Leads

Leads are people or companies whom fall in your target market and might turn into prospects interested in your products or services. Every business card you collect, every email address that gets registered on your website, or any one result of executive searches on LinkedIn are considered leads.

All leads should be captured in the CRM from the early stage, one by one, or in bulk and then be taken through the sales funnel until they turn into sales (or not).

Lead Qualification

The second stage in the funnel is Qualification. In this stage, you (or the person to whom specific leads are assigned) validates leads by contacting them, following up, and evaluating their interest level, decision-making power, and buying appetite.

You should be capturing every action done on the lead in the CRM. This information will help you qualify leads and push them to the next stage, or simply disqualify them and move on to the next lead.

Opportunities

After a lead is qualified, it needs to get “converted.” Conversion turns a qualified lead into a contact, an account, and an opportunity (or, potential) for a deal. In the “conversion” process, Zoho CRM generates the corresponding Contact, Account, and Opportunity in the click of a button.

A lot needs to happen between a lead becoming an opportunity and the actual sales happening. Further follow-ups are often needed, followed by sending quotes, sales orders, invoices, and hopefully a closed deal at the end.

These steps are documented in a logical and connected way in the CRM, centralizing important data and connecting the dots more effectively while keeping valuable information safe for future use.

Adding a New Lead

Let’s start exploring the essential lead management features of Zoho CRM by creating a single lead manually:

1. Click on the + (plus sign) on the right-hand side of the main menu bar and then select Lead from the drop-down menu (Figure 4-5). Alternatively, you can open the Leads page (from the top menu bar) and click the New Lead button.

   

   Figure 4-5. Creating a new lead

2. In the Create Lead page (Figure 4-6), put in as much information as you have about a lead, especially Company and Lead Name, as they are both mandatory fields for a lead.

   

   Figure 4-6. Populating the lead form

3. Once you are done with entering all the available information for the lead, click on the Save button in the bottom of the form. The new lead gets created and displayed in the lead details page (Figure 4-7).

   

   Figure 4-7. The lead page

4. You can repeat these steps and add as many leads as you need. To see the list of all leads, click Leads on the main menu bar (Figure 4-8).

   

   Figure 4-8. First lead in the leads list

Interacting with Leads

In addition to the basic information, such as name and company, each lead comes with the ability of connecting important and relevant pieces of information to it, such as notes, attachments, and tasks.

You can (and you should) manage virtually every bit of information relevant to a lead from a central place, the lead detail page. This centralization of information helps the person in charge of the lead and other concerned team members to stay productive and keep the information that may prove crucial in the future in a single place.

Now, open the lead you just created and follow these steps to add a few more pieces of information to our lead:

1. In the lead page, under Notes section, click Add Note and type in some notes for the lead (Figure 4-9).

   

   Figure 4-9. Adding notes for a lead

2. Under the Attachment section, click Attach. A drop-down menu opens, providing you with different ways of attaching a document to this lead, including uploading from your computer, or from cloud storage services, such as Zoho Docs and Google Drive (Figure 4-10). Choose one of the scenarios and attach one or more files to the lead.

   

   Figure 4-10. Attaching files to a lead

3. Under Open Activities, there are three types of activities to choose from: Task, Event, and Call. You can add a list of to dos, log of phone calls, and events (e.g., future meetings) with the specific lead in here. Click New Task to continue.

4. In the Create Task form, type in the mandatory Subject of the task and other optional fields (Figure 4-11). You can set up a due date and a reminder for the task. Zoho CRM will send you notifications to remind you about an approaching task. Click Save when you are done.

   

   Figure 4-11. Adding tasks for a lead

5. When you complete an open activity and change its status to Complete, it automatically moves under Closed Activities (Figure 4-12). Open the task you created in the previous step and set it to Complete. It will automatically move from Open Activities to Closed Activities.

   

   Figure 4-12. Closed Activites for a lead

6. Last, but not least, you can send emails to a lead from within the lead page. This is great, because it helps you keep a complete log of your communications with a specific lead in one place along with everything else about the lead. Under Emails click Send Email. In the Send Email dialog box (Figure 4-13), type in your message. Click Send after you are happy with the content of your message and it will be sent to your lead immediately.

   

   Figure 4-13. Sending email to a lead

Feel free to add more items for the lead and see how each section works.

