Build your own interactive product recommendation system in CRM with Guided Selling.
Update: CPQ was a public early access feature from March 2023 — January 2024.
Since February 2024, this is a public feature.
Since February 2024, this is a public feature.
Zoho CRM's in-built CPQ engine now facilitates Guided Selling, a setup in which the CRM system makes tailored and interactive product recommendations based on the unique needs and preferences of each customer, thereby enabling sales people to choose the most relevant products for them and create accurate, tailor-made quotes instantly.
Guided Selling — An Overview
The primary goal of any business is to cater to the ever-changing needs and preferences of their wide customer base. This could result in the introduction of new product lines, modification of existing product suites or updates to pricing. While this is a great way to accommodate the demands of your customers, what this also means is you must appreciate and acknowledge the complexity that this could bring about for your sales teams to create accurate, relevant and timely quotes for your customers.
When a customer makes an enquiry and there are over a hundred products to choose from, how does a sales person navigate the existing plethora of product choices and offer the right fit for their customer?
It could become a tedious task and slow down your sales pipeline if a sales person has to refer to a product list every time a quote needs to be tailored for a customer.
Here's where Guided Selling helps. While automated product and price rules in CPQ help you with product combinations, free products and dynamic pricing, Guided Selling goes a step further and helps you with which product to recommend to a customer in the first place. Sales managers can now guide their reps via the CRM system on which among the wide range of solutions suits a customer's needs the best.
Consider the example of Zylker Watches, which offers an exquisite collection of wrist watches and wall clocks. The watches come in all sizes and colors for men, women, and children.
For a customer making an enquiry regarding available options for watches, a sales person may have to navigate various products. The right choice of watch for the customer would depend on a multitude of factors, such as the color, warranty preference, manufacturer, gender, and so many other features of the watch. A sales person in this scenario would be bogged down by the sheer complexity involved in selecting from the myriad choices, and here is where guided selling helps.
In this case, Zylker could construct a Guided Selling flow in CPQ, where all of these factors that influence the choice of the right product can be organized as a questionnaire of sorts for the sales person to answer.
The questions in Zylker's case could be as follows:
So, originally if there were 50 watches available, once you answer each question, you could narrow down from random 50 to relevant top 10 and that makes your selection of products easier. The system now acts as a senior sales consultant trying to prod and help the sales person select the right product by asking a series of "questions".
Filtering products based on association of related modules
What's more, since the Guided Selling flow is part of Zoho CRM's in-built CPQ system, you can include not only product-based factors but also other related factors — that is, factors based associated accounts, contacts, vendors and deals (via lookup modules). This takes personalized selling to the next level and helps you build the most accurate and timely quotes.
In the same scenario, let's consider the following factors that are not directly related to the product itself.
— Say the customer prefers a particular watch Vendor only— named Titanix.
— Also, for more likely hits, the sales rep wishes to study and narrow down products previously purchased by customers similar to the one he/she is handling. For example, say the current customer is a student/homemaker. So the sales rep wishes to see which set of wrist watches were previously sold to other customers who were also students/homemakers. This would further narrow down the hunt with more likely hits.
So that leaves us with two additional factors based on two different modules in this case— Vendors and Contacts — which are related to the Products module.
This way, Guided Selling efficiently supplies the much needed sales context to the act of "guiding" a sales rep on identifying the most relevant products for their customers. Similar examples include:
- Filtering products that were <<previously sold to Indian customers.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Contact Mailing Country is India) - Filtering products associated to <<winning deals.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Deal Stage is Closed Won) - Filtering products that were <<previously sold to large enterprises.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Account No:of Employees >= 50)
So using related modules, you filter based on additional sales context that is supplied to you by the CRM apart from the straightforward product factors present in the Products module.
In the Guided Selling setup, each question is mapped to a particular "CRM field" as the "Input field". This way, all the sales person needs to do is choose the field value and as they answer each "question", what they are essentially doing is filtering the products further and further and zeroing in on the right products based on their answers or "criteria".
Note that the questions created in this Guided Selling flow involve input fields from both Primary module (Products) and Related modules (Accounts, Contacts, Deals, Vendors). Related modules are typically those that are associated to the primary module via a Lookup field.
