Guide to Getting Started with Zoho CRM Features

Guide to Getting Started with Zoho CRM Features

If you are interested in sales, have a knack for selling absolutely anything to people, or work in the sales department of a company, then you would identify with having that desire to be a smart sales representative at work.


Winning the sales game has a lot to do with using a sound CRM system to its full potential. For example, with the Zoho CRM features, your sales can be automated entirely, leaving you to focus simply on customer interaction and closing deals.


In this blog, we will be seeing the features of Zoho CRM that can help you become an efficient sales representative who knows how to ace customer relations and be one step ahead. Keep reading to see and understand these features one after another.


Use Zoho Mail Integration

 

Sales have a lot to do with being prompt with the customers. If you are a sales representative, you cannot afford to miss out on an important email from a customer. Let’s imagine running through all of your emails and replying to them simultaneously.


However, you realize that you ignored an important email from a hot lead by evening. The probable reason for this could be a cluttered inbox with many emails. Missing out on this important email may not be by intention, but the fact is that as a sales representative, you cannot afford something like this for your business.


It is important for the sales representative to attend to all the leads as soon as possible and for doing the same, there needs to be a filtered view of all the prospect emails. One of the most used Zoho CRM integrations, called Mail Magnet, allows you not just to receive emails but also get a filtered view of your prospect’s emails as well.


With this email integration, you will not need to keep checking the emails all the time. Every time you receive an email from a prospect, you will be notified by the mail icon that pops up right on the Zoho CRM home page. Remember that MailMagnet will be available with the Zoho Mail Integration only, so ensure that you ask your Zoho consultant to enable it and configure the email account with Zoho CRM.


Organize Emails According to Sales Priorities


Another essential thing to remember while dealing with customers is that the most recent email is not always the most important. For example, if a lead has emailed asking about the price of a product or negotiating on the price of a product, these emails must be immediately accessible. This can save considerable time and effort.


Naturally, you will be organizing the sales activities based on the pipeline and the level each deal is in. What’s notable is that you can similarly manage your emails using Zoho CRM features. For example, using the SalesInbox, you can access columns, filters, folders, and columns that can show your sales priorities and allow you to stay at the top of the emails that matter.


SalesInbox functions smartly by organizing all emails according to how you have set up your CRM. For example, even though the regular email clients allow you to filter emails based on a sender's address, SalesInbox enables you to filter emails based on the sender’s email address and sales parameters.


For instance, if you get emails from customers offering you deals of more than 1 lakh, that can be specified with the name Top Leads. Using SalesInbox allows you to create many folders and shows them right on the side of the folders you have.


Using SalesInbox, you can also automate the lead creation in your inbox, get automatic reminders, and work with helpful information.


Monitor Customer Activities

 

One of the most critical aspects of ensuring sales success for all sales representatives will be timing. SalesSignals gives you an immediate notification about what the prospects are up to. You will also know if the lead that you have been chasing has opened your email or not. An alert will be sent to you as soon as the email is opened.


Remember that the prospects and customers can reach out to you from different channels. They can visit your website, fill out surveys, raise support tickets, and post on your social media. To improve customer relations, you will have to be consistent and prompt. SalesSignal helps you track all customer activities by displaying them in an organized way.


SalesSignal will give you a prompt when your leads send you an email, open the email sent by you, click on the links in the email, or when the email gets bounced. You will also be notified when missed calls are received, surveys get filled, new tickets, comments, and responses are received, missed chats are received, or the support tickets are overdue or escalated.


Leverage Social Media for Getting Leads


As a sales representative, you must be aware of all that interests your prospects, the kind of products or services they are looking for, and what their likes and dislikes are. Like most people in the world, your potential customers use social media and post regularly. In this process, some of them may also be talking about the prospects they are using, their influencers in decision making, and the product and services they wish to use.

Being an intelligent sales representative, you must convert every like, reshare, or comment from your prospects into an asset. You can effectively convert the social media conversations into actionable leads by lead generation automation through a workflow. All you have to do is configure your social media channel properly.


