Announcing Early Access to "Zoho CRM for Everyone" — A new and exciting update to Zoho CRM

Announcing Early Access to "Zoho CRM for Everyone" — A new and exciting update to Zoho CRM

We are delighted to announce an Early Access to Zoho CRM for Everyone— a truly democratic approach to managing a CRM, gift-wrapped in an exciting and intuitive user interface. Here, multiple teams across an organization can coordinate among each other towards a singular objective —to delight their customers everyday.

Quote
Summary of this post: Zoho CRM for Everyone is a progressive and fundamental shift towards making the CRM a truly democratic system for every stakeholder that needs it in an organization. Zoho CRM for Everyone is not a new product, rather it is a new and visionary approach that tackles the challenge of disconnected processes by imbibing the philosophies of CRM democratization, team empowerment and coordination right into the DNA of a CRM. This is very much an updated version of the existing version of Zoho CRM. The key features in this release include Teamspaces, Team Module and Requests, all of which are presented in a reimagined user interface.

To learn more, please take some time to read this detailed post. Request Early Access Here

Why do you need Zoho CRM for Everyone?

Challenges of any current-day CRM

While CRM is indeed a powerful system that houses every piece of customer data, in most cases, it continues to be a system that is largely accessible by ONE primary section of an organization — Sales. While sales teams are indeed the champions that lead customer conversations and make the tough negotiations with prospects, the ultimate clinching of a business deal is the result of cumulative efforts of multiple minds.

Consider a deal convergence process. You are likely to have various stakeholders responsible for different parts of the process, where they come in, play their part, and pass the baton to the next team. For example, in a typical SaaS company, once the sales team starts pursuing a prospect, they may need the help of the marketing team to provide them with sales collateral to pique the prospect's initial interest. Then, they may need to work with the Presales team to showcase a well-tailored demo of the application to convey the value of the software. After negotiation, the salesperson will need the help of the legal team to draw up a deal contract and process it further.

So, as you can see, various stakeholders have an important role to play in the convergence of a single deal. However, when the CRM as a system is made accessible ONLY to the larger majority, that is the sales teams, there are quite a few undeniable challenges. Sales often has to spend time translating context and coordinating with these multiple teams offline— simply because these various customer operations teams do not have a place in the CRM system.

Think of the time and efforts that the sales teams have to put into:
  • Establishing customer context (which is already present in the CRM) to the other teams.
  • Coordinating and following up with each stakeholder for the convergence of a single deal.
In the following screenshots, the sales agent coordinates with marketing and pre-sales teams via communication platforms including say, email and chat.

Now at the receiving end of these emails and chat conversations, each of those customer ops teams may have their own separate gamut of apps and systems to process these deliverables. Once they understand the requirement from the sales teams, they swing into action using their own separate system or application, such as spreadsheets or project boards.


So in the end, the same customer context originally available in the CRM is now translated across different applications, in different ways by multiple stakeholders — in other words, this is a very disconnected process.
This way of working presents the following key challenges
  • All stakeholders work in silos. Different communication tools are used to achieve coordination, which could ultimately lead to a disconnected process.
  • The processes of stakeholders and related follow-ups are extremely fragmented.
  • There is a potential lack of customer context and communication gaps when teams have to coordinate with each other, but they are doing so across different apps and platforms.
These challenges lead to internal delays and poor coordination, which could ultimately impact the customer experience that the organization provides.

Here is where Zoho CRM for Everyone presents an all-new refreshing direction and exciting possibilities.

Zoho CRM for Everyone is a progressive and fundamental shift towards making the CRM a truly democratic system for every stakeholder that needs it in an organization. This new and visionary approach tackles the challenges of current-day CRM by imbibing the following philosophies right into the DNA of a CRM.
  • Democratization of CRM
  • Empowerment of teams
  • Achieving coordination as part of the CRM's process flows.

