Zoho CRM is a cloud based SaaS (software as a service) for customer relationship management (CRM). How to setup and manage new and potential business contacts in Zoho raises the question – what is a lead, what is a contact and what is a potential in Zoho ‘Jargon’. Managing Leads, Contacts and Accounts is a critical function of your business and it’s just as important that you understand Zoho’s sales management process.

Congratulations if you’ve already decided to use Zoho CRM, if you’re still deciding look at my guide on how to choose a web based CRM solution.

Zoho is extremely flexible in how you manage your database of contacts – in fact you can rename pretty much any Tab, Function or section if you want for example I could rename Leads to ‘Junk’ if I wanted – or realistically rename Potentials to Opportunities. I’ll cover this later.

Managing Leads and Contacts using ZOHO CRM

In daily business you will meet people and collect business cards or email addresses – these are going to be entered as new LEADS in ZOHO CRM or new CONTACTS.

Use Leads – if you need to do more work and nurture the lead before it becomes a new potential or opportunity.

Use Contacts – if you already qualified the lead and have a new quote or sales pitch to work on.

An existing contact can not have new leads – this is the only thing that may seem wrong with Zoho CRM especially as from time to time your existing contacts will tell you about potential new business – but this potential new business is really a Lead until you qualify it.

What is a Lead in Zoho

A lead is not a contact (yet)
A lead must have an owner and must have a Last Name

When a Leads is qualified you approve it and you convert it to a new contact, a new account (if needed) and a new potential

What is a Contact in Zoho?

An existing contact can not have a lead but it can have many potentials or opportunities

A contact can be associated with both an account and a vendor so don’t use Vendors if you don’t need them.

What is an Account in Zoho?

An account provides a hierarchical structure – A contact must belong to an Account or a new Account is created

Accounts are the same as businesses you work with

Notes on Vendors in Zoho CRM

Vendors are different to Accounts – Vendors can’t have sales opportunities

Damien Saunders

So you have decided to use ZOHO CRM as your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. You’re first step is to import your contacts into ZOHO. You will have contacts in a number of places and you want to get them all into ZOHO.

This guide applies to single users of ZOHO CRM and the SOHO small business marketing guy like me. I’ll start by focusing on the single user perspective of ZOHO – how to get my contacts into ZOHO and then I’ll finish by mentioning a few tips for people who want to share ZOHO with others in their team.

Ill also assume that you are on your free trial of the Professional Edition (BTW ZOHO guys are not paying me for this in anyway – I use ZOHO for my work and like it)

4 ways to get your contacts into ZOHO

1. Grab your business cards and enter them into Excel with a column each for First Name, Last Name, Email, Account Name
2. Manually enter them via the webpage at crm.zoho.com
3. Save them from Outlook to a .CSV or Excel file
4. Save them from Google

Its obvious that if you manually enter them via the web you don’t need to upload your contacts – but it is a method.

For those of you making your own Excel please use the column heads First Name, Last Name, Account Name typed just like First Name (you need to remember this for later tips).

However you choose to get your contacts into ZOHO the next step is about how you upload or import your contacts to ZOHO

How to save contacts from Google

1. Go to Google Mail and find your contacts http://mail.google.com/mail/#contacts
2. Near the middle – click on More and select EXPORT
3. Choose Every Contact on select which group to export
4. Choose to save as Outlook CSV format
5. Click Export

Upload your Contacts to ZOHO CRM

1. Go to the Contacts Tab in ZOHO – it looks empty

1. Select Import My Contacts

1. Select your file to import
2. Select OK / Next

That was easy

Match or Map your Google Contact Fields to Zoho Database Fields

Easy so far? This part is just as easy.

• Change First Name from None to First Name (Col 1)
• Change Last Name from None to Last Name (Col: 3)
• Change Vendor Name to None
• Change Email from None to Email (Col: 15)
• Change Account Name to Company (Col: 43)
• Change Phone to Primary Phone (Col1: 18)
• Change Mobile to Mobile Phone (Col: 21)
• Ok that should be enough for now … you can make other changes but for now keep Vendor blank
• Click Next
• Click Import to go ahead you want your contacts in there
• Review the results – don’t worry about missed records for now, that tells you that some of your Google Contacts are probably entered only with their First Name
• Click OK
• Now click on one of your contacts to see if everything looked the way it should
• then … Go make a cuppa tea

A couple of points to be aware of when importing and mapping contacts to ZOHO CRM database

Remember that the only fixed or mandatory column is Last Name. I like my Contacts to have at least a mandatory email or phone number so we will fix that later.