If someone tags your organization’s replies to your social media posts, you can add this person as a lead and assign the lead to a sales representative. Likewise, anytime someone messages you on social media or comments on your posts, you can also add that person as your contact and assign this contact to another sales representative.


Customize Templates

 

All sales professionals do not like manual data entry. However, there are times when entire days get wasted in typing emails while leaving only a little time to do what you are actually hired for, and that is selling. Email Templates is one of the Zoho CRM features that can help get rid of this.


You can personalize the emails for every activity and send these emails to individual prospects. In addition, you can also send mass emails to a list of leads. For example, if you have imported leads from market research and wish to engage prospects, you can send thank you emails. All that you have to do is choose the list of leads and send a mass email.


To customize the templates, you have to design your template with the help of text, images, and tables; merge fields to your template, and add headers and footers to the templates.


Track Email Performance


You can also monitor how your emails have performed. Remember that you will not be able to send better emails in case you do not know how they have performed. Hence, an innovative sales representative must be able to consistently send engaging emails that can grab the attention of prospects get them to read and respond as well.


There are smart insights available on how the templates are performing, and by using these insights, you can get closer to writing better content. The email insights can also get you weekly and monthly reports on the emails' open, click, and bounce rates. In addition, the dashboards can tell which email templates have the best open and click rates.


Keep in mind that you can use the templates with the highest open rates, update existing content, and create new templates. In case you have been sending the email template, your job is done.


Complete Sales Activities On the Go

 

The sales representatives work while also being a part of customer meetings, events, and conferences. While managing so many meetings altogether, there must be something handy to update the activities, keep the team in sync, and do important things on the go. Zoho CRM features solve this problem by coming into your pocket.


With Zoho CRM Mobile, you can add leads, create tasks, receive email notifications, find customers, etc. You can locate all prospects near you using Map View and locate leads, contacts, and prospects in any area while scheduling meetings on your trip. In addition, you can log in all your visits so that your team knows about all locations that you have visited.


In addition, you can also record your takeaways from a recent meeting with a customer effectively. Again, there is no need to type out lengthy notes; you can just record the voice notes when walking and driving, associate the audio files with the records, and download them for reference.


Use AI-Based Sales Assistant


Being a sales representative, you should not let multiple calls go unanswered. There is a smart approach called Zia, an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that shows you the notifications that let you know if your leads, prospects, or customers have been opening up and replying to your emails.

This assistant keeps track of when the prospects participate in surveys and posts on social media and based on this information. It tells you the correct time for reaching out to the prospect. If you know the best time to get in touch with your customers, you will get more replies from them at the right time.


Automate Actions

 

Being a sales representative, you will follow a fixed set of actions while contacting leads. For example, if you target to reach 40 leads a day, and 30 of your calls get answered, you can leave an email or voice message for the other ten leads.


After you complete your daily activities, you will update the tasks done. However, there is no need to manually follow a similar routine because you can automate these actions with macros. You have to choose the records and run the macro so that the repetitive tasks are taken care of automatically.


The Zoho CRM features know that a large part of your day includes a standard set of actions, which prompts you automatically with a suggestion to run a macro. For example, if you call a lead, send that lead a follow-up email, and create a task, Zia can suggest the same list of actions as a macro the next time. All that you need to do is run the Macro if it suits your needs.


Use CRM View for Activities

 

The workday of a sales representative is full of multiple events and activities that could be anything from visiting a prospect, demo shows, task creation for calling a prospect, or following up with customers after visiting a website. How can a sales representative know which task needs to be taken first on priority?


The CRM View for Activities lets you prioritize all sales activities by being available for tasks, calls, and events in the Activities module. In addition, the interface uses a view that lets you plan who should be followed up on that day. This view is divided into the categories called Customers, including all tasks associated with the customers; Open Deals including all tasks associated with deals in the pipeline, Leads including all tasks associated with leads and contacts; and Others including all other records.


