crm tips - zoho
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CRM Tips
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Generate the right report that can provide value to your business, and can also identify problem areas that you need to focus on. Understand the 3 types of reports in Zoho CRM and identify the ones that best suit your needs.
There are many benefits of getting your web form data straight into your CRM system instead of managing it in a different platform. So make the best use of web forms within Zoho CRM, with the help of 9 nifty tips.
Inaccurate or incomplete data may often hamper sales and marketing performance. Get your CRM system under control by maintaining clean and accurate information in your CRM database with 5 tips.
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Gain More Insight into Sales with Three Types of CRM Reports
CRM
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While you are busy calculating and assigning the sales target for your team, it is always helpful to go back and analyze what brought more deals to a closure. As you ponder over it, you may come across a lot of questions.
What is the average time taken for leads to complete the sales cycle?
In a month, how many leads are being converted to customers?
Who are the Star Performers in your sales team?
What are the regions that generate more business?
It is possible that you are not quite sure of the answers to these questions that you ask yourself on a regular basis… Accurate numbers are required. So what do you do now? Of course! You pull a variety of reports with the required filters to get the information that you need. But do these reports provide insights to effectively manage your sales process and sales team!
Zoho CRM’s Reports will help you out at this point...
We can distinguish three main categories of reports in Zoho CRM that will provide value to your business. They can help you identify the metrics that drive more sales so that you can spend your time and effort in the right place.
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Hundreds and thousands of leads do not guarantee increased sales. The secret of successfully converting qualified leads into sales lies in lead nurturing. And lead nurturing is effective only with a thorough understanding of the lead nurture process.
Do you have stagnant leads in your sales pipeline? How do you identify such leads and the extra time and effort taken for a successful conversion?Well, with the right report, you can.
Time is money – goes an old saying and it’s hard to argue! Every minute, hour, day and year counts when you face the customer or a prospect. In the process of converting a lead to opportunity, timing is everything so how much is your time worth!
Reports in Zoho CRM can help you with the proper analysis of the lead nurturing cycle. Take a look at some of these reports to calculate your valuable time and its effectiveness.
• Sales Cycle Duration across Lead Sources/Potential Type
• Overall Sales Duration across Lead Sources/Potential Type
• Lead Conversion across Industries/Owners
Measuring the performance of your sales rep is crucial for your business. The sales metric used to measure the performance and effectiveness of sales rep vary. But knowing the right sales metric and getting the relevant information will help in identifying the strengths and weaknesses in your sales process – which sales rep is doing a great job and who needs to do better and requires a little coaching.
STAGNANTLEADS
PROSPECTS
CUSTOMERS
Time Based Reports
People Based Reports
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How much revenue is your business making? How much does each region or line of product contribute to the overall profit? Your sales may be great in one region but not in the other!
Knowing everything about the monthly revenue, the lead source that gives you more business, percentage of target achieved, etc. is important. Figuring out who your most profitable customers are can be difficult unless you have a detailed report of everything a customer buys and their purchase life cycle.
Measuring your organization’s revenue and growth need not be very difficult with the right report in Zoho CRM.
• Sales by Lead Source
• Pipeline by Probability/Stage
• This Month Sales
Reports that give an insight on the target achieved by an individual and the activities performed to achieve the target, is important while calculating the monthly sales target. You may try these performance-based reports in Zoho CRM that serves to measure the progress of individuals in your team. More importantly, to check the overall quality of the service you provide to the customers:
• Sales Person’s Performance Report
• Sales Cycle Duration across Owner
• Lead Conversion Count across Owners
Revenue Based Reports
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Bob, the product marketer – “Lisa, I’ve got this idea! How about we build a landing page and put up a web form? Visitors can sign–up to receive notifications on the great deals and discounts we offer on furniture and furnishings.”
Lisa, another marketer – “That’s great but why would people want to give you their information? We need to offer some incentives.”
Bob – “I’ve a solution for that too. We can offer interior design advice, free of cost!”
Lisa – “Cool… interested people would definitely leave their contact details and we can follow up to get a deal with them.”
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Do you have such conversations at your workplace too? Are you trying to figure out a way to convert the traffic to your web page into quality leads?
Lead generation, as we all know is all about attracting people to your business. You could start a campaign, advertise, participate in trade shows, or conduct webinars. All this to get people interested in your product, just enough to persuade them to know more about it!
You can take these efforts a step further by using a good web form builder. And if the form builder has a WYSIWYG editor, you can just drag and drop and create web forms in minutes!
