Guide to Getting Started with Zoho CRM Features

Guide to Getting Started with Zoho CRM Features

If you are interested in sales, have a knack for selling absolutely anything to people, or work in the sales department of a company, then you would identify with having that desire to be a smart sales representative at work.


Winning the sales game has a lot to do with using a sound CRM system to its full potential. For example, with the Zoho CRM features, your sales can be automated entirely, leaving you to focus simply on customer interaction and closing deals.


In this blog, we will be seeing the features of Zoho CRM that can help you become an efficient sales representative who knows how to ace customer relations and be one step ahead. Keep reading to see and understand these features one after another.


Use Zoho Mail Integration

 

Sales have a lot to do with being prompt with the customers. If you are a sales representative, you cannot afford to miss out on an important email from a customer. Let’s imagine running through all of your emails and replying to them simultaneously.


However, you realize that you ignored an important email from a hot lead by evening. The probable reason for this could be a cluttered inbox with many emails. Missing out on this important email may not be by intention, but the fact is that as a sales representative, you cannot afford something like this for your business.


It is important for the sales representative to attend to all the leads as soon as possible and for doing the same, there needs to be a filtered view of all the prospect emails. One of the most used Zoho CRM integrations, called Mail Magnet, allows you not just to receive emails but also get a filtered view of your prospect’s emails as well.


With this email integration, you will not need to keep checking the emails all the time. Every time you receive an email from a prospect, you will be notified by the mail icon that pops up right on the Zoho CRM home page. Remember that MailMagnet will be available with the Zoho Mail Integration only, so ensure that you ask your Zoho consultant to enable it and configure the email account with Zoho CRM.


Organize Emails According to Sales Priorities


Another essential thing to remember while dealing with customers is that the most recent email is not always the most important. For example, if a lead has emailed asking about the price of a product or negotiating on the price of a product, these emails must be immediately accessible. This can save considerable time and effort.


Naturally, you will be organizing the sales activities based on the pipeline and the level each deal is in. What’s notable is that you can similarly manage your emails using Zoho CRM features. For example, using the SalesInbox, you can access columns, filters, folders, and columns that can show your sales priorities and allow you to stay at the top of the emails that matter.


SalesInbox functions smartly by organizing all emails according to how you have set up your CRM. For example, even though the regular email clients allow you to filter emails based on a sender's address, SalesInbox enables you to filter emails based on the sender’s email address and sales parameters.


For instance, if you get emails from customers offering you deals of more than 1 lakh, that can be specified with the name Top Leads. Using SalesInbox allows you to create many folders and shows them right on the side of the folders you have.


Using SalesInbox, you can also automate the lead creation in your inbox, get automatic reminders, and work with helpful information.


Monitor Customer Activities

 

One of the most critical aspects of ensuring sales success for all sales representatives will be timing. SalesSignals gives you an immediate notification about what the prospects are up to. You will also know if the lead that you have been chasing has opened your email or not. An alert will be sent to you as soon as the email is opened.


Remember that the prospects and customers can reach out to you from different channels. They can visit your website, fill out surveys, raise support tickets, and post on your social media. To improve customer relations, you will have to be consistent and prompt. SalesSignal helps you track all customer activities by displaying them in an organized way.


SalesSignal will give you a prompt when your leads send you an email, open the email sent by you, click on the links in the email, or when the email gets bounced. You will also be notified when missed calls are received, surveys get filled, new tickets, comments, and responses are received, missed chats are received, or the support tickets are overdue or escalated.


Leverage Social Media for Getting Leads


As a sales representative, you must be aware of all that interests your prospects, the kind of products or services they are looking for, and what their likes and dislikes are. Like most people in the world, your potential customers use social media and post regularly. In this process, some of them may also be talking about the prospects they are using, their influencers in decision making, and the product and services they wish to use.

Being an intelligent sales representative, you must convert every like, reshare, or comment from your prospects into an asset. You can effectively convert the social media conversations into actionable leads by lead generation automation through a workflow. All you have to do is configure your social media channel properly.