1. Democratization of CRM powered by Teamspaces

The ultimate goal of every business is to achieve customer delight—and as we noted above, achieving customer delight cannot happen with the effort of a single person or function. In such a case, why not empower all of these customer operations teams and processes with rich CRM capabilities?

Zoho CRM for Everyone effectively democratizes the CRM system by allowing a platform for all key stakeholders involved in an organization's customer-facing processes to get onboard the CRM system and have their dedicated, clutter-free space to organize their data and orchestrate their work.

This democratization of CRM is powered by what we call Teamspaces— which is quite simply a dedicated work area for every team that gets onboard the CRM system. Every team could have their own set of modules that are relevant to them. Teamspaces effectively offer this unique setup in which the teams are very much now part of the same CRM system where sales operates and which is rich with customer context—and at the same time, they are not overwhelmed with a hundred modules irrelevant to them. They are connected to CRM — at the same time, have their own private, clutter-free work area.

For example here are two Teamspaces — one for the Marketing team and one for Legal. Each team member will log into CRM and find that they are part of THEIR OWN Teamspace, with modules and data only relevant to them.



2. Empowerment of teams powered by Team Module.

Once you bring multiple teams onboard the CRM system, what next? Well, they need to set up and manage their own processes. Each team comes with accurate knowledge of their day-to-day activities and processes, and so they could be the best people to set up their workflows. So, in Zoho CRM for Everyone, teams are empowered to capture every unique process via what we call Team Modules.

Team Module is a bespoke module that, by design, is accessible only to a specific team and not across the organization.

Examples of Team Modules in the Marketing Teamspace for instance, could be "Sales Documents", "Win-loss analysis", "Beta-launch program" and more. Essentially every process of a team in question that needs to be systematically managed, can be set up using Team Modules.
Sales Documents Team Module (From Marketing Team)
Legal Reviews Team Module (Legal Team)
The unique attribute of Team Module is that it could have its own Team Module Admin. One of the main challenges of current-day CRM could be attributed to the fact that there is a huge dependency on central admins (with good reason). You don't want a chaotic setup, and you want the right people in control of the system's security and data.


However, consider this new proposition where an additional 50 teams will get on board the CRM system. If the central admins have to configure each and every aspect of each of those 50 teams, there is going to be a significant setback — an overall dependency on central admins not just by Sales but by a few other hundred members.

Therefore Zoho CRM for Everyone includes a possibility where the administrative activities of a Team Module, that is a module specific to a team's process, could be taken care by the senior leaders of that team themselves.



This is akin to delegating routine administrative tasks and entrusting responsibility to those teams. Not to forget that the central org admins continue to retain the highest authority across CRM— they can revoke a Team Module admin's access at any time. In fact this Team Module admin will be supervised and work with the central admins — it is just that the team need not wait on central admins now for minor admin tasks such as adding a new picklist field or a quick workflow. They are empowered in the system to organize their process flows the way they feel is needed, under the close supervision and guidance of the central admins.

Say hello to Team Modules, where every team's process can be captured via bespoke modules, complete with automation, process management and customization capabilities.



3. Achieving coordination among teams via Requests

Now that multiple teams are on board the CRM and able to setup and manage their own processes— the next thing to do is ensure a seamless coordination between them which is rich with context, and easy to execute without relying on third party platforms. "Requests" in Zoho CRM achieve exactly that.

A request is simply a record added by Team A directly in Team B's module so that their requirement is recorded in their module and ready to be processed. Instead of conveying a message to a colleague via phone, chat or email which could be fragmented, you now coordinate with them by directly leaving a record in their Team Module. This saves time in translating context and the fellow team in processing your requirement.

For example, Heather Woods, a salesperson can create a "Request" in the Marketing team's Team Module called "Sales Collateral". She can directly add a record which captures details of the particulars such as what she needs, the customer or deal that the document is for, by when it is needed and other important details. Then the marketing agent, say Tai Chang, can process the request directly from this Team Module and need not spend time in again organizing the requirement in a separate system. 

