I'm working with a small construction company and have implemented Zoho CRM for their sales process. This is working well so far and the office staff like it. Most Leads come in over the phone and the office receptionist fills out the Zoho Lead form, which has been customized with lots of extra fields. If an appointment/consultation is requested she also sets up the Activity on the proper sales rep's Calendar and then converts the Lead to a Contact/Potential with the Activity attached. The sales rep then follows up on the Potential and moves it through its stages, adding/updating information in the extra fields we added to the Potential form.
Once the sale is made, what's the next step? It feels like there should be a "Convert" button to convert the Closed-Won Potential into a project where materials/products, labor hours, shipping and other costs would be accumulated, eventually leading to an invoice when the project is completed, or the product is shipped. Is there anything like that?
Normally our next steps (after the sale) would be to order materials (lumber, sheet rock, nails, etc.) for the job and then schedule the individual workers. Is it feasible to add additional stages to the Potential for tracking it past the "Closed Won" stage?
I've looked at Zoho Projects, but that doesn't seem connected to CRM at all, and it only seems to track hours and tasks, not materials or products used during the project.
I don't see any obvious way to use Zoho CRM after the sale. Maybe we could use it to track Products (the materials for a job) that we would order from Vendors. We can attach Products to the related Potential. But it might be better to switch to a completely different system after the sale.
Any other service type companies using Zoho after the sale is made? Is there another application that can conveniently take over from Zoho after the sale?