So it's been a few weeks now since Zoho CRM released their latest feature set to the Enterprise edition, so we thought we'd give a quick review of them to summarise what they're about and give our input on having used them.
License
The first point to note is that the features listed below are Enterprise license features and thus not available if you are on say a Professional license. Zoho are offering a wide range of features in all of their versions, appealing to all levels of users and businesses, especially small to mid sized businesses who may not need such extensive features discussed here. If these features are of interest though, all you need to do is upgrade.
Blueprint
This function allows you to define workflow processes that run within your business, to help structure your sales process around that workflow and thus bring all sales team in line with this methodology, ensuring process complicance from the teams. Take a look at the animation below, it reminds me of the Workflow functionality in SageCRM, which is very useful for compliance related auditing in larger companies.
Zia
'Zia' is Zoho's new Artifical Intelligence function that pushes stats, data and also tips to you one a daily basis. It shows as an unobtrusive icon in the bottom right of the screen and tells you stuff like Task closure rate and whether or not this is down on the week before, Sales closure trends for the week and so on. The user can click the updates to find out more info. This is great for larger organisations with a lot of users; if you have small teams / just a few users you may not need it so much, hence the inclusion on the Enterprise license. Zia's appeal however is that it 'pushes' the information to you and save the trouble of finding the dashboard or report and also builds in trends and predictions as shown below.
SalesSignals
SalesSignals is a centralised integration/feed type function that enables you to centralise all of the information gathered not only from Zoho CRM but also 3rd party apps you may be using such as MailChimp, SurveyMonkey or DocuSign. Notifications from these apps are displayed within Zoho CRM helping to increase productivity. This is something we really love about Zoho: the way they embrace other cloud apps and work together with them, integrating them rather than running as separate applications.
Additional Telephony Integrations
Zoho CRM have increased the suite of telephony apps that integrate to Zoho CRM to include the following:
Conditional Fields
Zoho CRM now allows you to create complex form conditions that will enable you to display different fields and sections to different users based on user profiles. The advantages to this are that users see only what they need to allowing them to work faster and more efficiently.
Lead Scoring
Add scoring points to your leads by building in scroing logic based on the criteria you define allowing faster prioritisation and follow up by sales people.
Office365 Integration
This has been a long standing request from many of our customers and now Zoho CRM integrates seamlessly with Office365, allowing you to integrate all of your Users, Contacts and Calendars in one location.
Slack Integration
Again, Zoho, rather than trying to push all potential project management type users to their own Proiject Management software, Zoho Projects, have integrated the popular project management / collaboration app 'Slack', to Zoho CRM. This allows you to notify everyone instantly on sales wins, meetings and more as well as get reminders from Slack right inside your Zoho CRM calendar.
Interested? Contact Us
If you are interested in exploring these features get in touch with us here for a free, no nonsense consultation.