Introduction here: So far I have spent most of my time re-engineering our Zoho CRM system on the Leads side of the process. Before I started I thought we had a pretty good system but I noticed some pretty serious gaps and have worked hard to correct them and refine the process. At this point I am very happy with the Leads aspect of the system and more importantly the sales team is happy as well. In fact the new processes are already generating revenue and positive customer feedback.
So what happens when a lead expresses interest in purchasing something? What is the next step? Take a look at the screen shot below. Notice how the Lead downloaded a trial, all important fields are in the record, the lead has been pre-qualified, the lead status is A Qualified and the note says that the lead is interested in pricing information.
At this point the SA's job is almost finished. They have a perfectly qualified lead with all the proper documentation and history as part of the Lead Record. The only thing left to do is Convert the Lead into an Account, Contact and Potential by hitting the Convert button at the top of the Lead record. This brings up the Convert Lead UI and a number of interesting and very well thought out things happen with just a few clicks of the mouse. The Convert Lead function in Zoho allows the current Lead owner, the SA to:
Click Save and watch the magic happen: A new Account is created and the SC is notified. This Account has the name, address, territory info from the Lead. It creates a new Contact under the Account with the Contact and Lead Source info from the Lead. The Potential linked to the Account and the Contact. All of the attachments, activities, tasks and notes are appropriately linked. All this with one click! All the SC has to do is enter the appropriate Account Type = Prospect and Account Rating = Active in this case.
I should mention that this process requires almost zero set up and implementation. In fact it is so smart that it will attempt to warn the user that there is another duplicate Account record and offer to merge the two on conversion. This is a common problem in all CRM systems when there are multiple contacts in the Leads section under the same account. Zoho CRM gets it right out of the box and preserves all of the valuable Lead information on conversion.
Here is a pdf document of all the things that happen when you convert a Lead. It is hard to explain how complex this process is without dredging up all of the details that make it happen. Suffice to say that the logic behind the process is subtle but very well thought out and pretty much works right out of the box. I guess that is the difference between good and great software. The great software hides the complexity but not the power.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Introduction here: For the most part I have spent the last five weeks in front of my computer, listening to Sirius Radio (The Vault), eating seeds (Art's Sunflower and Pumpkin) and deconstructing the D-Tools/Zoho CRM system. In tough economic times sometimes the only thing you can do is to fine tune your internal business processes to stay ahead. This has the double advantage of making your company more competitive and efficient and when the economy improves (it always does) you will be in position to immediately capitalize on it. But before you can fine tune your processes you need to make sure you have the right tools for the job.
In our case our BPM tool of choice is Zoho CRM. With some exceptions Zoho CRM is one of those rare software products that is simple enough to immediately provide some value and sophisticated enough to scale thorough complex business process re-engineering. But I digress...
So I spent a fair amount of time analyzing and re-engineering our lead gathering, qualifying and marketing process's. The ultimate goal of this was to somehow classify each lead in the system across many different areas so we could communicate more efficiently with them. The final outcome of all this work is what I like to call the "D-Tools Email Marketing Engine".
Email marketing is perhaps the most cost effective and efficient way to reach your audience. However this is a not a secret technique and is also perhaps the most overused and abused form of marketing today. To be effective in this form of marketing you need to be able target your message right down to the individual. These days the only attention you get is the time it takes to read the subject line. A general message will usually go right into the trash.
With that in mind I created the D-Tools Lead Marketing Engine flowchart. Notice how the process starts general and then gets more specific through industry, category all the way down to the job function of the individual. This way I can easily send a message about wire labels to installers in the Broadcast industry while sending a different message about estimating and proposals to sales people in the Residential AV-Automation industry from a recent trade show.
In Zoho CRM this is as easy as creating a custom list view like one above and selecting the message template. Instantly a targeted, personalized (semi) custom message is sent out to the leads that match the criteria. The beauty of this is that the individual SA or SC can send very personalized and topical messages to their qualified leads while the D-Tools marketing department can send general company messages to the all of the unqualified leads. With this system we can now effectively market to our customer segments without sending out a message that would have no value to the recipient.