If you really hated the import and something went wrong … go to SETUP .. under Data Administration select Import History and you can rollback the import. Or just cut n paste this link: http://crm.zoho.com/crm/ImportHistory.do

One great feature is that the next time you go to import contacts, ZOHO CRM has remembered the field mapping so it will save you at least 1 minutes work.

Settings for ZOHO CRM and sharing contacts

By default only you can see your contacts and leads (except your boss and your IT Admin guy – but you’re the only user right now).

So if you are going to share ZOHO and want your team mates to see the same contacts … go ahead and add a few users

This is what ZOHO CRM Setup menu looks like for a Single User

• Choose the link under Admin for Users
• Go ahead and add someone
• You’ll have to enter your company name
• Make their role CEO just like you
• Make them a Standard User
• Press OK

• Now go to the setup menu and this is what setup looks like for a MultiUser database
• Select the new menu entry for Data Sharing Settings

• Click on Edit All Default Organization

• Change everything from private to public  (don’t worry .. you can change this later)
• Click Next

So that should have been really easy … What do you think of Zoho CRM? Do you use it often?

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM is one of the best web based SaaS customer relationship management web apps around and now its gone and made it even easier to capture your leads or enquiries from your website – if you use Google Sites.

Currently Social CRM is the new name for managing customers – CRM wasn’t good enough and wasn’t work for many. The new tag  Social CRM refers to engaging customers online where ever they are and hopefully that’s on your website!

ZOHO have been working hard at integrating more with Google Apps and publishing a web to lead form like this directly to a Google Site gets top points. If you’re considering building more of a website with Google becuase you use Google Apps, Docs or Gmail then this would be a reason to seriously consider Google Sites.

Damien Saunders

Here is a summer essential collection for ZOHO CRM a customer relationship management or CRM solution. When you get started in business your sales and marketing activities will need to be split 3 ways -

• Customers who are buying from you
• Nurturing Customers who will buy from you
• Generating new leads or potential customers

This may seem daunting – so from the day you open your doors or your new web business you’ll want a tool to track all your customers and maybe your suppliers too. ZOHO CRM is probably one of the best web based (SaaS) CRM solutions and its $12 per month professional version has all the tools you need to get started.

Here is an essential collection and guide to using ZOHO CRM for your startup:

How to choose a web based CRM solution – wondering why you want a web based software as a service (SaaS) solution for CRM and how to compare them – then read this

How to sign up to ZOHO CRM using Google Apps or your Gmail address – all the information you need to get going with Google and ZOHO CRM

How to get started with ZOHO CRM and import your contacts from Google – guide to getting your contacts from Gmail and loading them into ZOHO CRM

Understanding CRM what is a lead vs contact vs opportunity – ZOHO CRM has its own jargon and you need to understand this to match it against your sales process

How to change the names of tabs like leads & contacts – ZOHO CRM is easy to customise and you can easily change the names of tabs to match your sales process or terminology

Record an email address from your website into ZOHO CRM – capture a lead or email address from your website for your mailing list

Create a contact form or lead from your website – create a form for your website that adds the lead into ZOHO CRM

Respecting the Email Opt Out function – email opt out is a powerful tool in ZOHO, use it wisely.

How to send invoices to your customers – if you invoice customers ZOHO Invoice free edition is better than ZOHO CRM

What do you use ZOHO CRM for?

Damien Saunders

So here is an essential collection of startup resources to customer relationship management or CRM. When you go into business as a startup or entrepreneur your sales and marketing activities will need to be split 3 ways -

• Customers who are buying from you
• Nurturing Customers who will buy from you
• Generating new leads or potential customers

This may seem daunting – so from the day you open your doors or your new web business you’ll want a tool to track all your customers and maybe your suppliers too. ZOHO CRM is probably one of the best web based (SaaS) CRM solutions and its $12 per month professional version has all the tools you need to get started.

Here is an essential collection and guide to using ZOHO CRM for your startup:

How to choose a web based CRM solution – wondering why you want a web based software as a service (SaaS) solution for CRM and how to compare them – then read this

How to sign up to ZOHO CRM using Google Apps or your Gmail address – all the information you need to get going with Google and ZOHO CRM

How to get started with ZOHO CRM and import your contacts from Google – guide to getting your contacts from Gmail and loading them into ZOHO CRM

Understanding CRM what is a lead vs contact vs opportunity – ZOHO CRM has its own jargon and you need to understand this to match it against your sales process

How to change the names of tabs like leads & contacts – ZOHO CRM is easy to customise and you can easily change the names of tabs to match your sales process or terminology

Record an email address from your website into ZOHO CRM – capture a lead or email address from your website for your mailing list

Create a contact form or lead from your website – create a form for your website that adds the lead into ZOHO CRM

Respecting the Email Opt Out function – email opt out is a powerful tool in ZOHO, use it wisely.