#1 Connect your web form with CRM.
#2 Provide links and hints to fill fields.
#3 Avoid too many required fields and keep the form short and simple.
#4 Automatically pass hidden values for multiple forms.
#5 Eliminate spam and automatic form submission.
#6 Keep the visitor engaged by redirecting to another page.
#7 Reply back with personalized emails.
#8 Assign records automatically to sales reps for quick follow-ups.
#9 Filter records before adding them to your CRM.
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Why should you wait until a fair number of leads are collected and then transfer them to a CRM system? Getting a bunch of leads at once is difficult to manage. But if you get them one at a time, it is much easier to assign them to the sales reps, add tasks, schedule calls, etc.
Use web forms that are well connected to your CRM and get the data straight into the CRM database. You can relax without a tiny bit of doubt on the accuracy of the data that is captured from the web form and is accessed by your sales reps.
Take a look at some tips on setting up a good web form. Along with them are hints on how to implement them using Zoho CRM.
#1 Connect your web form with CRM.
#2 Provide links and hints to fill fields.
In ZCRM – Web-to-Lead Forms
?In ZCRM – Help Links for Each
Field in the Forms
Often people are reluctant to give away information, especially when email address, contact number, etc. are involved. Provide a link to the privacy policy and assure them that the information is safe with you.
Hints on the data and time format, phone number with or without the area code, are very useful to maintain your CRM with clean data.
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Often, there is a need to associate some details to the new leads without revealing it to the visitors of your form. It could be the campaign that generated the lead, or the source of the lead, or any other hidden value that you want along with the lead details.
Add hidden values that come in handy for such requirements. For example, if you want to host the ‘Request a Demo’ form in a couple of pages, get a clear picture of the source of lead generation by automatically passing hidden values.
#3 Avoid too many required fields and keep the form short and simple.
#4 Automatically pass hidden values for multiple forms.
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In ZCRM - Required Fields + Form Layout Settings for the Forms
X
In ZCRM - Hidden Fields in Forms
It would be a loss if you get huge traffic to your web page but don’t have a web form that’s appealing enough to get the user to fill it. Again, you can’t deny that it is always tempting to collect as much information as possible. But do you think a lengthy web form with clumsy layout and too many required fields will work? It may just scare them off instead!
Keeping the form simple with less required field would be a wise choice. Build a form with just the important fields that take less than 2 minutes to fill. Ask for only the basic contact details that are necessary for the sales reps to contact the leads and follow them up.
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The last thing you want is your site to get attacked by ‘bots’ that would sign up hundred times within a minute. And you definitely don’t want to receive frequent junk requests that are considered spam. Captcha is a well-known solution to this.
Captcha is used a lot, but is very useful too! Include captchas that tell humans and computers apart and eliminate automatic form submission to a great extent. It would reduce the amount of spam and give you quality leads to work on.
Persuading the visitors to fill up the form need not be the only goal. You can go further and keep the users engaged. Get their attention by leading them to a page that gives them additional relevant information. You could redirect the users to a page that:
• Highlights the latest updates, offers or discounts
• Provides an overview of the product in the form of a video or an interactive UI
• Lists the testimonials from existing customers…. or simply to a ‘Thank You’ page!
#5 Eliminate spam and automatic form submission.
#6 Keep the visitor engaged by redirecting to another page.
spam
In ZCRM - Captcha in Forms
wwwIn ZCRM - Landing Page URL in
the Forms
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Walking into a nearby cafe, if you hear “Good Evening! What would you like to have?“. That would sound very “usual”.
Who does not like a personal touch – “Hello! Welcome to The Coffee Shop. Would you like to try out the ‘Drink of the Day’ – Iced Coffee Slush with a hint of orange?”
Sending emails to acknowledge the requests sent by your leads is a good practice to nurture leads, but making it automatic is no fun. Add a personal touch to your emails and set the right note for customer relationship and sales. Let your customers know that you’re genuinely trying to help.
Your leads may fill up a form to find out more about your product, or to download a white paper or eBook. Whatever the case maybe, the question here is – How long does it take for your sales reps to follow-up on the leads and get back to them?
If it takes too long, then you need to revisit the lead management and follow-up process. Grab the opportunity and don’t make your leads wait for long. Create a simple workflow to assign and route the leads to the sales reps for quick follow-ups.
#7 Reply back with personalized emails.
#8 Assign records automatically to sales reps for quick follow-ups.