With this post I am finally happy with our lead gathering, qualifying and marketing processes. I have fully documented this process here and have communicated to each member of our sales team. Not only do we now have a rock solid process but each person on the team knows exactly what is expected of them and how to do their job.
The nice thing about automation and documentation at this level is that once it is done I can forget about it and move on to other areas. If we need to add a someone to the sales team it is simple enough to point them to these series of posts without revisiting in detail.
The next series of posts will deal with the conversion process from a Qualified Lead to a Prospect with a Potential.
Stay tuned.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Introduction here. I changed the title of this series from Explaining the D-Tools Zoho CRM system to Deconstructing the D-Tools Zoho CRM System because I realized that as I was trying to explain it I was tearing it apart an re-configuring it as I was explaining it. Just the act of explaining it made me realize it could be improved. In fact that explains my silence for the past few weeks. I have been deep inside our system trying to make it more reliable, easier to use, easier to explain, more accurate and ultimately more productive for all the users.
In the previous Lead Management post I went over our Lead Status qualification rules and explained how we implemented a Pre Qualification score. So far this has been extremely helpful in allowing our SA's to see which leads needed to be contacted first. Since more targeted marketing has already produced results I added a Pre-Qual score of "4-Great" indicating that the lead record includes a corporate email address, a professional website, a phone number and a Job Function. Again this allows our SA's to focus on the most productive leads first.
Check it out, when a new lead comes into the system the SAM evaluates the lead, follows the path on the chart, fills in the missing information, gives it a Pre-Qual score and assigns the lead to an SA based on the territory.
At this point the discovery (not sales) process begins and all the SA has to do is create a custom view (see this post on custom list views) in Zoho with "their" leads sorted by date created and/or Pre Qual score and it is clear which leads need to be contacted first. The lead status is still unqualified but once the SA makes some sort of personal contact with the the lead the status is elevated to a Qualified C status. If the Lead fills out a Lead Worksheet it is upgraded to a Qualified B and if the Leads attends a webinar or installs the trial it is then it is upgraded to a Qualified A status. At that point it would be assigned to a SC if the lead expressed interest in moving forward.
Notice that during this process the lead elevates themselves by actually doing something each step of the way and each step requires a little more commitment? This process has a number of advantages. First of all we now have a common definition of each Lead Status. We know exactly where the lead is at and more importantly we know exactly what to do next. For example if a lead is at the Qualified C status we know that they have not filled out a lead worksheet. Using the Zoho mass email function we can easily and instantly create a targeted email to all of the Qualified C's and attach a worksheet.
The bottom line is that we now have an easy to use, efficient and scalable process for getting through all of our leads and only engaging the leads that have expressed genuine interest. This is good for us and ultimatly it is good for our customers because we have now focused our presentation on THEIR needs and issues. In addition everything is documented each step of the way.
Also it needs to be mentioned that this process is only possible with a well designed and properly implemented CRM system. Don't try this at home with Outlook, ACT or god forbid Oasis CRM.
Here is a pdf of the entire D-Tools Lead Qualifying Engine document that the screen shots above were taken from. Here is a copy of the D-Tools Lead worksheet mentioned above. The Lead Worksheet form is pretty interesting, it is a basic pdf form but what we did was use the interactive elements of Adobe Designer to create form with drop down pick lists. This makes it much easier for the end user to fill out and the choices match the choices in our CRM system.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Introduction here. As I have stated at least twice now we have a LOT of leads in our system and we needed a solid process to manage all of these leads. In the previous post on Sales Roles I explained how each person on the D-Tools sales team has a specific role and and how we use our Zoho CRM system to manage the job function for each specific role.
One of the things that Zoho CRM does really well is the creation and management of custom lists for each entity in the system. An entity in Zoho is a list of related information like leads, or cases, or accounts and so on. Actually calling a Zoho entity a list is somewhat of an oversimplification but I digress.
So we have these "lists" (entities) of data, and each list contains x number of records and each record can have x number of fields. That is a LOT of information that needs to be listed and sorted to whatever the job function is of the person who needs to work with the specific entity. Different people in D-Tools need to work with the same entity but only need a subset of the actual data, not the entire list
Zoho CRM comes with a number of editable, predefined views that can change depending on the Zoho login and role of the login. For example one of the predefined views is " My Leads". Zoho assumes that "my" refers to the person logged in and will show a list of "their" leads.
