The Zoho Invoice (and Zoho Books) teams have introduced a new synch process that allows you to automatically create a Quotation as soon as a sales potential is created in the CRM.
Youmay have decided to use Zoho Invoice rather that Zoho CRMs own invoice module due to its powerful invoicing features, mobile compatibility and payment tracking functions. Until now Sales Managers just swap between the two apps when they need to create an 'Estimate' (aka Quotation) and they would typically do this when the sales potential reached the Quotation stage.
The latest enhancement will actually create an Estimate automatically when the Sales Manager creates the CRM potential and it will attach it to the same Account in Zoho Invoice with 'Draft' status.
Thereare no products associated with the Estimate at this time, obviously the system has no way of 'knowing' what products are being sold and ZohoInvoice uses a separate list of products from those in the CRM. So the synch places a dummy item in the item list, with the same name as the potential.
The next step forthe Sales Manager would be to edit the line items in the Estimate, to calculate the exact amount, then send the Estimate to the prospect. Whenthey send the Estimate using the Zoho Invoice one click send function, the Estimate status is automatically set to 'Sent'.
Normalsales processes would follow, these may differ slightly depending on your organisation but basically they would be Quotation... Negotiations... Closed Won!
TheCRM can be used to update the potential stages at the appropriate time,which can then be used to do sales pipeline reports. When the sale is won, instead of having to update the Quotation status in Zoho Invoice AND the Potential stage in Zoho CRM, the Sales manager now just updates the Potential stage to Closed Won and then the Quotation status is automatically updated to 'Accepted.
Workflowcan be used to automatically alert other members of the team during thesales cycle, for example Accounting when the sale is won.
Ifyou also make use of the integration with Zoho Reports, then you can create awesome looking pipeline and even activity reports based on salesstages and effectiveness of sales activities. Click here to learn more.
Ofcourse, it is not realistic to expect to win all deals. So the same concept is applied to lost sales - Sales Managers would change the Potential stage in the CRM to Closed Lost and the new sych feature will update the Quotation status in Zoho Invoice to 'Declined'.
It should be noted that this enhancement is optional, so if you prefer to do the Estimate manually, then you still can do so.
If you think about it though, this small but significant enhancement means that time savings can quickly mount up.
Even if you are a one man show creating a 4-5 quotes a week, that equates to almost an hour per week alone!
Itreally comes into its own when you are processing more quotations though, or when you have more sales people. We did some simple calculations based on a typical scenario:
Each Sales Manager conceivably saves about 10 minutes per Quotation using this enhancement.On average they create a minimum of 1 Quotations per day. Ifyour organisation has a sales team consisting of 3 people in your office in Cardiff, 2 in Pontypool and 3 in Abergavenny...
That's 1 Quotation per day, saving 10 mins per Sales Manager.
Multiply this by 8 Sales staff. That's 80 minutes per day.
Multiply that by 5 working days a week and you get almost 1 man day in saved time, per week.
Multiply that by one month, one year... and you get the drift.
Weintend using this enhancement ourselves! We have an in depth experience of implementing Zoho CRM integrations with Zoho Invoice, including multiple currency implementations.
If you are interested in implementing Zoho CRM and Zoho Invoice within your organisation, including the above enhancement and any of the workflows and other integrations we mentioned above, please contact us here, or via email on info at mangoho dot com.