Using Tasks (or something??) in Zoho CRM to track sent samples

Hello,

I sell upholstery material to my clients.

When I send catalogues to clients, I track this as a Direct Mail Campaign in Zoho CRM. It's an open-ended Campaign that started last month (with the brand new catalogue) and will run until the new catalogue is released in a few years.

So, if a client receives my catalogue, and then specifically contacts me and asks me to send samples of a colour (from that catalogue), I have decided to treat this as a Task in Zoho CRM. That way, I can quickly create a task linked to the Contact (and Account), and then my staff can send the requested samples.

I would like to be able to have some way to link to my products (which are registered in the Products module). That way, if the client asks for 1 piece each of Black, Purple and Blue, then I can select these within the task, and then be able to track what samples were sent.

And then since task is linked to the Contact, I should be able to view the contact record and see all the samples he requested. Or conversely, generate a report of all samples sent, in order to find out how many (and to whom) our samples were sent.

Question: I have a feeling it would be better to treat samples as a separate product - for example, the regular product would be "BLACK" but the sample would "SAMPLE BLACK" with a different item code, price and so on.

Would you agree? We have 58 colours.

Second, how do I put a picklist or some way of looking up samples from the Products module, in the Task? I've tried everything I don't know how to do it. I am using Zoho CRM Professional Edition.

Is the only way just to forget about the Products module, and create an ad hoc Multi-Select list with the 58 colours inside the Task?

I think treating each sample request as an individual Campaign is a bad idea, and similarly, creating a Potential for each one is overkill too, and again, I can't figure out how I would get the samples required into the potential. So Tasks seems to be the easiest and quickest- or should I just treat each sample request as an Order in the Sales Order module?

I'm confused. Please help!

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