This works great but where Zoho CRM really shines is in the ease of which any user can create their own custom view of the entity without any programming or advanced knowledge of the system. For example, say I am a salesperson we just got back from a trade show. I could easily create a custom list that had all of "my" leads from that show with just the company name, email, phone number and Pre-Qual score. This is how it is done:
You now have a list that can be easily sorted by any of the columns so the person using the list can easily find the relevant information. When the user clicks on the actual Lead Name it opens the record. A neat trick is to right click on the link and open the record in another window or tab so you can easily get both the micro and macro view of the list.
Easy to create and manage entity views are a critical part of any CRM system and Zoho CRM does it better than any other system I have ever come across. The only issue I have found is that there is no way to create a list that queries more than a single entity. This makes it impossible to send mass emails to contacts of a specific account type.
Also these is no ability to "clone" a custom list. This would come in handy when the SAM is creating custom lists for number of people where the only change is the owner of the record. For the most part you can clone just about anything in Zoho but not these custom lists. Both issues seem like oversights to me. I have let the Zoho CRM technical team know about these issues and I am confident that they will be updated in a future release.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Quick shout out to the Zoho CRM technical team. As anyone who has read my posts here or on the D-Tools blog would know that I sepnd a lot of time in Zoho CRM managing our system. Zoho gives the CRM admin a plethora of tools to use for this process but when I first implemented the system I found that they conspicuously left out the ability to search for a blank field, as in give me a list of all records where the email field is blank or empty.
This seemed odd because searching for blank fields is a common maintenance task. I mentioned this to the CRM technical team and in a few weeks I had the "is empty" criteria as part of filter. OK, great but why stop there? How about a filter I can use to find a field that contains information or "is not empty" criteria?. Pretty basic stuff and only interesting in it's absence.
Anyway, I was digging around in our system today and found the "is not empty" criteria. One of the nice things about a well managed and architected SaaS system is that it incrementally gets better and better on its own.
Thank you Zoho CRM team!
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
As I previously mentioned we have a lot of leads in our CRM system. Without some sort of solid process for managing these leads we would never be able to see the forest through the trees. Good lead management is a critical aspect for our company (really, all companies) because nothing happens without the sale and most of our sales start out as leads. The reality is the future of your company hinges on how you currently manage your leads. You need to plant your seeds before you are hungry.
In order to manage leads effectively each person on the sales team needs a specific role and set of tools in order to do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible. Once again Zoho CRM rises to the challenge and allows us to manage the entire process with a minimum of setup. In fact, I have spent more time defining and documenting the process than I have configuring the software.
We have three main sales roles at D-Tools: Sales Administrator, Sales Assistant and Sales Consultant. Each role has a distinct set of job functions attached to it.
Lets look at the life cycle of a lead and how it relates to each role. When a lead first comes into the system it needs to be approved. Since we have a public web to lead form on our web site we get a fair share of crap leads. Instead of these leads going directly into the system and mixing (infecting) with the other leads they go to a waiting for approval section and anyone with a Sales Admin role in Zoho gets an email announcing a new lead. I should mention that the web to lead form, lead approval process, and email are built-in Zoho workflow functions.
On a daily basis the Sales Admin (SAM from now on) looks at all the unapproved leads in the system and checks each lead to make sure all of the required fields are accurate. If it looks like a bogus lead then it is deleted. Next the SAM attempts to pre-qualify the lead by the email address (as explained in this post). If a website can be deduced through the email address the SAM subjectively evaluates the quality of the website and scores appropriately. Next the SAM assigns the lead to the proper territory, sub-territory (more on that later), and then assigns the lead to a specific Sales Consultant based on the territory assignment.
However the lead is still "unqualified", meaning we have not had a one-to-one conversation with the lead by either voice or email. This is where the Sales Assistant role comes into the picture. In general I do not want our Sales Consultants talking to unqualified leads. The Sales Assist (SA from now on) job is to contact the lead, fill in any missing information, ask questions that will determine how our software can benefit the prospective customer, do a web demo of the software (if appropriate), answer any basic questions and ideally move that lead up to Qualified A, B, or C status or (not as ideal) move them down to Dead or Inactive (it happens). In general our Sales Consultants do not get involved until the lead status is at least a "Qualified C".
