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Zoho People Plus: All You Need To Know

Abhishek Sharma / applicant tracking system, cloud based HRMS, HR Suite, offer letter management, payroll management, unified HR Platform, zoho consultant, zoho partner / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Zoho People Plus is a cloud-based HRMS and one-stop shop for all your human resource needs. The software assists with the complete people process, from handling an entire employee lifecycle on a single platform to carrying out Core HR Operations digitally and quickly. A well-integrated solution, such as Zoho People Plus, may help your firm advance by optimizing HR operations and managing its people.

Your employees may receive outstanding digital HR experiences from Zoho People Plus while the entire employee life cycle is managed on a single integrated platform.

Empowering them and maintaining their engagement helps to create excellent teams.

You can construct bespoke services, start from scratch, and build workflows to link your ATS, HRMS, or performance tracking with timesheets.

Zoho People Plus- The Perfect HR Suite

You need a whole suite that would provide the ideal experience for your employees, given the growing requirement to hire the top personnel and keep them. With the help of the integrated Zoho People Plus suite of tools, you can manage your employees’ hiring, performance reviews, payroll (in India), and expenses.

Seven applications are included with Zoho People Plus to assist you in managing your employee relationship from employment to retirement.

When it comes to finding fresh talent, Zoho Recruit is your go-to tool. It lets you manage your personnel database, leave and attendance, performance reviews, travel management, birthday reminders, and more.
The integrated receipt scanner in Zoho Cost, a comprehensive expense management application, makes entering data quick and easy.
For all of your organizational discussions, use the communication software Zoho Cliq.
You can quickly process your employee payroll with the aid of Zoho Payroll.
Use Zoho Expense to automate processing payments, expenses, and invoices. Automate your HR procedures, employee requests, and business processes.
With Zoho Vault, you can store, update, and manage passwords for your entire team. Never again waste time typing or trying to remember your passwords.
With features like Q&A and multi-thread conversations, Zoho Interact is a platform for your employees to connect and collaborate. It also functions as a platform for remote collaboration.

Manage All Actions Involving Your people

With Zoho People Plus, it’s easy to keep track of every aspect of your employees’ demands and productivity. This begins with the hiring procedure and continues throughout the employee’s employment with your business. You may manage your timesheets, payroll, benefits, contacts, and personal information.

Discover jobs that your business has advertised and communicate with HR easily.
Arrange interviews and carry them out either in person or via video call.
Manage routine HR tasks such as timesheet administration, attendance tracking, leave administration, viewing organizational charts, and holiday lists.
Handles pay stubs, travel costs, and reimbursementsPrivate messaging, discussion boards, polls, press releases, town halls, and more.
Securely exchange passwords for popular apps among friends.
Establish directional goals and KRAs and obtain 360-degree feedback from managers and peers. Use the LMS platform to rapidly respond to employee questions while training them on the job.

Why Choose Zoho People Plus?

1. The central database for all personnel requirements

Real-time updates eliminate the need for manual entry.

With a consolidated database, all apps will automatically reflect modifications performed in one location.

2. Dismantle silos

Your people speak when your systems do. Develop a networked system for your teams so they can transcend their limitations and become more productive.

3. Simple to administer

You can manage all workforce-related tasks from a single administrative portal, add users to all applications, and define role-based access to various apps.

4. Speed up your procedures

Any amount of knowledge is useless if it cannot be accessed.

You and your staff can easily stay informed when the data is on a single platform. When everyone is on the identical page, your processes run faster, smoother, and brighter.

Get All You Want With Zoho People Plus

Employee digital experience: Utilize self-service solutions to guarantee a seamless HR service experience.
Adaptive software: Supplying methods for managing vast amounts of data as firms expand
Easy customization: Customize existing services or design all HR-related services from the start.
Active collaboration: Foster cross-departmental or employee collaboration.
AI Assistant: Automate routine processes like event planning, reminders, or approval bot creation.
Strong analytics: Make the best choice by carefully examining the data for each function.

An Integrated And Unified HR Platform for a Better Employee Experience

Manage your personnel life cycle, time-consuming activities, and employee empowerment on a single platform with Zoho People Plus. Zoho People Plus provides an exceptional employee experience while allowing you to optimize your HR procedures and create a collaborative and engaging atmosphere within your organization.

1. Control the employee lifecycle

Zoho People Plus can help you manage the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring through onboarding, engaging, and empowering employees. From an applicant tracking system to expenditure management to an internal portal that encourages employee engagement, our system delivers the tools you need at each level.

2. Employee engagement

Improve workplace efficiency via employee engagement. With automation, Zoho People Plus creates a productive work environment and offers a variety of fun processes to connect teams while boosting engagement and productivity.

Social platform: Involvement of teams and fluid teamwork. Create a conversation platform for the group, and even between teams, so that ideas may flow freely, discussions can be finished more quickly, and the most crucial decisions can be reached jointly.
The AI assistant Zia: Zia, the intelligent assistant from Zoho, helps with scheduling and arranging activities like interviews, staff orientations, and client meetings. Zia can also set alerts, send messages and reminders, and help reschedule.

3. Scale for your HR requirements

Zoho People Plus expands with your company. So no matter how many employees or data you have, you will never be without the tools and resources you require for your organization to succeed. The Zoho People solution was designed to help organizations manage their human resources.

4. Talent acquisition

Experts in human resources rely on fostering a positive workplace and culture to maintain substance and compete.

Gaining crucial insights throughout each stage of the hiring process is made feasible with this service.

Simple to administer: This establishes and maintains a single platform for all employee-related management to facilitate easy and rapid access.
Single database for the needs of all personnel: With real-time updates, a single database eliminates the conventional method of entry. Instead, changes made in one place will be automatically reflected elsewhere. As a result, it is simpler for staff to stay updated with a single database.

5. Recruiting

The most expensive subscription from Zoho People includes a tool called Zoho Recruit, which is used for recruiting.

You can manage job advertisements, candidate pipelines, and candidate information from a single spot with the help of Zoho People Plus’s ATS features. It’s simple to edit your job applications. Streamline your hiring process, provide candidates with a wonderful experience, and get the top candidates.

Find Candidates
Resume parsing
Applicant tracking system
Onboarding
Offer letter management (with E-sign)

6. Talent management

Key Result Areas (KRAs) assist in laying out talent tasks, from new employees to team leaders.

Zoho People Plus offers the ideal approach to developing, managing, and directing people toward an organization’s objectives.

The system allows employees to grow professionally for each job role and aligns them with smaller personal and larger company goals.

7. Core HR

Streamlined and effective HR procedures: With the incorporation of Zoho People Plus into the company, daily HR processes can be automated, employees can be given more control, and HR operations may be transformed. As a result, HR procedures are effective in improving employee satisfaction.
Case management in HR: Assign an agent, categorize each query type, and organize and track each case’s progress according to established SLAs using the HR case-management application. The many inquiries about travel, wellness, corporate policies, and complaints are streamlined by a management solution.

Stages Of Zoho People Plus Project Schedule

There are several stages to the Zoho People Plus project timetable-

Process and policy information exchange, data gathering, and verification
Module configuration by organizational rules, automation and process, and dry portal testing
Analytics and customization of the platform’s integrated HR services
Strategic development and integration of all tool
User testing, training, and feedback integration throughout 4-6 sessions
Data entry, data matching, client-verified data review, and data rectification
2-3 administrative training sessions, client handover, and go-live

What Benefits Does Zoho People Plus Offer Your Company?

You can control every aspect of HR administration from a single dashboard while knowing that all employee data is safe.
You’ll be able to maintain track of your time, annual leave, and attendance, which will help you avoid mistakes and simplify timesheet creation.
You can determine an employee’s strengths and shortcomings as you set goals, provide feedback and evaluate performance.
With this fabulous kit, you may automate mail notifications, set tasks, start automatic field changes, and launch bespoke applications.
You may use your time more productively and intelligently by setting up clever workflows.
Customization enables you to design unique forms with the data you need to meet your business needs.

Use Zoho People Plus And Get The Best Results

Zoho People Plus is an all-in-one unified HR platform that supports the complete people process, from managing the entire employee lifecycle on a single platform to performing the Core HR Operations digitally and effectively. You may give your employees a wonderful experience with the aid of Zoho People Plus.

Enables people to effortlessly communicate with HR and find jobs that your business has posted.
Schedules interviews and conducts them by video call or in-person to simplify the screening process.
Simplifies the transition from applicant to employee and automates the onboarding procedure.
Assists in managing routine HR tasks, including handling timesheets, keeping track of attendance, tracking leaves, viewing organizational charts, creating holiday lists, and more
You can define directional goals and KRAs and receive 360-degree feedback from peers and supervisors.
Can use the LMS platform to respond to employee questions rapidly and train them on the job
Handles pay stubs, travel costs, and reimbursements.
Enables open dialogue through one-on-one chat, forums, polls, announcements, town halls, and other means.
Aids in securely distributing passwords for popular apps across peers

The Bottom Line

Zoho People Plus is an excellent option for businesses looking for economic HR software with top-notch hiring features, time-tracking capabilities, and cost management capabilities.

In actuality, Zoho People Plus offers features comparable to some much more expensive options.

Reducing HR procedures and managing employees, a well-integrated solution like Zoho People Plus could accelerate your company’s growth.

To get the best assistance with Zoho People Plus, contact our skilled team of experts at Encaptechno. As an authorized Zoho Partner, we have been assisting businesses in becoming truly digital by offering implementation and consulting experience. In addition, we aim to close the loop at every stage thanks to our exposure to rules, procedures, and processes from various industries and organizations.

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationapplicant tracking system, cloud based HRMS, HR Suite, offer letter management, payroll management, unified HR Platform, zoho consultant, zoho partner

10 Common Zoho CRM Mistakes and How to Avoid Them?

Abhishek Sharma / common crm mistakes, crm structure, online crm system, zoho consultant, zoho crm implementation / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

The customer relationship management systems have been helping many businesses grow by streamlining the entire sales process. However, the most important requisite for the CRM structure to perform well is a successful deployment of the system. There are many factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the online CRM system. They include ensuring that all the features are included, process-oriented implementation, and correct third-party integrations.

No matter how much prior focus is laid on not making mistakes while CRM implementation, something or another goes wrong easily. When the CRM systems were introduced in the beginning, they offered businesses a long-term strategy to promptly engage and manage customer relationships, close more deals, and automate any kind of recurring tasks.

A common misconception that comes with a Zoho CRM implementation is that it is seen as a one-time event. People make the mistake of thinking that after the implementation of Zoho, all lost leads, broken sales methods, and lack of follow-ups will be repaired. Even though it is true that the Zoho CRM system is designed to support the sales process through and through, it must also be remembered that the system will not by itself cause the business to grow.