How to send invoices to your customers – if you invoice customers ZOHO Invoice free edition is better than ZOHO CRM

What do you use ZOHO CRM for?

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM is one of the best web based (SaaS) customer relationship management solutions around today and it’s got great features even in its free version.

How to delete your contacts, leads, accounts and is pretty easy thing to manage in ZOHO, but until you empty your Recycle Bin, they are still there (and this can affect some reports and views).

The Empty Recycle Bin icon is at the top of the screen on the right hand side … clicking it will show you whats in your recycle bin and you can then choose to empty it or recover records.

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM has some great features including web to lead forms – but they don’t really look too stylish. Especially if you use 3rd party tools for your web forms.

If you use custom web to lead forms you may have to make the change to using the more secure HTTPS connection. After I noticed the web to lead form was not working I checked the standard code from ZOHO.

<div id='zohoWebToLead' align=center>

<META HTTP-EQUIV ='content-type' CONTENT='text/html;charset = UTF-8'>  

<form action='https://crm.zoho.com/crm/WebToLeadForm' method='POST' onSubmit='javascript:document.charset="UTF-8";' accept-charset='UTF-8'>

This is the code today … so you can see the form action URL is now HTTPS

Were you affected by this? Did you know about this change?

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM a web based (SaaS) customer relationship management solution (CRM) recently added a bunch of new features. For sometime users were able to record events like meetings but now there is an easy way to record daily / regular contact like telephone calls.

ZOHO CRM Call Logger

The Call Logger button is on the view Contact Detail page

Click on the Add Call button to reveal the call logger screen.

What’s useful about a call logger in ZOHO CRM?

There are a number of reasons call logging is good ….

• Record regular calls with contacts or leads
• Record notes for important calls (like verbal agreements, sales, etc)
• Record the purpose of the call (status, sales, etc)

Have you tried this new feature? What do you think?

Damien Saunders

The team at ZOHO have recently added a bunch of new features to ZOHO CRM. Some of these are going to be useful, but quite a few features are paid for and then only in the enterprise edition.

New Features in ZOHO CRM

1. Log a Call (All Editions)

This gives an easy way to record an inbound or outbound call to a contact. When viewing the Contact Detail, scroll down to activities and click on Log Call. You can record interesting data like duration and purpose of the call.

2. Group Chat (Enterprise Edition)

Now you can chat to fellow employees

3. Web Tabs & ZOHO Creator (Enterprise Edition)

Now apps created in Zoho Creator can be integrated into ZOHO CRM. Kind of like adding widgets to iGoogle.

4. Workflow Rules (Pro and Enterprise)

It would be good to see workflow rules integrated into ZOHO CRM free edition – but workflow automation is a killer reason to upgrade ZOHO CRM. These improvements are going to be brilliant for CRM/email/campaign marketing.

5. Auto Responders (Pro and Enterprise)

Another killer reason to upgrade ZOHO CRM at least to the pro edition … auto responders allow you to send emails to your leads uhhh automagically. I use this lots!

6. ZOHO Mail Integration & Data Privacy (paid add-on)

Changes to the ZOHO Mail addon to improve data sharing and privacy.

7. Add notes to cases (Pro & Enterprise Edition)

If you run a Helpdesk or just want to track issues then Cases are what you use. This change fixes somethign that was always missing – the ability to add notes to update the status of issues / cases.

8. Microsoft Office Excel 2007 file format support XLSX

No brainer really, this was going to have to happen – you can now import from a .xlsx excel 2007 file format

9. ZOHO CRM API changes

Anyone using the ZOHO CRM API was affected by this.

Read the full list of changes

How have you found the changes to ZOHO CRM? good or bad?

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM is one of the best web based (SaaS) solutions for day to day contact and customer relationship management. ZOHO CRM free edition doesn’t include features like creating a quote or invoice – don’t worry ZOHO Invoice is the perfect product for this. ZOHO Invoice free edition allows you to create up to 5 quotes, estimates or invoices every month.

How to login to ZOHO Invoice from ZOHO CRM

If you are already using ZOHO CRM just go to the homepage for ZOHO Invoice

You’ll have to complete some basic details and then you can create your first quote or invoice.

If you go to the customers tab – there is an option to import all your customer accounts from ZOHO CRM – rather useless, but its there.

Why choose ZOHO INVOICE over ZOHO CRM?