Since we have so many leads this Pre-Qual Score field makes it stupid easy for our SAs to sort the lists, or "views" as they are called in Zoho by this field so the most qualified leads get acted on first. Before we had this Pre-Qual Score process it was just hit and miss, not a good way to manage 11,000 leads. Below is a list view of what our SA's use to qualify leads.
Here is the criteria from the above list view.
As the SA is in the qualifying stage with each Lead Zoho makes documenting this process stupid easy again. All notes, phone calls and emails relating to the contact are included in the lead record. Outgoing email is automatically added to the lead record and by using the Zoho CRM to Outlook interface a SA can automatically sync a response email to the lead record. (red icon in the pic below) We do all this so when it comes time for a Sales Consultant to step in we don't make the potential client re-state all of their objectives, concerns and questions. Saves everyone time and frustration I should add.
Basically the main job function of the SA role is to communicate with the Lead, document ALL of the communication and move them to a "qualified" lead status. Once they get the lead to that point the sales Consultant steps and the SA starts the process over with another Unqualified lead.
Once a Lead gets to Qualified C or above and they want to talk to a Sales Consultant (SC from now on) a SC will automatically be notified by the SA using the Zoho Task functionality All the SA has to do is fill out this simple form. Since all of the information is contained in the lead record this eliminates all of the questions, emails and conversations that are usually associated with this type of hand off.
It is now the SC's job to work with this lead and convert them to an "Account" where the Account Type = Prospect. But this post has gone on long enough so process will have to be explained another day.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Introduction here.
We have a LOT of leads in our system. The current count is 11,192 and I archived any lead that was created before 2006 during the last conversion of CRM systems. Thankfully, Zoho CRM handles leads really well. This is the process we use to separate the forest from the trees and allow our sales team to focus on the most productive leads.
The way I define a lead is a person (contact) who works at a company (account) who has expressed some sort of interest in our products or services and has not purchased anything from us in the past. Leads come into the system from four main marketing activities.
These are called "Leads Source" in our CRM system. This is a mandatory pick list field. In addition to a Lead Source field we also have a related field called "Sub-Lead Source" that contains the specific information relating to the general Lead Source. For example a Lead Source that = Trade Show and Sub-Lead Source = CEDIA 08 is the name of the specific trade show That way we can easily track where revenue is coming from on a global or granular basis.
In order to better target our marketing message to each lead we categorize every lead into a specific Industry and Category. Industry refers to what industry the lead is in like AV-Automation, Broadcast and so on. Category refers to what type of customer they are. For example Residential or Commercial.
It sounds kind of confusing and a lot of extra work but we do this because the messaging to a company that is involved in AV-Automation for the residential market is different than what a commercial AV integrator would expect. In some cases a company could be involved in both residential and commercial work and in those cases we use a multi-pick field for the category so the user can tag the record as both residential and commercial.
We also have a mandatory "Lead Status" field with the following choices below: All Lead Status start out as "Unqualified" and then we change the status as we move them through the process. This is extremely helpful because we can give all of the "Unqualified" leads to a sales admin and let them fill in the blanks without getting a senior salesperson involved until the lead expresses real interest.
A new feature I just added to the system to help us focus on the most productive leads is the Pre Qualification Score or "Pre-Qual Score" field. Since it is so hard to to actually get someone on the phone these days I came up with a simple system for the sales person or sales admin to score the lead by just subjectively looking at a few key details that are usually part of every lead in the system without actually talking to them on the phone. The three lead Pre-Qual Scores are:
<rant>
Please let me explain before someone accuses me of calling some of our potential customers "Lame". That is not what I mean. At the recent CEDIA Expo we received "X" number of leads. Most of these came from our booth scanner and were converted to Excel (more on this process later) and some came through business cards. Most of the business cards had a website address but unfortunately the scanner information did not have the lead website information. So I hand picked through every lead that did not have a website and by using the corporate email domain I attempted to find and add a website attached to the lead.