Hence, it is necessary to consider CRM implementation as an important long-term and company-wide process as opposed to a one-time event. Oftentimes, the managers have the best intentions but their strategies end up hitting the hard ground during the implementation phase. In this blog, we will see why that is by looking at the 10 common Zoho CRM mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Inability to Underline a Problem

Somehow, this tends to be one of the most common mistakes during the process of Zoho CRM implementation. Understanding that you have a problem is the primary step. You may also have heard this before but let us look at this point in reference to the sales cycle.

You must understand the CRM strategy starts to unfold right when you are deliberating about choosing a CRM system. It is very much possible to think that you do not even have a problem. You must know how to manage all the touchpoints a potential customer can possibly have with your business.

Factors such as knowing how to sift through emails, the important points in your notepad, managing your call records, the customers who are there in your sales pipeline, and the revenue that can be expected next month are all important. If you feel that any of these factors are not understandable or known by you then there is a good chance that there is a problem in your sales cycle.

When you know all the problems, you will be able to use the features offered by the CRM system in a much better way. After all, the CRM systems are there to support you and make your work-life easy to manage. So you must see the problem for what it is and own it because the good news is that there is always a solution.

2. Failure to Purchase the Value of CRM

You must remember that communication is key in this situation. As a manager, you should understand the value that a CRM system is capable of bringing to your business. Once you understand this value properly, you will be able to make a better sense out of the big picture and the value that CRM can bring to your organization.

All employees are like puzzle pieces that fit into a bigger picture of your business growth. Getting a better context of how the CRM can support these roles can help employees to buy into the CRM strategy. You can help your team make the most out of the value of CRM by considering factors like the business growth strategy of CRM, the value provided by CRM to each time and organization, and the context of an existing CRM process.

All through this, the important part is to keep in mind that the sales team needs extra attention during the change. You would not want the sales team to think that you are adding a mundane task to their already existing busy day. You can gain buy-in from the experienced sales professional by offering a context of how the CRM system is designed to work on tedious tasks and problems out of the way so that the focus can be on closing deals.

3. Failure to Communicate Goals

Any changes can open a door for misunderstanding, loss of motivation, and frustration. Being a manager you can set expectations from the beginning. It doesn’t matter if your goals are not clear at the moment, you can give your team an idea of where you want to go and how the online CRM system is going to help in achieving that.

It must be clear that a CRM is like a consistently functional strategy that helps a team close more deals so that the business can grow. You can keep your team motivated by answering questions like what is the need of implementing a CRM system, how will the CRM system support the individual roles, and how can a CRM system offer a better context about these processes?

4. No Ongoing Executive Support

Avoid being the professional who has one meeting with the staff only to disappear later. It is necessary to be present and involved in the integration process. This way, you will not just give your employees a new process but you will also integrate a system into an already existing process.

Your employees should be able to trust you and when you are proactive while keeping your team accountable for integrating the process, the online CRM implementation and function become easy. The focus should be to keep the team in the knowledge by facilitating regular communication on how the employees are integrating CRM into the process.

Other than this, you must also be able to schedule individual meetings with employees and ask for their special input on the improvement of processes within the CRM system. In addition, you should also be able to hold the team leads accountable for supporting a long-term strategy with the integration of the CRM system.

5. No Strategy In Effect

It is easy to know that we need a CRM system but it is much harder to implement and use the CRM system in a suitable way. It is possible that you have deployed your CRM system to check off all important items. You could have also created roles and profiles, migrated the correct data, set up the workflow automation, put webforms on your website, scheduled the sales pipelines reports, and set up lead assignments.

However, the main challenges come when you are getting your teams to use it all. You have to give this part due consideration so that the job can be successful. Setting up the online CRM system and deploying it is a small part of the entire CRM strategy. The CRM system implementation actually continues after deployment as well. This is a long-term strategy.

You can consider factors such as how your team will be using the CRM, how the team will support the sales, marketing, and customer support, how the team will be held accountable for updating data constantly, how the employees will be trained, and which online CRM training will make you available to your team.

An effective Zoho CRM implementation strategy will include the development of a company culture where the customers are at the center of a business. You must be dedicated and consistent with your goals and strategy so that the CRM system can support your business growth in the right manner.

6. Taking More Features Than Needed

A common mistake while choosing and implementing the CRM system is getting attracted to multiple features without really understanding if your business requires them or not. There are many users who do not end up using the features of CRM properly.

You do not have to choose the most advanced and feature-rich uses. Rather, it makes sense to determine the most suitable features for you based on the business needs that you have. Make sure that everything is aligned with your budget and priorities.

Before the implementation, make a list of all the features that you want to use. It will also be beneficial if you end up getting the inputs of your end-users while asking them about the workflow pain points that they wish to solve.

7. Not Training the Team

Choosing and implementing a CRM structure is only the beginning of a long battle. A robust online CRM system will not mean anything if no one understands how to use it. Therefore, correct implementation and training the end-users on how to use the CRM system is important.

When you do this, you will help your team understand the need and benefits of using the system and also encourage them to integrate the CRM into their daily tasks. This will help you in having a low adoption rate. Businesses have a long way to go when it comes to CRM adoption.

Businesses must realize the importance that the CRM system is capable of bringing while increasing sales performance. The best way to avoid this mistake is by having a proper training program in the right place so that the end-users can have a chance to explore the system before officially adopting it in everyday activities.

Taking the support of a Zoho consultant can help you train the team for using CRM. You can discover the training tips such as planning, using resources, determining best practices, and creating training modules for making the most out of a CRM investment.

8. Not Using Mobile CRM

The most important benefit of accessing a CRM with a mobile device is that you can do it anytime and anywhere. This is one of the common CRM mistakes made by many companies. You must realize that mobile CRM keeps you on top of your tasks without any need to be in front of the computer at all times.

Not using the mobile CRM app properly can slow down the response time to customers and increase the chance of missing out on important customer updates. Most salespeople who use their mobile phones are able to meet their sales quotas as compared to the ones who do not.

Most of the teams that use the mobile CRMs also end up improving their overall productivity. You can choose a CRM system with an excellent mobile CRM app and ensure that the sales team downloads and uses it.

9. Failure to Maintain Clean and Accurate Data

The customer data is more like the lifeblood of a CRM system. It is necessary to ensure that you migrate and maintain correct and updated customer data into the online CRM system.

Despite understanding the importance of this, many businesses fall into the trap of maintaining bad data that result in inaccurate sales forecasts and outdated customer information. All the missing, outdated, and incomplete data ends up costing a lot to the companies.

To make sure that this does not happen, organizations can create a standard practice on data entry for the team to follow. For instance, the process of identifying mandatory fields that should be filled out when creating a new customer profile so that duplications are removed.

This can include full name, company name, contact details, landline, and mobile details, address, and social media profiles. Other than this, you can also schedule periodical setups to clean the maintenance system. Doing this can help in seeing duplicate or missing information after which steps to rectify things can be taken immediately when the process is done regularly.

10. Lack of Integration

One of the prime benefits of using a business tool and multiple software applications is the ability to integrate tools with each other. Any failure to do the same will end up decreasing the productivity level as it forces the users to use various systems and toggle between different business tools.

As a result, the chances of data duplication and scattered business knowledge will increase. Most people understand that lack of business integrations with other tools is one of the biggest challenges of using the CRM structure.

Before the CRM implementation, make a detailed list of all the business tools and see if they are compatible with each other or not. The CRM providers must have a list of native and third party integrations available to use the system. If you have a CRM system and are planning to subscribe to other tools then you can do the same by checking if the CRM integrates with these tools or not.

In case you discover that the CRM does not integrate with a business tool then you can also consult a Zoho consultant. The consultant will introduce an automation tool that can connect apps and services. Two or more applications will be easily connected to automate all repetitive tasks without any need to code or depending on developers for integration.

Conclusion

Making CRM mistakes can be costly. They do not just include financial impacts but they also lead to a loss of valuable time and key customer data management. The good thing is that careful research on important aspects such as knowing the right features, integrating them suitably and following the implementation process can avoid the common CRM mistakes.

You can consider all the mistakes mentioned above so that they can be avoided or you can do a better job and take the support of a Zoho consultant. This way, your business will be prevented from making potential hiccups down the road.

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationcommon crm mistakes, crm structure, online crm system, zoho consultant, zoho crm implementation

Sell on the Go with Zoho CRM

Abhishek Sharma / lead management system, lead nurturing strategy, sales funnel, zoho consultant, zoho crm implementation / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Sales are all about closing deals and generating revenue. It is not something that can only be accomplished by making calls or sending emails from a desk. Many times, you have to travel as well. When you are on the road, you will need a CRM mobile application that is both powerful and intuitive.

The mobile version of a CRM application helps in doing a lot more in much less time while staying ahead of your work and following up with the prospects to get more deals. Don’t get this wrong. A mobile CRM is not like the low-sized version of desktop CRM.

It is actually a more specialized and dedicated platform that is aimed at higher productivity. It lets the professionals focus on what matters the most. Most companies understand that maximum internet usage is through mobile phones and tablets as compared to desktops. This actually shows that the mobile versions of software and applications also lead to much more productivity.

In this blog, we will discuss six ways in which you can sell on the go using the Zoho CRM while empowering your sales team when they are on the move.

1. Smart Planning

You must be able to access your schedule within a moment’s notice. Opening up your laptop while you are commuting to see a prospect for finding your calendar is not something that is practical.

This is why Zoho makes it simple for you to view and track your schedule from the Zoho CRM mobile app. You can add tasks, create events, invite participants, and schedule calls from the Home Screen. In case you enable notifications, you will also be able to receive reminders of calls, events, and tasks that you have coming up in the future.

2. See Your Key Sales Metrics

The Zoho CRM implementation helps you see dashboards in the desktop version which further enable you in tracking trends in your sales, support, and marketing departments. This dashboard can help you see how many sales deals your team is making each month, glance at deals you have in the pipeline, record campaign success rate, and see the generated revenue per quarter.

The same information can also be accessed in the mobile application. You can also use the mobile dashboard to classify your CRM information into different dashboards on the basis of Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, Deals, Products, Inventory, Cases, and Solutions. Each segment differentiates information so that it becomes easy to find what you need quickly.

3. Locating Nearby Customers

Using the mobile Zoho CRM, it becomes possible to locate nearby customers. The lead management system can become remarkably enhanced with the use of this feature. There is a Map View in the Zoho CRM mobile application that helps in finding prospects near you wherever you go.

