Without the necessary planning, you may find yourself going down the wrong path only to start over again, or ending up with a solution that is not streamlined, does not offer any performance improvements, cannot scale and is difficult for your organization to fully adopt. Therefore, a Zoho CRM implementation plan is key to the success of your first Zoho CRM implementation.

In this guide, we will cover the planning phase of your Zoho CRM Implementation. For Administration, basic configuration, user setup, security and all other aspects of initial setup take a look at our Zoho Implementation Checklist here, or should your require implementation assistance, contact a professional software consultant like KumoFlow to assist you in this process.

To achieve a successful Zoho CRM implementation, planning is key. The business process flow that drives your business will be your guideline and frame of reference when deciding on how to best implement the CRM in your business. Understanding and documenting your flow is key to delivering a complete and well-performing solution.

While most businesses already have some guidelines in place for how they do business on a day-to-day basis, few have a fully developed and documented business process flow that models their business processes from start to finish. To develop a CRM solution that will not only improve efficiency in your business, but that will be scalable as your business grows, developing this set of step-by-step processes or process flow is a crucial step in your journey towards a successful Zoho CRM Implementation. Not only will this enable you to apply your process to your CRM, but it will also be key to determine which areas require improvement and where automation can reduce the workload of your people.

The most popular format to do this in is called The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which is a graphical notation that depicts the steps in a business process. BPMN depicts the end to end flow of a business process and the notation has been specifically designed to coordinate the sequence of processes and the messages that flow between different process participants in a related set of activities. Below is an example of a business process flow in BPMN.

Now that you have a clearly defined business flow, the next part in your Zoho CRM implementation plan is to establish what you would like to achieve by using a CRM. One of the biggest benefits in using a CRM system such as Zoho CRM are the features surrounding automation of processes and functions and now is the time to consider how automation can streamline your process, reduce inefficiencies and improve overall performance. Compile a list of the tasks and functions you would like to have automated in your process. This can be the sending of customer emails at a certain point in the sales cycle, automatically assigning records to groups or roles, internal notifications based on a client’s status, alerts based on value or time or generating of reports to name a few.

This is also the time to consider the other applications and services your business uses as part of your flow and to decide if you require integration to any of them. Whether you require the capturing of leads from the company website, measuring your Google Adwords performance in CRM or collecting information from online forms, it is important to understand if integration to your existing platforms and service providers is possible early on.

One of the major benefits of using a CRM as part of your business process flow is the ability to filter your data to access valuable insight quickly, generate reports on the fly to measure performance and identify problem areas. The extent of your filtering ability and depth of your reports will depend on the underlying data in your CRM.

Identify each piece of information that is not only required but also beneficial throughout your business process flow and document these. When you start building out the modules in CRM (the different sections where information will be stored for example: “Leads”, “Deals” or “Accounts”), this list of the required information will be used to customize the CRM to suit your business process flow. These fields will also form the basis of the automation you build into your CRM. This document should not only define the information you would like to capture but at which point in your flow it is required or beneficial to have.

The initial set up of Zoho CRM may seem a little daunting and with so many configuration options, one can feel a little lost at first. However, with a little guidance, you will quickly find your way around. We will take you through the most important steps in setting up your CRM for first use and by the end of this guide, you will be well on your way to actively using Zoho CRM in your business. For those that prefer to let someone else take care of your implementation, take a look at our Zoho CRM Implementation services.

The steps in our Zoho CRM Implementation Checklist are:

1. Onboarding Users and Configuring User Permissions
2. Customization of Modules, Fields and the Home Screen
3. Importing Data
4. Configuration of Communication Channels
5. Basic Automation
6. Reporting

The very first thing we’ll be covering in our Zoho CRM implementation checklist is setting up the first users. A user which more often than not will be an employee is someone that has direct access to the system via a username and password. Permission will control what data they have access to and which features they can use. Permissions are split into two sections including Roles and Profiles. Simply put, Roles control what data users can see and Profiles control what they are allowed to do. Roles are based on your company’s hierarchy. You can add users into their corresponding roles and define who they report to. The top-level role will have access to all the roles below them. The role below that will only have access to the data of the roles below them.

To set these up, open Zoho CRM in your browser (Quick tip – the quickest way to access Zoho CRM is through the direct URL – crm.zoho.com) and click on the tools icon in the top right corner. This will take you to the Setup page. In the Users and Control section, you can configure your users and permissions. For the initial setup, you can leave the Standard profile in place.

It is time to decide what to customize inside Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM is customizable in more ways one can imagine and many of these customization capabilities or requirements will only become clear after you have started using the system. We will not be able to cover all the customization capabilities in this guide. Instead, we will focus on the one that most companies will look at first including modules and fields. While the CRM can be used out of the box, it is so much more useful when it is customized to suit your company requirements when it comes to what data you need to capture, and how you will capture it.

To start customizing your CRM, click on the tools icon in the top right-hand corner, and select the Modules and Fields option in the Customization section.

Click Save when you are done.

Now that only the required modules are active you can define the fields you would like to show in each. You can remove those that will not be used and add the ones you require. To do this, click the link to the corresponding module and select the layout you wish to edit. In most cases, you will be editing the “Standard” Layout first and work from there. Click on the Standard link to open the Layout Customization screen.

Making sure all the required fields that apply to your company and data structure are available is an important step you need to pay close attention to as the fields you make available at this point will be the same fields you need to map all your data to when you start importing your data.

Another part of the customization you would want to look at as part of your initial setup is the home screen. If you have a specific layout you would like your users to view when they login to CRM, you can create that view and share it with your users. To create a new click on the drop-down list at the top right of your home page and then select Customize Home Page.

There a many different types of automation in Zoho CRM. In our Zoho CRM Implementation checklist we’ll only be covering the basics.

Assignment Rules allow us to assign records to certain users inside CRM. (Note that this is not for records that are manually added.) Assignment rules apply to records that are automatically added to CRM, for example, new leads that are added to CRM from your website integration.

Workflow Rules allow us to automate common procedures inside CRM. A simple example of a workflow rule is a task that gets created when a lead comes in from a specific source. Workflow rules and Automation in CRM are extremely powerful and for this guide, we only make mention of them. To learn more about the possibilities with Zoho CRM Automation, please click here.

Blueprints is another automation feature we’ll only briefly cover in this guide. It will take some time to develop your Blueprints but it’s a good time to start thinking about how you can implement Blueprints to your CRM. Zoho CRM Blueprint gives us the ability to, using our business process flow as a guideline, provide a mechanism to physically guide our users through the CRM processes. Each process in your business flow can be modeled inside this Blueprint and will provide a great deal of functionality moving forward. For each transition in the Blueprint, it is possible to collect the mandatory information required at that point, trigger automation such as creating tasks and sending notifications, provide information to the CRM user, actioning escalations, approvals and several other actions.