Dear Zoho CRM Product Team:

Below, is your announcement regarding new workflow rules for calls and I can confirm that I have this activated in my account.

I've tested a workflow whereby, when a call is received from a number that is not recognized in the CRM, it triggers the creation of a new lead.  Yay!  No.  Wait.  Not yay.

The lead doesn't get created until after the call ends.  So, think about it.  A sales agent receives a call and, like most sales agents that work in a CRM, they're first job is to pre-qualify the lead.  This means the caller has to take information from the new prospect, right?  So, what? We're expecting our sales agents to remember everything and then to update the new lead only when it gets created?  Or, perhaps they should just write everything down on paper, then transcribe that info onto the newly created lead after the call ends?

Let's be clear: creating a lead after a call is completed, is like putting on your socks after you put on your shoes.

I'm curious whether your product team neglected to think this through or if this is something on their road map? It would be really good to know if this use case is going to be addressed because it's a hugely important one.   

Here's why the new workflow is going to be a huge success once you get this figured out:

Most companies commit pretty large sums, relative to the size of their company, to make their phones ring.  To maximize the ROI on that spend, we have to ensure that every call we get actually becomes a lead in the system.  If a sales agent gets a call that they're not able to successfully convert, they might prefer to hang up the phone and call it a day without creating the lead at all, thus undercutting our ability to properly measure our lead counts, accurately compute our conversion rates and pulling the rug out from other agents that otherwise might be able to convert the lead and close the deal.  This is BIG STUFF and I believe I speak for many of the other marketers and business leaders that place their trust in Zoho to get things like this right.

For now, we'll have our developer sort this out programmatically but it seems such a shame when you are so close to a great feature that any admin should be able to set up in the UI declaratively.

Thank you for reading and please understand the importance of the opportunity that is so close at hand.

We're counting on you, Zoho!