With the use of this feature, you can easily locate the leads, contacts, and accounts in your area while scheduling meetings when you are on your next business trip. There is another significant use of the Map View. By using this feature, you can use where your leads are located and figure out the best time to contact them at any time.

4. Keep Track of Meetings

The sales professionals meet their customers almost on a daily basis but when the need comes, it is not so easy to recall all those customers. The Zoho CRM helps to check in at a customer’s location and log in all visits while adding more metrics to the reports.

This helps the managers to improve their sales strategy by generating reports based on the number of meetings that get logged in at a given period. You can track the number of customers and places a sales professional has visited each day, the total distance traveled by the agent, the total time taken to travel, etc.

This thing becomes much easier by recording information as a voice note instead of typing it as a text. The voice notes can be downloaded at any time.

5. Work On the Go

Using Zoho CRM, you can take your work anywhere you go. There is no need to sit behind a desk just for being productive. This feature helps in nurturing your lead nurturing strategy as well.

Basically, Zoho CRM does not let you sit behind a desk for being productive. You can instead stay connected at any time and anywhere with the offline mode in your Zoho CRM mobile application.

You can easily update a note, log a call, complete a task and add an event to your calendar even when you do not have internet access. All changes made in an offline mode will be synced automatically as soon as you go back online.

6. Follow Up Instantly

Zoho CRM allows you to follow up with leads instantly. With features such as MailMagnet, you can get notified instantly about important emails from leads and customers.

In addition, MailMagnet can also be used to scan your inbox and bring the emails from prospects and customers to your focused attention. Not only does it allow you to prioritize attention, but it also helps in sending emails, adding notes, and adding follow-up tasks right away. You can do all tasks single-handedly.

7. Real-time Collaboration

You can never expect all of your team members to be at one location when you have to make a collective decision. With the use of features such as feeds, you can keep everyone on the same page and increase your chances of winning a deal.

It allows you to see the work done by your team, comment on it, and also post a status to keep your team updated on the work. Being a sales representative, it is not easy for you to be everywhere. In case you have a team of sales representatives, they will be in different locations at different times.

However, the Zoho CRM mobile app helps you and your team centralize the CRM data. You can stay up to date on all of your tasks and handle your work in a way that you feel comfortable so that productivity increases.

Conclusion

Take your CRM wherever you go and sell immediately. Getting in touch with a Zoho Consultant can help you in getting real-time updates, receive notifications, access customer information, find your customers nearby and do much more.

Encaptechno has a wide experience of supporting many customers by offering Zoho consultancy services. You can get Zoho mobile CRM today and begin selling on the move while making your business dreams a reality. Contact Encaptechno today!

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationlead management system, lead nurturing strategy, sales funnel, zoho consultant, zoho crm implementation

All You Need to Know About Zoho Contracts

Abhishek Sharma / clm platform, clm system, contract lifecycle management, contract management software, zoho consultant / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

The contracts are legal documents that govern almost every penny that either comes in or leaves a business. If the businesses are equipped with the right contract management software for managing them then they can transform contracts from static documents into strategic assets. In a business landscape that changes so quickly with the evolution of technology, regulatory measures are coming up often.

Moreover, the global supply chains are only becoming complex and the marketing and sales models are becoming increasingly diverse. This is a state that has led to a need for digital contracts that can be easily accessed and amended. There is an increasing demand for a powerful CLM platform that allows you to manage and get the most out of your contracts.

A powerful contract lifecycle management software lets you automate and streamline contract processes and unlock the real potential within them. With a CLM such as Zoho Contracts, legal teams can save considerable time which can be invested in high-value tasks.

In this blog, we will have a detailed look at Zoho Contracts and the functions that this software offers.

What are Zoho Contracts?

Zoho Contracts is a simple solution for all the contract challenges. It helps in efficiently streamlining the Contract Lifecycle Management process with a feature-rich platform while achieving compliance at scale with reduced costs.

The implementation of CLM platforms like Zoho Contracts enables you to reduce contract cycle times, mitigate business risks, and improve contract governance. It is a complete contract solution that eliminates the need for multiple applications.

All business owners can stay on top of their business contracts no matter where they go. Zoho Contracts applications create a personalized mobile dashboard that offers insights into key contract metrics. The application also comes with features that are needed when you are away from your desk.

Other than offering efficiency in legal operations, the Zoho Contracts software facilitates better business outcomes. It addresses the below-mentioned aspects of legal operations.

Streamlining Contract Lifecycle

There are five stages included in the contract lifecycle that Zoho Contracts takes care of and they are mentioned below:

Authoring: Zoho Contracts comes with an extensive library of predefined contract templates and an ability to create custom templates in Zoho Contracts which makes contract authoring a breeze. The contract type templates along with the clause library in Zoho Contracts bring a systematic approach to contract authoring. It helps in saving a lot of time at the authoring stage while ensuring that there is language consistency across all contracts. The document editor comes with advanced document assembly capabilities, collaborative editing features, fillable field features, contextual commenting, etc.
Approvals: All contracts are legally binding documents so the content included in them must be clear, concise, and accurate. The approval process of contracts can improve compliance and reduce risks by making sure that stakeholders are aware of the scope of a contract before it is executed. Zoho Contracts can be used by admins to set up approval workflows both sequential and parallel and associate them with contract types. The approvers can add contextual comments in the documents and approve or reject them as well.
Negotiations: As opposed to the traditional approach in which you send contracts back and forth as email attachments, Zoho Contracts helps you with controlled access to counterparty contacts with password-protected links. The counterparty contacts can collaborate with each other in real-time, suggest relevant changes that should be made to the document, make contextual comments, and set the visibility. This negotiation history tracking and comparing changes feature comes in as highly useful when there are various negotiation rounds.
Execution: Zoho Contracts is a CLM system that comes pre-integrated with an e-signature software called Zoho Sign which makes this important step in the contract lifecycle extremely quick and effortless. The turnaround time for emailing, printing, signing, and faxing cycles can be eliminated or reduced considerably. You can sign and secure the legally binding electronic signatures within a few minutes. A signing order can also be specified that pans all across the signer group, organization signers, counterparty signers, other representatives, etc.
Post-execution Management: The use of Zoho Contracts also supports the post-execution stages along with amendments, extensions, terminations, and renewals. The software comes embedded with a predefined letter template that is customizable for each of these stages. The conventional templates only offer a skeletal structure of the document in which all members can contextually edit the content and make it complete. On the other hand, Zoho Contracts enables a user to amend a contract by making changes in the contract as the amendment letter that gets generated automatically captures the current changes along with the entire contract history. This extreme reduction of any manual intervention in document generation makes the lifecycle management of post-execution contracts extremely simple and straightforward.

Creating Risk Proof Contracts

Zoho Contracts is excellent contract management software that can help in gaining access to predefined templates for commonly used contracts such as NDAs and MSAs. Templates can act as a guide rail for the contract authors. You can change the details as much as you need while authoring a contract. You can also create your own template.

Instant contract creation is also enabled with the use of Zoho Contracts as you can simply add the contract and counterparty information in a form for generating contracts with all the right details in place. The contracts can be created based on the templates which empower all members to create contracts while also ensuring that there is language consistency across all contracts.

Zoho Contract comes with a built-in document editor with all features in a powerful word processor called Zoho Writer. The cloud offering allows you to author contracts from wherever you may be. Lastly, the advanced clause picker enables contract authors to search for and insert a clause in a contract easily. All the clauses in predefined templates including the ones you add are available in the clause library.

Contract Data Can Be Turned Into Business Insights

The feature of Dashboard lets you gain a high-level overview of your business at a glance while quickly making informed decisions. You can see the KPIs regarding your business health and growth at your fingertips.

Other than the Dashboard feature, the Reports feature also helps in gaining actionable insights across all aspects of the contract management system. You can check on things such as milestones, clauses, obligation, counterparty, performance, and other general contract attributes.

Enhancing Governance

Zoho Contracts is advanced contract management software that enables admins to make well-informed decisions by arriving at actionable business insights gleaned from a wide range of contract data. It comes with more than 30 standard reports across different aspects of contract management. And the personalized dashboard offers a high-level overview of business contracts at a glance.

Moreover, Zoho Contracts also allows activity tracking on three different levels including the contract level, user level, and stage level (approval, negotiation, signature). All kinds of activities performed by users on these levels are tracked chronologically. The stage level tracking presents the contract owner with information on whether the people involved in this stage have received the email notification, viewed the document, and performed the intended action along with time stamps.

The admins can structure the entire contract lifecycle process by configuring the clause library, contract letter templates, contract type templates, and approval workflows for contract types. The activity, access, and audit logs offer better visibility over organization-wide activities.

Reducing Business Risks

Adding suitable clauses such as limitations of liability and indemnity can eliminate all risks at an individual contract level and only a holistic contract management process designed with risk mitigation in mind can make a business truly risk ready. The use of Zoho Contracts comes with a peer review and approval workflow capability that offers better transparency over contract items to almost all the stakeholders involved. You can set up a clause library with legally approved languages and contract-type templates that act as a guide rail for contract authors. The governance settings give better control to the admins for the contract process while also improving compliance.

A critical risk factor for a business is to not fulfill contractual obligations. Any failure to comply with obligations can result in adverse regulatory and financial consequences and also leave the organization with damaged business relationships. A CLM system such as Zoho Contracts ensures that all obligations related to a contract can be tracked and managed from the contract obligations section. The contract owner can assign obligations to respective business owners and set reminders for them. Admins can also stay on top of these obligations with the help of obligation-based reports.

Promoting Cross-Functional Integrations

Contracts are considered dynamic documents that touch all parts of a business. The ever-increasing importance of the role of contracts necessitates cross-functional visibility and collaboration over them. The Zoho CRM integration allows sales professionals to initiate contracts from related sections of a deal record in CRM and track the contract’s status from CRM.

Most business development professionals report that any inefficiencies in the contracting process lead to slow revenue recognition. The main cause of this is sales and legal teams working in silos rather than together. The deals that were won and have been closed are often marked as complete after the sales agreement is signed which means that any inefficiency in the contract lifecycle management process of an organization impacts the revenue growth.

Any lack of transparency or difficulty in communication between the sales and legal teams result in long contract cycle times and it can even result in lost deals sometimes. With the Zoho CRM integration, you can establish a sort of transparency between the sales and contract processes while considerably improving the cycle times.

The integration can make the critical functional aspects of Zoho Contracts that are relevant for salespeople within the Zoho CRM. The sales cycle management offered by Zoho CRM and the contract lifecycle management offered by Zoho Contracts works together as the best contracting process for the sales team.