To create a Guided Selling flow, all you need to do is create a set of Input Fields and frame your questions to the sales rep. These input fields could be from the primary (Products) module or Related Modules (Contacts, Deals, Accounts and Vendors).
To learn more about creating your own Guided Selling flows, please refer to this Help document.
Availability and Release Status:
Guided Selling is available in the Zoho CRM Professional Edition and above. It is live now in all DCs.
Note: CPQ and Guided Selling are available on the Public Early Access* mode.
(*) Public Early Access — Refers to a the status of a feature that is available for all applicable Editions, however, is subject to changes, improvements and updates as part of continuous development.
Access your files securely from anywhere
New to Zoho Recruit?
Zoho Developer Community
New to Zoho LandingPage?
Zoho LandingPage Resources
New to Zoho Survey?
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Bigin?
Topic Participants
Vaagdevi Ravishankar
Toca Travel
Strategy and Planning
Sunderjan Siddharth
Sticky Posts
Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift
Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activitiesVoC in Zoho CRM is now data savvy: Explore response drilldown, summary components and participation in CRM criteria
VoC has all the goods when it comes to customer intelligence—which is why we're constantly enhancing it. We recently added the following: A customer drilldown component that shows you the list of prospects and customers behind a chart's attribute ExpandedWrapping up 2025 on a high note: CRM Release Highlights of the year
Dear Customers, 2025 was an eventful year for us at Zoho CRM. We’ve had releases of all sizes and impact, and we are excited to look back, break it down, and rediscover them with you! Before we rewind—we’d like to take a minute and sincerely thank youPresenting ABM for Zoho CRM: Expand and retain your customers with precision
Picture this scenario: You're a growing SaaS company ready to launch a powerful business suite, and are looking to gain traction and momentum. But as a business with a tight budget, you know acquiring new customers is slow, expensive, and often deliversCreate and populate a record in an instant: Introducing zero-shot field prompting to Zia's ICR
A couple of months ago, we upgraded our in-house AI image detection and validation tool, Zia Vision, with intelligent character recognition (ICR). By training Zia with sample images, you could create and enrich CRM records with data extracted from standard
New to Zoho TeamInbox?
Zoho TeamInbox Resources
Zoho CRM Plus Resources
Zoho Books Resources
Zoho Subscriptions Resources
Zoho Projects Resources
Zoho Sprints Resources
Qntrl Resources
Zoho Creator Resources
Zoho CRM Resources
Design. Discuss. Deliver.
Zoho Show Resources
Get Started. Write Away!
Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.
Zoho CRM コンテンツ
-
オンラインヘルプ
-
Webセミナー
-
機能活用動画
-
よくある質問
-
Ebook
-
-
Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho サービスのWebセミナー
その他のサービス コンテンツ
Nederlandse Hulpbronnen
ご検討中の方
Recent Topics
Search Just Got Smarter in Notebook
Hello there! Introducing Our New & Improved Search Experience! We heard your feedback! Many of you shared that our previous search had some challenges like • Inconsistent results across different clients • Limited accuracy in finding the right contentZoho Desk app update - AI Integration for IM Chats
Hello everyone! We have now introduced AI integration for IM Chats within the Zoho Desk mobile app. To access the feature, please enable the 'Generative AI' settings on the desktop site(desk.zoho.com). Please refer to the help link attached below: ZohoOpen A.I assistant Connect with Zoho Desk instant Message Conversations
I would like to know how do I connect my instant messenger in Zoho desk with my Open A.I Gpt Assistant. this is very easy to setup using the Salesiq Zobot but when it comes to Zoho Desk i cannot figure how to make the connection. Ideal workflow CustomersCannot upgrade subscription plan due to payment error message
Hi Zoho team, This is to request support on an issue I am facing during an upgrade I am trying to make to our company's yearly Zoho subscription. I am trying to add 3 more license to my plan and during the payment phase I get the below error as in theEnhancing Zia's service with better contextual responses and article generation
Hello everyone, We are enhancing Zia's Generative AI service to make your support experience smarter. Here's how: Increased accuracy with Qwen One of the key challenges in AI is delivering responses that are both contextually accurate and empathetic whileZoho Desk app update: AI powered features
