sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with CRM + Zoho

Introduction here: So far I have spent most of my time re-engineering our Zoho CRM system on the Leads side of the process. Before I started I thought we had a pretty good system but I noticed some pretty serious gaps and have worked hard to correct them and refine the process. At this point I am very happy with the Leads aspect of the system and more importantly the sales team is happy as well. In fact the new processes are already generating revenue and positive customer feedback.

So what happens when a lead expresses interest in purchasing something? What is the next step? Take a look at the screen shot below. Notice how the Lead downloaded a trial, all important fields are in the record, the lead has been pre-qualified, the lead status is A Qualified and the note says that the lead is interested in pricing information.

At this point the SA’s job is almost finished. They have a perfectly qualified lead with all the proper documentation and history as part of the Lead Record. The only thing left to do is Convert the Lead into an Account, Contact and Potential by hitting the Convert button at the top of the Lead record. This brings up the Convert Lead UI and a number of interesting and very well thought out things happen with just a few clicks of the mouse. The Convert Lead function in Zoho allows the current Lead owner, the SA to:

1. Assign the appropriate SC and send an email to the new Account Owner
2. Create a potential on Conversion. A “Potential” in Zoho is a named opportunity with an amount and close date associated with an Account. For the most part we use Potentials when converting an Account and then rank the Potential on the likelihood of closing. If this box is checked the Potential will NOT be created but the Account and Contact will be created.
3. Name the Potential, the system automatically fills in the Account name and the user would add what the specific Potential name is, in this case 10 seats of Pro.
4. Edit the Potential close date and the Potential Stage, the closer to close the higher the ranking percentage.
5. Identify the decision making role of the Contact.
6. Edit the approximate amount of the Potential

Click Save and watch the magic happen: A new Account is created and the SC is notified. This Account has the name, address, territory info from the Lead. It creates a new Contact under the Account with the Contact and Lead Source info from the Lead. The Potential linked to the Account and the Contact. All of the attachments, activities, tasks and notes are appropriately linked. All this with one click! All the SC has to do is enter the appropriate Account Type = Prospect and Account Rating = Active in this case.

I should mention that this process requires almost zero set up and implementation. In fact it is so smart that it will attempt to warn the user that there is another duplicate Account record and offer to merge the two on conversion. This is a common problem in all CRM systems when there are multiple contacts in the Leads section under the same account. Zoho CRM gets it right out of the box and preserves all of the valuable Lead information on conversion.

Here is a pdf document of all the things that happen when you convert a Lead. It is hard to explain how complex this process is without dredging up all of the details that make it happen. Suffice to say that the logic behind the process is subtle but very well thought out and pretty much works right out of the box. I guess that is the difference between good and great software. The great software hides the complexity but not the power.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

Introduction here. I changed the title of this series from Explaining the D-Tools Zoho CRM system to Deconstructing the D-Tools Zoho CRM System because I realized that as I was trying to explain it I was tearing it apart an re-configuring it as I was explaining it. Just the act of explaining it made me realize it could be improved. In fact that explains my silence for the past few weeks. I have been deep inside our system trying to make it more reliable, easier to use, easier to explain, more accurate and ultimately more productive for all the users.

In the previous Lead Management post I went over our Lead Status qualification rules and explained how we implemented a Pre Qualification score. So far this has been extremely helpful in allowing our SA’s to see which leads needed to be contacted first. Since more targeted marketing has already produced results I added a Pre-Qual score of “4-Great” indicating that the lead record includes a corporate email address, a professional website, a phone number and a Job Function. Again this allows our SA’s to focus on the most productive leads first.

Check it out, when a new lead comes into the system the SAM evaluates the lead, follows the path on the chart, fills in the missing information, gives it a Pre-Qual score and assigns the lead to an SA based on the territory.

At this point the discovery (not sales) process begins and all the SA has to do is create a custom view (see this post on custom list views) in Zoho with “their” leads sorted by date created and/or Pre Qual score and it is clear which leads need to be contacted first. The lead status is still unqualified but once the SA makes some sort of personal contact with the the lead the status is elevated to a Qualified C status. If the Lead fills out a Lead Worksheet it is upgraded to a Qualified B and if the Leads attends a webinar or installs the trial it is then it is upgraded to a Qualified A status. At that point it would be assigned to a SC if the lead expressed interest in moving forward.