Much Better Control and Compliance

Zoho Contracts is highly functional contract lifecycle management software that keeps all stakeholders aware of potential risks and opportunities in a contract before it becomes active by adding them as approvers. You can design your own approval workflows both sequential and parallel. The approvers can also collaborate through the comment section.

There is a central repository where all the contracts can be stored. There are search and filter options as well that enable much better visibility and accessibility. One can stay on top of all user activities in the CRM platform of Zoho Contracts. It is easy to view the history of all progress, changes, and suggestions made in one place.

With version control, all versions of a contract can be seen in chronological order. It is also possible to compare versions and restore any of the older versions simultaneously. There is another feature of Calendar View that offers a month view calendar display of all the contract schedules and reminders.

You can never miss any obligation or an opportunity for a renewal with the help of reminder alerts. Lastly, with User Roles and Permissions, you can assign roles for users in the organization. There are different access permissions for each role which enable better control over the contract lifecycle management software.

Conclusion

Zoho Contracts can empower organizations and individuals with better control over the contracts because of its impressive automated workflows. It has a wide portfolio of products and seamless integrations that make the workflow very easy to manage.

You can quickly set up Zoho Contracts with only a little support from a certified and experienced Zoho consultant. The professional will be able to introduce you to all features while also importing your key contracts. Get in touch with Encaptechno to stay on top of the contracts all through their lifecycle.

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Guide to Getting Started with Zoho CRM Features

Abhishek Sharma / customer relations, zoho consultant, zoho crm features zoho crm integrations, zoho crm tutorial for beginners / Zoho CRM

If you are interested in sales, have a knack for selling absolutely anything to people, or work in the sales department of a company then you would identify with having that desire to be a smart sales representative at work.

Winning the sales game has a lot to do with using a good CRM system to its full potential. For example, with the Zoho CRM features, your sales can be completely automated leaving you to entirely focus on customer interaction and closing deals.

In this blog, we will be seeing the features of Zoho CRM that can help you in becoming an efficient sales representative who knows how to ace customer relations and be one step ahead. Keep reading to see and understand these features one after another.

Use Zoho Mail Integration

Sales have a lot to do with being prompt with the customers. In case you are a sales representative, you cannot afford to miss out on an important email from a customer. Let’s imagine that you are running through all of your emails and replying to them simultaneously.

However, by evening you realize that you ignored an important email from a hot lead. Now the probable reason behind this could be a cluttered inbox with many emails. Missing out on this important email may not be by intention but the fact is that as a sales representative you cannot afford something like this for your business.

It is important for the sales representative to attend to all the leads as soon as possible and for doing the same, there needs to be a filtered view of all the prospect emails. One of the most used Zoho CRM integrations called Mail Magnet allows you to not just receive emails but also get a filtered view of your prospect’s emails as well.

With this email integration, you will not need to keep checking the emails all the time. Every time you receive an email from a prospect, you will be notified by the mail icon that pops up right on the Zoho CRM home page. Remember that MailMagnet will be available with the Zoho Mail Integration only, so ensure that you ask your Zoho consultant to enable it and configure the email account with Zoho CRM.

Organize Emails According to Sales Priorities

Organize Emails According to Sales Priorities _ Zoho CRM _ Encaptechno

Another important thing to remember while dealing with the customers is that the most recent email is not always the most important too. If a lead has emailed asking about the price of a product or negotiating on the price of a product, then these emails must be immediately accessible. This can save considerable time and effort.

It is natural that you will be organizing the sales activities based on the pipeline and the level each deal is in. What’s notable is that you can organize your emails in a similar way as well with the use of Zoho CRM features. Using the SalesInbox, you can access columns, filters, folders, and columns that can show your sales priorities and allow you to stay at the top of the emails that matter.

SalesInbox functions smartly by organizing all emails according to the way in which you have set up your CRM. Even though the regular email clients allow you to filter emails based on the address of a sender, SalesInbox allows you to filter emails based on the sender’s email address and sales parameters.

For instance, if you get emails from customers who are offering you deals of more than 1 lakh, then that can be specified with the name Top Leads. Using SalesInbox allows you to create many folders and also shows them right on the side of the folders you have.

Using SalesInbox, you can also automate the lead creation in your inbox, get automatic reminders, and work with useful information.

Monitor Customer Activities

For all sales representatives, one of the most critical aspects to ensure sales success will be timing. SalesSignals gives you an immediate notification about what the prospects are up to. You will also know if the lead that you have been chasing has opened your email or not. An alert will be sent to you as soon as the email is opened.

Always keep in mind that the prospects and customers can reach out to you from different channels. They can visit your website, fill surveys, raise support tickets, and post on your social media. To improve customer relations, you will have to be consistent and prompt. The use of SalesSignal helps you track all customer activities by displaying them in an organized way.

SalesSignal will give you a prompt when your leads send you an email, open the email sent by you, click on the links in the email, or when the email gets bounced. You will also be notified when missed calls are received, surveys get filled, new tickets, comments, and responses are received, missed chats are received, or the support tickets are overdue or escalated.

Leverage Social Media for Getting Leads

As a sales representative, you must be aware of all that interests your prospects, the kind of products or services they are looking for, and what their likes and dislikes are. Just like most people in the world, your potential customers use social media and also post regularly. In this process, some of them may also be talking about the prospects they are using, their influencers in decision making, and the product and services they wish to use.

Being a smart sales representative, you must convert every like, reshare, or comment coming from your prospects into an asset. You can effectively convert the social media conversations into actionable leads by lead generation automation through a workflow. All you have to do is configure your social media channel properly.

In case someone tags your organization’s replies to your social media posts then you can add this person as a lead and assign the lead to a sales representative. Anytime someone messages you on social media or comments on your posts, you can also add that person as your contact and assign this contact to another sales representative.

Customize Templates

All sales professionals do not like manual data entry. There are times when complete days get wasted in typing emails while leaving only a little time to do what you are actually hired for and that is selling. Email Templates is one of the Zoho CRM features that can help in getting rid of this.

You can personalize the emails for every activity and send these emails to individual prospects. In addition, you can also send mass emails to a list of leads. If you have imported leads from market research and wish to engage prospects, then you can send thank you emails. All that you have to do is choose the list of leads and send a mass email.

To customize the templates, you have to design your template with the help of text, images, and tables; merge fields to your template, and add headers and footers to the templates.

Track Email Performance

You can also monitor how your emails have performed. Remember that you will not be able to send better emails in case you do not know how they have performed. Hence, a smart sales representative must be able to consistently send engaging emails that can grab the attention of prospects, get them to read and respond as well.

There are smart insights available on how the templates are performing and by using these insights you can get closer to writing better content. The email insights can also get you every day, weekly, and monthly reports on the open, click and bounce rates of the emails. The dashboards can tell which email templates have the best open and click rates.

Keep in mind that you can use the templates that have the highest open rates, update existing content, and create new templates as well. In case the email template that you have been sending then your job is done.

Complete Sales Activities On the Go

The sales representatives work all the time while also being a part of customer meetings, events, and conferences. While managing so many meetings altogether, there must be something handy to update the activities, keep the team in sync, and do important things on the go. Zoho CRM features solve this problem by coming into your pocket.

With Zoho CRM Mobile, you can add leads, create tasks, receive email notifications, find customers, etc. You can locate all prospects near you using Map View and locate leads, contacts, and prospects in any area while scheduling meetings on your trip. You can log in all your visits so that your team knows about all locations that you have visited.

In addition, you can also record your takeaways from a recent meeting with a customer effectively. There is no need to type out lengthy notes, you can just record the voice notes when you are walking and driving, associate the audio files with the records, and download them for reference.

Use AI-Based Sales Assistant

Being a sales representative, you should not let multiple calls go unanswered. There is a smart approach called Zia, an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that shows you the notifications that let you know if your leads, prospects, or customers have been opening up and replying to your emails.

This assistant keeps a track of the time at which the prospects participate in surveys and posts on social media and based on this information, it tells you the correct time for reaching out to the prospect. If you know the best time to get in touch with your customers, you will be able to get more replies from them and at the right time.

Automate Actions

Being a sales representative, you will be following a fixed set of actions while contacting leads. For example, if you have a target of contacting 40 leads a day, and 30 of your calls get answered, then you can leave an email or even a voice message for the other ten leads.

After you complete your daily activities, you will update the tasks done. However, there is no need to manually follow a similar routine because you can automate these actions with macros. All you have to do is just choose the records and run the macro so that the repetitive tasks are taken care of automatically.

The Zoho CRM features know that a large part of your day includes a regular set of actions which is why it prompts you automatically with a suggestion to run a macro. If you call a lead, send that lead a follow up email and create a task then Zia can suggest the same list of actions as a macro the next time. All that is needed for you to do is run the Macro if it suits your needs.

Use CRM View for Activities

The workday of a sales representative is full of multiple events and activities that could be anything from visiting a prospect, demo shows, task creation for calling a prospect, or following up with customers after visiting a website. The main question is that how can a sales representative know which task needs to be taken first on priority?

The CRM View for Activities lets you prioritize all sales activities by being available for tasks, calls, and events in the Activities module. The interface uses a view that lets you plan who should be followed up on that day. This view is divided into the categories called Customers including all tasks associated with the customers; Open Deals including all tasks associated with deals in the pipeline, Leads including all tasks associated with leads and contacts, and Others including all other records.

Streamline With Tagging

You will need special identifiers associated with your CRM records that can help you search, sort, categorize, filter, and also segment the records effectively. The tags can help you in clearly prioritizing all records and contacting them as well. If you have some leads in your account that must be given high priority then you can tag these leads as Important and also filter all of them easily from other leads in the Zoho CRM account.

Conclusion

If you use all the amazing features of Zoho CRM that are listed above then you will see your productivity go very high. Zoho CRM can be used for maximizing your potential as a sales representative but for that you need to have knowledge of all the features offered by it.

If you need further support in the implementation of Zoho CRM then you can get in touch with our expert Zoho consultants. They come with years of experience that can lead them to help you maximize your potential.

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Zoho CRMcustomer relations, zoho consultant, zoho crm features zoho crm integrations, zoho crm tutorial for beginners

How Is Zoho a Good Option for Business Organizations in 2022?

Abhishek Sharma / online crm system, streamline business processes, zoho consultant, zoho implementation, zoho integration / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Ever since Zoho was launched in 2005, it has been focused on enabling businesses to expand effortlessly. This means that if a business wants to grow then Zoho implementation can be very helpful. It offers an ease of use that makes Zoho one of the topmost CRM choices available. All thanks to Zoho, one can still have effective customer relationships even though there is no real person to do a specific job.