ZOHO Invoice (even the free edition) includes more features for financial controllers then ZOHO CRM.

Zoho Invoice includes features like customised emails, creating automatic or recurring invoices, management of billable expenses and mulitple currencies.

In fact I’m annoyed that ZOHO CRM (paid edition) doesn’t include all this workflow and reports too!

Do you use ZOHO CRM and ZOHO Invoice? What do you think?

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM – the best web based customer relationship management (CRM) service has a great tool to make it easy for any website to capture leads with a web form. This ZOHO web to lead form is easy to hack and make beautiful for your website.

Why have a web to lead form?

Simple – Your website should be working hard to generate leads for you and focusing on inbound marketing techniques is the best way to capture new leads.

Features of ZOHO CRM Web to Lead Form

• ZOHO CRM free edition allows you to have one web to lead form – this is not a problem we’ll customise the form for your business.
• The professional edition allows you to create autoresponder emails (emails sent automatically when a lead is added).
• On a downside, you can design your own form but you must keep the your field names consistent with ZOHO or the Form will be lost when the user clicks on submit. So remember to use First Name and Last Name (Capitalisation on the first letter) as you build your form.
• When creating a new lead the minimum fields you must have is Last Name and Email.

How to create a web to lead form in ZOHO

• Go to the Setup menu
• Under Leads, choose Web to Lead form

• Click Create new form

• Fill in the basic details (ie the website page you want to show after the lead is added)
• Select First Name, Last Name, Email, Company, Description (description gives you a large text area that your new lead can write anything making it perfect for a Contact Us form).

• Select Lead Assignment and choose you or whoever will be assigned the new leads
• Press Generate Code

• Select the code and copy and paste it to word or your favourite text editor.
• Select Finish then Save

You have now created a form ready to be added into your website. Just email this code to your webmaster and ask them to add this as the new contact form on your website.

Suggested Improvements to the Standard Web to Lead Form

This is approximately what your new web to lead form looks like .. so make sure you give it some ‘spunk’ with these ideas:

• Record email address for newsletters – Create a custom field – called newsletter signup
• Track the source of the lead in Zoho – Add a hidden field called Lead Source and set the value to ‘ContactUs-Lead’, and add this to the list called Lead Source in Zoho.
• Remove the Reset button – its another way for some potential lead to be lost.
• Form validation – there is no validation or special script to check that the Last Name or Email Address has been completed

Damien Saunders

Zoho CRM is one of the best web based customer relationship management services – great features and cheap pricing. Zoho has its own quirks such as Email Opt Out.

What is Email opt-out? unsolicited emails

For marketing people, email opt-out would mean the customer or client has chosen to not receive unsolicited emails from your business – this is ususally a good way to stop sending bulk emails to certain customers.

What is Email opt-out in ZOHO CRM?

Email Opt-out is flag set for each individual contact. This flag prevents you sending solicited and unsolicited emails to that contact. You can think of this flag as 2 things:

1. If a contact changes company / moves on to greener pastures – use this to stop send emails

2. If you lose an account you can set all contacts in that company to not receive any new emails

So don’t be confused – create another field call email newsletter opt-in to track if customers want unsolicited emails … and don’t use email opt out which would block genuine solicited emails being sent.

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM is a very flexible web based (SaaS) solution for customer management. Before starting to use ZOHO CRM for managing leads and communications, its common sense that you should add a custom field to record which contacts and customers agreed to receive marketing communications from you.

How to track email newsletter signup in ZOHO

We are going to add a custom field in ZOHO to track newsletter signup – by default we’ll enable this so that all manually entered contacts and leads are already opted in to receive marketing comms. We are making an assumption that your leads and contacts have asked you to send them stuff by email.

For inbound marketing – or generating leads from a website, its more important that customers have the choice to not receive these comms.

How to add a custom field in ZOHO

1. Go to Setup

2. Under Leads, choose Fields List

3. Click on New Custom Field

4. Add a Checkbox field, called Email_Newsletter and by default it is checked

5. Click also to create this for Contacts  (but not Accounts or Potentials – Accounts or Companies dont need this and Potentials or Projects dont need this either).

6. Save this

Other things to do with ZOHO CRM and the Email Newsletter field

1. Create a web to lead form with the Newsletter field

2. Run a mass update on your existing contacts to

Damien Saunders

So you choose to use ZOHO CRM because it’s a great web based solution for customer relationship management. There are now 3 ways to sign-up to ZOHO CRM using Google Apps or a Gmail address.