Sales team adding a request to the marketing team



Marketing team processing the request and handing the deliverable back to Sales



As you can see, the placing of a Request and the processing of the same are done in CRM. What's more, the "Requesters", that is the members who have placed the request can track them all in a consolidated manner via their My Requests tab.
My Requests
This way, follow-ups are far from fragmented, they are neatly consolidated and you can track various key aspects of your Requests such as the status, the stakeholders, the deal associated and so on.

So with these three pillars— that is democratization of CRM with Teamspaces, empowerment of teams via Team Modules and achieving coordination between teams via Requests, you essentially ensure a seamless experience AKA a CRM for Everyone!

Team Module — Quick information on Availability and Limits

Team Modules are available from the Standard Edition onwards, including all Free Trial editions.

For detailed Availability and Limits: Learn more

Now what's the incentive to bringing all of your team members on board the CRM?

Well, great news! You do not have to pay full price for using only a small portion of the CRM system. Introducing Team User Licenses, which acts a limited access to CRM at a subsidized rate. This is introduced in order to encourage more and more users to get onboard CRM, and leverage this powerful system for their specific processes at a nominal rate.

The fundamental difference between a Team User and an Org User is that a Team User by default will have access to only the Team Modules they are added into. They will not own any organization modules, nor be able to share them. They can view certain org modules as that may be needed as a reference point for their work, but they will not be able to modify org module data.

For example, while the sales team members in an organizaiton will use the full CRM license, the Presales team or the Legal team members could be added under the "Team User License". Here, they will have access only to their respective Team Modules. They could view Leads, Contacts and Accounts if their tasks call for it— however they won't be able to own or modify any of these org module data.


Here is the price breakdown for Team User licenses.
— $9 / user / month if billed annually.
— $11 / user /month if billed monthly.

As part of this announcement, we are thrilled to offer 100 free team user licenses for 100 days as a trial for all early access customers of Zoho CRM for Everyone. Post this 100 day period, the above prices will apply.

Public Fields:

In a different scenario, you may want to further restrict a Team User's access to the org modules. You don't want them to view the entire record but only a handful of fields. For example, you don't want to expose the contact details of a customer or their deal amounts, but you only want a legal executive or presales engineer to view the customer's industry and employee size to further understand how to tailor their work. In such a case you can mark these specific fields — such as Account Name, Industry, Employee Size etc as Public Fields. Public fields are those specific fields which you can make visibile to anyone across an organization on a read-only mode, while the rest of the fields in the record except for those public fields, remain hidden.

Introducing the Next Gen UI of Zoho CRM

The CRM user interface has been re-designed to accommodate the needs of multiple teams in an organization and support easier configuration of key settings such as modules, reports, and dashboards, apart from several other visually pleasing surprises!



Primary and Secondary sidebar:

The menu options from the top band menu bar have been moved to the left-hand side vertical sidebar. The sidebar is now an extremely functional piece of the UI with contextual shortcuts for quick settings, neat folders for better organization of modules and more. The sidebar now has two divisions— Primary Sidebar and the Secondary Sidebar.


  • The Primary Sidebar is for first-level navigation of the product. The top portion of the Primary Sidebar houses icons to view and work with Modules, Reports, Dashboards, Requests, Marketplace, and Global Search. The bottom portion of the Primary sidebar now contains intuitive utility icons such as Quick create record, Mail magnet, Calendar and more. (originally located on the top right corner of the UI).

  • The Secondary sidebar opens up quick-controls contextual to what you choose in the Primary sidebar. This is collapsible in order to allow you to maximize your right-hand side work area. 

    You have contextual shortcuts to Setup options on the Secondary sidebar. Ex: You can create a module, a report or a dashboard right from this location without having to navigate to the backend Setup. (While the backend Setup is still intact, the Secondary sidebar options offer a quick shortcut).

    You can also directly create layouts, webforms, wizards, canvas pages, etc from the Secondary sidebar.