Importing Multiple Leads

Adding leads one by one is a straightforward task in Zoho CRM. There is also the Zoho CRM mobile app for the people on the go, so you can add new leads on your way back from a successful meeting instead of spending time on Instagram.

But how about when you need to add multiple leads quickly and efficiently? For instance, if a large list of leads is generated from an email campaign, or you have a helpful admin person to digitize a million business cards you accumulated in a recent exhibition you attended?

Thankfully, Zoho CRM has a feature that allows you to import leads in bulk sans the joy of keying them in one by one. This is particularly easy if you have the list of leads in an Excel or CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. The data in such a list must be properly organized and all mandatory fields (Lead Name and Company are mandatory by default) are populated for each row.

Let’s learn how this is done in Zoho CRM. If you have your leads already stored nicely and cleanly in an Excel or CSV file, you can ignore the first three steps of the following instruction set and go directly to step 4.

Otherwise, for the purpose of this exercise, we need to first create a dummy list and then import it into CRM. There is a lifesaving website called generatedata.com, which helps you create dummy data tables populated with random information. We use this site to create our list of dummy leads:

1. In your web browser, log onto http://generatedata.com .

2. Under Generate tab, enter “Leads” as filename, then create data columns starting with First Name as displayed in Figure 4-14. You can add new rows to add more data columns by clicking Row(s) button below the list.

   

   Figure 4-14. Creating dummy data on generatedata.com

3. When you are finished with adding all the data columns, make sure the CSV tab is selected under Export Types, then enter a single comma (,) for Delimiter char(s).

4. Leave other fields as they are and click the Generate button on the bottom of the page. The list will be generated within seconds and automatically downloads to your computer. Depending on your operating system and browser settings, you may get a message box asking you to confirm the download.

5. Open the downloaded CSV file. The data should look like Figure 4-15. Quite good for random information!

   

   Figure 4-15. Snapshot of the dummy data

6. Now switch back to Zoho CRM, open the Leads page, and click on the Import button on the top right of the leads list. The Import Leads wizard will open (Figure 4-16).

   

   Figure 4-16. Import Leads wizard

7. In the Import Leads page, select Import My Leads, which will set the lead owner to your name.

8. Click Choose File button to select the leads CSV file you downloaded (or you had from before).

9. Select Overwrite for Duplicate Record, and set Find duplicates using to Email.

   Note This setting will tell CRM to consider two (or more) leads the same if they have the same email address and then overwrite the older lead (if already existing in the CRM) with the new one that is just being imported. This doesn’t mean that the older lead will be completely replaced by the new one, rather only the fields that exist on both existing and the importing leads will take the value of the importing lead. For this particular example, where we are working with dummy data, we don’t worry about existing information, but in an operational system where valuable lead information already exists, a simple overwrite could delete existing information partially or completely. So, depending on the scenario choose Clone or Skip for duplicate leads.

10. Click Next to continue. The import wizard will upload the CSV file and load the columns it found in the file for you to map to the matching fields in the CRM Leads module (Figure 4-17).

    

    Figure 4-17. Mapping fields

11. Review the fields and make sure each column is mapped to the corresponding column in CRM. Other than the mandatory fields that are indicated with a red label, you can skip mapping for the information you don’t have.

12. Click Next to continue. In the next step (Figure 4-18), CRM may show you the columns in the CSV file that are not mapped to Leads in the CRM. Ignore the message and click Import to continue.

    

    Figure 4-18. Confirming unmapped columns

13. The import wizard will import the data and show you a report of how many rows were imported in total, how many added to CRM, how many existing ones updated (because we chose to overwrite), and how many skipped due to errors (Figure 4-19). Also, a sample list of imported information will be shown. Review the import and click Done if you are happy, or Undo Import if you found an issue and you want to start over.

    

    Figure 4-19. Bulk leads import complete

Great. The import is done and you can start working with them (Figure 4-20). Feel free to navigate through leads, change values, and delete some of them to familiarize yourself more with the Leads module.

Figure 4-20. List of all leads in the CRM

Bulk Operations

From the previous section, you can see that in our newly imported list, Lead Source is missing, because it was not in the CSV file and the import wizard left the value empty for all imported records.

Since lead source is an important piece of information, we want to populate this value for the leads. One way is to open each lead and set the Lead Source, but that is too much work, especially if lead source for all of these leads is the same (a trade show, or online campaign). Such scenarios happen often and you need bulk operations to perform repeated data manipulation faster and stay productive.