If someone tags your organization’s replies to your social media posts, you can add this person as a lead and assign the lead to a sales representative. Likewise, anytime someone messages you on social media or comments on your posts, you can also add that person as your contact and assign this contact to another sales representative.


Customize Templates

 

All sales professionals do not like manual data entry. However, there are times when entire days get wasted in typing emails while leaving only a little time to do what you are actually hired for, and that is selling. Email Templates is one of the Zoho CRM features that can help get rid of this.


You can personalize the emails for every activity and send these emails to individual prospects. In addition, you can also send mass emails to a list of leads. For example, if you have imported leads from market research and wish to engage prospects, you can send thank you emails. All that you have to do is choose the list of leads and send a mass email.


To customize the templates, you have to design your template with the help of text, images, and tables; merge fields to your template, and add headers and footers to the templates.


Track Email Performance


You can also monitor how your emails have performed. Remember that you will not be able to send better emails in case you do not know how they have performed. Hence, an innovative sales representative must be able to consistently send engaging emails that can grab the attention of prospects get them to read and respond as well.


There are smart insights available on how the templates are performing, and by using these insights, you can get closer to writing better content. The email insights can also get you weekly and monthly reports on the emails' open, click, and bounce rates. In addition, the dashboards can tell which email templates have the best open and click rates.


Keep in mind that you can use the templates with the highest open rates, update existing content, and create new templates. In case you have been sending the email template, your job is done.


Complete Sales Activities On the Go

 

The sales representatives work while also being a part of customer meetings, events, and conferences. While managing so many meetings altogether, there must be something handy to update the activities, keep the team in sync, and do important things on the go. Zoho CRM features solve this problem by coming into your pocket.


With Zoho CRM Mobile, you can add leads, create tasks, receive email notifications, find customers, etc. You can locate all prospects near you using Map View and locate leads, contacts, and prospects in any area while scheduling meetings on your trip. In addition, you can log in all your visits so that your team knows about all locations that you have visited.


In addition, you can also record your takeaways from a recent meeting with a customer effectively. Again, there is no need to type out lengthy notes; you can just record the voice notes when walking and driving, associate the audio files with the records, and download them for reference.


Use AI-Based Sales Assistant


Being a sales representative, you should not let multiple calls go unanswered. There is a smart approach called Zia, an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that shows you the notifications that let you know if your leads, prospects, or customers have been opening up and replying to your emails.

This assistant keeps track of when the prospects participate in surveys and posts on social media and based on this information. It tells you the correct time for reaching out to the prospect. If you know the best time to get in touch with your customers, you will get more replies from them at the right time.


Automate Actions

 

Being a sales representative, you will follow a fixed set of actions while contacting leads. For example, if you target to reach 40 leads a day, and 30 of your calls get answered, you can leave an email or voice message for the other ten leads.


After you complete your daily activities, you will update the tasks done. However, there is no need to manually follow a similar routine because you can automate these actions with macros. You have to choose the records and run the macro so that the repetitive tasks are taken care of automatically.


The Zoho CRM features know that a large part of your day includes a standard set of actions, which prompts you automatically with a suggestion to run a macro. For example, if you call a lead, send that lead a follow-up email, and create a task, Zia can suggest the same list of actions as a macro the next time. All that you need to do is run the Macro if it suits your needs.


Use CRM View for Activities

 

The workday of a sales representative is full of multiple events and activities that could be anything from visiting a prospect, demo shows, task creation for calling a prospect, or following up with customers after visiting a website. How can a sales representative know which task needs to be taken first on priority?


The CRM View for Activities lets you prioritize all sales activities by being available for tasks, calls, and events in the Activities module. In addition, the interface uses a view that lets you plan who should be followed up on that day. This view is divided into the categories called Customers, including all tasks associated with the customers; Open Deals including all tasks associated with deals in the pipeline, Leads including all tasks associated with leads and contacts; and Others including all other records.


