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Build your Sales Process Understanding the Sales Cycle in Zoho CRM. There is a sales cycle in every business. Although selling might go through different stages in various companies, there is a pattern that we all follow that defines the sales cycle. A sales cycle can generally be defined as the different stages from acquiring leads to closing a deal. The stages include prospecting > qualification > initial contact, offering, negotiating, and closing. Lead Capturing is the first step that most businesses would take in a sales cycle. You may run campaigns and visit trade shows to collect leads from various other sources to fill up your sales pipeline. Prospecting: Once you have the list of leads, the initial contact starts. Some of them may be interested in listening to what you have to offer while others may not even qualify for the next stage.The plan would be to create a database of potential customers who might, at some point, buy what you offer. Connecting: In this next step in your sales cycle, you would gather all the information about the prospect’s requirements. You may connect with the prospects via emails, calls or even social media to share what you offer and find out if they will be interested to know more. Offering: The previous step will greatly help you in understanding and building a presentation that will address the business requirements of the prospect. At this stage, your team needs to tailor your proposal ing to the prospects' needs. Negotiating - Even with the best of offerings, your prospects may hesitate and object to the price, delivery timeline, or terms. For this stage your sales teams need to stay positive and be prepared in handling the situation to speed up the process and to push the deal further through the sales pipeline. Closing - And finally, it’s time to close the deal when the purchase is made or a contract is signed. Now to put it in perspective, let's see how an ideal sales cycle can be mapped and implemented in your Zoho CRM account. The primary modules that will capture the sale cycle in your CRM account are Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Deals and Activities. The Leads module is where all your lead information is captured. You can import a bunch of leads that were collected from trade shows and campaigns or gather them via web forms. You can also directly add a lead from the Facebook or Twitter accounts of your company when they are integrated with your CRM account. Next, it is essential to find out the best opportunities that might give you a winning deal. As the primary means of communication, emails can be sent and associated to the leads by configuring IMAP or POP accounts within your CRM account. Additionally, make use of the Activities module to create tasks and events, and also register call logs. These details can be associated with each lead. Your initial contact matters here since you are looking out for the leads that have a high chance of becoming a customer and most importantly, a long-term loyal one. Once you qualify a lead, it can be converted to a contact, account and deal. Contacts are people with whom you communicate for a business opportunity. They can be the decision makers in a company, administrators, or even partners. Accounts on the other hand are companies or departments within a company that your organization is currently doing business with or plans to do in the future. Understanding the requirements of the prospects and connecting with them will help you identify a potential customer. So you could also identify a potential customers as early as converting a lead and create a deal to track the various stages the deal goes through in the sale pipeline. Finally, the deal can be marked as closed won or lost. Initial stages in your sales process Now that we have covered an ideal sales cycle in Zoho CRM, let's discuss the initial stage in a sales process - the Lead Management. The cycle goes like this - Lead capturing, distributing, tracking, nurturing and finally converting. Plan on how you would like to implement these stages in your CRM account. Lead Capturing - First, list down the various sources that your leads come from and how you can capture it all within the leads module. Adding leads manually is not feasible, and automating lead capturing can ensure you do not miss out on the details collected form the source. For example, leads generated from web forms in your web site can be directly captured when your prospects submit the form. Customers today have their presence in social media and so integrating Facebook and Twitter within your Zoho CRM account can be of use. Lead Distribution - Secondly, decide how you would like to assign these leads among your sales teams. Do you want to assign leads with high potential to an experienced sales rep, do you want to apply a round robin method as well? Assignment rules can help you distribute leads to various team members. This automation can make sure you reduce the response time and leads are appropriately distributed within the team. Lead Tracking - Next, determine the components that you want to track and measure from the data that you have in the Leads module. For example, you may want to know the average time taken for leads to get qualified and converted or the number of leads that you receive from a particular source or industry. Create these reports or filter it out in a list view to analyze. Lead Nurture - Then, list out ways to constantly engage with the leads across different channels. Not all leads are interested right away to make a purchase. You may want to identify such leads to put them in the lead nurturing cycle. Emails, calls and social media will assist you in communicating at the right time as timing is essential. Lead Conversion- And lastly, decide your conversion point. Your sales cycle may require you to fulfil certain criteria before you qualify a lead. Say for digital marketing campaigns, filling up the survey or a Contact Us form on the landing page is a good conversion point. In a trade show, requesting a demo and exchanging business cards can also be a conversion point for your business. Configure and mandate these in CRM so that sales teams adhere to the defined process. From here, there are two main components that primarily cover the sales cycle implementation - lead conversion mapping deal stage customisation and stage-probability mapping. As seen before, the initial information collected for a lead can be distributed to a contact, account and deal. Zoho CRM comes with a pre-built lead conversion process where a qualified lead can be converted. All the details of the person are stored as a contact and the details of the company are captured as an account. If the lead is ready to give you a deal, you can create a deal record as well during the lead conversion. The key is to map all the fields from Leads to Contacts, Accounts and Deals modules. Well, since not all businesses follow the same process, customizing the deal stages and creating a sales pipeline is significant. The deal stages in your business may be in line with pro specting, demo scheduled, need analysis, qualified, negotiation, and closed won/lost. When it does not match, you have the flexibility to change them as you need. Adding to that is the flexibility to change the stage-probability mapping. Deal stages helps you identify where the prospect is in a sales pipeline and tells you the likelihood of a sale. Identify the deal stages and its winning probability to configure in your CRM account. Say for instance in the Proposal stage, there is a 75% chance of closing the deal and in the Negotiation stage there is a 90% chance. When stages are mapped to the probability of a sale like this, it gives visibility into your forecasts and targets. Now, let's recollect what we have learned. Sales cycle is different for every business. You need to identify and define the stages included from acquiring leads to closing a deal. Map these stages with the functionalities in Zoho CRM to implement them in your business account. Get the lead management sorted as it is the first stage in your sales process. Finally, go over the lead conversion strategies and deal probability mapping to get the sales process in place - from lead capturing to closing a deal.