CRM for efficient sales follow-up — Never miss out on a potential big deal ever again.

CRM for efficient sales follow-up — Never miss out on a potential big deal ever again.

Rigorous follow-ups in business demonstrate one's determination to build relationships with your customers. The end result of these successful relationships is, of course, more sales. Simply put, a follow-up is the process of proactively communicating with customers to complete an activity—in this case, a sales rep carries out a set of repeatable steps to build relationships, taking the prospect from the early stage of awareness to the final sale.

Why following up in sales is important
  • Never miss out on a potential business opportunity
    In any organisation, losing leads (especially hot leads) means the loss of potential business. By not following up with your leads, you will never know if they could become opportunities, or not.

    Let's use the example of a clothing line. 150 prospects visit the company's website and express interest in multiple designs. While some add clothes and accessories to their carts, others leave the website, perhaps planning on returning later, while some others leave the site altogether. If sales reps fail to follow up with them, many of the leads who hoped to return to the site later may forget, and end up becoming lost leads. 

  • Fulfil your customers' expectations
    If you don't regularly interact with your customers, you may never know what they want. This could eventually result in them losing interest in your products and services. In the clothing line example that we used before, following up with their prospects will help the company understand their expectations and direct them to their choice of clothes and accessories. Follow-ups make customers feel special, and helps them decide what they want next. 

  • More opportunities that end in success
    When customers feel that they are being heard and their needs are being met, they show more interest in your company's products and services. Not only does this provide a higher chance for opportunities, but with quality follow-ups, there is an increased chance that your prospects eventually make a purchase and become repeat customers. 
How to follow up 
  • Always prioritise the customers' preferences
    It is always essential to understand your customers' preferences before you attempt to make a sale. This involves studying their shopping interests, listening to their complaints, conducting customer satisfaction surveys, and more. By understanding what each person is looking for, you can make a sales pitch that speaks directly to their needs. 

  • Get in touch on the same day
    Reaching out to your prospects promptly is essential, as it will help them keep you in mind when choosing between multiple providers. For instance, after your first interaction, make sure that you send an email the same day, thanking them for their time and providing them with more details of your company. 

  • Follow up at multiple stages
    In a sales process, it is essential for sales reps to follow up with their prospects at different stages of the lead nurturing cycle. To that end, it's helpful for sales teams to create a plan for prompt follow-up to be applied at various stages.

    In our previous clothing line example, let's say:
    • After the first interaction, they send an email to their prospects, thanking them for their time and providing a list of their services.
    • They then send a follow-up email a week later reminding them of their interest and requesting a time for a call. 
    • If they do not receive a response, they can send their prospects SMS reminders.
Implementing sales follow up in Zoho CRM 

1. Set prompt alerts by creating "Activities" in CRM
In any business, sales reps are usually charged with a variety of tasks, such as field visits, frequent emails, and phone calls. Keeping track of all these tasks—both trivial and significant—and ensuring that they are organized, can prove to be quite challenging.

The Activities module in Zoho CRM helps you with this. It provides you with a clear view of your upcoming tasks, sorted by each customer or opportunity. An activity in Zoho CRM could be a follow-up task, an event, a meeting, or a follow-up call. You can assign an activity to any of your team members and associate them with a specific customer. Once scheduled, CRM alerts you of upcoming activities, and sends prompt reminders before they are due.

2. Prioritise leads for follow up using scoring rules
Often, it's difficult to decide which leads to start with for an active follow-up. Say you have obtained about 100 leads. How do you decide where to begin? You can go in chronological order, but it may be the smartest way to go about it. What if the leads that are likely to convert are at the bottom of the list? You may end up delaying your follow-up and damaging your big deals.

This is why it's important for you to identify the leads that are most likely to convert and reach out to them first. Now, how how can you do that? 
Imagine this: you have 10 leads with a score awarded to each of them.
  • Lead A is referred to you by an existing customer and is from your city. Since this lead might be more interested than others (referred by an existing customer) and it's easier for you to follow up given the proximity, this lead gets 10 points.
  • Lead B, on the other hand, is a cold call from another city. Cold calls do not always offer genuine prospects, and considering this lead is farther away, this lead only gets 5 points. 
Based on these points, you would choose Lead A to follow up with first. 
These scores can be assigned to your leads by the system automatically. You can design the whole process of automating these scores using "scoring rules" in CRM. Scoring rules help you prioritize the leads that are most likely to convert. 