Streamline With Tagging

 

You will need unique identifiers associated with your CRM records to help you effectively search, sort, categorize, filter, and segment the records. The tags can help you clearly prioritize all records and contact them as well. For example, if you have some leads in your account that must be prioritized, you can tag these leads as Important and filter all of them easily from other leads in the Zoho CRM account.


Conclusion

 

If you use all the fantastic Zoho CRM features listed above, you will see your productivity go very high. You can use Zoho CRM to maximize your potential as a sales representative, but you need to understand all the features offered by it. And now you know all the basics :)


If you need further support in implementing Zoho CRM, you can get in touch with our expert Zoho consultants. They come with years of experience that can lead them to help you maximize your potential.



I hope that you learned something new 
Cheers!
Abhi
(Seasoned Zoho Authorized and Certified Partner)

Feel free to contact me if you have any queries
Email: abhishek(@)encaptechno(dot)com
Call: +1-416-405-8185

    • Sticky Posts

    • How to reach the official Zoho Support channels and avoid fake ones.

      Dear Customers, Thanks a lot for choosing Zoho! Our applications are built to help achieve your day-to-day business goals. We are committed to engaging with you, to understand and develop solutions that enhance your productivity.  We are happy and ready to help you use our services effectively. Understanding and avoiding fake support Just like using popular bank names and financial applications for phishing purposes, using Zoho and claiming to be providing Zoho Support or services with false numbers

    • Function #35: Close all tasks associated with a lead and create a new task.

      Welcome back everyone! Last week, we learnt how to close all tasks of a deal depending upon the deal stage. This week, let's look at a custom function that lets you close all of the tasks associated with a lead while simultaneously creating a new task, like when you need to halt all progress towards a lead while the lead is not available at the moment but create a reminder task. Business scenario: The success of a company, in one way or another, is determined by the leads it gets. Each lead is just

    • Zoho CRM Webinar - Redesigning Daily User Experiences with Canvas

      <br> Your users across roles use the CRM for day-to-day tasks that are necessary. Whether they perform their tasks on time, the right way, or at all depends on a lot of factors, including User Experience. Many businesses struggle with rigid layouts,

    • Join us at the Canada ZUG Meetup: What’s New in Zoho CRM

      Hello Zoho Community! Start your year with fresh insights into Zoho CRM’s latest updates and tools. Whether you're a CRM beginner or a experienced user, this meetup is crafted to help you optimise your processes and leverage new features. Explore practical

    • CRM Hack #2: Automate sending of birthday greetings to your customers.

        Hello everyone! What sets you apart as a sales person is your ability to add that personal touch to your business relationship with your customers. Sending a gift on a special day, or leaving a note wishing them on their birthdays, are small, yet significant actions that show your customers that you care. And these are actions done without any expectations :) You must be engaging with a lot of customers and it is highly unlikely that they all are your friends on Facebook or some social channel,

    • Recent Topics

    • How to change the from address from 'no reply' for an email template in CRM

      Hi, We have our CRM set up with the from field as sales@XXX. I have just created a series of email templates and sent a test and they are sending from noreply@zoho I have tried searching for how to change the email template but don't have the options

    • Zoho CRM Client Script - SetCriteria in lookup Field

      Hello All One More Zoho CRM Client Script Tips & Trick. Now you can Set the Criteria on Your lookup in zoho CRM, It Comes With a Create Page, Edit Page, and Details Page (Standard). Example:- We have a Room Module that includes Room Name, Status, Campus,

    • Kaizen #71 - Client Script ZDKs for Detail (Canvas) Page

      Hello everyone! Welcome back to another interesting Kaizen post. In this post, we can discuss Client Script ZDKs support for Detail (Canvas) Page. What is Detail (Canvas) Page? A Detail(Canvas) Page allows you to customize the record detail page to your

    • Rich-text fields in Zoho CRM

      Hello everyone, We're thrilled to announce an important enhancement that will significantly enhance the readability and formatting capabilities of your information: rich text options for multi-line fields. With this update, you can now enjoy a more versatile

    • Zoho Reports Duplicating Entries

      I have a custom costing tab with a table where we entre invoices. These are under a Heading (PO Subject) and notes added in the form with different line items. In the reports, I have organised the report to group per PO Subject, with the total of the