Mass Updating Leads

Fortunately, Zoho CRM offer mass updating features for leads and other modules, so we can go about changing the lead source of all newly important leads in one go following these steps:

1. In the Leads page, click on the … button on the top right of the page and select Mass Update in the drop-down menu (Figure 4-21).

   

   Figure 4-21. Starting the mass update process for leads

2. In the next page (Figure 4-22), under Criteria Component select Lead Owner for the first criterion, then select is and then type in your name. This means that the mass update will be performed only on the leads whose owner is the current user, preserving other people’s leads from being mass updated.

   

   Figure 4-22. Choosing the Lead Owner as a search criterion.

3. Click the green (+) button next to criterion #1 to add another criterion. Then select Lead Status, and is empty (Figure 4-23). This ensures a mass update happens only on your leads whose Lead Status is not set yet, sparing the ones with existing lead status.

   

   Figure 4-23. Choosing only the leads with no Lead Source

4. Click Search to see a list of leads that match the above criteria (Figure 4-24).

   

   Figure 4-24. List of leads found based on the search criteria ready for mass update

5. Click Mass Update button on the top-left side of the list. A dialog box will open asking which field you want to mass update (Figure 4-25). Select Lead Source in the drop-down list.

   

   Figure 4-25. Choosing Lead Source to be updated for all selected leads

6. In the next screen (Figure 4-26), a drop-down list will be shown with a list of different values for the Lead Source. Select “Trade Show” and click Save.

   

   Figure 4-26. Setting the new value for the Lead Source field to be applied to all selected leads

After clicking save, as you can see in Figure 4-27, all leads matching the criteria set above will have their Lead Status set to “Trade Show.”

Figure 4-27. Mass update took effect for all the leads selected previously.

Searching for Leads

In Zoho CRM, the quickest way of finding leads (and other information) is to use the global search. The global search is accessible throughout CRM by clicking on the magnifier button on the top menu bar (Figure 4-30). Simply type in the name of a lead, company, source, or basically anything you can remember about the information you are looking for.

Figure 4-30. Searching for a term in the entire CRM

By default, any piece of information that contains the search term (“acme,” in this example) in any of its data fields will be pulled from across the CRM and listed in the search results. You can see in Figure 4-31 that the search results shows account, contacts, deals, and tasks. The result will vary for you as you have different information stored in your CRM account.

Figure 4-31. Global search results

On the results page, you can click on any of the results found and access the corresponding information. For instance, clicking on a task will open the detail’s respective task.

Notice at the bottom of the results page, there is a gray info-bar listing the modules (e.g. Leads, Events, etc.) in which the search didn’t find any results. This means there were no leads in my account (i.e., current user) that contains “acme” in any shape or form.

Narrowing Down the Search Scope

Searching the CRM globally is quite handy and often finds the information you are looking for; however, these results can get crowded depending on the size of the information kept in the CRM and also how generic the search term is.

One good way of quickly narrowing down the scope of your search is to choose which CRM module the global search should look into. To do so, in the search results page, click the magnifier icon on the top left of the screen and choose the target modules (Figure 4-32).

Figure 4-32. Choosing which modules to search in

For example, if you are looking to extract the contact information of everyone in a company and see if there are any events scheduled for that company, you can deselect all modules in the list and only keep Contacts and Events and then click Search.

Filtering Through Leads

As mentioned previously the global is powerful and easy to use, but it is designed for quick on-off searches. If you tend to look for specific information in a module (including Leads) regularly, there is a better way to find the right information: Filters.

As the name suggests, filters let you filter the long list of leads and see only what you are looking for more quickly and more efficiently. The big advantage of filters is that they can be saved for later use, without the need for entering the search term every time.

To see them in action, let’s apply a filter to the list of leads:

1. In the Leads page, select Lead Owner in the list of fields on the left side of the screen and then select is and type in a user name (Figure 4-33). The list of leads immediately changes, showing only the leads that match the filter.

   

   Figure 4-33. Filtering leads by Lead Owner

2. To use this filter again in the future, click Save Filter button on the bottom left of the screen and enter a suitable filter name (Figure 4-34). Click Save Filter to proceed.

   

   Figure 4-34. Saving the filter for later use

The new filter will be listed under filters and is ready to use in the click of a button.

Views

As you have seen a number of times in this chapter before, when you open the Leads module, by default a list of leads is shown in the leads page.

