Hello All,

We hope you're well! We are thrilled to introduce you to Stage component in Zoho CRM. This is a public early access feature and is available to customers upon request. Please submit your request for early access by filling this form. 

Analytics is at the epicenter of every successful business out there. It shows the reality about their performance, helps identify bottlenecks, and facilitates confident decision-making. It is a guidepost for continual business growth.

Zoho CRM has about nine types of analytical components —comparator, KPI, chart, target meter, funnel, anomaly detector, cohort, quadrant, and zone to conduct different types of useful analyses. Joining this list is a brand new component called the Stage component.

Let's learn more!

Your business is made up of several processes with prominent stages. The sales pipeline is a classic example and its stages like prospecting, qualifying, negotiation, and closure act as milestones. Another example could be the lead management process and its stages like lead generation, enrichment, scoring, distribution, and nurturing. These stages help you record progress and track conversions in your process. Thus, these stages act as a testimony to your records' behavior. It reveals direct conversions, spillage, and stagnation in your process.

Now, for a business to sail successfully, it has to be sure of its conversion, stagnation, and spillage across each of its stages, simultaneously. It should know at which stage, your leads are stagnating, at which stage there are direct conversions, and what is causing the delay in convergence are different perspectives a business has to thoroughly cover, before developing new strategies. That is something the all-new stage component can help you with.

Stage component in Zoho CRM

Stage component is an extension of the funnel-type component and it shows conversion, stagnation, and spillage at each stage of a process. It will also highlight the number of direct conversions happening at each stage and overall win rates.

Here's how a basic stage component will look like. Its called the basic staircase.

Basic staircase
The basic staircase aims at showing the total number of records present in each stage. It will show how the records have advanced to the next stage, the conversion rate, and the overall win rate. If there are records that directly converted or dropped out of a stage—those insights are also highlighted

Let's look at the sales pipeline, for example. An ideal pipeline has the following stages:

Here, the target stages are deal won and deal lost and the rest of them are transitioning stages.

From the above image you can infer the following:

Likewise, the basic staircase shows you the conversion and spillage observed across the stages in your process.

To have a deep dive into insights, the stage component also boasts three other representations. They are

Using these representations, you can closely analyze your process flow, stage by stage.

The advanced staircase provides intricate details about process flow at each stage. It shows all the desired metrics like conversion to the neighboring stages, direct conversions, drop-outs, stagnation, and delayed conversions. It is a useful tool to understand record behavior.

Let's say, the time limit to qualify a prospect is 3 days. Based on this average time frame, the advanced staircase will categorize the record flow into four types:

From the above image, you can infer the following:

Also, from the 2000 overall records in qualification stage, 80 directly reached the target stage and won the deal and 120 records were directly marked closed lost. Likewise, you can see how 2000 records traversed through different stages to be a final 100 with a 19% overall win rate.

This is a great way to understand in what fashion the records are moving within and amongst the stages in your process.

The tabular view is an alternative representation of the advanced staircase. It displays the count of records in a particular stage under categories like Moved, waiting, stalled, won, and lost, as a table.

This chart is a split between categories. The categories moved and moved with delay; won and lost; and waiting and stalled are clubbed together to understand the record flow.

In Zoho CRM, stages are captured using pick list fields. The stage component is able to monitor the conversion, stagnation, and spillage, because of thehistory tracking enabled in a picklist. Thus, before you start configuring the stage component, ensure you have enabled picklist history tracking, and that you have a minimum of two picklist values to up to 50 values.

The stage component can be created from the list of dashboard components available in Zoho CRM.

If you have chosen the advanced stair case or tabular view or stacked bars, represent the stalled stage:

Now, based on your configuration, the stage component will start displaying the record flow for the period.

Roadmap:

That's all about stage component—for now. We hope this new addition will add value to your business. Thanks and have a good one! 

Please submit your request for early access by filling this form.