This is what I found out. 18% of the leads used a free (yahoo, hotmail, gmail) or home based (aol, comcast, sbcglobal) email. 21% had a corporate email domain but not a website that matched that email domain. 59% had both a corporate email address and a matching website.
So close to 40% of our potential customers from this show do not have a website and/or use a free email address. That is "Lame". There are couple of things you can do to be taken seriously in this world, especially if you are in any industry that professes to be of a technical nature. Getting a real email address and a real website would be at the top of the list. Speaking to the system integrators in the 40 percentile, would you do any business with a manufacturer who did not have a website or someone with an aol.com email address? Everyone does research on the internet now, why do you think your potential customers are any different? You could be excluded from a project just based on this criteria.
</rant>
Zoho CRM makes it very easy for users to create and sort lists into custom views so our sales team can filter by Lead Status = Unqualified and sort by the Pre-Qual score. This allows the sales team to focus on the most productive leads first, while the marketing team drips on all the leads with email marketing as appropriate.
The last custom field we use to target our message to our prospective clients is the "Job Function" field. The reason for this is that our software can be used by many people in an organization. People involved in the installation side of a company would perhaps be interested in our integration with Brother wire labels while a salesperson would be more interested in making his proposals look more attractive. This is pick list field with the following standardized choices:
The picture below is what a well qualified lead would look like in our system before we have had any contact with that person. In this specific case all a sales admin would have to do is contact the lead by phone or email, find out how many employees are in the company, what the specific title of the lead is and change to the appropriate Lead Status. Once the lead gets "Qualified" it becomes much easier for a Sr. Salesperson to step in, identify the opportunity and move the Lead to a "Potential" and eventually a "Client".
The reason we go to all this trouble in geting our leads in order is to make it as easy as possible for the sales team to focus on the customer needs and move them through the pipeline. In addition we can now easily send VERY targeted emails based on the Category, Industry, Lead Source and Job Function. With the proliferation of email messages on a daily basis it is very important to target each message to the needs of the individual.
One of the luxuries of being the boss is that I can choose what projects I want to get to get involved in here at D-Tools. For the most part all of the core software development, marketing, sales and finance/operations are handled with great care and competence by the D-Tools executive and management team. This means that the bulk of my time at work can be devoted to improving our internal business processes and looking down the road at what products and services we can add to our mix.
Just as D-Tools SI becomes an integral part of our low voltage system integrators clients' business process our CRM system is an integral part of our business process. Anyone who has read any of the previous posts on this topic could come to the conclusion that that I am somewhat of a CRM freak or superfreak. I have found that a good CRM system can always be made better by constant tweaking of the business process and work flow.
In the past I would send these updates and tweaks by email to the sales team and post specific business process documentation to the D-Tools internal wiki. That works OK but all of that information stays behind our firewall and does not help anyone else trying to implement Zoho CRM or any other CRM system for that matter.
So moving forward I am going to "open source" our internal business process on how it relates to our CRM system. I am doing this for two reasons. One, I tend to get kind of lazy when I am writing for a small audience compromised of company employees. This will help me explain the processes better. Two, at the recent CEDIA Expo a colleague mentioned that one of my memorable quotes was "high tide floats all boats" as it relates to sharing information. I don't remember saying that but I agree with the statement. In any case a well functioning CRM system can help all companies of any size be more successful and chances are that some of those companies are in low voltage integration space and will eventually need more seats of our software.
OK, three reasons. Add greed to the list.
Stay tuned for follow-up posts under this title.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
Email campaigns. Check. Every CRM has this as a checkbox on their feature list. Whether it is integrated as part of the system, as is the case with NetSuite & Oasis, or acheived through a partner integration, ala Salesforce and Campaigner, no CRM system is complete without it. Doing it well and making it easy, however is another story. Having been a marketer for longer than I care to admit, suffice it to say I have had plenty of experience with email campaigns...(not to date myself, but can you say mailmerge & Eudora?)
Ah but I digress. After struggling in this area with our previous CRM system, I was psyched to be able to quickly and easily generate targeted, personalized email campaigns. (and better yet, teach my team to do this as well!)
