercharge your CRM system. Firstly, you will gain an understanding of Zoho Marketplace and an insight into some of the more useful and recommended extensions. Then you will learn about another key method of extending the functionality of Zoho CRM using custom functions – with some practical examples for you to try. Finally, you will discover some of the more popular third-party integrations and the different ways that they can be achieved.
Chapter 9, Zoho Campaigns, will cover Zoho Campaigns, which is an enterprise-level email marketing platform. It is similar in functionality to most other software in this sector – however, you could be missing a huge trick by not using this due to its powerful two-way integration with Zoho CRM. In this chapter, you will discover the key steps required to make sure you are effectively getting the right messages to the right people at the right time.
Chapter 10, Zoho Forms, will explore a powerful yet intuitive web form builder that requires no development. Zoho Forms can replace emails and spreadsheets for data-collecting purposes, and once integrated with the CRM can trigger workflows, thus unlocking the potential for more automation and saving your team a huge amount of time and effort. In this chapter, we will show you how to maximize this value to your business and will include real working examples from a business networking firm and a training company.
Chapter 11, Zoho Survey, will introduce you to Zoho Survey, which is an intuitive survey tool that makes capturing customer feedback fun and insightful. With a lot of overlap with Zoho Forms, sometimes the trick comes down to understanding which is the best tool to use out of Survey or Forms. Once again, the most powerful aspect of Survey is the ability to integrate with your CRM. Absorb the advice and tips in this chapter and you will never look back when it comes to gathering feedback and taking action on the results.
Chapter 12, SalesIQ, will look into a powerful and insightful tool, Sales IQ, that will allow you to engage with prospects and clients via a live chat tool and track website visitors so that you can better tailor communication to them. You will learn the basics of live chat that will help you convert leads and then also personalize some of the nurturing content once you know which pages have been visited, by whom, and when. As the saying goes – knowledge is power!
Chapter 13, Zoho Analytics, will cover Zoho Analytics, an enterprise-level Business Intelligence (or BI) tool. It is also one of the most underused tools among Zoho CRM users. This is partially down to the quality of the internal reports and dashboards, and sometimes there's also the misconception that this tool is overkill and too complex to use. In this chapter, that myth will be busted. Additionally, we will provide some practical examples of how this tool can be used to gain insights that would otherwise be missed.
Chapter 14, Zoho Creator, will look at another excellent application developed by Zoho that can further help the digital transformation of your business: Zoho Creator. In this chapter, we will provide an introduction to how you can create custom applications on your own without any prior coding experience or IT expertise using Zoho Creator's drag and drop interface.
Chapter 15, Building Actionable Reports and Dashboards (CRM), will focus on the CRM capabilities where you will learn how to create list-based reports and schedule them to be distributed automatically to team members and also how to create visually appealing and powerful dashboards within minutes.
Chapter 16, Best Practices to Adopt and Evolve Your CRM, will help you to learn how to avoid common mistakes and set three early adoption milestones that will set you on the right path. As good as your CRM may be, if it is not adopted by your team successfully, you will never fully realize the potential it has to transform your business. Slow user adoption is frequently cited as the main reason for a CRM project to fail.
To get the most out of this book
You will need access to the Zoho CRM Professional/Enterprise/CRM Plus or Ultimate edition. You will also need access to either the free or paid editions of the other Zoho applications used within Section 3, Six of the Best Zoho Apps to Integrate with Your CRM.
Note
Some of the features (including integration with CRM) may not be available using the free edition of the six other Zoho applications. Once you have read the chapter, implemented the suggestions, and completed the practical examples, you may wish to consider upgrading to unlock such features.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800564664_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In your website's source file, paste the code into your existing code anywhere before the </body> tag."
A block of code is set as follows:
leadinfo = {"Company":input.Company,"Last_Name":input.Last_Name,"First_Name":input.First_Name,"Phone":input.Phone_Number,"Email":input.Email,"Product":input.Product,"Partner_Code":input.Partner_Code,"Lead_Source":input.Lead_Source};
response = zoho.crm.createRecord("Leads",leadinfo);
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
leadinfo = {"Company":input.Company,"Last_Name":input.Last_Name,"First_Name":input.First_Name,"Phone":input.Phone_Number,"Email":input.Email,"Product":input.Product,"Partner_Code":input.Partner_Code,"Lead_Source":input.Lead_Source};
response = zoho.crm.createRecord("Leads",leadinfo);
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "You may obtain this code by navigating to Settings | Brands | Your Brand Name | Installation | Website."
Tips or important notes
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