    • Validation Rule Not Working for Mandatory Field in Zoho Blueprint

      As a Zoho user, we created a validation rule for a specific field. However, we noticed that when we made the same field mandatory within a Blueprint, the validation rule we defined did not work. When we reported this issue to Zoho Support, they stated

    • Notes Issues

      Been having issues with Notes in the CRM. Yesterday it wasn't showing the notes, but it got resolved after a few minutes., Now I have been having a hard time saving notes the whole day. Notes can't be saved by the save button. it's grayed out or not grayed

    • Export from Contacts module to Products module in Zoho CRM

      Good afternoon, I would like to send a number of contact info from the Contacts module into the customized module (tickets to an event) in one operation. I have selected several contacts in the Contact module (people who I have labelled as people I want

    • Zoho Commerce

      Hi, I have zoho one and use Zoho Books. I am very interested in Zoho Commerce , especially with how all is integrated but have a question. I do not want my store to show prices for customers that are not log in. Is there a way to hide the prices if not

    • Can’t receive emailI c

      I have generated a basic for but when I submit it I don’t get a email, I’ve been in the settings and tested me email, all appears correct, can you please help me

    • Data Capture for Historical Activity (Especially One Lead Downloading Variois reports without Overwriting the info)

      Is there a better way in Zoho CRM to capture and archive a lead’s historical activity—specifically whenever they download reports—so that the data is stored without being overwritten?”

    • Client Script - Updating Field Value in Detail Page of a Lead

      Hello, I'm trying to use Client Script To enrich some data of the Lead when one of my User fill the "City" field in the detail page of the Lead. This is my Script: log (value); var response = ZDK.Apps.CRM.Functions.execute("getInfoCitta", { "nomeCitta":

    • Auto shapes in Zoho sheet.

      Does Zoho sheet supports inserting auto shapes (rectangle, circle...). I did not see any option to do so.  If its not supported currently, is there any plans on bring in this features. Any timelines ?

    • I Can't Clone Webinar that I Co-Organize

      How do i get our account admin to give me permission to clone our webinars? I am a co-organizer

    • How to get the call recording external ID via desk API

      I have enabled phonbridge integration with Zoom Call. I am trying to access the call recording in Zoom by calling Zoom API. I have built a Desk workflow to trigger on a new call, to call a custom function. when calling the API, the response doesn't contain

    • Can't View Project Names in Mobile App

      I can't view project names on PO's in the app, nor can I add that as a viewable PDF field in inventory on the computer. I've attached screenshots showing that in the mobile version whether you are on the PO, editing the PO, or viewing the PO line items,

    • How do you print a refund check to customer?

      Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does anyone print a refund check to a customer? We cant find anywhere to either just print a check and pick a customer, or where to do so from a credit note.

    • Notebook

      I have purchased the monthly pro subscription of Notebook. But it does not support my XP-Pen to write something in it. So it is not useful to me. Hence I am requesting you to help me to discontinue this subscription.

    • Domain Mapping & Image Publishing Issues on Zoho Sites

      Hello, I am facing two issues with my Zoho Sites account: 1. Images not visible after publishing. 2. Domain mapping error: "Domain already exists". I am a paid customer. Please connect me with Live Chat Support or Zoho Assist so I can show my issue

    • Prevent duplicate with custom fields?

      I was wondering something about custom field/custom modules in Zoho Desk. For some reason you can make a custom field mandatory but not unique? For example, if I create a custom module to manage equipment and renewal and make a field serial number no

    • Two currencies

      More and more I am finding that internattional payments' fees are unpredictable. I would like, on my invoices that are in a foreign currency (eg. USD$ or EUR€) for there to be a GBP£ TOTAL display alongside the invoice's currency total. This would make

    • Generate leads from instagram

      hello i have question. If connect instagram using zoho social, it is possible to get lead from instagram? example if someone send me direct message or comment on my post and then they generate to lead

    • Where is the desktop app for Zoho Projects???