1. Google Apps – If you are an administrator you can add ZOHO CRM from the Google Apps Marketplace

2. Google Apps – Sign-up online and create a ZOHO account at the same time

3. Gmail – as above, signup online and create a ZOHO account at the same time.

There is a 4th way to get started with ZOHO CRM and you sign-up and which is to create a ZOHO account that is NOT associated with your Google Apps or Gmail address

First-timer User Sign-up and Login using a Google Apps or Gmail address

1. Go to crm.zoho.com

2. In the sign-in box click on either the Gmail or Google Apps icon

3. If you choose Gmail or Google Apps the next screen will ask for your permission to use your Google credentials, then click OK

4. Now just confirm your username and accept the T&C’s

Eh voila … you are now registered and logged in to ZOHO CRM.

Damien Saunders

ZOHO CRM, which I reckon is the best free CRM for the web or SaaS is now available to add from the new Google Apps Marketplace.

(note if you’re already using ZOHO CRM with Google Apps you are better to leave things as they are for now)

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is really about 3 things:

1. Building up knowledge on the people you do with business with or relate to – your clients, customers and the companies they work for
2. Communicating with your customers and managing those ‘relationships’
3. Selling your stuff, or supporting your clients and staff to sell

In the past business process managers would have focused on Managing Customers as a key process for the Customer Lifecycle. CRM provides a holistic overview of these activities.

You can read more about how to chose a web based CRM and the key features in ZOHO and tell me what you think …

Have your say: Are you using ZOHO for CRM??

Damien Saunders

Inbound Marketers, Sales managers, customer care, account managers, business development managers – all need a good system for managing diaries, customer details and leads. Managing your sCRM using something like Zoho CRM means you have access to all your customer relationship data anywhere you are. And you don’t have to install anything on your Mac, PC or Linux operating system, just open your favourite web browser.

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an art and a science. CRM is really about 3 things:

1. Building up knowledge on the people you do with business with or relate to – your clients, customers and the companies they work for
2. Communicating with your customers and managing those ‘relationships’
3. Selling your stuff, or supporting your clients and staff to sell

In the past business process managers would have focused on Managing Customers as a key process for the Customer Lifecycle. CRM provides a holistic overview of these activities.

What is Saas?

It’s easier to understand that Software as a Service (SaaS) as just cloud computing.  So this means if you have a SaaS CRM solution then

• it is always online,
• it travels with you – you can access it from the office, from home, on your iPhone, etc
• features and roadmap are managed by someone else
• technology and operational costs are external to your business
• your data is backed up in the ‘cloud’
• you normally have to pay to unlock premium features

Why choose Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is possibly one of the most feature rich CRM solutions around. It’s difficult to find a features comparison matrix but here’s a quick summary of a few systems

1. Highrise from 37 Signals

• Offers a ‘free’ account with 2 users and 200+ contacts.
• No product or price book
• Supports Contact History
• Supports To Do list
• Minimal document storage

2. Salesforce.com

• No ‘free’ account
• Regarded as the fully-featured SaaS service
• Supports Price Books
• Supports Customer Contact History
• Supports To Do Lists
• To unlock features like Forecasting, Autoresponders, Document Management, you must be on the £45 per user Premium plan
• Up to 1gb per user storage

ZOHO CRM

• Good features in the ‘free’ account – up to 3 free users
• User Pays Freemium pricing model
• Supports Price Books
• Supports Customer Contact History
• Supports To Do Lists
• To unlock features like Forecasting, Campaigns, Email Autoresponders, Document Management, you must _buy_ 1 user at on the £12 per user per month (then all 3 free users are upgraded as well.
• Login using Google Apps Domain
• Supports Google Docs
• Supports Outlook or Gmail plugin (from £3 per month)
• 1GB per domain.

Getting Started with ZOHO CRM

Every business needs a good customer records system – even if you only use the free ZOHO CRM tool you’ll find that you can manage your accounts, contacts and meetings all in one place.

Damien Saunders

Until recently mobile devices were often overlooked by marketing managers in favour of online campaigns or traditional paper-based direct marketing. However, brands, ad agencies and telecoms operators are increasingly using mobile as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

The rapid growth in smartphones spurred by the iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android has given mobile marketing a major boost. The latest devices offer fast and easy web access, often with flat-rate charges. This has sparked a flurry of development in a range of formats, including thousands of mobile apps, as well as in music content, search and social media.

The latest handsets can add location and web browsing behaviour to the streams of customer data, such as call statistics and purchasing behaviour, that mobiles already generate. This data can be harvested or saved to improve customer service and increase sales from existing customers. In theory, the more a company knows about its customers, the better it can match communication to behaviour.

[via new media age]

Damien Saunders