    Besides, the Secondary sidebar houses folders for better sorting modules, reports, etc.Folders

Chart view alongside list views — where the records in a module can be organized in the list view space as a chart component.
Learn more. 

Chart View
An omni-channel Interactions tab — where you will be able to see the complete timeline of communication via multiple channels with a customer. Learn more

Interactions Tab

Well, what are you waiting for? We hope that this detailed elaboration gives you a fair idea of our directional progressive improvements with Zoho CRM for Everyone.

Notes
NOTE:
  • "Zoho CRM for Everyone" is NOT a new product from Zoho. This is the name of this latest release, which promises a host of features and possibilities that makes Zoho CRM a system that is easily accessible for "everyone" in an organization. Hence the name. Rest assured, these releases are part of the Zoho CRM product.
  • Early Access to Zoho CRM for Everyone including Team Module and Next Gen UI is being rolled out in a phased manner. This means, our customers will receive this option to try the new version in batches over the next few weeks.

That said, we are happy to enable this on priority to those who submit an early access request.
Submit your entry for EARLY ACCESS to the Zoho CRM for Everyone today. 
https://www.zoho.com/crm/ea/crm-for-everyone.html?drlnk=request-access


We are continuously innovating and adding feature sets to substantiate our claims as part of this release. We appreciate any suggestions, criticism and feedback on this direction.

Useful Links

Start your journey with Zoho CRM for Everyone by bookmarking the following useful links. 




        • Recent Topics

        • How do you remove a user from SalesIQ?

          I have a user in Sales IQ who needs to be removed (she's no longer involved with sales and chat) but I can't find any way to remove her. How do I do that?

        • Integrate SalesIQ with tiendanube.com

          Tiendanube.com is the leading e-commerce platform designed to help businesses create and manage online stores. It provides tools for entrepreneurs and companies to set up, customize, and operate their online shops with ease. Tiendanube is particularly

        • How to reset Zoho Commerce

          Hi, we are preparing a new onlineshop connected to commerce and books for going live in the next days. Now we want to delete all tests and transactions we made within the development process. And also add a new tax rule which is not possible at the moment

        • Create Ticket from Chat with Rest API

          Hi to everyone, is possible to create a ticket from Chat with Rest API? In user interface is possible by clicking on the button "Convert chat as a ticket". Anyone know how to do that? Thanks

        • Free webinar: ‌Zoho Vault in 2024—A live Q&A with our experts

          Hi everyone! 2024 has been a pivotal year for us, taking our journey from a basic team password manager in 2013 to a full-featured security platform offering password management, single sign-on (SSO), and soon, passkey management. Our team has been tirelessly

        • Kaizen #167 - Configuration and Initialization of Zoho CRM Python SDK (V7) for different client types

          Hello everyone! Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! Zoho CRM Python SDK allows developers to integrate Python applications with Zoho CRM. In today's Kaizen post, we will explore how to initialize and configure the SDK for both self-clients and server-based

        • Zoho Forms - Dynamic Prefill Setup Question

          Hello, I'm very excited about this feature. So much I'm learning about webhooks. However, it seems that the webhooks I can obtain from Zoho Flow and Zoho CRM come with already parts in the URL that are put as invalid by the GET Webhook URL. Do I need

        • How to get a list of Team Folders associated to a Project from the API?

          I've tried the below, based on another article and was unsuccessful. response = invokeurl [ url :"https://projectsapi.zoho.com/api/v3/portal/" + _portalID + "/projects/" + _projectResID + "/folders" type :GET connection:"zohoprojects" ]; info response;

        • Email Alert attachments unavailable for Vendor Payments

          I have several vendors with country specific compliance requirements to support the payment of their invoices. I've created Vendor Payment templates to meet their requirements and I setup an automation workflow that gets triggered when the invoice is

        • How to create Sepa Direct Debit XML file: solution and code

          Even though Books provides a payment integration for Stripe and Gocardless (in Europe) there are customers that want to use the Sepa services of their own bank. Mainly because Stripe and Gocardless are quite expensive. In that case they would need a Sepa

        • Exporting Project Tasks

          I can export the gantt chart to a nice PDF in colour, but we want just the task list in a nice colour layout. Is there a way to export it to PDF without the gantt? It would be perfect to give to clients.