Zoho is user-friendly and comes with all that is needed to keep the customers satisfied. It is a decent CRM solution for many types of businesses. The pricing that Zoho is available at is quite competitive and is considered to be at par with Salesforce and Microsoft CRM. The fact that Zoho comes with so many features makes it a great tool for businesses to grow.

Zoho is available in several tiers of plans and ranges from the free option to the Enterprise solution which is a great option for virtually any company. Its applications and features make it worth using for any kind of business. In this blog, we intend to see the different features of Zoho and how it is a good option for business organizations in 2022. Let’s begin.

Overview of Zoho CRM

One can effectively say that Zoho CRM is like an all-in-one solution. It is an online CRM system that does not need you to look through different departments or anything of that sort which makes it an excellent option for businesses of all sizes. Zoho CRM is a tool that all employees can use effectively and this is one thing that is very important.

The Zoho CRM implementation makes sure that employees do not need training for taking advantage of many features right away. It is a CRM solution that can effectively bend to your needs. You can customize the dashboard for different teams or projects and create multiple pipelines for matching the customer journeys. In addition, Zoho CRM allows you to create reports in a couple of clicks with deep insights on just about anything that you can think of.

Moreover, Zoho CRM includes features such as real-time sales signals and customer notifications, blueprint business management for online and offline processes, mass emails, prospect scoring capabilities, advanced customizations, AI assistant, inventory management, etc. The best part is that Zoho is affordable. The cheapest plan that Zoho offers starts at $14 per user per month and there is no skimping on features. If you need customization and features then Zoho’s upper-tier CRM plans come at $23, $40, and $52 per user per month.

What’s more, Zoho also provides a free plan with three users. It comes with many important features such as lead management, task management, document sharing, workflow rules, and a mobile application as well. To help small businesses, Zoho has recently started Bigin – a CRM that enables small businesses to manage their customer relationships easier than ever. When small businesses are prepared to move ahead of spreadsheets and legacy sales tools, Bigin is a great tool to begin.

What’s new in Zoho CRM in 2022?

Other than the many features that customers are already aware of, Zoho is coming up with other powerful features in 2022 that can empower business organizations. These features will be centered on delivering an exceptionally high standard in customer experience. Let’s have a look at them below.

1. Unified Platform for End-to-End Remote Working

One of the biggest problems that professionals have seen while working remotely is context switching. This is a problem that makes the professionals leave tasks incomplete and move on because of an interruption and it creates a negative impact on productivity. There can be many reasons for the disruptions and so many of them are inevitable when working from different locations.

For example, if the web developer is supposed to finish an important task in the fixed timeline and there is an immediate team meeting called then the developer will end up attending the meeting which will leave the task incomplete. This and many other interruptions can be avoided when there is a team collaboration tool in use.

With the Zoho implementation, you can set your status at “Engaged at Work” when you are working on completing an important task while informing your teammates that you will be unavailable. This way, remote work status in Zoho Cliq can help in focusing on work without causing any interruptions.

Zoho Cliq is a team collaboration tool that can be used by professionals for working and collaborating effectively. It comes with remote work features that help in working through the various disturbances along with being integrated with other apps or tools that you use. This helps in avoiding contextual switching at work and being all the more productive.

2. Client-end Scripting

The client scripts help the developers to use JavaScript codes for extending the capabilities of the Zoho CRM system in a way that addresses niche business needs. Since the scripts are executed on the client-side, a team can address many requirements.

This can be primarily done with low latency scripts that perform actions such as field validation, computations, UI actions, auto-population, field validation, enrichments along with trigger widgets, functions, and flyouts.

3. Omnichannel Communication

The present hybrid work environment presents a vital place for the sales representatives to maximize benefits across channels of communication when engaging with prospects.

For building the robust omni-channel communication platform that is already a part of the Zoho CRM system, many enhancements have been introduced across email and telephony systems so that sales can become more effective.

4. Personalized Emails

The personalization of emails has proven to be an important step in building long-term trust with customers. Hence, Zoho is presenting new ways to add a personal flair to emails so that the business identity can be established strongly in the minds of customers.

Zoho will enable businesses to customize all aspects of emails from font styles and sizes to the email signatures for individual email addresses and email aliases. This will help the businesses to foster a much better reputation in the minds of clients.

5. Smart Working With Automated Workflows

Artificial intelligence will hold an important place in future workspaces. While curbing the challenges posed by the pandemic, many organizations realized the importance of AI because it helps in the automation of everyday tasks with the use of bots.

AI also reduces workload and improves productivity by focusing on important work rather than manual data entry on a loop. The workflow automation does not just reduce human error in the workflow but it also saves a lot of time. In fact, automation of the workload can give the professionals the benefit of streamlining business processes.

For instance, one of the important tasks for any organization is to engage the customers and address their questions. This is an important task as happy customers form the foundation of any business. The customer service can address issues and an internal communication tool can help in discussing work items with fellow customer success executives.

Zoho CRM helps in navigating between the customer community while being updated on the new customer posts. You can also engage a bot that instantly notifies new queries and complaints within Zoho. This is an exceptional way in which routine tasks can be automated efficiently.

In addition, Zoho will also be coming up with exciting new updates to Zia which is Zoho CRM’s AI sales assistant. These updates will be bringing new levels of insights and understanding of customers and they will help in building meaningful and personalized customer relationships.

6. Defining Email Sharing Policy

Based on the roles of CRM users and the kind of email communications that you are engaging in, you might want emails to be available to every user in a CRM. The emails should be confidential and they should only be available to a small group of decision-makers.

With the Zoho CRM, you can effectively define your email sharing policy at the organizational level for each role while updating the policy for users in bulk. You can also set email sharing permissions for new employees or update them when users move to assume different roles in the CRM system.

7. Streamline Sales Calls

The native integration comes with an ability for managers to monitor, guide, and support the representatives to improve at making sales calls. The Zoho CRM integration enables sales professionals to keep an eye on how the representatives are performing in their active calls while managing the calls that are there in the queue waiting.

Sales managers can also coach new sales representatives as they progress through a call by jumping in directly to take the lead when the situation calls for it. This will lead to streamline the business process of sales effectively.

8. Understanding Workflow Failures

Workflows play the role of building blocks of automating the sales processes. Anytime when they fail to trigger or do not operate in the manner that they are supposed to, the direct impact can be on the sales performance which can negatively impact customer experience.

Zoho integrations make it simple to get in-depth information about when and where the workflow fails and all the records that get affected. The team can use important data for fixing the underlying problems and get the workflows up and running once again.

9. User Experience

The user experience has been a forgotten aspect when it comes to CRM solutions. While pursuing robust functionality, strong market presence, and competitive prices, businesses can often overlook the experience offered by CRM solutions to the daily users.

A good user experience has the ability to offer a better customer experience because it helps the sales team to be more productive and effective when working with the CRM solution. This is why Zoho has come up with Canvas that lets businesses provide a hyper-personalized CRM experience to users. Moving ahead, Zoho will also be bringing more intuitive features for building on a strong UX foundation.

10. Accessing Multiple CRM Accounts

It will be possible to associate a user with multiple CRM accounts to allow business owners, upper management, and decision-makers for managing multiple businesses with ease.

The users will be able to switch between accounts easily and quickly which will make it easier to access key business data that helps in understanding growth and deriving insights. This feature of accessing multiple CRM accounts can be used to prepare agendas, reports, and ideas for future planning with a single set of login credentials.

Conclusion

The online CRM system that you use should keep growing to keep pace with the constantly growing work environment and technological advancements. Take the step of choosing and employing the best available CRM system for your business so that your organization can function well.

Zoho CRM comes with a free trial which can help you in experiencing all the features that it has to offer. If you want to make the most out of Zoho and all the amazing features that can offer your business, get in touch with an experienced Zoho Consultant of Encaptechno. You can look forward to consistent support and valuable suggestions that will prove valuable for your business.

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationonline crm system, streamline business processes, zoho consultant, zoho implementation, zoho integration

How to Setup Blueprints on Zoho CRM?

Abhishek Sharma / what is blueprint, zoho blueprint setup, zoho consultant, zoho crm blueprint / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Each business has a well-defined way of doing things. There are workflows that serve as a pathway to complete different tasks and projects. The way in which workflows transpire contributes as a significant factor while deciding the software requirements as the software must be robust to offer a vast amount of capabilities that handle unique business processes.

Now, Zoho understands these different requirements down to the core and does everything possible to implement them properly. The Zoho CRM Blueprint is, in fact, a method in which the sales process can be broken down into individual stages. As we transition between every stage, it becomes possible to prompt users and the staff to enter relevant information so that nothing goes unnoticed.

Below, we will first understand what is Blueprint in detail to get a clear context on how we can set it up on Zoho CRM and what it can do.

Zoho CRM Blueprint

From the time a lead gets captured in the CRM system until the time it is followed and beyond, there are many sales processes that an organization carries out in function. For example, there is a company called Explore Electronics Pvt. Ltd. that offers technical gadgets to customers.

Now, other than the online orders that this company might get, they can also have a dedicated sales team that is supposed to follow up on the leads that get generated via demonstrations, offline sources, and events. The sales representatives at Zoho CRM Blueprint can start by calling a set of leads and scheduling product demos with these potential customers.

By the end of this demo, when the prospects get interested in purchasing the projects, a quote gets generated, which can further get converted to an order once it is approved. The products can then get shipped and delivered to the customers.

Sales Problems in Explore Electronic Pvt. Ltd.

Now this process that we just spoke about may sound very simple to you when you read it. However, when it actually comes to the execution of this process, one can face many problems because of certain roadblocks and loopholes. Let us look at them in complete detail.

Oftentimes, the sales managers can spend most of their time training new sales reps, which means that they do not get enough time to focus on their work.
The product and all that it can offer are not always clear in the minds of all the sales representatives. Many times, sales representatives may not be aware of important product details requested by prospects over a call which may also disappoint the lead and result in loss of sale.
At other times, important customer information may be missing. It is only during the process of an order when the delivery team may realize that the customer information or address is wrong, and this can clearly delay the order delivery.
They may be times when the discount policies are not followed. Explore Entertainment may have a policy that discounts cannot be more than 20%, but in some cases, quotes with higher discounts may get processed, which may escape the attention of Sales Managers.

The instances mentioned above are some of the most classic ways in which problems can be encountered when you have a large team for executing a process, but a well-defined system is missing for executing it efficiently. In this case, the main problem always revolves around the absence of clear guidance and validation of CRM.

