Hi all. I need some help getting my head around how to set up Zoho CRM for our particular needs. Here's what I sent to support (no response):

I have several questions as we’re thinking about how to set up Zoho CRM for our company’s specific needs. In particular, I’m working on the Sales portion of the process, and I’m having difficulty determining how to classify different types of people and companies we deal with in the sale process.

Perhaps if I described our situation, you could make a suggestion or two on how we might best customize and use the application.

We are a services firm. Our customers/clients are entrepreneurs and  small businesses.  

In some cases, we market directly to our customers. They become leads, prospects, clients. Very straightforward.

But a majority of our sales come as *referrals* from other companies, like accounting firms, that refer their clients to us.

So, our sales efforts focus on building relationships with the referral firms, e.g., accounting firms, law firms, etc. They are “leads” that we need to follow up on, but they never convert to clients. They become a referral source to other leads (their clients), which we hope to convert into our clients.

The accounting firms are more like a channel, but they are not resellers.

Our relationship with accounting firms does have a funnel-like progression. Once we get the lead, and qualify the lead, we meet them in person and give them a demo of our processes. At this point, they may begin to refer clients to us. Reaching this point with them is “success” in this type of sales process.

So they don’t become ever a client, but it is our goal to get them to a stage in the sales process where they become an active channel for referrals. So we do want to use ZohoCRM to manage the sales process for this group. But I’m not sure how to set it up.

Therefore, the big question is how do we handle this?

If anyone can offer advice on this, I'd be most grateful.

Best,

 Matthew

 p.s. I'm now considering an approach to handle our 2 kinds of funnels (clients and referral sources): get the CRM app in Creator, then duplicate it, and make one app for the Client Funnel and one for the Referral Network Funnel. Would this work?