Neil Weston, Clareti Ltd.

Dear All

Firstly all of us at Clareti hope you had a great Christmas holiday period and have a fantastic 2016. We would like to thank all of you for your business during 2015 and the best of success for you as we start 2016, an Olympics year and one that has been designated the International Year of Pulses by the United Nations!

This newsletter is targeted at giving you all an update about some of the things that you may (or may not) have noticed about the extensive array of Zoho business applications and frankly to encourage you to call us and let us help you make more use of them. We usually estimate that most companies only make use of around 20% of the capabilities of the CRM application. There is so much in there that can help you take away the mundane cutting and pasting and email alerting. We will list some of these ‘forgotten’ features later.

Changes and Enhancements

CRM

  • Unique fields – It is now possible to designate up to two fields within a module as ‘unique’ fields now preventing duplication of membership numbers etc.
  • New customisation layout (again) – Don’t forget to try out the new module customisation functionality. It’s much quicker and easier than then old way. Let us know if you need help finding how to enable it.
  • Trigger workflow on event cancellation – For those of you who use events you can now trigger a workflow on an event cancellation. You may want to send an alert if a certain event is cancelled etc.
  • My Activities View – There is now a new default view that will show all your personal activities. Useful for preparing ‘to-do’ lists.
  • Web Forms – For those of you who use Web Forms you can now attach up to 3 files (total <20Mb) when submitting a form.

Things you may not use or just may not have noticed

  • Web forms and lead allocation – get your leads directly into Zoho, allocate them to the right person and trigger alerts from them. They’re your leads, not your agencies!
    Automation – many people are scared of this but with a little thought you can automate many of the repetitive marketing or sales processes. Workflows are hugely powerful and often not used much or at all by Zoho users.
  • Report Scheduling – generate and send weekly or monthly reports to both Zoho users and anyone else with an email address (maybe the chairman??). Any report can be scheduled to run and be emailed to anyone.
  • Territories – set up either product or geographical territories and allocate roles appropriately to these. Territories is much more flexible than using roles and territories can be shared or changed very easily.

Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is due to have a new user interface early this year. We are waiting to be given access to this (much overdue) new UI. One thing we know that has already been fixed in the current UI is the problem associated with displaying text and images side-by-side when people view this in Outlook. The text and image now don’t overlap!

New and Interesting Zoho Applications

Zoho People
I doubt it many of you have looked at Zoho People before but it is a hugely capable and useful HR and Task Management application. It deals with all of those things such as timesheet, leave and attendance management and is extremely easy to use. When set up it allows you to monitor which projects and clients people are spending time on and HR processes/approvals etc. can be automated. Let us know if you want to hear more as this really is a useful and cost-effective Zoho application that takes away the difficulties of keeping multiple spreadsheets and scattered HR records across your business.

Zoho Forms
I’ve chosen to mention Zoho Forms again this quarter. Most of your businesses will require either customers or employees to fill out forms at some point. Forms is a great way to design these forms and to gather and process the data. Any of the data can also be integrated into CRM to trigger workflows, alerts etc.

Zoho Motivator
This may not be for everyone but Zoho have released Zoho Motivator, a gamification solution that integrates fully with CRM and is aimed at maximizing revenue and driving team engagement. Sales people can participate in sales contests, meet sales targets and showcase their performance to managers and peers.

As always do feel free to get in contact about any CRM or Marketing questions you may have. Clareti doesn’t just do Zoho but has extensive experience across the whole area of marketing and/or business strategy.

With thanks to you all for being Zoho users (or potential users!)

Neil.

neil.weston@clareti.com | 07802 225194 | 020 7458 4200