When your team is working from the same office, it is easy to walk up to the coworkers and discuss important details or inform them about a client visit, you can also gather them for a quick meeting. However, when your team members are working remotely, you need to redefine the ways of communication and collaboration to maintain consistency and productivity at the workplace.
As remote working becomes more prevalent, you must ensure that you continue to improve your overall productivity and customer experience. Zoho CRM provides you with a toolkit that contains three essential applications to help enhance your remote management skills.
Zoho CRM's Remote Sales Office is a bundle of two applications: Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting.
- Share a record, report, and dashboard, and send workflow notifications and activity reminders. Read more about Zoho Cliq.
- Conduct online meetings with your team or clients from CRM meetings. Use audio or video conferencing and screen-sharing features to give live demonstrations and quickly resolve support issues. Read more about Zoho Meetings.
Availability
Permission Required
Users with administrator profiles can access this feature.
Features, plan, and edition
Business scenarios
Let us take a look at some scenarios where Remote Sales Office can help perform daily business activities.
Scenario 1. Your sales team gets a hot deal and the customer insists on getting the product implemented for their business within 10 days.
Challenge: The sales manager has to onboard the product specialists, sales reps, and technicians for a quick discussion and lay the plan before committing to the customer. His biggest challenge is getting them together because the team members work from different locations and time zones.
Solution: The best approach would be to share the leads record with the team members over Cliq and quickly discuss the details over chat. The sales manager can create a group in Zoho Cliq with the important team members aboard and share information on chat instead of email or phone.
Scenario 2. Once the plan is ready the sales manager decides to conduct a meeting with the customer and share the details.
Challenge: In the meeting he wants the product manager and the technician to demonstrate the implementation plan prepared by the team, so the customer gets a complete picture of their approach and may suggest changes to the plan at the beginning.
For the record, the sales manager creates a meeting and marks it in the CRM calendar. However, with the meeting being conducted via a different application, the recording of the meeting, details of the participants, and even the meeting invitation cannot be stored in CRM. The team members will have to switch between CRM and the meeting app to get the details.
Solution: The sales manager can integrate the CRM account with Zoho Meeting, which makes conducting virtual meetings easier than before. The meeting can be created from the CRM platform. The recording, participant details, date and time of the meeting, and other information are securely stored in Zoho CRM for future reference. Also, auto-generated invitations are sent to the participants ' email addresses reducing the sales manager's workload.
Enabling remote sales office
Remote Sales Office is available only for users who are not subscribed to the paid plans of Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting already.
Note: In the Remote Sales Office version of Zoho Meetings, you can invite only up to 10 participants. Also, you cannot conduct webinars in this version.
CRM admins can configure the remote sales office in the following ways:
New CRM Sign-ups and Trial users
A trial version of the Remote sales office will be enabled by default for all new sign-ups, both for paid and trial editions. This trial version will be available for 15 days. The admins can buy the bundle or cancel the trial within this period.
Adding users:
CRM Users will be automatically added to Zoho Meeting. However, the admin needs to enable Zoho Cliq for the users manually.
Note: Remote sales office will not be available for users who are already subscribed to the paid editions of Zoho Cliq and Meeting.
To purchase the bundle
- Go to Setup > Marketplace > Zoho.
- In the Remote Sales Office banner, click Buy Now.
You will be redirected to the purchase window.
- In the Buy Subscription window, click Make Payment.
To cancel the trial
- Go to Setup > Marketplace > Zoho.
- In the Remote Sales Office banner, click Cancel Trial.
- In the confirmation popup, click I Understand, Cancel now.
Once cancelled, the Zoho Cliq and Meeting integrations will be downgraded to the free plan.
Existing CRM users who have not used Remote Sales Office Trial
Users who are subscribed to the paid CRM edition and haven't used the Remote Sales Office bundle in the previous launch can purchase or enable a trial of the bundle from the
Setup >
Marketplace >
Zoho.
The bundle can be purchased for the same number of user licenses as that of CRM users. That is, if there are 5 users in CRM then Remote Sales Office can be purchased for 5 users. You can also use the 15 days trial version of the bundle.
To purchase or enable trial
- Go to Setup > Marketplace > Zoho.
- In the Remote Sales Office banner, click Setup Now.
You will be redirected to the Enable Trial page.
- Click Enable Trial.
On the Remote Sales Office page, click Buy Now to purchase the bundle.
Click Cancel Trial, to exit the trial period.
Existing CRM Users who have used Remote Sales Office Trial
CRM users who configured the trial version of Remote Sales Office in our previous launch will have to purchase the bundle at $36/user/year to continue.
Note that Zoho ShowTime is not part of the bundle and therefore, you will not be able to use it.
To purchase the bundle
- Go to Setup > Marketplace > Zoho.
- In the Remote Sales Office banner, check Setup Remote Sales Office.
You will be redirected to the purchase window.
- In the Buy Subscription window, click Make Payment.
After purchase, you can use the basic paid plans of Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting.
Inviting CRM Users to Cliq
When the Remote Sales Office bundle is purchased or the trial is enabled, by default all CRM users will be added to the Zoho Meeting tool. However, the CRM admin must manually enable Zoho Cliq for all the users.
Note that, Cliq will be enabled for all CRM users. You cannot select specific users and enable them.
To enable Cliq
- Go to Setup > Marketplace > Zoho.
- In Remote Sales Office, click the User Management tab.
- Click Enable Cliq access to all CRM users.
- Click the Meeting tab to see the number of users present in the Meeting.
Enabling Zoho Cliq and Meeting individually
You can enable the Zoho Cliq and Meeting separately if you want to use only one of the tools from the bundle. The Remote Sales Office pricing ($36/user/year) will not be applicable for individual integrations. Read more about integrating
Zoho Cliq and
Zoho Meeting.
To enable Zoho Cliq and Meeting
- In the Remote Sales Office banner, click enable Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting individually.
You will be redirected to Zoho Integrations.
- Click Setup Now for Zoho Cliq and/or Zoho Meeting.