These lists are called Views and are one of the powerful features of Zoho CRM. As the name suggests, View gives different ways of viewing your information. One of the fundamental characteristics of good software is that users enter information once (e.g., add new leads) and output this information in different ways. The difference in output of information is often about formatting, order, data set, and output medium.

For instance, one view will show all the leads in the system, while another will only show the current user’s leads entered today. Also a view can output its data on the screen, to a CSV file, or a PDF document to be sent by email to a third party.

Let’s start our tour of the Views by having a look at two of the most common existing views in Zoho CRM.

The first one is All Views, which is accessible by simply opening the Leads module. To open other views, you need to click on the view selector button on the top left of the screen just below the top menu bar and select any other view (Figure 4-35).

Figure 4-35. Choosing My Leads view

Figure 4-36 show My Leads view, which shows the list of leads belonging to the current user.

Figure 4-36. My Leads view

You can see that in the view, the Lead Owner column is not shown simply because we already know who the lead owner is. Another characteristic of good software is to show only the relevant and necessary information and avoid information clutter as much as possible. You will see in the upcoming sections that you can customize and create views. Keeping this small but important point in mind helps you create useful views for your users.

Deals

Deals hold the live summary of what is happening with an opportunity. Figure 4-48 shows all the details of a deal we created in the previous section.

Figure 4-48. The Deal created during lead conversion

Vital information, such as contact information, current stage of the deal in the pipeline, the history of stage change, notes, tasks, and other related information are all listed here in one place.

There are also other pieces of information that you can add to the deal as you go forward. Among other things, you can manage the list of competitors who may impact the deal, products being sold in this deal, sales order sent to the potential client, and the email correspondence. Once a lead is converted, this page will be the command center for the user in charge of the deal.

Keeping the Stage Up to Date

As you go forward with the deal in real life, the stage in which the deal is in the CRM should change too. This is particularly important to keep the sales pipeline in the reports and the people concerned with sales performance in your organization up to date.

You can easily do this by selecting a relevant stage from the Stage graph in the deal details page (Figure 4-49). In the graph, the current stage is shown as a green circle while previous stages are indicated as green check marks and future stages are grayed out. By default, the last three stages of a deal indicate if it is a win or a loss. Visually, these stages are indicated with thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons.

Figure 4-49. Moving a Deal along the sale funnel

To select an applicable stage, simply click on the next stage (gray circle) in line or jump and select another future stage. You can hover on a stage to see its name.

In an upcoming section, you will learn how to customize the deal stages to match your sales process.

Viewing Deals

To quickly see all active deals in the system in one place, click on Deals on the top menu bar. The All Deals view will show all deals grouped by stage (Figure 4-50). Click on each deal listed in the view to see its details.

Figure 4-50. Deals page with all deals listed in different stages of the pipeline

All Deals view has two ways of displaying deals: one is the default-by-stage view, and the other is the simple list view. You can switch between these two by clicking on the list and bar icons on the top right of the screen.

Also, there are filters for you to select (from the left sidebar) to narrow down the list, in case there are many deals listed here. You can choose to see deals only for a specific account, stage, lead source, etc.

Similar to other modules, you can select other available views from the view selector drop-down on the top left of the screen and see, for example, only your own deals, deals closing this month, etc.

It is also worth reminding you that you can customize these views by clicking Edit next to the view selector drop-down and also create new views from scratch by clicking Create New item in the drop-down.

Homepage Dashboard

As you enter information in the CRM and keep it up to date, the homepage dashboard turns into a powerful place to quickly see the state of your business in one page.

By default, two of the four Components (what Zoho calls the building blocks of the dashboard page) show the list of the deals closing this month and the graph of the sales pipeline by stage, not surprisingly shaped like a funnel.

In Figure 4-51, you can see that there is only one deal closing this month and judging by the funnel, the majority of the deals are still in the qualification stage. Now, if this were a real business, you may have needed to ask the sales team some serious questions.

Figure 4-51. Homepage dashboard showing the state of the business

You can make the homepage more powerful and add more views and dashboards by clicking on the Add Component button (green plus sign) in the bottom of the page and choose from available views and dashboards in the CRM. I leave exploring this feature to you.

Emailing Quotes

To send quotes to clients, you can export them to PDF and email them to clients and other people. You can also kill more trees and print them on paper to send them by snail mail (killing even more trees) or fax them if the other party lives in the previous century.