Streamline With Tagging

 

You will need unique identifiers associated with your CRM records to help you effectively search, sort, categorize, filter, and segment the records. The tags can help you clearly prioritize all records and contact them as well. For example, if you have some leads in your account that must be prioritized, you can tag these leads as Important and filter all of them easily from other leads in the Zoho CRM account.


Conclusion

 

If you use all the fantastic Zoho CRM features listed above, you will see your productivity go very high. You can use Zoho CRM to maximize your potential as a sales representative, but you need to understand all the features offered by it. And now you know all the basics :)


If you need further support in implementing Zoho CRM, you can get in touch with our expert Zoho consultants. They come with years of experience that can lead them to help you maximize your potential.



I hope that you learned something new 
Cheers!
Abhi
(Seasoned Zoho Authorized and Certified Partner)

Feel free to contact me if you have any queries
Email: abhishek(@)encaptechno(dot)com
Call: +1-416-405-8185

    • Sticky Posts

    • How to reach the official Zoho Support channels and avoid fake ones.

      Dear Customers, Thanks a lot for choosing Zoho! Our applications are built to help achieve your day-to-day business goals. We are committed to engaging with you, to understand and develop solutions that enhance your productivity.  We are happy and ready to help you use our services effectively. Understanding and avoiding fake support Just like using popular bank names and financial applications for phishing purposes, using Zoho and claiming to be providing Zoho Support or services with false numbers

    • Function #35: Close all tasks associated with a lead and create a new task.

      Welcome back everyone! Last week, we learnt how to close all tasks of a deal depending upon the deal stage. This week, let's look at a custom function that lets you close all of the tasks associated with a lead while simultaneously creating a new task, like when you need to halt all progress towards a lead while the lead is not available at the moment but create a reminder task. Business scenario: The success of a company, in one way or another, is determined by the leads it gets. Each lead is just

    • Zoho CRM Webinar - Redesigning Daily User Experiences with Canvas

      <br> Your users across roles use the CRM for day-to-day tasks that are necessary. Whether they perform their tasks on time, the right way, or at all depends on a lot of factors, including User Experience. Many businesses struggle with rigid layouts,

    • Join us at the Canada ZUG Meetup: What’s New in Zoho CRM

      Hello Zoho Community! Start your year with fresh insights into Zoho CRM’s latest updates and tools. Whether you're a CRM beginner or a experienced user, this meetup is crafted to help you optimise your processes and leverage new features. Explore practical

    • CRM Hack #2: Automate sending of birthday greetings to your customers.

        Hello everyone! What sets you apart as a sales person is your ability to add that personal touch to your business relationship with your customers. Sending a gift on a special day, or leaving a note wishing them on their birthdays, are small, yet significant actions that show your customers that you care. And these are actions done without any expectations :) You must be engaging with a lot of customers and it is highly unlikely that they all are your friends on Facebook or some social channel,

    • Recent Topics

    • Field authorization for Linking module in Zoho CRM portal

      Hi guys! Currently building a customer portal for one of my clients, and I ran into a bit of a roadblock while using a multi-select lookup field. The issue is that there is no way to hide or define access in the linking module created by this multi-select

    • Kaizen #63 - Layout Rules in Zoho CRM

      Hello and welcome to another week of Kaizen! This week, we will be discussing Layout Rules in Zoho CRM. If you need to modify the layout of a module based on user inputs, or to show or hide sections based on the value of a specific field, we have got

    • Zoho CRM Portals - allow access per account

      Hello all, I am trying to set up a portal for our customer but I seem to be hitting an obstacle and I am not sure if it is my problem or a limitation in the software. So basically the way I understand the portal Contact Email > Each Record or Related

    • Android - Writer não acentua em Português com teclado bluetooth

      Gosto muito do Zoho, tanto o Note quando o Writer. Infelizmente, o Writer sofre de um problema sério: ao usar um teclado bluetooth, forma mais cômoda de lidar com um processador de texto, os acentos (todos!) da Língua Portuguesa não são aceitos. Todos

    • Set File Upload fields as mandatory

      Currently the CRM for some reason lacks the ability to set a file upload field as mandatory So we have an issue We have a requirement that before a Deal stage is set as Deal is Won the member needs to upload a file Now for some weird reason in Zoho I

    • Editing HTML in Zoho CRM Email Template

      I am trying to create a template within the CRM email option, but need to be able to use custom HTML. There does not seem to be a way to do so.