Solutions Offered by Zoho CRM Blueprint

The Zoho CRM Blueprint can enable an organization to design and execute a process in an organized manner while being completely free from loopholes. With the Zoho Blueprint setup, almost every detail can be captured from the offline process within CRM, and hence the process of streamlining becomes very easy.

It is possible to define each stage in one process and link people with each stage. You can guide your teams along with the execution of a process, validate important information contextually, and also automate routine actions.

Lead Qualification

To make sure that the lead qualification objective is met, Zoho CRM Blueprint helps in making the calling agent’s script pretty linear. The software guides the sales representatives at each step of scheduling a product demo. The Blueprint acts as a call agent script and helps the sales representatives with product descriptions while they are on the phone with a prospective customer. This can solve the problem of any inconsistency in the message being communicated to the sales representatives.
Following-Up

With the Zoho Blueprint setup, almost every step can be regulated in the follow-up process, which consists of sending and reviewing a quote. In this, the discount offered to the customers can be validated by the CRM while ensuring that the sales team is adhering to the policies of the company. The email notifications are automated to the sales managers whenever anyone accepts the quote so that nothing skips their attention.
Order Management

For guiding the sales representatives at each step of the order management process, the Zoho CRM Blueprint plays an important role. It takes care of inventory check, shipping, and even delivery. Here, the sales representatives are also prompted to enter the CRM information such as customer address. This makes sure that there are no delays in product delivery.

Fundamental Blocks of Zoho CRM Blueprint

Blueprint in Zoho CRM is basically designed to execute a business process in a systematic and well-defined manner. With this Blueprint, one can define each stage in a process and associate the right people with every stage. It can also help in guiding the teams all through the execution of a process. In addition, it also helps in mandating and validating important information contextually while automating routine actions.

A Blueprint gets designed by creating a sequential order of the stages counted in a process. In the CRM language, the primary building blocks of a Blueprint are States and Transitions.

State

In a Blueprint setup, a “State” is the condition that something is in at a specific time. For instance, any deal in a CRM goes through different stages until the follow-up happens, which includes qualification, negotiation, and discount approval. All these stages are called a State. The states must be dragged and dropped in the Blueprint Editor to design the process flow.

Transition

A Transition is nothing but a link between two States that come in a process. It prescribes the conditions needed for a record to move from one kind of State to another. For example, the conditions and actions required for a record to move from Qualification to Negotiation are usually prescribed in the Transition block.

Designing a Blueprint

The process of setup or building a process is actually a three-step procedure. It includes:

1. Entering Basic Information

Here, you can specify the module, layout, and field for which the process needs to be created.

You can go to the “Setup”, then “Automation”, and then “Blueprint.”

You can then click on creating a Blueprint.
In this Create Blueprint popup, you can choose the module, layout, and the field for which the process is supposed to be created.
Let us say that the process is that of Following up with leads. In this case, you can choose the Deals module with a Standard layout and Stage field.
For more clarity, you can also specify criteria because if you do not do that, then all records created in the layout will enter the process.
Finally, click on Next.

2. Defining Process Flow

In the Blueprint Editor, you can define the process flow right from the beginning of the default state to the exit state.

In the Blueprint Editor, you can drag and drop all the States that form a part of the process.

You can also establish the process flow between States by connecting different nodes in the State buttons.
You must note that the Start state is equivalent to none value of the chosen picklist field.
You can create Transitions by clicking on the + button between two States. For deleting a transition, all you have to do is right-click on the transition line and click Remove Transition.

3. Configure Transition Settings

You can configure the Before, During, and After Transition settings between different states in the process just as required. For example, we can look at the Transition between the States.

We can name this “Closing”. In the example of Explore Electronics mentioned above, the following can be some of the guidelines that should be observed at the time of configuration.

For completing the Negotiation Transition, a sales representative in Explore Electronics can enter the Discount percentage and the closing date.
Based on the company’s policy, the discount for a product cannot be more than 20%.
Right when the Closing Transition is executed, an email notification can be automated to the sales representative’s manager while informing them about the deal submission.

Hence, one can easily say that Blueprint enables you to create a replica of offline business processes in your CRM. Right from lead generation to deal closure, an organization follows many business processes. The Blueprints can be used to give Zoho CRM users a detailed guide on how to carry out all steps in a business process.

For example, one needs to collect some documents before sending a quotation to a customer. One can set up a stage within a blueprint that mandates the document upload and enable the record to move to the next stage right after the documents have been uploaded.

Conclusion

When the process that you follow offline is not captured accurately in the software application, there is never any assurance that it will be followed in the right manner. There might be some inconsistencies and possible gaps in the process, and this is the problem that Blueprint solves.

The Zoho CRM Blueprint is like an online replication of a business process. It can capture all details of an offline process in the software. Implementing the Zoho CRM Blueprint by getting in touch with an expert Zoho Consultant can ensure automation, validation, and effective team collaboration which further make the process efficient and free from any kind of loopholes.

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationwhat is blueprint, zoho blueprint setup, zoho consultant, zoho crm blueprint

Detailed Understanding of Zoho Subscriptions

Abhishek Sharma / online subscription billing software, zoho consultant, zoho subscription billing, zoho subscription management / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Automation in all business processes has become a necessity rather than a choice. In case a business desires to evolve with time while making sure that all the business processes are completed in an efficient way then automation precedes it all. Zoho Subscriptions introduced by Zoho is essentially an online subscription billing software that is created for growing a business.

You can think of Zoho Subscriptions as an innovative and evolved recurring billing and subscription application that is designed to manage all processes linked with a subscription-based business. It is a platform that comes with a wide range of features and benefits including that of generating multi-currency invoicing, offering discounts, trials, and online and offline payment methods, etc.

Zoho Subscriptions essentially comes pre-loaded with applications and important tools that make it compatible with Zoho Books – the accounting software of Zoho. Another important and significant feature of Zoho Subscription billing is that it comes with a dunning management feature that enables businesses and individuals subscription providers to chase overdue payments from customers and address payment failures.

Offering a highly flexible pricing scheme, Zoho Subscriptions allows the customers to pay a price that falls within their budget comfortably. What’s more, there is a free test package also available so that interested businesses and individual service providers can easily explore a platform’s functionalities and features.

In this blog, we intend to introduce you to a detailed understanding of Zoho Subscriptions, its features, and why you should adopt it. In case you wish to stimulate your entrepreneurial spirit by adding functional software to your use then this blog is for you.

What is Zoho Subscriptions?

After offering a small insight into the Zoho Subscriptions, let us move to understand more about this software application. Essentially, Zoho Subscription is a cloud-based recurring billing and subscription solution that is designed to handle each aspect of a subscription-based business. It is an online subscription billing software that is innovative and helps in addressing payment failures and chasing overdue from the customers.

It provides businesses and individual subscriptions with multi-currency invoicing, trials, offline and offline payment methods, discounts, and other features. What is the best thing about Zoho Subscriptions is that it is loaded with a pre-integrated tool and application that lies at the data level which is basically meant to connect Zoho Subscriptions with Zoho Books – Zoho Accounting software.

Each transaction linked with a new subscription, customer credit, renewal, and refund is almost instantly available in Zoho Books which saves the user’s time and effort to transfer the data manually. Since this integration involves no clicks, efforts, or costs, the users are free of all manual data entries for any of Zoho’s productivity suite products.

To ensure that things become even better, Zoho Subscriptions management also provides the users with a wide range of apps and integrations that help in streamlining the corporate operations. Some important features include RESTful APIs, integrated payment methods, Webhooks, and powerful reporting tools for mentioning a few.

The pricing scheme is actually very flexible which means that the entire system is available even for the users who are on a budget and this is actually great because one can explore important features while seeing if Zoho is the ideal product or not.

Reasons Why You Should Adopt Zoho Subscriptions?

1. Subscription Billing

Regardless of whether you are offering weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription-based advice, all of these things can easily be set up for the auto-billing of your customers. Some of the important features that can be added for the initial setup include the free trials, frequency of billing cycles, tax, price, expiration after some amount of billing cycles, and many more.

You can set up so many plans with ease while including the plan descriptions so that your clients are never unsure or unsatisfied when the billing time comes around. Very similar to the other functional online solutions that come in the Zoho Finance Suite, Zoho Subscriptions is a software application that comes with many pre-existing templates for invoices.

In case you do not have a fixed template, you can also create one so that your auto-billing is sent out on a rather professional level. With this, you can pull out fields from the customer’s data for automatically filling in blanks that are within an invoice.

By using the custom fields, you can record substantial information that relies on the needs of a business to make important decisions when it comes to growing a business. You can also know what works and what does not while adjusting a subscription model accordingly.

2. Processing Payments

One should always know that more is better and this goes for allowing a customer to have different ways to pay for a subscription. With the use of online subscription billing software such as Zoho Subscriptions, it is easy to collect payments. In fact, it can be done online and offline.

Even if you are running an international business, it is possible to do so because Zoho Subscription supports as many as 87 currencies. This means that the international portfolio of your business can be managed under one roof.

To make this simpler, let us give you an example. In case your customer’s payment fails to get processed then you might lose out on the revenue from that client for a month. However, with the implementation of Zoho Subscriptions, this can be helped. Let’s say your client got a new credit or debit card because they lost their old one. Now, this can be a real reason for the payment failure.

With the use of Zoho Subscription Billing, you can easily automate an email for going out to the customer while following up with an email after that. This can depend on the fact if your customer fixed the payment method on the file. When this specific thing goes overlooked, your client might not even realize that they are missing out on paying you for a month. This one stream of revenue that you might be missing out on can actually add up to your overall profit very quickly.

3. Impactful APIs

It doesn’t matter in case you are a small, medium, or large business, the more you can focus your energy on automating things, the more you will be able to save. An important rule to make all businesses thrive is by being smart with the labor costs. These small tasks should not be left to the risk of any kind of human error as well.

With the help of Zoho Subscription API – the root of automation, it becomes possible to create workflow rules that help in automating actions that particularly cater to the business needs. This majorly includes automated email alerts, custom functions, and buttons, and tracking the subscription changes with the help of Webhooks.

This place is right where you will be able to make the most out of the key features in an organization while creating functions that give analytics. In essence, once you have built a machine, maintenance must be minimal. The initial build-out can definitely be costly in the beginning, but in the long run, it can help in saving you a lot of money on the labor and also boost sales.

4. Manage Multiple Subscriptions

Subscription management has a tendency to become complicated when the clients have multiple subscriptions. However, it can become very easy with the help of Zoho Subscriptions management. You can send an invoice to a customer who has subscribed to different products or services along with adjusting their credits.