The better way, however, is to email quotes directly to the client (i.e., the contact mentioned in the quote) from within the CRM. To do this, follow these steps:

1. In the quote detail page , open the … menu on the top right of the screen and click Send Mail on the drop-down menu. The Send Mail form will open (Figure 4-64).

   

   Figure 4-64. Sending a quote (to a contact) via email

2. Choose Quote Template from Choose an Inventory Template drop-down list. The quote will be formatted based on the template chosen and a preview will be displayed on the right side (Figure 4-65). Click Next to continue.

   

   Figure 4-65. Choosing a template for the quote

3. The Send Mail window will load ready for you to populate the message body. To field is already populated from the quote contact and the quote itself is attached to the message (Figure 4-66).

   

   Figure 4-66. Composing the email with the quote attached

4. Click Send once you are happy with the message body. Your client will receive an email from you with the quote attached.

Customized Templates

In the previous section, you used a template for a quote. Templates in Zoho are predesigned pages that contain visual elements as well as placeholders for information to generate formatted output for quotes, invoices, emails, etc.

Templates help save time and also create a uniform way of generating output compliant with the branding guidelines of your business. For example, you can design templates that feature your logo and use your brand color and typeface while mentioning a generic note in the footer.

Then when you send documents such as quotes and invoices, they look professional and have the common elements across the board.

The template you used in the previous section was quite simple and unappealing at best. Apart from design, you may want to have different templates for quotes (or other modules) that have different elements in them.

Zoho CRM allows you to create complex templates with a great look and feel by simply using the template designer, dragging and dropping elements into the template. There is also a more advanced option for users who want full flexibility designing with HTML and CSS.

Creating a Custom Template with HTML and CSS

Follow these steps to create a custom template:

1. Open the CRM Setup page (Figure 4-67) by clicking the tools icon on the right side of the top menu bar and selecting Setup from the drop-down menu.

   

   Figure 4-67. Zoho CRM Setup page

2. In the Setup page, click on Templates under Customization section. The Templates page will open, listing the existing templates (Figure 4-68).

   

   Figure 4-68. List of exisitng templates

3. There are three template categories: Email, Inventory, and Mail Merge. Click the Inventory button on top of the page to see a list of templates specifically designed for inventory-related templates such as quotes and invoices.

4. While in the Inventory list, click the (blue) New Template button on the left side of the list.

5. In the Create Inventory Template form (Figure 4-69), select Quotes for Select Module and click Next.

   

   Figure 4-69. Creating a new template for quotes

6. In the template designer page (Figure 4-70), click on the “<html>” icon (next to the smiley face) on the toolbar. Instead of using the rich text editor, we are going to paste some HTML code in here.

   

   Figure 4-70. Template editor

7. In your browser, open https://github.com/sparksuite/simple-html-invoice-template (Figure 4-71). This is a modern and minimal invoice template you can use in your template and modify to your liking.

   

   Figure 4-71. Simple HTML Invoice Template page on Github

8. In the file list on the page, click index.html. The source file will open (Figure 4-72).

   

   Figure 4-72. Simple HTML Invoice source code

9. select all the HTML code, copy it, and paste it into the Edit HTML box in the CRM Template Editor you opened in step 6 (Figure 4-73).

   

   Figure 4-73. Pasting the Simple HTML Invoice source code into the quote template HTML code

10. Click Insert to continue. The template will be shown in the editor (Figure 4-74).

    

    Figure 4-74. Simple HTML Invoice pasted as the quote template

11. To make the template work for you, add Merge Fields to its body, so these fields get replaced with real data relevant to a quote when a quote is generated (Figure 4-75). You can select the Merge Fields by selecting them from the two dropdowns on the top of the template deisgner and then copying and pasting the generated code in to the content.

    

    Figure 4-75. Customizing the quote template

12. Once you are done with designing the quote template, click the Save button. The template designer will close and you will be redirected to the list of existing templates (Figure 4-76). You can go back and edit these templates or create new ones for different purposes.

    

    Figure 4-76. New quote template appears in the list of Zoho CRM templates

Figure 4-77 shows our newly created quote template in action. You can see that the merge fields are replaced with actual values from the quote.

Figure 4-77. Using the new quote temaplate in action

Converting Quotes to Sales Orders

A Sales Order (SO) is a confirmation document sent to the customer before delivering goods or services. In contrast, a Purchase Order (PO) is an order placed for procuring products or services from your vendors.