Notice that during this process the lead elevates themselves by actually doing something each step of the way and each step requires a little more commitment? This process has a number of advantages. First of all we now have a common definition of each Lead Status. We know exactly where the lead is at and more importantly we know exactly what to do next. For example if a lead is at the Qualified C status we know that they have not filled out a lead worksheet. Using the Zoho mass email function we can easily and instantly create a targeted email to all of the Qualified C’s and attach a worksheet.

The bottom line is that we now have an easy to use, efficient and scalable process for getting through all of our leads and only engaging the leads that have expressed genuine interest. This is good for us and ultimatly it is good for our customers because we have now focused our presentation on THEIR needs and issues. In addition everything is documented each step of the way.

Also it needs to be mentioned that this process is only possible with a well designed and properly implemented CRM system. Don’t try this at home with Outlook, ACT or god forbid Oasis CRM.

Here is a pdf of the entire D-Tools Lead Qualifying Engine document that the screen shots above were taken from. Here is a copy of the D-Tools Lead worksheet mentioned above. The Lead Worksheet form is pretty interesting, it is a basic pdf form but what we did was use the interactive elements of Adobe Designer to create form with drop down pick lists. This makes it much easier for the end user to fill out and the choices match the choices in our CRM system.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

Introduction here. As I have stated at least twice now we have a LOT of leads in our system and we needed a solid process to manage all of these leads. In the previous post on Sales Roles I explained how each person on the D-Tools sales team has a specific role and and how we use our Zoho CRM system to manage the job function for each specific role.

One of the things that Zoho CRM does really well is the creation and management of custom lists for each entity in the system. An entity in Zoho is a list of related information like leads, or cases, or accounts and so on. Actually calling a Zoho entity a list is somewhat of an oversimplification but I digress.

So we have these “lists” (entities) of data, and each list contains x number of records and each record can have x number of fields. That is a LOT of information that needs to be listed and sorted to whatever the job function is of the person who needs to work with the specific entity. Different people in D-Tools need to work with the same entity but only need a subset of the actual data, not the entire list

Zoho CRM comes with a number of editable, predefined views that can change depending on the Zoho login and role of the login. For example one of the predefined views is ” My Leads”. Zoho assumes that “my” refers to the person logged in and will show a list of “their” leads.

This works great but where Zoho CRM really shines is in the ease of which any user can create their own custom view of the entity without any programming or advanced knowledge of the system. For example, say I am a salesperson we just got back from a trade show. I could easily create a custom list that had all of “my” leads from that show with just the company name, email, phone number and Pre-Qual score. This is how it is done:

1. Go to whatever entity you want to work in and click the Create View link
2. Give the custom view a name like “My CEDIA Leads”. CEDIA being a trade show
3. Specify the criteria as Lead Owner = me, or whoever you want that has a login to the system
4. Click Add Criteria and add CEDIA 08 (trade show name) as the Sub-Lead Source
5. Choose what columns you want to see in the view
6. Check the Show this Custom View only to Me option. This is a great feature because it gets rid of the “custom list pollution” I have seen in other systems. You also have the option of showing this list to everyone, specific users or specific roles in the system. Very well thought out feature set.
7. Hit Save and you have the custom list. You can always go back later and edit this list.

You now have a list that can be easily sorted by any of the columns so the person using the list can easily find the relevant information. When the user clicks on the actual Lead Name it opens the record. A neat trick is to right click on the link and open the record in another window or tab so you can easily get both the micro and macro view of the list.

Easy to create and manage entity views are a critical part of any CRM system and Zoho CRM does it better than any other system I have ever come across. The only issue I have found is that there is no way to create a list that queries more than a single entity. This makes it impossible to send mass emails to contacts of a specific account type.

Also these is no ability to “clone” a custom list. This would come in handy when the SAM is creating custom lists for number of people where the only change is the owner of the record. For the most part you can clone just about anything in Zoho but not these custom lists. Both issues seem like oversights to me. I have let the Zoho CRM technical team know about these issues and I am confident that they will be updated in a future release.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

Introduction here.

We have a LOT of leads in our system. The current count is 11,192 and I archived any lead that was created before 2006 during the last conversion of CRM systems. Thankfully, Zoho CRM handles leads really well. This is the process we use to separate the forest from the trees and allow our sales team to focus on the most productive leads.

The way I define a lead is a person (contact) who works at a company (account) who has expressed some sort of interest in our products or services and has not purchased anything from us in the past. Leads come into the system from four main marketing activities.