Hello everyone! We’ve introduced various AI-powered services on the Zoho Desk app. Let's take a look at what's new. Generate Content: Generate Content uses AI to formulate responses based on the your query and provides a ready-to-use reply which can beBulk update Archived Ticket
Dear All We would like to update the "Category" values to the new filed. We found the archived Ticket seems to be don't support the bulk action. Do we have any way to update it. Finally, we would to generate a report for our ticket system. Regards IChannel Configuration and Default Channels
There are some of the default fields that cannot be removed or changed. Examples are the social media ones, such as Facebook. It would be nice to be able to remove these fields as it would be confusing if someone selected this but it's not configureDelay function execute
I've got a workflow which uses a webhook to send information to Flow, which in return updates a record in Creator. Problem is, by the time this has executed, the rest of my script has run and can't find the (yet to be) updated info in the record. Is thereSupport www.camcard.com
Hi, Is it possible CRM Zoho have integrations with https://camcard.com/? Thanks Br, AndyOption to Customize Career Site URL Without “/jobs/Careers”
Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you are doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the Career Site URL structure in Zoho Recruit. In the old version of the career site, our URL was simply: 👉 https://jobs.domain.com However, after moving toCan't make a document editable to anyone
Hey everyone, I am using Zoho Workdrive and trying to share a document so that it is editable by anyone with the link. I am trying to convince people to shift from Google to Zoho, but they don't have accounts yet. When I try to change the share settingsEdit Default Print
What I want to do is create / edit the "Default Print" template without changing the layout I'm using. Currently I can create "Email Templates" but I don't use them for emailing and getting to that selection takes multiple clicks. If an email template could be set to be the Default Print template that would be helpful. I'd also like to print these in bulk but don't see that option (there is a mail merge macro but that goes straight to emailing, not to print or PDF).Widget shows error
Hi， May I ask why below characters will be auto added into the widget link and how to solve this error? As my widget shows 404 error now. ?serviceOrigin=https%3A%2F%2Fcrm.zoho.com&frameorigin=https%3A%2F%2Fcrm.zoho.comHow to print envelope labels from Zoho CRM
Can anybody give me any clue how to print envelope/package labels directly from Contacts view? Regards, Alexandru Moderation Update: The Canvas Print View, which also facilitates the formatting of mailing labels, is now available! Learn more here: ZohoData Import: New interface, improved field mapping, and more
Hello everyone! We’ve redesigned the data import process to ensure accurate field alignment and verify that every column in the uploaded file maps correctly with Desk fields before import. Here's how: Streamlined Import Steps Importing data is now moreAddress labels
Hi, we've been searching for a long time for a simple way for our employees to print address labels using a Dymo Label Writer 450. We came up with two alternatives that work, bur aren't really optimal. First one is WebMerge. Webmerge is a great application that does 100% what we need but it is way too expensive for our needs. We only need to print a couple of labels per month. The second one is the integrated print tool in Zoho CRM, (Print preview) You would think this is the obvious way to do thisPrint Labels
How can I configure my address to print my labels like this: Name Mailing Address Mailing City, Mailing State Mailing Zip Country Instead of: Name Mailing Address Mailing City Mailing State Mailing Zip Country Thanks!!!!Mailing labels - Improperly formatted
All I'm trying to do is print one, properly formatted, mailing label. I'm in the Contacts module. In the default "list view" for mailing labels I selected a single client, hit the "more actions" drop down and selected print mailing label. Unfortunately,Printing mailing labels
The ability to print mailing labels would seem to be an important, basic, function of a good CRM. I find it very surprising that this has still not been addressed adequately by Zoho. When trying to use the existing "mailing label" included: 1. the dataPageless mode needed to modernise Writer
When we switched from GSuite to Zoho, one of the easiest apps I found to give up, was Docs. In many ways, Writer has always been more powerful than Docs, especially in terms of workflows/fillable forms/etc. However, I went back into Docs because I noticeZoho Projects - Visual improvement to parent and sub-task relationship
Hi Projects Team, My feature request is to improve sub-task visibility. Please see screenshot below. I really think parent child relationships could be visually improved. Even if the first letter of the parent task was inline with other same level tasksAPI method to get activity feed in Recruit
