In every sales organization I've been, the flow of information has followed the same path:
- RFQ received from customer
- Quote sent to customer
- PO received from customer
- Sales Order created internally (work begins)
- Invoice sent to customer
- Payment received from customer
This workflow is very hard to follow in Zoho, which makes me wonder if there's a different method that I'm just not aware of.
Here's an example of what I mean, using Zoho Finance integration in CRM:
If I send a Quote/Estimate to a customer from CRM, neither that email nor his replies or attachments are visible or accessible at all from that Estimate; Same goes for Sales Orders. I have to find the Contact or Account to locate the customer's reply to find the PO attached to it.
From there, I can't simply associate/move the attachment to the Estimate; I either have to download the attachment and upload it again to the Estimate, or add it to my Work Drive and attach it from there (which is about as many clicks). If I create a Sales Order from that Estimate, the attachment isn't copied over.
And the attachments I add to the Estimate and Sales Order in CRM aren't synced over to Inventory or Books, so the PO isn't visible to the Invoicing team.
I thought maybe I should be going through the whole process in Books or Inventory, but the "Mails" tab only shows email subjects - not their contents or attachments (which is strange).
I'm surprised at how tedious this all is, given how streamlined Zoho is for other tasks; it's actually more work to use Zoho for this than to just forward emails around internally and save POs to a Google Drive folder. So I feel like I must be missing something.
Is there an easier way to go about this?