        • bug reporting with the count of linked Desk tickets

          I am aware that when viewing an individual bug, you are able to see a count of the Desk tickets that are linked to the bug on the right hand side. However, I cannot see a way of reporting this figure from a list of bugs. Our use case is that we would

        • Unable to send e-mails to an specific address

          Hello. I'm having problems sending e-mails to my shipping company. user@shippingcompanydomain.com INVALID_ADDRESS, ERROR_CODE :550, ERROR_CODE :5.1.1 <user@shippingcompanydomain.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table Reporting-MTA:

        • Blueprint transition help needed

          I have 5 approvers. For a stage to be passed to the next stage, I require any 3 out of these 5 approvers to make the approval. There is no particular sequence of approval, at any one time, any one can approve. As long as 3 approvers approve, the stage

        • Year-End Wrap: Out-of-Office Made Easy with Zoho Mail

          As we wrap up 2024, now is the perfect moment to take control of your email routine and gear up yourself for a productive and successful new year. We have curated a series of weekly tips to help you master your email management starting today. Watch out

        • Creator Simplified #9: Automatically Sending Uploaded Files as Email Attachments

          Hey Creators, Welcome back to the Creator Simplified series! Today, we’ll explore how to automate file uploads as email attachments in Zoho Creator—a handy feature that saves time and reduces manual effort in your business processes. Use Case: In a typical

        • Zoho Books Community Meetup: Learn, Grow, Network!

          Hello users! We are excited to announce a series of upcoming Zoho User Group meetups and would love for you to join us! This is a great opportunity for you to connect with other users, share experiences, and learn more about how to make the most of our

        • Bar chart from Deal Stage Snapshot table not showing right amounts

          Hi, since we needed to track the changes of our deal pipeline over time, I added a new data source and selected 'Snapshots' to start the sync. At first I thought it was working just fine, after a few days I realized that something was wrong with the amounts

        • How to Display Territory Field on Deal Object

          I am assigning Territories to Deals. I am able to use the Territory field as a column in my list view but cannot figure out how to enable it to be visible when viewing a Deal record directly. Can you advise on how to display the territory assignment as

        • Power of Automation::Automate the process of creating Tasks from Task template on project status update.

          Hello Everyone, Here we are again to share another requirement that has been accomplished through the implementation of custom functions. A Custom function is a user-written set of code to achieve a specific requirement. Set the required conditions needed

        • Im Stuck in an EDIT ONLY WITH WIZARD issue

          So I found Wizards to be a really helpful tool in minimizing the exposure of redundant, superfluous fields to staff that would never otherwise have to edit those fields. My issue is, that when the record (in this case a lead) is created with a wizard,

        • Mass Update in Zoho CRM

          Hello, I want to update my past update records by using deluge on some conditions. anyone can please tell me how can I do it.

        • LinkedIn Followers not correct

          It looks like Zoho Analytics only counts followers from the day it was connected to our LinkedIn-page. The Total Followers Count in Analytics only displays 549 followers, while in reality we have 1,036 followers. The information is correct in Zoho Social,

        • [API] How to get Contact's funnel?

          Hi everyone! I am trying to use the API to get a Contact funnel's (step, name.. anything). Can anyone help me? This information is not available in the API response... I need to retrieve and change my Contacts between funnels dynamically according to

        • Task created from Email Alias

          When forwarding multiple emails to project email alias, it will create a task as internal which makes a lot of "General" Task List as I've created automation to set the flag as external. Is there any way to set up the task list created from email alias

        • Automation#24: Auto-Update custom field from Accounts to Tickets

          Hello Everyone! Welcome back to the Community Learning Series! This episode dives into how Zylker Techfix streamlines account-related ticket references. Previously, employees had to manually check account details to retrieve specific customer information,

        • How do I add an email to tasks in Trident?