3. Set follow-up triggers using workflow rules
In any business, there are a number of routine tasks that need to be carried out on a highly regular basis, like sending prospects welcome emails. If your sales reps carry out these tasks manually, it could take up a lot of their time, result in errors, and eventually affect their sales process.
In Zoho CRM, companies can use workflow rules to automate these routine tasks. Here are some examples of how you can use them to streamline your follow-ups at different relevant points: 
  • Automate a "Thank you" email to a prospect after initial contact is established. 
  • A week after the first follow-up, automate sending a newsletter via email outlining your products and services to remind the prospect of their interest. 
  • Automate the assignment of follow-up tasks to a sales rep as soon as a prospect is imported in CRM. 
4. Zero in on idle leads
Once you are done with one round of follow-up, you should resume your sales process with leads that have converted. You may eventually need to remove leads that don't yield a response from your follow-up flow.

As a result, there may be many leads that do not qualify and remain idle in your Leads module for a long time. Perhaps six months down the line, if you make an attempt at starting a fresh round of follow-ups with these idle leads, you may be able to strike a deal with some of them with a fresh approach.
This way, you don't have to rely on brand new business all the time. However, zeroing in on those older leads manually can be difficult. Don't lose hope! CRM makes it easy with the help of advanced filters.
With advanced filters, you can easily generate a list of leads that have not been actively followed up with within a selected time frame—six months, 2 months, a year, and so on—and you can quickly send them emails, reassign them to a new rep, or apply any other follow-up action. 

5. Follow up on the move:
Another great aspect of Zoho CRM is its ability to let you follow up on the move with the mobile application.
You can make your follow-up calls, update tasks, events, calls, and more⁠—all from within the app. In fact, right after you leave your client's premises after a meeting, you can associate notes immediately, instead of waiting to reach the office. You can also make a check-in within CRM as soon as you reach the meeting location. This will help you to record all your in-person appointments.

    • 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

    • Tip #44 – Get Deeper Insights with Zoho Assist’s Custom Reports – ‘Insider Insights’

      In today’s fast-paced IT environment, having a clear view of your remote support activities is more important than ever. Zoho Assist’s Custom Reports feature gives IT teams the ability to generate tailored reports that provide actionable insights and

    • Message "...does not support more than 100 distinct values..." WHY????

      I get this message on one of my reports: Sorry, Zoho Reports currently does not support more than 100 distinct values in columns. 'Account Name * Sum(Amount),Count(Amount Tier)' contains more than 100 distinct values.  Possibly, you can apply filter to reduce the number of distinct values in 'Account Name' or drop the 'Account Name' field in Rows. I want to list all ACCOUNT NAMES (about 500) with SALES BY ACCOUNT.  What is blocking this?

    • Setting up primary mobile number.

      Hi Sir Earlier I joined IIFL team and got an organizational email of zoho services. Later i quit and now my account is deactivated with IIFL but i am unable to link my mobile number to my own email id with zoho.

    • Need Easy Way to Update Item Prices in Bulk

      Hello Everyone, In Zoho Books, updating selling prices is taking too much time. Right now we have to either edit items one by one or do Excel export/import. It will be very useful if Zoho gives a simple option to: Select multiple items and update prices

    • Let's Talk Recruit: Super-charge hiring with Zoho Recruit add-ons

      Welcome back to our Let’s Talk Recruit series! This time, we’re diving into something that might seem like a small upgrade but has a huge impact on recruiter productivity: Zoho Recruit add-ons. Think about how much of your day is spent in your inbox or

    • Vendor Signatures Needed for Purchase Orders

      Hello everyone, We have a unique requirement that necessitates that Vendors & Suppliers formally acknowledge our Purchase Orders upon receipt. I was hoping that there would be an option to do so in Zoho Books, but that does not appear to be the case.