    • Ability to CC on a mass email

      Ability to CC someone on a mass email.

    • How to make attachments mandatory

      I want the user to be unable to mark an opportunity as Closed – Won if it doesn’t have any attachments. I’ve already tried client scripts and functions, but nothing worked.

    • SLA Ticket Report

      From data to decisions: A deep dive into ticketing system reports Service level agreement (SLA) ticket reports in a help desk system are crucial for ensuring that services are delivered according to established commitments. They help maintain accountability

    • Zoho Backstage - PCI Compliance / Web Security

      I have a couple of questions related to Backstage and payment processing.... 1. my purchasing division is not giving approval to use Backstage yet because of some security issues. In order for us to take payments via a payment gateway like Authorize.net

    • Zoho Tables August 2025 Update: Faster and Smoother

      We’ve been working behind the scenes to make Zoho Tables faster, lighter, and more reliable. Here are the highlights: Faster Response Times Optimised the way responses are generated. Reduced memory consumption by 20–25%, leading to smoother performance

    • Video Upload from app says "unsupported aspect ratio" but is verified to be correct.

      I and my social media person are experiencing a problem where Social will not accept video uploads to Instagram. The error we receive is "unsupported aspect ratio" but looking directly at the file in question we see that the width and ratio both match

    • Disposable Email Addresses

      Dear zMail Team, Can you also bring out a few disposable email addresses for each accounts? That way occasional registrations and imminent spam from them can be largely solved right? ---- Deepak Vasudevan http://thamizhththendral.blogspot.com/

    • Zoho sheet - Zoho expense

      I want to schedule to create an expense using Zoho Sheet and flow. That is the EMI that I pay on a particular date to the bank and should be itemised, like principal and interest on the loan. Can someone help me in this regard??

    • Ability to configure a schedule/shift for each user and/or crew in Zoho FSM

      Hello, In our team of Field Agents, we have different shifts. Some field agent always work from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM while others work the evening shift like 4:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Sometime shift are on weekdays only or on weekend. It would be great to be

    • Free webinar: Streamlining customer service paperwork with the Zoho Sign extension for Zoho Desk

      Hello Everyone! Have you been wondering about bridging the gap between digitised customer service and business paperwork? Join our free webinar to learn how you can do this by connecting Zoho Sign, our digital signature app, with Zoho Desk, our online

    • Zoho Books | Product updates | July 2025

      Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From plan-based trials to the option to mark PDF templates as inactive, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. Introducing Plan Based Trials in Zoho

    • Mail Search should allow grouping by conversation like Gmail.

      Having switched from gmail I have found the search function hard to use. Mostly because mail is not grouped by conversation in search. If I search for a word when looking for a conversation had with someone then sometimes 10 emails will come up from the

    • Improve Zoho Learn updated article notifications

      I noticed today while updating an article, that the notification users get says "[User Name] has published article [Article Name]..." My feedback to the product team is that it would be really helpful for an end user, if the system notification differentiated

    • Safari Support

      Safari, the world's second largest browser, zoho desk does not officially or fully support. That needs to change.

    • Can I get images from an "Image Upload" field in a webhook?

      I want to send images from 2 "image upload" fields via a webhook. Is this possible?

    • Ticket closure notification - all contacts cc'd on email thread

      Hello, If a client sends an email to our service desk and cc's in other people that work at the same company - so that they are in the loop of the service request. When the we close the ticket, only the ticket owner (person who emailed us - which created

    • Inactive account cleanup policy for Zoho Sign

      Zoho Sign reserves the right to delete accounts that are license free and inactive for more than 120 days. The account deletion will be initiated only after the user receives prior email notice about possible data deletion and how to backup the data.