Hi community, I'm trying to figure out - is there any API method tto get information about datetime when Recruit/Candidates record tag where added?Printing Mailing labels
Is there any way to adjust the size of the printing labels? or product would I use to print labels from Zoho? Thanks, Josef Krieger Moderation Update (14th April 2025): We have another post discussing the same topic with votes and feedback from users.Default to Current Date
I'm importing data from a excel spread sheet that does not have date column and I'd like the date column in the Zoho Database to default to the current date. Any way I can do this?Different Company Name for billing & shipping address
We are using Zoho Books & Inventory for our Logistics and started to realize soon, that Zoho is not offering a dedicated field for a shipping address company name .. when we are creating carrier shipping labels, the Billing Address company name gets alwaysMake Packages from multiple sales order of a single customer
Our customers sends orders to us very frequently, some times what customer wants is to ship items from 5 to 6 sales orders in a single shipment. it will be very nice if, zoho can implement this function, in which we can select items from other sales orders of the customer.Show Custom Button in Portal Listview Canvas
I have created a custom button that shows in a list view of deals (internally I can see it). I have permissions to allow this button on the portal. But it is not displaying in the canvas list? Before I do too much leg work, is this function allowed?Zoho Sites "pages" management page
I have 80 plus pages on zoho sites. When I go to the "pages" link to view and edit pages, They are not in any kind of order, so I spend lots of time searching for pages when I need to edit or create new. How can I change the view order of all my pagesAI feature in Zoho Desk suggesting answers based on past ticket threads
Hi I would like to suggest something that would be very useful : instead of suggesting answers based on the Knowledge Base, I think it would be great if Zia could analyze the history of all customer and agents threads, to suggest answers in new tickets.Advanced Customization of the Help Center using JavaScript
Hello everyone, The Help Center in Zoho Desk can be customized by using HTML and CSS to provide structure and enhance the page's appearance—but what if you want to add interactive and dynamic elements? You can add these effects with JavaScript, a programmingIntroducing Zoho POS for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Hey everyone, We are excited to kick-start December with a completely personalized edition of POS for retail businesses in Saudi Arabia to help run your operations with ease. It offers four different subscription plans—Free, Standard, Professional, andUnveiling Zoho Sites 2.0 - A new dimension in website building
Dear Zoho Sites Users, We are thrilled to announce the launch of Zoho Sites 2.0 today! This refresh represents a significant step forward in the capabilities of Zoho Sites and is crucial for creating a lasting and positive impact on our customers' businesses.Script Editor not an option
I am trying to apply a script to a sheet and Script Editor is not an option. I don't want to go outside Sheets to do this (like Creator) if it can be done inside Sheets.Not able to link email text.
Kindly check Zoho Sites. I am unable to turn a text into a email link. The save button does not work. Kindly try yourself to see it not responding to save.Migrate data from old to new account
Hy, Have one Old Zoho Notebook Account with Data , want to migrate that whole Data to New Zoho Notebook Account which is in Zoho One . Is that possible ? If Yes then how?Zoho Analytics Regex Support
When can we expect full regex support in Zoho Analytics SQL such as REGEXP_REPLACE? Sometimes I need to clean the data and using regex functions is the easiest way to achieve this.Add Custom Reports To Dashboard or Home Tab
Hi there, I think it would be great to be able to add our custom reports to the Home Tab or Dashboards. Thanks! Chadlanded cost-need help with different currency under the same bill
I’m having trouble recording landed costs in Zoho Inventory/Books. My purchase order is in CNY, but the landed cost (freight) I pay is in USD. Zoho forces everything under the same bill to use one currency, so I can’t enter the landed cost in its actualPricing Strategies: #1 Nuances in Pricing
When Clara first opened her digital printing shop, pricing was simple. She sold handmade greeting cards, planners, business cards, and other physical items at fixed label prices, individually and in bulk. One SKU, one price, one bill, and that's all itNext Page