SO can be created once the quote is accepted by your customer often via a PO sent by the customer for further processing.

After sending your (the seller) the PO, the customers may request an SO to know the exact date of delivery of the goods or services. Also, the inventory/production department (if there is one) looks at the list of Sales Orders to see what needs to be shipped out and when.

Similar to quotes, you can create SOs directly in the Sales Orders module. The recommended way, however, is to convert a quote to an SO, so most of the information in the SO populates automatically from the quote and a logical connection between SO and other related documents is created.

To convert a quote to an SO simply open it and click the (green) Convert button on the top of the quote details. Then select Sales Order from the drop-down menu (Figure 4-78).

Figure 4-78. Converting a quote to a sales order

Once the new SO is created it is displayed for you to review and perform other tasks on it. As you can see in Figure 4-79, the SO is quite similar to the corresponding quote as it gets its fields from the quote. However, there are subtle differences, such as the SO Number vs. Quote Number, Status vs. Stage, and the addition of Sales Commission field.

Figure 4-79. Sales order details

You can also see that there is a link to the corresponding quote and deal under Sales Order Information section, Quote Name, and Deal Name.

One more thing about the SO is to make sure you change the Status field as you go forward to reflect the actual status of the SO. As mentioned in the previous sections, you can change the values in the Status list in the Setup page under Modules.

Converting Sales Orders to Invoices

Once the sales stage reaches its final phase, you may start working on the payment procedure and, obviously, the invoice. This is an important stage for both sales and accounting purposes as it completes the sales process and begins the accounting process.

An invoice usually contains the PO reference number, date, address information, payment terms, line items (products/services) with quantities and prices as well as (optional) tax and discount information.

Again, you have the option of creating invoices from scratch, or converting a quote or SO to an invoice, bringing all the information from the base document.

Follow these steps to convert an SO to an invoice:

Not enough product in the inventory; go and change to 10 each; come back to sales order; convert.

Now if you go back to the Products page and check the Quantity in Stock, you will see that the number is changed to the balance of previous stock minus the number of products in the sales order.

You can add to the inventory either manually as you just saw, or through issuing POs.

Exercise: Order new products for the inventory by creating a new PO.

Hint: You will need to add a new Vendor to be able to issue a PO. If you get stock, refer to Zoho CRM documentation.¹

This basic inventory management is handy, but for complex operations it will never replace proper inventory management.

You can email or print invoices similar to sales orders and quotes. By default, there is one minimal invoice template available in the CRM. You can create nicely designed invoice templates similar to the ones you created for the quotes in a previous section.

1. Open the SO you created in the previous section.

2. In the SO page, click on the (green) Convert button on top of the SO details and select Invoice in the drop-down menu.

3. Depending on how much stock you have of the products that are in the quote list items, you may get a warning about low inventory levels (Figure 4-80). Click Cancel to proceed.

   

   Figure 4-80. Converting a sales order to invoice interrupted, due to not enough stock of the inventory

4. Open Products page (Figure 4-81) and find the products with a low quantity in the stock.

   

   Figure 4-81. List of Products

   Note By default the All Products view doesn’t show the value of Quantity in Stock. You need to either check the products one by one, to see the quantity for each one, which is a pain; or you can quickly edit the view and add the extra column Quantity in Stock to it.

5. In the product details page change the Quantity in Stock value to an arbitrary number (because we are testing; otherwise this should match the real number in your inventory). Then click Save to apply the changes (Figure 4-82).

   

   Figure 4-82. Changing Quanitity in Stock for a product

6. Now go back to the SO and convert it to an invoice. The invoice gets created immediately and you will be redirected to the invoice detail page (Figure 4-83).

   

   Figure 4-83. Details of the converted invoice

Take a moment and review the fields in the invoice. Many values are brought from the underlying SO (or quote, depending which one you converted).

Quite similar to quotes and SOs, you can print invoices, export them to PDFs, and send them via email to your clients directly from CRM.

Using Existing Reports

Zoho CRM comes with a host of premade reports for most common scenarios. In many cases, they are quite usable out-of-the-box, or good to go with a little bit of tweaking.

To access the reports, you need to open the Reports module by clicking on Reports on the top menu bar. A list of all existing reports in the CRM will be shown by default (Figure 4-84). These reports are divided into smaller categories based on the contents of the reports, for example, Lead Reports; or based on other criteria to make them easier to find, such as, Recent Reports. These categories are accessible from the left sidebar.