• Trade shows - Import list
• D-Tools website - Web to Lead form
• Google Adwords and SEO - Web to Lead form or incoming call
• Download Trial - Import list

These are called “Leads Source” in our CRM system. This is a mandatory pick list field. In addition to a Lead Source field we also have a related field called “Sub-Lead Source” that contains the specific information relating to the general Lead Source. For example a Lead Source that = Trade Show and Sub-Lead Source = CEDIA 08 is the name of the specific trade show That way we can easily track where revenue is coming from on a global or granular basis.

In order to better target our marketing message to each lead we categorize every lead into a specific Industry and Category. Industry refers to what industry the lead is in like AV-Automation, Broadcast and so on. Category refers to what type of customer they are. For example Residential or Commercial.

It sounds kind of confusing and a lot of extra work but we do this because the messaging to a company that is involved in AV-Automation for the residential market is different than what a commercial AV integrator would expect. In some cases a company could be involved in both residential and commercial work and in those cases we use a multi-pick field for the category so the user can tag the record as both residential and commercial.

We also have a mandatory “Lead Status” field with the following choices below: All Lead Status start out as “Unqualified” and then we change the status as we move them through the process. This is extremely helpful because we can give all of the “Unqualified” leads to a sales admin and let them fill in the blanks without getting a senior salesperson involved until the lead expresses real interest.

• Qualified A - Interested in purchasing in 3 months or less
• Qualified B - Has gone through a needs analysis or a demo
• Qualified C - We have had a one to one conversation or email
• Unqualified - Have not had any personal contact
• Inactive - Interested but “not now”
• Dead - Not interested

A new feature I just added to the system to help us focus on the most productive leads is the Pre Qualification Score or “Pre-Qual Score” field. Since it is so hard to to actually get someone on the phone these days I came up with a simple system for the sales person or sales admin to score the lead by just subjectively looking at a few key details that are usually part of every lead in the system without actually talking to them on the phone. The three lead Pre-Qual Scores are:

• 1-Lame - If the email domain address is a free mail service like Hotmail or a home based service like Comcast and no website or a lame website like under construction.
• 2-OK - If the email is a corp address or there is a professional looking website and a free or home based email service
• 3-Good - If the email address is the same as the corp email address and there is a professional looking web site

<rant>
Please let me explain before someone accuses me of calling some of our potential customers “Lame”. That is not what I mean. At the recent CEDIA Expo we received “X” number of leads. Most of these came from our booth scanner and were converted to Excel (more on this process later) and some came through business cards. Most of the business cards had a website address but unfortunately the scanner information did not have the lead website information. So I hand picked through every lead that did not have a website and by using the corporate email domain I attempted to find and add a website attached to the lead.

This is what I found out. 18% of the leads used a free (yahoo, hotmail, gmail) or home based (aol, comcast, sbcglobal) email. 21% had a corporate email domain but not a website that matched that email domain. 59% had both a corporate email address and a matching website.

So close to 40% of our potential customers from this show do not have a website and/or use a free email address. That is “Lame”. There are couple of things you can do to be taken seriously in this world, especially if you are in any industry that professes to be of a technical nature. Getting a real email address and a real website would be at the top of the list. Speaking to the system integrators in the 40 percentile, would you do any business with a manufacturer who did not have a website or someone with an aol.com email address? Everyone does research on the internet now, why do you think your potential customers are any different? You could be excluded from a project just based on this criteria.
</rant>

Zoho CRM makes it very easy for users to create and sort lists into custom views so our sales team can filter by Lead Status = Unqualified and sort by the Pre-Qual score. This allows the sales team to focus on the most productive leads first, while the marketing team drips on all the leads with email marketing as appropriate.

The last custom field we use to target our message to our prospective clients is the “Job Function” field. The reason for this is that our software can be used by many people in an organization. People involved in the installation side of a company would perhaps be interested in our integration with Brother wire labels while a salesperson would be more interested in making his proposals look more attractive. This is pick list field with the following standardized choices:

• Design/Engineering
• Finance/Accounting
• Installation/Service/Training
• Operations/Administration/Management
• Owner/Partner/Executive
• Sales/Marketing/Consulting

The picture below is what a well qualified lead would look like in our system before we have had any contact with that person. In this specific case all a sales admin would have to do is contact the lead by phone or email, find out how many employees are in the company, what the specific title of the lead is and change to the appropriate Lead Status. Once the lead gets “Qualified” it becomes much easier for a Sr. Salesperson to step in, identify the opportunity and move the Lead to a “Potential” and eventually a “Client”.