    • Missde API documentation for Sales Receipt

      Hi! I noticed that the Sales Receipt endpoint is not currently listed in your API documentation (https://www.zoho.com/books/api/v3/introduction/). Could you please provide any available temporary documentation for this endpoint, along with a detailed

    • Multi-currency in Zoho CRM Forecast and Reports

      As a company we have branches in 4 different countries with as many different currencies. Our Sales Teams would like to work with their local currency as much as possible. The Forecast module using only 1 currency is practically usable only by the sales

    • How to select from pricebook when creating a salesorder or quote

      I am creating a sales order and when selecting the Products I do not see any where to select from pricebooks. How do i associate this to my orders?

    • Proposal for Creating a Unique "Address" Entity in Zoho FSM

      The "Address" entity is one of the most critical components for a service-oriented company. While homeowners may change and servicing companies may vary, the address itself remains constant. This constancy is essential for subsequent services, as it provides

    • I cannot find my older documents from 2024 and 2023

      I cannot find my older documents from 2024 and 2023.

    • System default SLA descriptions can't be modified

      The system default SLAs have identical descriptions for all SLA levels, but their settings differ. However, I am facing an issue where I cannot modify these descriptions and save the changes. The content of the description box can be edited but the changes

    • Customising Help Center

      Hi I don't think it is possible to add custom pages to help center? We'd like to use this as a customer portal with support tickets, FAQ/Guides, Billing and contracts. Is there any plans to add a feature like this or an alternative way to do it other

    • Replies sometimes creating separate ticket

      Sometimes when a customer responds to an email coming from Zoho Desk, instead of adding a reply to the original ticket, a separate ticket is created. This happens even though the response subject line contained the ticket number, and the person responding

    • Ticket Approvals - External Users

      The ticket approval option - we need to be able to select external users (Contacts) for approvals. Sometimes we are working with an end user and their boss needs to approve a purchase. For example, working with a cashier on a broken cash register and

    • Force Users to Ask Answer Bot a question... First

      End users will always skip talking to a bot. It would be nice if Zoho adopted the standard and forced users to first ask a question to answer bot (or zia in some fashion) and then pass to the agent if it wasn't answered. Options to force the user to speak

    • View Answer Bot conversations?

      We are trialing Zia and are experimenting with Answer Bot on our knowledge base. So far so good! Management asks me if it is possible to view Answer Bot conversations, the purpose being to look over its shoulder and confirm that it is working as des

    • Mass Email an Account

      It would be nice to mass email an account stating there is an outage at their business or something specific to an account is needed to be mass communicated. Even if it makes a ticket for every Email Out to every contact in the Account. Think: the customer

    • Multiple Topics assigned to a single Campaign

      Hello, is it possible to assign multiple Topics to a single Campaign? We frequently write a content to our subscribers that spans multiple Topics and we would like to send it to all Contacts that are subscribed to at least one of the Topics. But it looks

    • Zoho Projects Fonts and Accessibility missing

      I cannot find any more the tab where I can change the font in Zoho Project. I also checked the knowledgebase and there they have accessibility tab which I am completely missing. Is there some setup I am missing or is it a problem with our account?

    • Zoho Books Custom Widgets Deprecation Error

      I created a simple sample widget with zet and published it using sigma Both in the Sandbox and Production the Widgets are showing this error

    • Problems with PDF files in notebook

      I'm evaluating Zoho Notebook as an alternative to Evernote and imported my Evernote account to Zoho Notebook. First issue is that notes in Evernote that comprise a PDF are turned into a 'group' with a single note page (that has the text from the Evernote

    • API (v3) Tasks sorting issue

      We are using the v3 API for Projects. When we gat all tasks, per page of 100 tasks, we get the task info alright. But when we try to sort based on DESC(last_modified_time) we don't get the correct sort order. It is roughly sorted by the last_modified_time,

    • Next Page