Figure 4-84. List of default reports in Zoho CRM

One nifty categorization is the Favorite Reports, which as the name suggests, allows you to group your favorite reports in one place.

To add a report to favorites, simply click on the gray star next to any report in the list, and the star will turn gold and the report will be added to the Favorite Reports.

Let’s have a look at two of the available reports. The first one is Leads by Status, which shows all the leads grouped by their status (Figure 4-85). This report has two parts, a pie chart on the top providing a quick and visual representation of state of the leads in the organization, followed by a list of leads with more details and also grouped by the status.

Figure 4-85. Lead by Status Report

The second one is Pipeline by Stage, which again is a two-part report with a funnel showing the volume of the deals in each stage of the pipeline on the top of the report. There is also a detailed list of pipeline stages and the deals in each stage, including the sum of the amount per stage (Figure 4-86).

Figure 4-86. Pipeline by Stage Report

Creating New Reports

Of course, Zoho CRM comes with a collection of useful reports out-of-the-box that you can use or modify to your liking; however, there are times when you need to create a report from scratch. Thankfully CRM comes with a powerful report designer.

Follow these steps to create a new report from scratch:

1. Open the Reports page and click on the (green) Create Reports button on the top right of the list (Figure 4-87).

   

   Figure 4-87. Creating a new report – picking report type

2. In the New Report wizard, start by setting module information and selecting Deals for the main module, and Contact and Quotes for related modules (Figure 4-88).

   

   Figure 4-88. Selecting the source modules for the new report

3. Click Continue to proceed with Report Type. Select Tabular Type and click Continue (Figure 4-89).

   

   Figure 4-89. Selecting tabular format as the report type

4. Under Report Representation, select the columns that will be showing in the report according to Figure 4-90. Then click Continue.

   

   Figure 4-90. Selcting information columns to show on the report.

5. Under Filters, Select Deal Closing Date from the first drop-down, then Current FY in the second one, and set the date range to cover the current financial year (Figure 4-91). Click Continue.

   

   Figure 4-91. Setting a filter for the report.

6. Finally, under Basic Information, Select Deal Reports from the drop-down list, enter “Deals and Quotes” as the report name, and provide some description about what the report does (Figure 4-92).

   

   Figure 4-92. Putting in report name and description

7. Click Run to see the report in action (Figure 4-93). If you like what you see click Save; otherwise click Edit to make changes in the report.

   

   Figure 4-93. Running the new report to see it in action

As you can see in Figure 4-94, once you run a report, you can export it to an Excel, CSV, or PDF document by clicking on the Export button on the top right of the report.

Figure 4-94. Options to export the report into different file formats

You can also directly send out the report via email by clicking on the Send Email button.

Creating Your First Forecast

Let’s start by creating a quarterly forecast for our sales team.

1. On the top menu bar, click on Forecasts. If this is your first time here, an introductory text will be shown about forecasting and its advantages for your business (Figure 4-95).

   

   Figure 4-95. Getting started with forecasting in Zoho CRM

2. Click Get Started to continue. The Forecast Settings page will load asking you to enter settings for the new forecast (Figure 4-96).

   

   Figure 4-96. Creating your first forecast

3. In the Forecast Settings, page select Quarterly for Target Period, pick a start for the Fiscal Year, and select Expected Revenue for Target Field. Click Save to continue.

4. You will be faced with a confirmation dialog box indicating the choices you just made for the forecast settings. Review these choices and click Confirm and Continue to proceed.

5. In the next screen, Create Forecast for CEO (Figure 4-97), and select the appropriate reporting quarter. Then set a target (in your currency), set quarterly target for the available subroles under the CEO (if any), and finally set individual targets for users whose role is CEO (highest role level in Zoho CRM by default). Click Save to continue.

   

   Figure 4-97. Setting targets for the forecast

6. Immediately after the new forecast is created, the current state of your business in terms of role and individual performance will be reported in the Forecast Summary page (Figure 4-98).

   

   Figure 4-98. Forecast Summary page

In the summary page , you may see a red asterisk warning you about a mismatch in the target. This happens when the total target amount and the sum of individual targets for the subroles and its users don’t match. You can fix this by adjusting the main target, or adding to the target amount of the team members.