Been using Zoho CRM for about a year and a half now in my Manufacturers Representative company. It's working really well for us. We don't use multiple users, it's a simple database, contact list and we use some basic commission tracking.

We are contracted sales agents, representing multiple brands. We sell more than 1 brand to multiple accounts.  We have accounts set up, and I've created fields in the account module to sort if an account is a "Target" or "Dealer" for particular brands.

I can apply lot's of filters to drill down a region, account rep, etc.

Here’s a reqular task that we do often and I'm looking for an easier workflow.

 

Let’s say Vendor A sends us a new price sheet. We need to get that email into the hands of all of our dealers and targets for Vendor A.

 

Today, here’s what we do….

 

 

Zoho

 

Reports

 

Run a report I created titled “Full Account List – Contact and Brands”. Essentially it’s a tabular report, set up to include columns from my account filtering section. I include account name, all of the contacts at that account, their email address, the account rep name, and every brand’s status (either dealer, target or NA) with each account.

 

 

Export that list to CSV

 

 

Open the csv file in Excel

 

Add a filter, and isolate every dealer labeled as Vendor 1 Dealer and or Vendor 1 Target

 

Cut and paste all the email addresses from Excel and into Outlook as a BCC

 

Compose and send the email

 

 

If it’s something we end up sending regularly, I will export those Vendor 1 Dealer and Vendor 1 Target contacts into Mail Chimp (my email blast program like Constant Contact and iContact).

 

I HAVE played with emailing directly out of Zoho and it works. We are currently using Office 365 and it works great, so today, I’m not looking for Zoho to be my exclusive email solution. HOWEVER, I wouldn’t mind using Zoho for group emails or distributions like I lay out above.

 

 

Any ideas to streamline this?