    • Is there an API to "File a Ticket" in Desk

      Hi, Is there an API to "File a Ticket" in Desk to zoho projects?

    • تغيير عمله الدفع"Change payment currency"

      ما هى طريقه تغيير عمله الدفع "ما هي طريقة تغيير عملة الدفع؟"

    • Store "Sign in with Google/Microsoft/GitHub etc." details

      Quite often now, users are using a sign-in provider like Google or Microsoft to sign into various apps and services. It would be great if Vault could remember which providers you use for each website and sign you in with that provider instead of a username

    • Critical Issue: Tickets Opened for Zoho Support via the Zoho Help Portal Were Not Processed

      Hi everyone, We want to bring to your attention a serious issue we’ve experienced with the Zoho support Help Portal. For more than a week, tickets submitted directly via the Help Portal were not being handled at all. At the same time no alert was posted

    • Tip of the Week #72– Assign thread ownership to avoid confusion.

      When teams handle a large volume of emails, managing threads becomes important to stay organized. Without a clear system, duplicate replies, missed follow-ups, or confusion over responsibilities can happen. Thread assignment solves this by designating

    • Unarchive tickets

      How can I manually unarchive tickets?

    • Optimize your Knowledge Base for enhanced accessibility by adding alt tags for images

      Let's learn why alt tags are crucial for your articles. You can add alternative tags (alt tags) and alternative text (alt text) to the images you share on your community forums or when embedding them in articles. Alt tags refer to the HTML attribute,

    • FSM trying again

      have not linked FSM yet to the rest of out Zoho suit. It certainly looks like the apointment and service part is more manageable for our staff. The question is that our engineers multi task examples 1. deliver products to customers not fitted 2. Service

    • Feature Request: Conditional Field Mandatoriness Based on Display Status

      Hello Zoho Creator Team, I would like to suggest an enhancement to improve the flexibility of form validations. Currently, when we need a field to be mandatory only if it's displayed on the form, the only option is to: Set the field as not mandatory in

    • Data Migration Strategies for Moving to a Cloud Solution

      Hi everyone, I’ve been working on moving some of our critical systems, including CRM and project data, to a Zoho cloud solution, and one of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is data migration. Transferring large volumes of data while keeping it

    • Commerce Order as Invoice instead of Sales Order?

      I need a purchase made on my Commerce Site to result in an Invoice for services instead of a Sales Order that will be pushed to Books. My customers don't pay until I after I add some details to their transaction. Can I change the settings to make this

    • How to set different item selling prices for Zoho Commerce and Zoho Books

      Item selling prices for Zoho Commerce and Zoho Books are in sync. If we update the Item selling price in Books, the same will happen in commerce and vice versa. I need a separate commerce selling price for online users and a separate books selling price

    • Time Entry Notifications

      Hi All - I have support staff who place notes of their work in the time entry section of Zoho Desk. Is there a specific workflow or setting I need to enable to have the ticket holder updated via email when an entry is saved?

    • How to report 'Response violation' OR 'Resolution violation'

      Hi, I want to report on SLA Violation Type. I grouped my tickets on this column. It seems I only get 'Response and Resolution Violation' or 'Not Violated'. The former seems to be given to a ticket if only the Response Time was violated. I would expect

    • [Webinar] Automate sales and presales workflows with Writer

      Sales involves sharing a wide range of documents with customers across the presales, sales, and post-sales stages: NDAs, quotes, invoices, sales orders, and delivery paperwork. Generating and managing these documents manually slows down the overall sales

    • Power of Automation :: Quick way to associate your Projects with Zoho CRM

      A custom function is a software code that can be used to automate a process and this allows you to automate a notification, call a webhook, or perform logic immediately after a workflow rule is triggered. This feature helps to automate complex tasks and

    • Date triggering Workflow rule

      I have a function triggered by a workflow rule. The function takes a date and creates a task for that date and fills in a field with the name of the day for that date. It also updates the status field of the record. The workflow rule is set to run whenever

    • Restricting contact creation

      Hi all! I am looking to use Zoho Desk in a part of the business that takes end user enquiries. These are generally single interactions, and not linked to an account name. As Desk is Account centric, has anyone designed a way to manage these incoming emails