      As a project manager, I need a desktop app for the projects I manage. Yes, there's the web app, which is AWESOME for cross browser and platform compatibility... but I need a real desktop app for Projects that allow me to enter offline information where

    • White Label certificate

      Hi all, About 72 hours ago, we fulfilled all steps for white labeling (CNAME to point to mail.cs.zohohost.eu), but since then the configuration page is now stuck at "generating certificate" since 3 days. When I execute an NSLOOKUP mail.webfoundry.be it

    • How to Automate Monthly PDF Reports with Filters in Zoho Creator

      Hi everyone, I’m trying to build an automated monthly reporting process in Zoho Creator and would appreciate suggestions or best practices from anyone who has done something similar. What I’m trying to do: I have a form called New_Customer with fields

    • Feedback: Streamlining Note Management in Zoho Notebook

      Dear Team/Support, I would like to share some feedback regarding the note management system that could help improve usability and accessibility for users like myself. Notebook 1 (screenshot attached): Currently, the system does not allow selecting and

    • showing Limit exceeded

      Good afternoon...trust you're good. I've been having issues working with but it's not responding. it's showing Limit exceeded, sorry it seems like too many people are working on the sheet right now please try again later. meanwhile no one is working on

    • Sorting columns in Zoho Projects

      Hi, In project management best practice, sorting columns (ascending, descending) is an important tool. Sorting dates to see the order of tasks starting, sorting on priority or even on planned hours is a must for an efficient project control. Currently,

    • Upload API

      I'm trying to use the Upload API to upload some images and attach them to comments (https://desk.zoho.com/DeskAPIDocument#Uploads#Uploads_Uploadfile) - however I can only ever get a 401 or bad request back. I'm using an OAuth token with the Desk.tickets.ALL

    • Losing description after merging tickets

      Hello, We merge tickets when they are about the same topic from the same client. It happens sometimes. We recently noticed that after the merger only the description from the master ticket is left in a thread. And the slave-ticket description is erased.

    • update linked contacts when update happens in account

      Hi, I have a custom field called Licence in the Accounts module. When someone buys a licence, I’d like to update a custom field in the related Contacts. How can I achieve this? I noticed that workflows triggered on Accounts only allow me to update fields

    • Problem Management Module

      I am looking for a Problem Management module within Zoho Desk. I saw in some training videos that this is available, and some even provided an annual price for it. I want an official confirmation on whether this is indeed available. This is not a particularly

    • Unable to explore desk.zoho.com

      Greetings, I have an account with zoho which already has a survey subscription. I would like to explore desk.zoho.com, but when I visit it while logged in (https://desk.zoho.com/agent?action=CreatePortal) I just get a blank page. I have tried different

    • Offline support for mobile app

      Accessing your files and folders from your mobile devices is now quicker and simpler, thanks to the power of offline support. Whether on an Android or iOS device, you can use the Offline function to save files and folders, so you can review them even

    • Zoho Desk KB article embedded on another site.

      We embed KB articles from Zoho Desk on another site (our application). When opening the article in a new tab, there is no issue, but if we choose lightbox, we are getting an error "To protect your security, help.ourdomain.com will not allow Firefox to

    • OPTED FOR STORAGE BY DESCRIPTIVE MISGUIDANCE

      We've opened a domain with three mail ids and payment has also been processed now the bill raised is for single use ID with additional storage capacity. Kindly request you to modify the purchase.

    • List of packaged components and if they are upgradable

      Hello, In reference to the article Components and Packaging in Zoho Vertical Studio, can you provide an overview of what these are. Can you also please provide a list of of components that are considered Packaged and also whether they are Upgradable?

    • Does Attari Messaging app have Bot option and APIB

      Hi, Does Attari also have Bot and API as we use in WhatsApp??

    • How to add application logo

      I'm creating an application which i do not want it to show my organization logo so i have changed the setting but i cannot find where to upload/select the logo i wish to use for my application. I have seen something online about using Deluge and writing

    • Email login error

      Login successfully but email page error

    • Next Page