Sales Force Automation (SFA) in Zoho CRM

Sales Force Automation (SFA) in Zoho CRM

Your sales team has an overflowing plate of tasks: following up with leads, closing deals, providing accurate reports and forecasts, learning more about your product or service, and the list goes on. Staying on top of these tasks can be tough.

As your business grows, the number and complexity of your product or service may also increase; the competition is likely to become stiffer and the customers will surely expect more and more from you. This translates to more tasks that are more complicated and more difficult for your sales team.

If left unmanaged, this scenario could quickly lead to inefficiency, low productivity and, consequently, lost revenue.

Zoho CRM is built to support your sales team by automating routine tasks and facilitating non-routine ones. In general, this application of information technology to support the sales function of your business is called sales force automation (SFA).

How is Zoho CRM designed with respect to the sales cycle?


During the sales cycle:
  1. The leads entering your system get qualified and converted into contacts.
  2. Post-conversion, you pursue deals with these contacts.
  3. Once you close your deals, you generate revenue for your organization.
At any point, there are leads and deals in different stages of this cycle. In each stage, a good sales team tailors its activities and interactions to move the lead or the deal to the next stage.

For this to happen, you need a system to keep track of the leads and deals moving at different velocities through the different stages of a sales cycle. The data generated during this process needs to be organized in such a manner that the right person can quickly access the right details at the right time.

In Zoho CRM, this data is organized into modules, records, and fields.

A module is a set of records related to an entity. For example, if we take "Leads" as an entity:
  1. Bob and Alice are leads.
  2. Their records are present in the Leads module.

In our example, a record would include details like the lead's name, lead's phone number, and lead source. These details are called fields. Each field has a name and a value.

Field name
Field value
Lead name
Bob
Phone number
0192837465
Lead source
Cold call

So, a record is a collection of fields.

We can represent the above example as follows:

In Zoho CRM, we don't create one record for a potential customer and stuff all the details related to their ongoing journey in that single record.

Instead, we chunk these details into records in different modules called Sales Force Automation (SFA) modules. This is done to:
  1. Maximize the amount of relevant details for the salesperson's tasks
  2. Minimize the need to move between modules to get relevant details
  3. Minimize the need to re-enter details that are common to many records

SFA modules

The SFA modules are Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Deals.

Leads module


The leads module is where you first store details about your incoming leads. You can import your leads from spreadsheets, manually enter them, use webforms,etc. No matter where they come from, they get stored as records in this module.

As your leads make their one-time journey to becoming a contact, you can track their status, add useful details, and collaborate with your team without having to leave this module. If all goes well, your lead will soon be ready to get converted into a contact.

Contacts and Accounts modules

At this stage, you convert your lead into a contact and an account.

When you convert a lead:
  1. The details related to that person go into the contacts module
  2. The details related to his or her organization go into the accounts module

Because this is a one-time process and we are dealing with one person, there is no need to maintain the lead record once we've created a contact record. So, the lead record gets deleted after conversion.

The lead record is split into a contact record and an account record because you may have to deal with many contacts belonging to the same organization. For this reason, it's a good idea to have an accounts module with only the organization-related details. You can link such an account with multiple contacts.

Deals module

You can now pursue deals with your contacts and accounts. Since you can work on many deals with the same contact or account, there is a separate module designed for this process. You can track your deals and access your deal-related details in this module.

Scenario

When we put all these steps together in concert with the sales cycle, it looks like this:

Let's use an example to see these modules in action.

Emma works at Sketles Developers. She is interested in purchasing some machines and their attachments for her employer. She searches online and comes across some products from Zylker Inc that seem to fit her requirements. She contacts the sales team at Zylker for more information.

How is this lead processed using Zoho CRM?
  1. Emma is added as a lead in the leads module.
  2. She is contacted to find out more about her and her organization. Once the sales rep is satisfied, the lead is converted into a contact (Emma) and an account (Sketles Developers).

  3. A deal is created in the deals module. This deal is linked with Emma (a contact) and Sketles (an account). The sales rep records details, changes the stage of the deal, and collaborates with the sales team as they slowly but surely move towards winning the deal.

Track your activities

With your data organized into modules, you can concentrate on performing your sales activities. This may include tasks, calls, or meetings. We have standard modules where you can create, assign, and track them. More importantly, they all come with the option of setting reminders so that no lead or deal is lost due to oversight.

Let's say that you perform the following activities as part of your sales process:
  1. Call your lead during qualification.
  2. Call your contact after conversion.
  3. Meet the contact during proposal/negotiation.
  4. Conduct a product demo for the contact.
You can record these activities in the activities modules:

You can add and view these activities from within the records in leads, contacts, accounts, and deals modules. For example, we can see all the activities linked to Emma in her record. We can also create tasks, calls, or meetings from within Emma's record.


Smoothen your sales process

Once you are comfortable with using these modules (Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Calls, Tasks, and Meetings), you can explore other modules and features to automate and streamline your sales process. Some of these include:
  1. Reports and analytics to ascertain the health of your sales pipeline quickly:

  2. Forecasts to set targets, track achievement, and predict performance:
  3. Lead assignment rules to automatically assign leads to your sales team:
  4. Lead scoring to help you prioritize your leads:
  5. Blueprints to standardize your sales process:
  6. Workflow rules to automate steps big and small:
You can pick and choose among these and other features to create a setup that is tailored to your organization and its personnel. With this in place, your sales team will be spending more time selling and less time performing important but routine record keeping tasks.

Resources

To learn more about the various modules discussed here, please use the following resources:
Module
Documentation
Leads
Contacts
Accounts
Deals
Activities
Forecasts






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