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.
Access your files securely from anywhere
Centralize Knowledge. Transform Learning.
All-in-one knowledge management and training platform for your employees and customers.
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
Anna Sakhi John
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 numbersFunction #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 justZoho 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 practicalCRM 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,
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
Tip #38- Track Organizational Changes: A Guide to Using Action Log Viewer- 'Insider Insights'
Hello Zoho Assist Community! Ever needed to trace who did what and when within your remote support operations? Let’s say your support team is growing, and you want to monitor key activities like settings updates, user invites, module changes, or permissionAnswer Bot - Issues with language recognization
When a user enters the phrase "gift vouchers" into the chatbot as their first message, the bot responds in French, even though: The default bot language is set to English The user's browser language settings are set to English All translate settings inTip of the Week #67– Avoid confusion – Mark duplicate threads.
When customers send the same message to multiple email addresses, such as support@ and sales@, your team may end up seeing the same message in different inboxes. This creates confusion, risks double replies, and clutters your workspace. Use the Mark asFinal Reminder: Discontinuation of Older ASAP Widgets and Mobile SDK Support
We launched the new ASAP Help Widget last year, introducing a unified and enhanced experience. Since then, older configurations have been placed in read-only mode, with all major updates and improvements built exclusively on the new version. As part ofZoho Subscriptions -- Zoho Commerce integration
Is there integration between Zoho Subscriptions and Zoho Commerce? I would like to create subscription plans in Zoho Subscritpions and list them for on my Zoho Commerce store.Website show Blank white screen
Customer called me to tell me my website is currently down upon review it shows a white screen however I can access everything via editor. JITCADCAM.comHow manufacturing analytics can transform your enterprise with Zoho Projects Plus
Did you know that every single car is made up of 30,000 to 40,000 individual parts? All of these are manufactured meticulously in various facilities before being assembled into one. The global manufacturing industry spans a wide range from deliveringCustomize your SalesIQ live chat with Custom CSS and blend it with your website design
Hi everyone. Hope you all are having a great day! SalesIQ offers various inbuilt customization choices for your chat widget and window like changes in colour, theme, font etc. Although these choices are many, sometimes they may not match with the designFrom Email Address When Replaying to Missed Chats
One of the most common things we do is follow up on every missed chat. Missed chats are like money in the bank, people just waiting for your response and to start a relationship with our companies. However, SalesIQ only lets you respond from 1 email address from your entire account?! We have happily paid for 4 subscriptions, but our users cannot reply from their own email address? How are we supposed to build customer relationships? The fix to this issue is so simple, just load in the logged inNarrative 6 - The impact of rebranding
Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system - BTS Series Narrative 6 - The impact of rebranding Every organization has invested in branding to set itself apart, and that should be reflected in the help desk. Zoho Desk enables organizations to applycustom color palette for picklist in Sheet
Migrating over from Google Sheets and missing the ability to customize the individual item colors of my picklist/dropdown menus. Is this something that is possible? A search showed me creating a custom color palette in Analytics is possible but I am notWhat's New - July 2025 | Zoho Backstage
Start smart, end strong. From knowing who’s coming to celebrating who showed up, July’s updates help you run events that feel organized from the first invite to the final thank you. Planning an event used to be like writing a choose-your-own-adventureImage Upload Field API get encrypted ID and sequence number
Hello is there a way to extract the encrypted id and sequence number from image upload fields through the Zoho CRM API? I created a custom script with javascript within Zoho CRM, but I want to extract the encrypted id and sequence number for all my imagesAttention: Changes to 10DLC TCR pricing and new authentication requirements
Hi everyone, Starting August 1, 2025, The Campaign Registry (TCR) is introducing new pricing changes and a mandatory brand verification process called Authentication+ 2.0, which will affect how you register and manage your 10DLC messaging services. TheseBetter Time Tracking
We need better time tracking customization for IT MSPs. We also need reporting that is built in, rather than having to try and fumble with creating custom reports. We also need to be able to mark whether a ticket has been billed or not, I don't thinkScheduled Tickets Need Updated
There is a very clunky manual way to create reoccurring scheduled tickets. This should be created to be easy for the administrator to create. We create several (10 to 12) reoccurring tickets per account for biweekly and monthly auditing purposes.. TheTeam Feeds Improvements
Team Feeds needs to show a feed of every action within the department. Currently it seems that the feed will only show a ticket that I've personally commented on or interacted with/followed. A feed should be that, a feed. As a manager I would like toBetter Security, Better User Experience | Help Center Update | June'25
As part of our commitment to enhancing user experience and security, we are happy to announce updates to our authentication mechanism. This update introduces several key enhancements designed to improve the password recovery process and streamline theUpload Logo to Account Page
It would be nice to set a logo for an AccountView Agent Collision on Ticket List Page
It would be nice from the ticket listing page (views) to see what agents are working on what tickets rather than having to click into each ticket throughout the day to see what agents are working on what tickets. This functionality would also be desiredRestrict user from viewing the detail standard view
Is there any way to restrict a user(it can be user-field-based) from viewing the detail standard view? Basically, I have created a canvas detailed view so that on some conditions I can hide some data from the users but the standard view client scriptUpload Picture to Contact
It would be nice to upload a profile picture to a contact.Allowing Pictures for Client Contacts
Do you have any plans to allow us to add pictures of our client contacts? There is a silhouette of a person there now, but no way that I can see where I can actually add a picture of the individual.Agent name Alias
I am seeing that Full name of my staffs are written on every ticket response which is not good for some reasons. It is possible to user like this: Manny P. (First Name with Last Name's First Letter) or Manny (First Name) This is want we want to showUnable to add attachments to tickets through Desk API
I able to use the Desk API to generate tickets. However when I try to use the tickets/{ticketId}/attachments endpoint, I always get an Unauthorized error. My app has Desk.Tickets.ALL included in its scope so this should not be an issueWhat's wrong with this COQL?