The reason we go to all this trouble in geting our leads in order is to make it as easy as possible for the sales team to focus on the customer needs and move them through the pipeline. In addition we can now easily send VERY targeted emails based on the Category, Industry, Lead Source and Job Function. With the proliferation of email messages on a daily basis it is very important to target each message to the needs of the individual.

Email campaigns. Check. Every CRM has this as a checkbox on their feature list. Whether it is integrated as part of the system, as is the case with NetSuite & Oasis, or acheived through a partner integration, ala Salesforce and Campaigner, no CRM system is complete without it. Doing it well and making it easy, however is another story. Having been a marketer for longer than I care to admit, suffice it to say I have had plenty of experience with email campaigns…(not to date myself, but can you say mailmerge & Eudora?)

Ah but I digress. After struggling in this area with our previous CRM system, I was psyched to be able to quickly and easily generate targeted, personalized email campaigns. (and better yet, teach my team to do this as well!)

Zoho works like other CRM systems in terms of splitting up leads, accounts, and contacts. It is very easy to create email templates in either plain text or HTML, and use these templates for emailing out to leads or contacts. The text editor is simple and straightforward, and to add your own HTML creative you simply cut and paste. Adding wild cards for personalization is suprisingly easy, and acheived by simply choosing fields (in plain english!) from a drop down list and copying and pasting into your template.

By making the templates available to everyone who uses the system my team can personalize their messages and add wild cards for their signatures - leveraging content that is available for everyone to use yet giving the messages their own personal flair. Again, not a new concept but deceptively simple in Zoho.

Once the template is created you then go to either the Leads or Contacts database (depending on your desired targets) and select the Mass Email feature (this is easily located at the bottom of the main page of the Leads and Contacts databases.

This takes you to the Mass Email page, and is the area where you will select your email template and records to send it to. To select your template just choose one from the drop down menu. Then click on the “Select Records” tab to choose your recipients.

This is the area where Zoho really shines. While this is undoubtably the most important aspect of any direct response effort (selecting the actual targets for communication) - many systems fall short when it comes to being able to quickly get to the right target list. In fact, this basic ability was completely lacking in our last system without having to directly create a SQL database query. Not impossible, but for a marketing team not the most practical approach.

In Zoho there are a few basic ways to search for and select your email recipients. The first way is to use the “Custom Views Criteria.” This will use any of Zoho’s standard or user-created Custom Views to select the recipients. You can create custom views into your data based upon certain criteria (such as geography, timeframe, etc.) or you can choose your recipients based on Zoho’s out-of-the-box views such as “My Leads” or “Today’s Leads.”

From this view you can choose to send to all or manually select which contacts you want to receive the email. This feature alone is extremely valuable, especially in the case of not having a complete up-to-date, clean list, which can often happen right after a trade show, webinar, or some other event. This basically gives you a quick and easy way to opt out people that you do not want to receive the email, or weed out duplicates without having to clean the entire database. This is a great feature that has alowed us to continue to communicate effectively without having to go through an arduous database cleanup exercise.

The other method to select your recipients is to utilize the “Manual Criteria” feature. This allows you to select criteria from a number of fields to get to the right list. Say uou wanted to send a thank you note to all prospective customers who visited you at a recent regional trade show. You could search for all records with the lead source “trade show” and narrow it down to the specific show, account owner, territory, etc.

Again, not rocket science, it just works. And not only does it work, it’s simple enough that my entire team is now empowered to be more effective in their outbound communications. Once the target list is specified they can quickly choose from that list who should receive the email and who should not.

Overall for us it has never been easier to generate targeted, personalized, and effective email communications. While we will always continue to send out general HTML-based messages that highlight news and offers for a mass audience, we are now able to more effectively communicate with our customers, partners, and prospects. There are many more features in Zoho that my team is utilizing and in future posts will discuss more about how our entire process is improving the more that we continue to use the system.

This post was originally written by D-Tools VP marketing, Tim Bigones

Introduction here

As far as I know Sheet View is exclusive to ZOHO CRM. A common task (chore) in the management of any CRM system is editing large swaths of data at once. Some systems like Oasis CRM only give you a really crappy (trust me) mass update function. Other systems like Salesforce make you export to Excel to update a bunch of records and then re-import. (not fun)

ZOHO has a great mass update function that works as expected but sometimes you want to be able to change selected records as a group. For example changing just certain records to a new sales territory without changing all of them at once. You want to be able to get a view of all the possibles, sort as needed and then make the changes as needed. Common problem in the CRM admin world and until now I have not seen a good solution until I started working with the ZOHO CRM Sheet View.