    • Import Holiday Calendars

      HI Zoho Is there anyway of importing an online calendar like https://www.calendarlabs.com into the business hours calendars, to speed up setup of holiday calendars. Also could we also request a feature where you can specify a Holiday as hours, i.e it could be that the company is on a 1/2 day due to a holiday or when it is Eid in the UAE and they are only allowed to work restricted hours so we need the calendar to be flexible to allow for this. Regards Jamie

    • Filtering Tickets based on Email headers

      We're starting to get a lot more junk coming into our Zoho Desk, which is then triggering unnecessary email alerts to agents. Once thing we could do to cut this junk in half, is to filter tickets based on email headers. Any email containing the `List-Unsubscribe`

    • Error 550 5.4.1

      I’ve tried sending an email to someone but keep receiving this back. Any help would be greatly appreciated 

    • Billing Management: #2 Fair way of Billing- Prorated Billing

      Hello, From speaking about the traditional ways of billing in the previous post, we are moving into the deep sea of billing. We are now in a zone to break out the most complex yet, I would call it the fairest way of billing, the Prorated Billing. Prorated

    • Has Anyone successfully integrated Zoho and Sage Intact?

      Hey all, We’re evaluating Zoho One + Sage Intacct and I’m trying to connect with anyone who has actually implemented the two together.Specifically, I’d love to know: -- Which functions you kept in Zoho vs. Intacct (e.g., Product Catalog, AR/AP, invoicing,

    • How can I filter a field integration?

      Hi,  I have a field integration from CRM "Products" in a form, and I have three product Categories in CRM. I only need to see Products of a category. Thanks for you answers.

    • Adding image in HTML report page

      Hi, I want to know two things: 1. Can anyone advise how to add an image in HTML report. The tagged used is <img> but what path do I mention for the image to be added in the HTML report. 2. Also, I want to know if I am creating an application for the market

    • How to change view of HTML report based on device but always print in A4

      Hello everyone, I am aware that HTML report view can be configured to adjust according to the screen size like Laptop, Tablet and mobile using media queries. But my concern is no matter on which device the reports is opened when printed should always

    • Age Calculation

      I've attempted to calculate the age of someone based on their birthday input by using the formula field. It works but I don't want all those decimals on there. I then tried to use "set variable" after birthday input but I get a field type mismatch, long vs. floating. Any ideas would be wonderful.

    • Search on Custom Field

      We're working on an integration with the Zoho FSM API and are trying to retrieve companies based on a custom field we added to the Companies module. However, we can't find a way to filter or query records using custom fields through the API. We have a

    • Sendmail function / custom action?

      I've setup a function hoping to email various business departments the details of a record once all work in that record is complete so gone about setting up a custom action in such way that each record line on the report has a button to click. Question is how do I actually include data from that record in the email that is sent when the button is clicked? I had thought that since this were being sent per record the email would include the data which had been entered

    • API to post drafts for social media

      I we want to post draft posts to our zoho social account and then approve and schedule them within Zoho social. is this possible with for example: https://apis.zoho.com/social/v2/post TIA Jon

    • Canvas View in Zoho Recruit

      Is it possible or would it be possible to have the new 'Canvas View' in Zoho Recruit?

    • What impactful sales coaching techniques have you used to boost your team's performance?

      I'm curious about the real-world impact of sales coaching on team performance. What specific techniques or strategies have you found most effective in driving consistent improvement and growth in your sales team? Any success stories or lessons learned

    • Adding Taxes to paid consultations in Zoho Bookings

      I created a 'paid' consultation under Zoho Booking and integrated it with payment gateways for online/instant payment before a booking is done. How can I add 'taxes' to the price of consultation? I can add taxes to other Zoho apps (liks Books, Checkout,

    • Zoho Finance Suite - Customer Custom Tabs - Dynamic Link

      Hi Finance Suite team, When creating a Custom Tab for a Client Portal, there is no option to add dynamic parameters. This would be very helpful for adding Zoho Analytics dashboards which can be dynamically filtered through the URL to only show information

    • Next Page