What's wrong with this COQL? Code returns "invalid operator found". SELECT id, Name, Stage, Account, Created_Time, Tag FROM Production_Orders WHERE (Account = '4356038000072566002' AND Stage NOT LIKE '%customer%') ORDER BY Created_Time DESC LIMIT 200[Feature Request] Add support for internationalized top-level domains mail hosting
This is an important request to add support for internationalized domains mail hosting to https://www.zoho.com/mail/ In this case, that is only limited to domain name/mail address however currently it's already possible for us send mails etc using belowAdd Enable/Disable to Field Rules and other Rules
Hi, Sometimes I have rules setup for fields, and until I want to enable them for use, I can set the fields to Hidden but rules still show them, today you have to delete rules and then recreate them again, would be nice to have a toggle for Enabled/DisabledSyncing stuck for days
Hello when I made an account a few days ago and synced all my notes to it, it is still syncing. My app is only 400mb so I do not know why it is taking so long. Please helpWorkflow runs on every edit despite not ticking the field repeat this workflow whenever a parent is edited.....
Hi, It is my understanding that this workflow should only trigger once. Why is this triggering on every edit of the field? Based on another support query - directly from Zoho, If i tick the box 'repeat this workflow whenever a parent is edited' it shouldHow do you add or update tags on Zoho CRM records via n8n? (Workarounds or best practices?)
Hi all, I’m running into some limitations with the Zoho CRM node in n8n and was wondering how others have handled this: From what I see, the standard Zoho CRM node in n8n doesn’t allow you to add or update tags when creating or updating contacts/leads.API PARAMETER FOR TICKET CLOSED TIME
Hi, Is there a parameter for filtering tickets by closed time in zoho api, i can see closed time in the API response i get, but can't get tickets by that field while calling. Regards, Anvin AliasReply to email addresses wrong.
I have setup my Zoho mail account using my main domain and I also have an Alias setup from a different domain. In Settings - Mail - Compose I have selected to the option "For replies, send using The same email address to which the email was sent to".Meeting integration with Otter.ai
Would love for an integration with an AI transcription service like Otter.ai to be integrated with Zoho Meeting. ThanksHow to close/delete a free creator account?
I have a free zoho creator account associated with my email address that is not being used. I want to become a user of another paid zoho creator account but I can not associate with the paid account with the same email. I assume if I can close or delete the free account I will be able to use the paid account. I have emailed support but no response. Suggestions?Zoho books and zapier causes Invalid data provided
I have been using zoho books with zapier for over 2 years now, everything was working fine. On September 13th my zaps stopped working. Now on step create sales invoice in zoho books i get an error: Failed to create a create_invoice_v2 in Zoho Books TheCRM report
Is it possible to pull a contacts report that also includes the company industry, as well as the company name? I’m having trouble combining company and contact fields – any help is appreciated. Thank you, SamEnhancements to Client script?
Hi Zoho CRM, I've been extensively using Client Scripts to enhance our Deal form experience, particularly for real time validations and auto updating fields based on specific logic. However, I've encountered a challenge regarding permission boundaries.Add views to new CRM UI navigation + Unlimited Webtabs
Zoho CRM is so close now to being the ultimate business application with the new UI, as soon as this one feature is added. This is probably where Zoho is headed but if it's not I want to BEG for this to be incorporated. What we need is to be able to putE-Mail Distribution List
How do I create an e-mail distribution list in Zoho Mail?Next Page