Zoho Subscriptions helps in adding and managing different pricing plans to the products and services. This further enables you to reach out to a diverse range of potential customers. In fact, you can also get a peek into all the pricing details from a screen while allowing more people to test your products and services on a trial period.

Other than this, the Zoho Subscriptions Customer Portal enables your customers to see important information about the subscriptions, payments made, and statements without any kind of need to wait for sending information. This also helps in updating a card and contact details directly from the portal.

Essentially, with the use of Zoho Subscription Management, you can create plans, offer add-ons and coupons, empower your customers with a dedicated self-service portal, manage multiple subscriptions, and consolidate invoices for different subscriptions.

5. Customized Subscription Experience

By using the Zoho Subscriptions Management, you can choose the invoice templates that you want and make them reflect your brand simultaneously. By adding a company logo and including your terms and conditions, you can customize each element of your invoice.

Other than this, you can change and customize the hosted payment page to make sure that it matches the image of your brand. By using customizable elements, you can convey important information to the prospects before they subscribe to your products or service.

What’s more, Zoho Subscriptions has a ready-to-be deployed pricing table along with a checkout button widget that helps the prospects to get all the important information they need to make a payment in a couple of clicks. All you have to do is edit the widget for matching your needs and embed the code on the website.

In addition, the best is that Zoho Subscriptions makes your clients feel at home after they subscribe because it offers them access to the customer portal. You can personalize the portal to make sure that your customers can make subscription changes without leaving a brand environment.

6. Getting Important Insights

There are more than forty subscription metrics and analytics from Zoho Subscriptions that do the job of reviewing quick insights into the subscription business health such as churn rate and monthly revenue from the intuitive dashboard of Zoho Subscriptions.

Zoho Subscriptions Billing provides financial reports such as net revenue and invoice details, activity-based reports such as API usage, and activity logs that help in understanding subscription billing, the business revenue, and customers. Regardless of the fact if you need to filter a report for a particular time period or see results for a specific product, Zoho Subscriptions helps you. You can easily create custom reports for all of your business needs.

You can also know your taxable amount and the amount of tax you have collected from the clients, with detailed reports that depict your tax summary and the outward supplies to enable you to file your GST returns accordingly.

With more than thirty analytic reports, encompassing sales, revenues, and subscription activity, you can stay at least two steps ahead with your decision-making operations. You can view important information from the dashboard, get important reports such as MRR, churn rate, and LTV, understand the tax liabilities, and get reports delivered to your email.

Conclusion

Zoho Subscriptions is a one-stop recurring billing and subscription management solution. Using the Zoho Subscriptions, you can manage important billing cycles, see customer subscriptions, automate invoicing process and payment collection, manage failed payment retries, and analyze business growth.

Hence, if you make the decision to adopt Zoho Subscriptions now by getting in touch with an experienced and knowledgeable Zoho Consultant, it will pay off immensely for your business. You will be able to experience some of the best integrations that help you in managing all the important aspects of your subscription business.

Encaptechno offers reliable services in the implementation of Zoho Subscriptions. Get in touch today to have the subscription management software installed and experience its unlimited benefits.

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationonline subscription billing software, zoho consultant, zoho subscription billing, zoho subscription management

Why Is Zoho Implementation A Good Investment for Your Business?

Abhishek Sharma / automate business processes, zoho consultant, zoho crm integration, zoho implementation, zoho partners / Zoho Implementation

The success of any business is dependent on customer relationships. Organizations of all sizes are increasingly realizing the importance of investing in a credible customer relationship software application for improved business processes. A CRM application that has managed to change the entire ecosystem of business considerably is called Zoho CRM. This CRM works on the SaaS model, it is light in weight and is cloud-based while being packed with numerous customizable features.

Zoho implementation is perfect for carrying out business operations efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Moreover, Zoho CRM is particularly targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses for storing customer and vendor data, improving customer engagements, and increasing conversion rates.

Empowered with a network of hundreds of thousands of businesses spread across 180 countries, Zoho CRM integration has proven useful to many organizations. It is a highly rated software application that enables companies to grow their revenue, convert leads, and engage with customers.

In this blog, we will understand the way in which Zoho implementation proves to be a good implementation for a business. If you own a company that you wish to expand then understanding the benefits of Zoho implementation will help you considerably.

Zoho Implementation and Business Efficiency

Zoho can be very easily customized for fulfilling the needs of different businesses regardless of their nature and size. Right from small and medium-sized start-ups to large scale organizations belong to a diverse business vertical, all businesses use CRM software for increasing their marketing operations, sales efforts, and customer service processes.

The implementation of Zoho helps to automate business processes with various modules. Some of them include marketing automation, order management, salesforce automation, contact management, customer support, activity management, inventory management, vendor management, website integration, workflow automation, CRM analytics and reporting, and billing and payment management.

Other than this, Zoho can also be integrated with many other applications. In fact, when compared to all the CRM options that are commonly available, Zoho CRM provides some of the widest range of integrations. Other than email integration in Zoho CRM, one can integrate Zoho CRM to applications such as Gmail, WordPress, Office 365, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, and much more.

Zoho Implementation – A Good Investment for Business

The decision to integrate Zoho CRM can without a doubt be the best decision to enhance the business efficiency. The Zoho CRM actually comes with different applications as add-ons that help businesses to boost their overall sales. Below, we will be mentioning some of the benefits why Zoho implementation is a good investment for your business.

1. User-friendly CRM

One of the most important factors that make a software application desirable and we might as well say, beneficial is the user-friendliness quotient. When it comes to ease of use and simplicity, Zoho CRM is exceptionally user-friendly.

The employees of an organization do not need comprehensive technical know-how to monitor and customize the platform. The Zoho CRM integration enables the employees to take care of all the departments that need attention. Moreover, there is real-time access for monitoring sales, deals, and contact history.

All in all, the company’s employees can stay ahead of managing important customer relationships with the implementation of Zoho CRM.

2. Improved Customer Relationships

The implementation of an efficient customer relationship management application is one of the strongest and also an efficient method for maintaining and creating relationships with the customers. With the implementation of Zoho CRM, customer relationship management does not only stay limited to businesses but also ideates to strong bonding with the customers.

The development of this kind of strong bond enables the business to reach new levels of success. Once the personal connection is built with the customers, it becomes very easy to find the actual needs of customers and help them to serve in a much better way.

It is a strong belief that the more streamlined strategies involved in the implementation of customer relationship management, the better and more productive the business becomes. Zoho CRM empowers organizations to be armed with dedicated tools for the maintenance of CRMs in the workplace.

3. Advanced Marketing Processes

The implementation of Zoho CRM leverages and amplifies the customer base of an organization with an effective marketing strategy. In fact, the Zoho CRM brings new dimensions when it comes to marketing by significantly enhancing the overall operations and their execution as well.

The intuitive CRM-associated marketing strategies such as web marketing; email marketing, direct marketing, etc. have been developed in the recent past. These methods are more promising and effective as compared to the traditional ways of marketing because they deliver higher business performance.

Zoho CRM makes all these processes very easy by enhancing the response rates on the marketing campaigns, streamline costs on the promotions and also provide better security on marketing investments. With the assistance of a dedicated Zoho partner, you can improve things such as web marketing, email marketing, analyzing the buying behaviour of customers, forecasting future marketing strategies, and building business impact models.

Zoho CRM comes with synergistic marketing strategies that help in developing high-end marketing businesses. Therefore, it is important for an organization to incorporate them completely by anticipating change, testing their performance, assembling the best strategies, and maximizing the marketing growth.

4. Easy Migration of Data

If you have been looking to change your data management system or even adapt consciously to a new CRM then Zoho CRM is the way to go. It helps in migrating extremely valuable data precisely in just a few simple steps. Once the data gets converted in the required format, Zoho implementation maps out the import files with the modules within the CRM and vice versa.

In case there are no important fields left to map then Zoho CRM takes the responsibility of creating them for you. The entire process of migration is very simple and easy to carry out. In fact, with the support of an experienced Zoho consultant and Zoho’s dedicated data migration, there will be reduced manual work and everything will become much easier when it comes to the migration of data.

5. Telephony Features

To enable optimized call dialing and automatic call logging, Zoho comes up with a single click dialing that can take place directly from the CRM. After the successful integration of telephony, anytime a user views a contact card, there is an option to click to call.

Further, the telephony feature comes with a built-in reminder so that you can set the future callbacks and also automate the call logging which then makes it simple to see the customer information and conversation history. The call analytics and reporting round out Zoho’s telephony features by offering extremely important data visualization and feedback on customer service.

6. Detailed Reporting and Advanced Analytics

Zoho CRM integration enables much more visibility into a business. It allows the sales, marketing, and support team to capture the leads from incoming calls, emails, or messages that come through websites.

You can log into important information about the lead and also the sales activities like important calls, meetings, and emails. With the analytics feature of Zoho, it is also possible to convert the lead to a potential sale for pipeline reporting, run the reports on sales activities per user, and record the sales performance.

This further helps in creating quotes and invoices even in multiple currencies while closing sales and tracking business revenue. You can focus on ROI with better marketing campaigns, track the customer complaints or problems, enhance customer retention, and reduce the overall sales time.

7. Task Automation

With Zoho implementation, it becomes possible to automate various activities within a business workflow and triggering certain actions. This further enables businesses to save a sufficient amount of time because the employers will no longer have to manually record the information which in turn will help them focus on the lead nurturing process and the conversion rate.

In essence, Zoho understands that the task processes can be pretty complex in function. They might include multiple teams, require certain approvals at stages from some people, and may also need notifications to be sent out. Since doing all of this manually can prove pretty tiresome, Zoho comes with tools such as Blueprints that let the tedious work gets completed.

8. Artificial Intelligence Feature

Zoho CRM is known as one of the very few business-focused SaaS CRMs that come with a high-quality AI drive functionality. Zoho’s proprietary AI assistant comes with predictions on trends, anomalies, conversions, and closing deals.

At the most advanced level, which means the ultimate subscription plan, this assistant called Zia offers detailed insights about the best time for contact customers. It also sets auto-reminders that can be used for reaching out to the customers and analyzes the tone of emails sent by customers to come up with the best response.

9. Customization

You can customize your CRM application in the best way possible that suits a business’s needs. By presenting the information you acquire in a unique way, the Zoho CRM can be used for great customization. With the option of Layouts, one can create individual layouts for different processes and in turn control the data that enters a system for making a quick sale.

With custom components, you can use custom modules, fields, and buttons that present the information the way in which you want in the CRM. In addition, you can also cater to more customers across the globe by offering multi-language and multi currency to a team. Finally, the option of views and filters helps in adding custom filters and other settings that mark the important information and make it easily available.

