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Sales Signals in Zoho CRM: What is it and why does it matter?

Sales Signals in Zoho CRM: An Overview

Sales Signals in Zoho CRM helps you track real-time customer interactions across channels—so you never miss the right moment to engage.

From email opens to social media mentions, it brings every critical signal into one place, enabling your team to respond faster and close deals more efficiently.

How Signals help accelerate your business growth

As businesses expand across multiple channels, customer interactions become increasingly fragmented—making it harder to track, prioritize, and respond at the right time. While more touchpoints mean more opportunities, they also increase the risk of missed follow-ups and delayed responses.

Imagine you are a real estate developer launching a new project. Your campaigns—billboards, digital ads, and social media—start generating interest across channels. New enquiries begin to flow in, while existing leads continue progressing through the pipeline simultaneously, and some are close to conversion.

These interactions, each with different intent and urgency, directly influence your revenue. Missing or delaying even a high-intent signal can result in lost opportunities. Signals in Zoho CRM helps you stay on top of these moments by bringing every interaction into a unified, real-time view—so your team can act when it matters most.

What counts as a Signal?

Signal is to be understood at its face value—a signal for whenever there is an event occurs that needs your attention. By this logic, Signal can be classified into three:
 
  1. Customer actions are events observed at their behavior-level. Non-interaction can also account for a signal just as much as interaction does.
  2. System events like automated actions. Expiry of a ticket, bounced emails, or any event triggered from the system is also a Signal.
  3. Communication-based events are direct one-to-one communication between the customer and the business like missed chat, missed calls, survey responses, and more.

Types of Signals in Zoho CRM

System-default Signals: A brand new CRM will come with default Signals enabled which includes your email insights like Open, Click, and Bounce. Irrespective of whether you have a mailbox connected or not, default Signals can notify you about the emails’ opens, clicks, and bounces that are triggered from Zoho CRM’s email server.
Integration-derived Signals: When you integrate different Zoho services, you also get events from the respective services listed as Signals.

The following table lists the service and their respective signals for your reference:

Signals for

Displayed when

Incoming Email

Mails are received from leads, contacts, or potential customers.

Email Insights

A lead, contact, or potential customer opens an email sent from CRM, clicks a link in the email, or when the email has bounced.

The status of the email can be "Opened", "Clicked", or "Bounced".

Call

Missed calls are received from leads, contacts, or potential customers.

Survey

Survey responses are received from leads, contacts, or potential customers.

Campaign

A lead, contact, or potential customer opens an email sent from an email campaign, clicks a link in the email, or when the email has bounced.

The email status can be "Opened", "Clicked", "Hard Bounced", or "Soft Bounced"

SalesIQ

You receive missed chats from leads, contacts, or potential customers.

Desk

New support tickets, comments, or responses are received from leads, contacts, potential customers, or customers.

You will also receive Signals notifications for support tickets that are overdue or escalated or when a new rating is provided by a customer for a support personnel.

Note: You can filter the Signals notifications for new tickets, comments, and responses based on leads, contacts, or potential customers.

Backstage

You will receive notification when tickets are purchased and when the attendee checks in to the event or if the ticket is cancelled.

Webinar

You will receive notification when registrations are made.

Custom Signals

Custom Signals are custom-built notifications to capture the events you desire to be notified of. Add to cart, added to wishlist, tool accessed, brochure downloaded are events many business want to capture that are specific to their targeted use cases.

Zoho CRM lets you trigger Custom Signals via functions or API from third-party application. Learn more to understand how to create Custom Signals.