Streamline Your Processes with CRM's Blueprint
In the fast-paced world of sales and business, keeping track of leads, prospects, and customers can be a daunting task. With numerous steps involved in the pipeline, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. However, Zoho CRM has introduced a game-changing solution to this challenge: the Blueprint feature.
Blueprint is a powerful tool that simplifies and optimizes your sales process, making it easier to build, sell, and repeat your success. Let’s delve into how Zoho CRM’s Blueprint feature can transform the way your team operates.
What is Blueprint?
Blueprint is an online replica of your business process, capturing your entire offline workflow within the software. It facilitates automation, validation, and collaboration among your teams, making your process more efficient and free from loopholes. With Blueprint, you can execute a business process in a well-defined, systematic manner, ensuring that best practices are consistently followed. A blueprint creates a standardized and repeatable process that allows companies to scale efficiently. Otherwise, staff may get creative with the process resulting in incorrect or missing data causing a chaotic system that will be difficult to scale moving forward.
Key Features of Blueprint
Blueprint offers a wide range of features that can benefit your team.
Here are some of the key elements that make Blueprint a valuable addition to your CRM:
1. Visual Design with Blueprint Editor
With the Blueprint editor, you can design your process visually. Simply drag and drop to connect your actions together. Specify the sequence in which you want your team to address each type of opportunity, decide who can do what, and set conditions and actions required for a deal to close.
2. Turn Best Practices into Daily Actions
Best practices can only yield results if they are put into action. Blueprint ensures that your team follows the process you’ve designed. For instance, when closing a deal, Blueprint helps you ensure specific conditions, such as maximum discounts or negotiation periods, are met. It guarantees that activities not only happen but also occur within the specified time frame.
3. Sell on Time, Every Time
Time is of the essence in business, and Blueprint ensures that your process keeps moving. It prevents leads or deals from lingering in a particular stage for too long. Blueprint also ensures that critical tasks, like sending a quote or scheduling a follow-up call, are marked as complete before moving to the next stage.
4. Measure and Improve
Blueprint provides built-in reports that help you identify bottlenecks in your process. By analyzing where significant time is spent and where progress has stalled, your team can work together to make necessary revisions and improvements.
5. Automation of Routine Actions
Blueprint allows you to configure actions for each stage of your process. From sending follow-up emails to maintaining customer records, routine tasks can be automated, saving your team time and effort.
Creating a Blueprint
Creating a Blueprint is a straightforward process.
Here are the steps involved:
Enter basic information: Start by defining the name and description of your Blueprint.
Define the process flow in the editor: Use the visual editor to outline the steps in your process.
Configure transition settings: Specify the conditions required for a record to move from one state to another, both before, during, and after a transition.
Building Blocks of Blueprints
Blueprints consist of several building blocks, including:
State: Represents the condition that a record is in at a specific time.
Transition: Defines the conditions needed for a record to move from one state to another.
Common Transition: An option that can be reached from any state in the process and can be reused in different states.
When to Use a Blueprint
Blueprints are most useful when your business process takes place over a period of time and involves specific steps. They are best suited for processes that occur within a single module.
CommandCenter vs. Blueprint
While both CommandCenter and Blueprint assist with business processes, they serve different purposes. CommandCenter is driven by automation, combines multiple modules, and is flexible, while Blueprint is user-driven and designed for uniform processes within a single module.
In conclusion, Zoho CRM’s Blueprint feature is a valuable asset for businesses looking to streamline their business processes. It offers a clear, visual way to design and execute workflows, ensuring that best practices are consistently followed. By leveraging Blueprint, your team can work more efficiently, close deals on time, and achieve better results.