10. Effective Collaboration

Zoho implementation comes with many collaboration tools that are considered suitable for small to medium-sized teams. It has a built-in document management system that stores important documents, pictures, music, and videos which makes accessing these things simple at the time of need.

The access privileges also make it easy to lock down important material and share some items with the team members. The feature of the calendar is also helpful for collaboration because it allows the teams to share calendars so that individuals can maintain an easy calendar within their CRM.

Conclusion:

In case you are handling a business and your focus is on the maintenance of customer relationships then Zoho CRM will help you get everything that is needed to improve the organizational infrastructure and productivity.

You can actually customize your business infrastructure with the assistance of Zoho CRM integration because that will prove beneficial in building a strong organization and improved customer relationships. At Encaptechno, we have a team of focused and experienced Zoho consultants who have offered the best assistance in Zoho implementation to many businesses.

If you wish to ensure smooth workflows then get in touch with us to know more about Zoho implementation.

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Zoho Implementationautomate business processes, zoho consultant, zoho crm integration, zoho implementation, zoho partners

Zoho Sprints V/S Zoho Projects: What is the Difference?

Rabia Bajaj / agile project management tools, project management software, what is zoho projects, what is zoho sprints, zoho consultant / CRM Services

The success of any project relies on finding something that leads to team productivity and effective project management. The project managers in any organization are required to see the bigger picture of each project and they might struggle to manage tasks that can effectively fulfill a project’s need.

More often than not, the project managers deal with a significant amount of difficulty to keep a track of everything that they are supposed to monitor which leads to the situation going haywire. Now, in order to get rid of this chaos, project management software ends up making everything much better and way more streamlined.

Zoho Sprints and Zoho Projects are both project management tools that enable businesses to manage projects efficiently. In case a business firmly believes in following a traditional approach to manage project completion and organize several tasks then Zoho Projects is perfectly suitable.

However, in case a business is keen on following a top to bottom approach for managing projects while ensuring a streamlined workflow at every step then Zoho Sprints can be preferred. Zoho Sprints is essentially an agile project management tool.

In this blog, we will see a detailed comparison between Zoho Sprints and Zoho Projects. In case you are running a business or if you are or aim to become an efficient project manager then this blog will give you a descriptive understanding of two of the most effective project management software applications.

What is Zoho Sprints?

Zoho Sprints can be understood as a cloud-based project planning and monitoring solution for businesses that prefer working on an agile methodology. It provides the agile teams with a drag-and-drop feature, a meeting schedule feature, a dashboard to manage everything, timesheets, reports, a team activity feed, etc. This is software that is used by teams of different sizes working on numerous projects.

It is extremely rich in features, very easy to use, and comes at an affordable cost. The users can begin a free trial of Zoho Sprints just by creating a Zoho account and opening the Sprints application. Eventually, the user can get access to an active application that will include a sample project. This app can enable the user to use rich features and functionality.

Features of Zoho Sprints

As an agile project management tool, Zoho Sprints solves the needs of an agile team for a quick and efficient system capable of keeping up with a fast-paced work environment. It comes with a wide range of features that help in achieving optimal performance. Some of them are:

1. Monitoring Project Development

Being aware of how close or how far away the team is from reaching project completion enables to keep a track of development and also achieving milestones within a decided time period. Zoho Sprints has a Scrum board that is used for tracking each team member’s progress transparently.

As and when a team member will complete a task, it will get reflected in the mutual team feed. Furthermore, the team members can also customize the project status dependent on particular requirements and steps of the project. The team members can reopen different tasks, remove errors, and also move stories with the help of the drag-and-drop method.

It is because of these small details that a project manager stays on track with small details while sorting items according to estimation points, priorities, and story. The graph of Sprint activity enables us to see all the changes made including the items that get added recently, closed, opened again, shifted, and the ones that remain idle.

2. Prioritize Tasks

Regardless of the size of different tasks needed to be completed in project completion, they can pile up on one another easily. In case they are not tracked, the ones with medium to low priority may be easily overlooked. With the implementation of Zoho Sprints, this problem can be solved.

The project management software comes with a drag-and-drop feature which enables to move the hierarchy of tasks based on importance and urgency. Moreover, there are reminders and fixed durations that notify the team members whenever there is a newly released sprint.

3. Timesheets Maintenance

With the help of Zoho Sprints, it becomes possible for all team members to log in to billable and non-billable hours. This enables tracking and aggregating the time logs of all team members. According to their discretion, the team members can choose which task they wish to work on while recording the total time spent on working on the same task.

This project management software has a global timer that helps in starting, stopping, and pausing for certain items so that the day’s work can be broken down. Simultaneously, the scrum master and product owner can also approve the timesheets in just one click. This helps in understanding the total time needed for the upcoming sprint and completing invoices efficiently.

4. Enhancing Project Analytics

Zoho Sprints comes with a velocity chart that offers the project delivery rate of a team and also helps in estimating future sprints. On the other hand, the Burnup and Burndown charts also showcase a team’s speed while reaching the project line.

In addition, the cumulative flow diagram is also important for determining any changes in the work progress and finding any possible bottlenecks. The data that gets recorded in these features helps the team members to implement some actionable steps that can further strengthen a team’s productivity and efficiency.

5. Consistent Interaction With Team

While using Zoho Sprints, it becomes much simpler to manage meetings because the software helps the team members to look for upcoming and already completed meetings.

All team members who are supposed to attend a specific meeting are sent reminders so that it is ensured that the meeting goes as planned and something productive comes out of it. Meetings are extremely important in an agile team. Keeping that in mind, Zoho Sprints enables the team members to connect and collaborate with regular meetings.

The above mentioned are some of the features of Zoho Sprints that make it capable of helping an agile project development. Let us now understand what is Zoho Projects and what features does it offer?

What is Zoho Projects?

Zoho Projects is an online project management software solution that enables a person to run a business with much-needed ease and efficiency. It was made to offer a rather holistic solution for everyday problems that occur in project management and adds great value to a business.

It is software that helps in planning, tracking, collaborating, and achieving business targets with ease. You can get started with using this software in a simple way with only a few initial configurations and customizations. This software is available in different subscription plans that solve the needs of organizations of different sizes.

Features of Zoho Projects

1. Task Automation

Zoho Projects enables you to automate a task which means that you can set time for adding a task or even a reminder. It is mainly known for its ability to automate different tasks by setting up a centralized workflow. There is a blueprint feature that enables the creation of an independent blueprint with proper designing, the configuration of settings, and execution of processes easily.

With the help of task automation that Zoho Projects offers, task automation can become way easier because the recurring work is removed. This helps in making sure that just the right steps are taken to complete the project implementation. Different tasks can be easily automated with the help of Zoho Projects and by getting in touch with an experienced Zoho consultant.

2. Forming Task Lists

While a team of an organization is implementing task management rules and timelines, the chances of working continuously are increased tremendously. There is no delay or interruption. A significant feature of Zoho Projects is that it allows creating task lists which helps the users to create a streamlined list of things to be done in any project.

By tasks, we mean that activities that should be accomplished in a specific period of time. For adding any specific task from the dashboard, you can click on the “Add Task” button and enter a suitable name associated with the task. You can also make any task in the task list while including associated files or attachments for the colleagues to view.

3. Document Sharing

Zoho Projects is a project management software that lets users access tools that manage and share multiple types of documents and files. These files and documents can be stored in just one place while being associated with specific tasks. A hierarchy of folders can also be used for storing documents in a manner that mirrors the structure of present workflows.

For uploading the important documents and tracking the file versions, you can click on the Documents button and choose the file that you want to upload. After this, add a description along with important tags and select which folder for the file.

An automatic notification will be sent to the users when the file has finished uploading in case you choose that option. These notices are going to go out irrespective of the fact if a user has enabled a notification or not.

4. Setting Tasks and Milestones

With the help of task management, task dependency views, and project milestones, it becomes possible to carry out resource allocation and report on any function. You can set the tasks and assign them to the staff just as you feel it is necessary.

Other than this, it is also possible to set the due dates for tasks so that they can be delivered in a timely fashion. With every task, there is a timer equipped anyone who is assigned a task can log in their hours while undertaking and completing that task.

A task can have attachments and instructions and it is also possible to form a dependency where beginning one task will depend on the completion of another. Right after the task is completed; the dependency can be set to close. Additionally, custom statuses of tasks can also be configured. The milestones must be logged separately. Either they can be associated with tasks or you can set a milestone for a set of tasks.

5. Gantt Charts

Gantt Charts offered in Zoho Projects are another way to visualize the progress of the tasks that are underway. They allow you to see every detail of a project including the task lists, percentages of completeness, overdue tasks, dependencies, and milestones. Every category is assigned a different color which makes it easy to identify and distinguish the tasks.

Besides this, the rescheduling and reorganizing of the tasks are also made simple with the use of Gantt Charts. You can alter your plans by adding the tasks, dragging and dropping a task from one area of the chart to another, and then editing the milestones just as is needed.

Moreover, you can also switch views on a chart depending on the kind of information that is needed. If you wish to know which projects are due in the coming time then you can switch the view of the Gantt chart for showing the upcoming due dates first. Finally, the Gantt Chart can be customized based on your preference including scaling a chart, filtering the information, and exporting the task data just as needed.

Conclusion

Basically, Zoho Projects is an online project management software for creating and managing projects and Zoho Sprints is a planning and tracking tool for agile teams in particular. Where Zoho Projects help in planning project activities, assigning work, and managing resources, Zoho Sprints is a tool that prepares teams to cope up with changes and complete projects timely.

Regardless, both of these tools help in project management. Whether an organization wants to use Zoho Projects or Zoho Sprints depends entirely on the approach to managing projects.

Get in touch with the experienced Zoho consultants to make your project management goals sorted. They will help you get the most out of these project management software applications according to your organization’s goals.

Zoho Sprints V/S Zoho Projects: What is the Difference? Read More »

CRM Servicesagile project management tools, project management software, what is zoho projects, what is zoho sprints, zoho consultant

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7. Real-time Collaboration

Conclusion

What are Zoho Contracts?

Streamlining Contract Lifecycle

Creating Risk Proof Contracts

Contract Data Can Be Turned Into Business Insights

Enhancing Governance

Reducing Business Risks

Promoting Cross-Functional Integrations

Much Better Control and Compliance

Conclusion

Use Zoho Mail Integration

Organize Emails According to Sales Priorities

Monitor Customer Activities

Leverage Social Media for Getting Leads

Customize Templates

Track Email Performance

Complete Sales Activities On the Go

Use AI-Based Sales Assistant

Automate Actions

Use CRM View for Activities