Check it out. In this case I want to add a Sub-Territory to the main Territory. All I have to do is create a custom list view of the information. Press the ZOHO Sheet View link and I get an instant ZOHO Spreadsheet of the exact data presented in a new browser tab.

Once I am in the ZOHO Sheet View I can use any normal spreadsheet functions to copy, add cells change case, whatever I want can be done in the spreadsheet and when I hit save the records are automatically updated in the CRM system.

Very well implemented feature, totally useful, easy to use and HUGE time saver.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

Needless to say, we are heavy users of the various Zoho apps ourselves. Most of our help docs are on Zoho Wiki. We embed Zoho Show slide shows in our blog posts (even this post has one embedded below). Let me give you a latest example. We recently reached the 1 million user mark and wanted to share this glad news to our Newsletter subscribers. Here’s how we did/do it :

1. When a user chooses the ‘Subscribe to Zoho Newsletter’ check box when he/she registers, they are added to our Zoho CRM contacts or leads list.
2. When time comes to send the Newsletter (monthly), we log on to our Zoho CRM account, make an email template and save it
3. Then select all the contacts who are to be emailed
4. Schedule when to send the email
5. A couple of points to be noted : a) A Newsletter is typically HTML formatted and some email clients strip off formatting. So it is safe to have a version of it hosted online and point to it in the newsletter email you send. We have an online version of the Newsletter as a Zoho Writer public document. b) We have an ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each mail. Submitting your email address there will directly opt you out of the Newsletter subscriber list that we maintain in Zoho CRM
6. Lastly, we use Zoho Mail internally. And the filters/folders option there allows us to get the Newsletter related replies (genuine replies, bounced/undelivered mails, Out of Office/Vacation replies, auto-responses etc) segregated so that we can attend to each one of them easily.

We will be sharing more such scenarios of how we are using Zoho within our organization.

We get asked frequently about integration of some Zoho service or another with a third party service, often with that of a competitor. As one recent example, see this thread on Zoho CRM integration with GMail/GTalk. The question often is “Is Zoho all or nothing? If we like and use one Zoho service, would we be forced to use all of them as a bundle?”

The categorical answer is “No, Zoho is not an all or nothing proposition. We fully respect user choice and will fully support mixing and matching Zoho services with competing services.” We have intentionally architected the Zoho suite so that each service stands on its own, and can be mixed and matched with third party services. This “depth-first” architectural strategy, whereby each service is useful by itself (independent of integration with other Zoho services), enables a style of loose-coupled - RESTful, in the technical lingo - integration that makes it just as easy to integrate a Zoho service with a third party as it is with another Zoho service. We believe in customer choice, interoperability and data portability, and we do not want to lock-in any user. And we fully recognize the reality, particularly as a smaller vendor, but even true for very large vendors, that customers do not want to put all their eggs in one basket.

Specifically, to answer the specific question asked in our forums, Zoho CRM will interwork with the Google suite - including the all-important GMail, but with other Googe Apps components as well. But this extends beyond Zoho CRM - all of Zoho services will interwork with third party vendors wherever it makes sense, regardless of whether Zoho competes with that vendor in one aspect or another. As an example, if 37Signals would let us, we would be happy to integrate our Zoho Invoice or Zoho Wiki with their Basecamp project management offering, in spite of the fact that Basecamp competes directly with Zoho Projects.

It is that philosophy that guided us in our integration of the Zoho productivity applications with Salesforce AppExchange - an integration we nearly completed when they decided it wasn’t in their interest, something I actually disagree with; I believe it would actually make the Salesforce ecosystem stronger to let Zoho services in, but then again, perhaps it is in our best interest that they won’t let in Zoho! It is a different matter, of course, that it is their customers who lose.

Zoho a la carte is a fundamental guiding philosophy for us, not just a tactical competitive move. It brings numerous architectural benefits to us, enabling us to move faster in our own development.

That was my response to the announcement that Salesforce.com is integrating their CRM system with Google Apps. I respect what Marc Benioff has done to evangelize the SaaS model in the enterprise, but I cannot bring myself to accept his business model, which is summarized by the spreadsheet below (data courtesy of Google Finance):



&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Salesforce spends nearly 8 times on sales/marketing as it spends on R&D. Sounds to me a text book definition of “business model bloat”. If you are a customer of Salesforce, it makes you feel really happy that the company spends 8x on selling to you as in writing the code, right?