          Hi, I'm trialling Trident to see if it works better for me than the browser version. It's a nice idea and looks quite refined, so I'd like to be able to use it. My first question is: how can I add and email to a task? I can't find any obvious way, but

        • Project template after project creation

          How can I apply a project template AFTER the project has been created?

        • Creating Email template that attaches file uploaded in specific field.

          If there's a way to do this using Zoho CRM's built-in features, then this has eluded me! I'm looking to create a workflow that automatically sends an email upon execution, and that email includes an attachment uploaded in a specific field. Email templates

        • Filter Tabs in a Dashboard

          I have multiple tabs in a dashboard one of which is aimed at a different audience, is it possible to filter out this tab for a group of users?

        • How do I set up Contact Scoring for my existing contacts

          I'm trying to set up Contact Scoring for my subscribers, 9 months after creating the database. I've added the Campaign Activities, but none of the contacts have a score. How can I update all the contacts so they show a score? My goal is to ultimately

        • ZOHO PEOPLE

          HOW CAN I DELETE LEAVE HISTORIES IN ZOHO PEOPLE?

        • Kiosk Studio: Function FIX for Date/Time Field (Keep getting wrong format error)

          I am using the foillowing function in my Kiosk Studio to update the previously entered Date/Time field from previous screen to update that to the same date/time field in Lead Record. Every time I 'Save & Execute' I get a Success but with 'Date/time Format

        • Zoho CRM Web To Lead Form: Radio Buttons/Pulll Down Menus?

          Hi is there a way to set up radio buttons, check boxes or pull down menus in the web to lead form? We often ask additional lead qualifiers or demographics information and in some cases radio buttons or pull down menus are necessary or more efficient to

        • 5名限定 課題解決型ワークショップイベント Zoho ワークアウト開催のお知らせ （10/31）

          ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。Zoho ユーザーコミュニティチームの藤澤です。 10月開催のZoho ワークアウトについてお知らせします。 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目的とした「Zoho ワークアウト」を開催します。 Zoho サービスで完了させたい設定やカスタマイズ、環境の整備など……各自で決めた目標達成に向け、 他の参加者と同じ空間で作業を行うイベントです。先輩ユーザーや他の参加者と意見交換をしながら集中して作業に取り組むことが可能です。

        • Zoho Meetings - Scheduling sucks

          I wanted to try this out for our little meeting group. I scheduled the meetings for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. No matter what I did, the meetings all showed on FRIDAY. I changed the date and hit save. Still friday. Terrible system. Back to Zoo

        • This user is not allowed to add in Zoho. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details

          Hello, Just signed up to ZOHO on a friend's recommendation. Got the TXT part (verified my domain), but whenever I try to add ANY user, I get the error: This user is not allowed to add in Zoho. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details I have emailed as well and writing here as well because when I searched, I saw many people faced the same issue and instead of email, they got a faster response here. My domain is: raisingreaderspk . com Hope this can be resolved.  Thank you

        • Brand New and have some questions

          Hi everyone. I am brand new to Zoho and have some questions I need help with. 1. I just imported a bunch of contacts and most of them don't have any association with an account. However, an account is required to add them to pipelines it seems. Can I

        • Zoho very poor support!

          More then 1.5 week ago I've contacted Zoho support by email and STILL no reply. What kind of business are you people running? I'm a paying customer and I demand support. Your email service is blocking valid emails from my business partner because of  "we generally do not accept emails from dynamic IP bla bla bla" I, NOT YOU, decide which emails I want to receive. I don't need your crap email protection. If I want spam protection I'll implement it myself. I've put his domain on the whitelist and STILL

        • Immediate action required by Notification SMS users

          Attention dear customers, This announcement seeks immediate action by CRM Notification SMS users to update their telemarketer aggregator for notification SMS compliance. We would like to bring to your attention an important update in the Telecom Regulatory

        • Next Page