Cube Yogi

With Christmas round the corner, everywhere you see cakes and so the title seemed more apt for this time of the year 😉 Here is a recent conversation I had with a customer (rather, lead). He contacted me asking for some modification to an Excel template. This was a Sales Pipeline Tracker template, which he had downloaded (& started using) from this website . I have uploaded the file here with the customer's data masked https://docs.zoho.com/file/4ogu8568be2e1b3584c61a04203a17674007d Some issues in using Excel are immediately obvious as soon as you glance through the Excel file. Like a bachelor pad 🙄 Ever went into a bachelor pad and seen the mess? Same with the Excel data in here. Once you open the file, you can notice immediately that the data is not properly organised. See the first column for Client Name. Some have just first name, some just the last name, some have full name. Sometimes, it is just the initials! There is no specific idea o...

Recently Zoho CRM Community had a blogpost on how to add country code to Leads along with a script to do the same. But the script seemed to leave a lot to be desired. Here is a screenshot of their 10-line script: These are the missing things we noticed with the above script: 1. First, there needs to be validation of whether the incoming phone number is empty or not. In the above script, even if the phone number is empty, '+91' will be added to the phone number. So, this means, in such records, phone number field will have only the value '+91'. 2. It would have been good to make it more generalized than hardcoding a specific country code into the script. Because this script is going to be applied to Leads, it is possible that the Leads may be coming in from various countries, given today's global nature of businesses. So having the script address just one country code is not going to satisfy today's growing business needs. 3. There is no checking in the script t...

Well … truth be told, there is no magic in anything … not at work, not in life. But why did I con you by naming this post with the words ‘magic’? Something can 'appear magical', though truly, behind the scenes, lot of work has gone into it meticulously to make it appear so. Your co-salesman might be ‘magically’ appearing to close almost every prospect coming his way. If you asked him, he would lift his collar and say "That’s the magic, dude!" and leave you with more awe. But what is unsaid is a lot more … lot of hardwork he would have put in behind the scenes to make every deal work out, lot of shitty stuff that would have happened under the cover, which no one wants to, or neither would, speak of. So time to create the magic yourself!  According to this Harvard Business Review article , a whopping 44% of sales executives think that their sales process is poorly managed! The key is to define your sales process really well, and it is well worth spending that initial ti...

Getting in Leads into the system is only half the story. Now, for the better half - following up with leads. The key to following up with Leads is to maximize conversion, as we know. It’s an ongoing challenge. Market situation may change. Competition landscape will undergo its own changes. So it’s not just enough to have a lead workflow, but it is crucial to measure its ongoing success rate as you keep using the workflow. Let’s talk about this in more detail. 
 Things to Remember Bucket-Based Followup So now we have categorized Leads into buckets, based on strategies we discussed in the previous post. It might be useful to come up with a different workflow for different buckets. Someone might have a 90% chance to convert to a customer, whereas someone else may have only a 20% chance. You may want to treat these leads differently when following them up, so that you allocate your salesperson to do more followups with those leads who have higher probability of conversion.  
 Modes of ...

So now you are in meditation . Meditation on your business processes and workflows. Since we are now focusing on CRM,I will consider on of the most common workflows almost every business owner has to chart out : lead followup workflow. I would suggest using a drawing tool as Draw.io ( https://www.draw.io/ or https://www.samepage.io/ ). It forces you to get into the finer details of the workflow. Also you can connect draw.io with other storage systems like Google drive, Dropbox, and few others so you can maintain versions of your workflows and also easily share with others. So let's get to it. Here are the things you might want to think about deeply and chart out a workflow. I will share a template for this workflow next week. Meanwhile, it's useful to try this exercise yourself. Feel free to write to me if you have questions or feel stuck. 1. Lead Source Do you have different sources from which you get leads? How do these sources differ in: a. The quality of leads they brin...

When you start a business and are few months into it, you find that many other business owners are using something they call a CRM software to manage their business. So you are compelled to think you also somehow should follow the herd effect and start using a CRM as the first step. Why do I call it a 'herd effect'? We will come to that in a separate post. Right now, let's say you decided you want to use a CRM. You sign up for one of the popular CRM software in the market like Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and start entering data. I see that business owners put in a lot of effort to do a detailed comparison of the various CRM software in the market. But they don't put as much effort to find out how to use the software they finally choose. Actually the effort should be in reverse. To be frank, in today's competitive software landscape, almost every CRM in the market is equal, at least the top players. They necessarily have to keep upgrading their features...