Zoho works like other CRM systems in terms of splitting up leads, accounts, and contacts. It is very easy to create email templates in either plain text or HTML, and use these templates for emailing out to leads or contacts. The text editor is simple and straightforward, and to add your own HTML creative you simply cut and paste. Adding wild cards for personalization is suprisingly easy, and acheived by simply choosing fields (in plain english!) from a drop down list and copying and pasting into your template.
By making the templates available to everyone who uses the system my team can personalize their messages and add wild cards for their signatures - leveraging content that is available for everyone to use yet giving the messages their own personal flair. Again, not a new concept but deceptively simple in Zoho.
Once the template is created you then go to either the Leads or Contacts database (depending on your desired targets) and select the Mass Email feature (this is easily located at the bottom of the main page of the Leads and Contacts databases.
This takes you to the Mass Email page, and is the area where you will select your email template and records to send it to. To select your template just choose one from the drop down menu. Then click on the "Select Records" tab to choose your recipients.
This is the area where Zoho really shines. While this is undoubtably the most important aspect of any direct response effort (selecting the actual targets for communication) - many systems fall short when it comes to being able to quickly get to the right target list. In fact, this basic ability was completely lacking in our last system without having to directly create a SQL database query. Not impossible, but for a marketing team not the most practical approach.
In Zoho there are a few basic ways to search for and select your email recipients. The first way is to use the "Custom Views Criteria." This will use any of Zoho's standard or user-created Custom Views to select the recipients. You can create custom views into your data based upon certain criteria (such as geography, timeframe, etc.) or you can choose your recipients based on Zoho's out-of-the-box views such as "My Leads" or "Today's Leads."
From this view you can choose to send to all or manually select which contacts you want to receive the email. This feature alone is extremely valuable, especially in the case of not having a complete up-to-date, clean list, which can often happen right after a trade show, webinar, or some other event. This basically gives you a quick and easy way to opt out people that you do not want to receive the email, or weed out duplicates without having to clean the entire database. This is a great feature that has alowed us to continue to communicate effectively without having to go through an arduous database cleanup exercise.
The other method to select your recipients is to utilize the "Manual Criteria" feature. This allows you to select criteria from a number of fields to get to the right list. Say uou wanted to send a thank you note to all prospective customers who visited you at a recent regional trade show. You could search for all records with the lead source "trade show" and narrow it down to the specific show, account owner, territory, etc.
Again, not rocket science, it just works. And not only does it work, it's simple enough that my entire team is now empowered to be more effective in their outbound communications. Once the target list is specified they can quickly choose from that list who should receive the email and who should not.
Overall for us it has never been easier to generate targeted, personalized, and effective email communications. While we will always continue to send out general HTML-based messages that highlight news and offers for a mass audience, we are now able to more effectively communicate with our customers, partners, and prospects. There are many more features in Zoho that my team is utilizing and in future posts will discuss more about how our entire process is improving the more that we continue to use the system.
This post was originally written by D-Tools VP marketing, Tim Bigones
Managing duplicate records is one of the hardest things to accomplish when using CRM software. Just trying to determine what is a duplicate is hard enough and when you find a duplicate somehow you have to decide which fields need to be merged from the duplicate records.
In ZOHO the process is almost automatic. I have spent so much time on this issue with other CRM systems in the past that when I saw how ZOHO handled it I shed a little tear of joy.
Check it out. Go to any kind of record, Lead, Account, Contact, Vendor, whatever that you think is a dupe and click the Find and Merge Duplicate button.
You will go to a UI that allows you to narrow your dupe search. In this case I am using the email address and last name. I came up with 6 matches and four of them have the same email address.
I can merge three at a time so I check them and press the View Duplicates button. This is where the magic happens. I can choose which record is the master record and if the fields within each record are different I can choose which field will get merged. It works perfect. This is a huge feature that solves a huge problem and is so easy to use any temp admin staff person can do with minimal training. Not the case with any other CRM system I have used.
From a software development standpoint this is a deep and complex problem to solve. The fact that Zoho CRM does it so well is a solid indication of the thought and planning that has gone into the product.
More information on the ZOHO Find and Merge process can be found here.
Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.
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