In ZCRM - Automated Personalized Emails & Autoresponse Rules
In ZCRM – Assignment Rules + Follow-up Tasks for Record Owners
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Someone in your sales team needs to give thumbs up to the leads that are getting added to your CRM system. Captcha is basically to avoid spam. But what about junk leads that enter your CRM?
When your web form and CRM system is tightly connected, possibilities are that the ‘not seriously interested’ leads get added too. You definitely do not want your sales people to waste their time on junk leads. Keep a check on records that are automatically added and approve them before they are ready for the sales team to follow up.
#9 Filter records before adding them to your CRM.
In ZCRM - Approve Records Generated
from Web Form
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Five Ways
To Maintain Clean and Accurate Customer Information
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Has it ever happened, that you make a follow-up call, only to find out that another member of your team had already contacted the customer?
That would be a little embarrassing but where was the confusion? After cross-checking you clearly noticed that there was no record of a call being made to the contact, but there sure was a duplicate contact, assigned to another sales rep!
Inaccurate or incomplete CRM data often hamper sales and marketing performance. Many of your contacts would have changed their phone number, email address or even their company, leading to an accumulation of redundant and incomplete data in your CRM. So how are you going to maintain clean CRM data? We all realize how important it is to add clean data in the CRM system and not just that, to avidly maintain it too! Help yourself with these 5 tips to not only get your CRM system under control but also to save time and headache down the road.
Tip #1 Maintain Complete Data
Tip #2 Avoid Entry of Duplicate Leads & Contacts
Tip #3 Merge Existing Duplicate Records
Tip #4 Maintain a Style Sheet
Tip #5 Use Roles for Security
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Complete Data Avoid Entry of Duplicate Use Roles for SecurityMerge Use Style Sheets
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#1 Maintain Complete Data
Believe it or not, incomplete information is not a good sign for data quality. The CRM account requires you to fill in numerous fields that are mandatory. It’s time-consuming! And as a sales rep, that becomes a reason for you to neglect proper data entry.
The best way to deal with this is to set important fields as mandatory such as name, email address, phone numbers, and address. So, determine the fields that are most important for complete information and encourage users to fill in those important details.
Ask yourself one question: How
complete are my records?
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#2 Avoid Entry of Duplicate Leads & Contacts
Every individual has a unique email address. If two entries in your contact list have the same email address, then you have duplicate records. One simple trick to prevent duplicate records is by comparing the email address of people.
While adding a lead/contact, Zoho CRM gives you the option to check whether the newly added record already exists in your CRM account. Now, this will definitely save the effort of going through the records for duplicates.
Complete Data Avoid Entry of Duplicate Use Roles for SecurityMerge Use Style Sheets
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#3 Merge Existing Duplicate Records
Preventing duplicates work great when adding new contacts but what about eliminating duplicates from your existing data? Duplicate records are not necessarily identical. Let’s say, two contacts have the same name, email address and company name but one has a phone number that is not found in the other.
This is sometimes frustrating as some of the crucial information that you need is scattered in both the records. In that case, instead of blindly deleting one record and potentially losing important data, merge the information into one contact.
Complete Data Avoid Entry of Duplicate Use Roles for SecurityMerge Use Style Sheets
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what about eliminating
duplicates from your existing
data?
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#4 Maintain a Style Sheet
While automation does most of the work, human efforts are essential for data quality. One way to make data entry easy and maintain consistency, is by introducing naming conventions. For example, a country’s name is sometimes used in different formats: USA, US, United States of America.
Having a standardized format for such data helps you generate accurate reports and filter records based on the exact criteria. Follow a style sheet with a list of abbreviations and standard data entry formats for address, company names, designations, etc. Pre-defined drop-down values also helps a lot in eliminating a small part of the problem.
Complete Data Avoid Entry of Duplicate Use Roles for SecurityMerge Use Style Sheets
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}USA
US STYLESHEET
UnitedStates
of America
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#5 Use Roles for Security
With data pouring in from several sources and multiple users accessing it, maintaining a clean CRM database is not that easy. One best practice is to restrict access to data in your CRM account.
Define Roles that will help you control the access rights of users while working with CRM data. That way, users will modify only those records that are relevant to them.
Complete Data Avoid Entry of Duplicate Use Roles for SecurityMerge Use Style Sheets
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Author: Pavitra J.
Pavitra is the Lead, User Education at Zoho CRM.
You can reach her at www.twitter.com/jpavitra/