Let me mention some history here that I believe is relevant (note: I am not under any NDA). Several months ago, Salesforce.com invited us to participate in their AppExchange ecosystem. They knew of our Zoho CRM competition (which is why it was mutually agreed than an NDA was inappropriate), but the AppExchanage folks thought it was still good for their ecosystem. We agreed that it would be good for both of us, so we worked on making Zoho work with AppExchange, with their help & support. We invested in R&D to make the integration work, and we were about a week from launch, when Marc Benioff decided to pull the plug. He invited me for discussions. He offered repeatedly to acquire Zoho outright, which we rejected. I told him there is absolutely no fit between our companies, particularly with his business model (as noted above) and our business model. I told him there is just no cultural fit between our companies and such an acquisition would be miserable for both parties. Finally, he offered to let us integrate Zoho into AppExchange, provided we pull the plug on Zoho CRM. We told him that kind of pre-condition is totally unacceptable, and it also completely negates his claims of openness of their platform. Needless to say, we never did agree on the issue, and we dropped the integration effort.

The reason I am recounting that history is to show just how little Benioff understands the value of open ecosystems. He is still playing a 1990s software game, with expensive software (sorry, software-as-a-service!) and a business model that is sure to make Larry Ellison flinch, which is saying something.

I want to contrast that with our Google Gears integration. Google is our principal competitor, yet neither their team nor ours had any issue at all integrating - it was obvious to us this is the right thing to do for customers. The Google Gears folks bent over backwards to make sure the playing field was level, and we got access to information and support to do the integration right. That is openness.

History shows that integration efforts like the Google/Salesforce one, where the business models are so radically different, don’t prove durable. Ultimately markets will be smart enough to figure out what is obvious to many already: the Salesforce business model is an evolutionary dead-end. The proof is the silent popularity of Zoho CRM, one of the most successful Zoho services to date.

How often do you use Zoho CRM’s Calendar and Clock utilities? Let us know in this poll.

http://polls.zoho.com/rajeshsundaram/crm-utilities-usage-clock-and-calendar

thanks,
dharma

ShareThis

Time for little visual changes. Yes, we are updating the color themes in Zoho CRM. Here is a sneak peek of “Nature” color theme that is under development.

Also you can rate the existing color themes in this URL :
http://polls.zoho.com/rajeshsundaram/rate-existing-crm-color-themes

- Dharma

ShareThis

Some of you would have tried to unsuccessfully login to Zoho CRM by giving your credentials at the http://zoho.com url. You are unable to login because Zoho CRM still does not support SSO (Single Sign On). 

Kindly use the http://zohocrm.com url to sign in to your Zoho CRM account.

In the meantime, we are working on providing an alternate solution.

Thank You

ShareThis

Paul Greenberg mentions that CRM is getting more credibility now and the credibility has come over a period of time. Companies like Cisco (non-traditional vendors - the not-necessarily-CRM vendors or not-really-social media vendors) are jumping into the pool as they find that they need to tap into the unstructured conversations happening and mine that for information thereby helping them provide better services/products. This is good news for all around.

Paul also says the following :-

“… mega-giant companies like Oracle and SAP are integrating those tools because they see it makes good business sense. I’m excited that NetSuite went public and was successful as was salesforce when it went public a couple of years ago as was RightNow when it went public in 2006. Meaning that not only has the on demand market arrived but it has its own suburbs. There is a real place for software as a service or even simpler for data and applications being hosted on someone elses servers that is being provided for an affordable price. Its the real deal fo’ shoh, Jack.”

You will find the full post here :- http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/2008/01/signs-of-life-d.html

Integration with social tools is something that is going to happen across the board. The line between CRM and the social networks are getting more and more fuzzier. CRM is gerrymandering into the social networks now on the pretext of mining the data to get a more wholesome customer experience for the company (primarily) and the customer next.

What do you think about these changes?

ShareThis

We have updated the Outlook Plugin.
The login screen has been made more user-friendly.

Earlier there was confusion as to which username and password one ought to use in the Outlook Plugin to sync with Zoho CRM.

We have also given the facility to register with ZohoCRM from the Outlook Plugin login screen.

A new Help Link too is introduced which takes the user to the wiki spot handling the Outlook Plugin issues.

Some of the issues that have been fixed are as follows :-

• “Session Expired” problem fixed.

Earlier while synchronizing contact, task, calendar and etc., while the session used to get expired, it returned error message for each item(Invalid return value). Now it returns the message - “Session Expired and login again” . It also logsout automatically when this message gets popped-up.

• Duplicate contact check has been made faster.