Online businesses needs a technology to manage and interact with your customers so that it can help you make maximum profits. A CRM technology can help you achieve that extra edge over your competitors. And for that you need to setup a sales pipeline in CRM. Here, in this blog I will explain in 7 easy steps to setup a sales pipeline using Zoho CRM for your online business.
Considering the fact that you already have a business website up and running successfully. Your next requirement is to have a zoho crm/one account.
I have divided the complete sales pipeline in 7 easy steps for you to setup easily. These are as follows. You can click on any of the step to jump to that section.
- Integrate website with the Zoho CRM and start getting Leads
- Convert the lead into Deal
- Generate Quote/Estimate from Deal
- Send the Quote/Estimate to Prospects
- Create Salesorder/Invoice from Quote
- Deal is won or lost
- Make sales report
These are the general steps any company follows, however we can customize these steps according to your business needs.
1. Integrate website with the Zoho CRM and start getting Leads
This is the first step in any sales pipeline that your queries/customers should be stored as leads at some place in CRM. And the best place for that is Leads module in CRM. Generally your website has a contact us form in the landing page, the customer fills the form and all the details that is received in the form is stored in the Ledas module of of the CRM.
This can be achieved in number of ways depending upon your requirement and most specifically what twchnology your website uses to run. Integrating wordpress websites with Zoho CRM is very straight forward. However, if you run custom built websites that can also be integrated with Zoho CRM.
2. Convert the Leads into Deals
Once the lead is stored in the CRM you can perform a variety of task it. You can setup workflow to send automated emails to leads/customers. Create a Contact or Account for every lead generated manually or we can make automation for this also.
Now we dont perform all the task in a single module there are multiple modules and every lead goes through these modules and in each module we can perform some task what is necessary, it can be atomated or manual. Once the lead is confirmed we can move it to Deal and in the same time we can also generate a Contact or Account for this. The complete process may look complicated for a newbie but all these operations are achieved in just click of a button.
3. Generate Quote/Estimate from Deal
Deals is one the important module of any sales pipeline. It gives you the data of how many lead prospects have confirmed to become a Deal. The confirmed Deal is again goes forward to become a Quote that is forwarded to your customers. Customer can agree on the quote/estimate or you can send revised quote to the customer.
This way you can have multiple quotes/estimates attached to your Deals. If the final quote is agreed by customer, the Deal is won.
4. Send Quote/Estimate to prospects
Once the Deal is is created we send it to prospects. If prospects do not like the quote we can make another quotation and send again the revised quote from the same Deal.
The process works in just few click that you need not worry about the complications invlved at all.
5.Create Salesorder/Invoice from Quote
Creating Salesorder is the next thing after Quote is created, sent and agreed upon by customer. We might skip salesorder and create invoice and send it to customer also. However, it totally depend on the business and varies form organization to organization.
6. Deal is won or lost
Once you have created the invoice or salesorder you can mark the Deal as won. You can manually the Deal as won or we can make an automation to mark the Deal as won auttomatically on some action. So, when the action is triggered the automated workflow runs and mark your Deal as won. The action can be anything like creation of salesorder or invoice or when you receive the paymemt from cleint.
7. Make sales report
