Zoho's latest online business app is an e-signature software solution to allow small businesses to electronically sign documentation online.

This is just one more example of how Zoho really listen to their customer feedback as we know this has been a very popular request from users of Zoho CRM and other Zoho software through the years, who often struggled using external software to e-sign the documents, which lacked the functionality to integrate to Zoho CRM.

Zoho Sign is an online document signing app that can be integrated with other Zoho software such as Zoho CRM and also Zoho People which is there online HR information system software.

You can use this to sign documents such as quotes/invoices, contracts, policies, training records and more.

The software allows you to create your signature online using inbuilt functions such as a handwritten signature generator, or by writing the signature yourself on-screen, or uploading it from a JPEG file.

You can then upload the document that needs to be signed and then send it to the people who need to sign it, as well as specify the order that it needs to be signed.

These people will each receive an alert when they at required to sign the document and they will be able to apply the signature so that the document gets sent to the next person in the approval process.

There is even a feature to have a kind of 'time out' function so that the document becomes invalid if one of the signees does not sign it in time.

This kind of app is invaluable for any kind of business that has documentation that requires a 'sign off' as part of the business process.

Obtaining signatures on documents can often be a time-consuming part of any business process, often causing bottlenecks and delays, so this can be considered an important area to increase efficiency and certainly internal and even external documents can be signed in this manner and synchronised with the CRM lead or contact the document is associated to much faster than sending PDFs, printing them, signing and scanning and sending back.

We're excited to see where this app will go and are really pleased that Zoho have introduced this e-sign software to their rapidly expanding sweet of online business tools.

Contact Us

Contact us here for more details on how Zoho Sign can be implemented in your business and/or integrated to Zoho CRM to make your business operations more efficient.

Zoho CRM, the award winning online CRM tool from Zoho, allows you to increase sales team efficiency by implementing CRM workflow and formula fields. Use our Zoho CRM tips to learn how to set up automated calculations of sales team commisisons.  

Use Formula Fields and Custom Reporting in Zoho CRM to Calculate and Report on Sales Commissions

The tremendous flexibility of Zoho CRM web based CRM solution allows you to improve sales and accounting workflow by creating custom formula fields, CRM workflow and customised reports that can be used to automtically calculate and report on commissions owed to sales managers.

Let's take a simple process as an example:

For each sale, the Sales Manager would enter the sale value (opportunity Amount) and other details and save the opportunity as normal.

A Regional Sales Manager then gets an alert when an opportunity has been won. This alert can be general or specific to region.

That Sales manager is then responsible for reviewing the data and entering the relevant commission for that Sales Manager.

Zoho CRM calculates the commission due to each Sales Manager and outputs them to an attractive report, which it send to the Accountant on a monthly basis.

The steps for this process are relatively simple:

1) Create a custom field, 'commission percentage', this can be a free number fireld or a drop down.

2) Create a custom formula field, based on the formula = (potential amount / 100)*commission percentage

3) Say you want to restrict access to these fields - use the Data Sharing rules to make them visible to the Regional Sales Manager profile only. This way, regular Sales Managers cannot see or change the commissions fields.

4) Set up an alert to send an automated email to the Regional Sales Manager when a sale is won, add filters based on region if needed and enter the relevant Sales Manager name as the recipient.

5) When the sale is won the Regional Sales Manager will review the sale info, enter the commission percentage and the commission owed will be calculated when the opportunity is saved.

6) Create a custom report that reports on commissions earned on closed won sales by month.

7) Create a report schedule that sends this report to the Accounting team or Sales Director on a monthly basis

The result: an automated sales process utilising Zoho CRM workflow that includes all levels of the sales team as well as accounting.

We hope this online Zoho CRM assistance is useful!

We offer affordable, professional Zoho CRM implementation services in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei.

For more information, contact us here or send us an email on sales@crmasiasolutions.com

Online meetings are not like normal meetings.  You cannot judge body language as well as you can when doing them face to face, you cannot always see your participants, you need to rely a lot more on technology, which can have glitches. Here are a few tips to help you on your way to hosting effective online meetings.  

At first, they can be daunting, but with some practise they get easier and can be quite good fun as you work to overcome the challenges involved. And ultimately doing meetings online can save your business many hundreds, even thousands of dollars in travel costs and time, so learning how to do virtual meetings efficiently is well worth the effort.

Here are ten simple tips for doing online meetings more effectively.

1.Send an agenda and any material to participants before the meeting
The meeting will go more smoothly if all people know what they are meeting about

2. Keep virtual meetings short
Maximum time should be about 45-60 mins, have breaks if longer is required

3. If you are meeting with people in multiple locations, assign co-facilitators in each location to help
This might be assistance with setup, resuming hardware/software after a glitch, or even simply organising the attendees to be there on time!

4. No laptops
If users are on the web in your meeting they are using your bandwidth and not listening to you! If you keep the meetings short then they should not have the need to bring their work into your meeting.

5. No Mobile phones
If phones are ringing and people are talking on mobiles during your meeting, it may interfere with the sound quality and general experience of the online meeting.  If it is essential for a particpiant to have a mobile phone, such as support staff, set to vibrate and leave the room when calling

6. Limit the number of participants in each location
8-10 people in each remote meeting room is adequate, more can result in excessive noise

7. Plan and know the technology
As the presenter you need to be proficient in all technologies involved.  If you're not confident, have a co-facilitator with you and / or at the various locations to help.  Learn how to ‘ad lib’ if something goes wrong and how to keep people interested while systems are rebooted or if one party drops out.  Be flexible, be prepared.

8. Make a ‘participant map’ to remind you who is present
Select participants at random to answer questions and keep them involved, ask questions, make the virtual meeting a multi directional event just as you would in a normal meeting.

9. Send materials prior to the meeting
Patricipants will get more involved more quickly if they are aware what you want to talk about before the meeting. You will use less time explaining and will be able to get straight to the point. Follow up with participants before the meeting to be sure they have received and reviewed the materials.

10. Allow time for link ups
There is sometimes a delay in audio / video – factor this in to your presentation / meeting and make sure people are with you as you progress through the meeting. Ask for participant feedback on connection speed etc., you may be talking but the participants may not be able to see you! If possible use a simple web survey after each meeting to see users felt how it went. Over time you will know where to improve.

As a Project Manager you need to organise your own and your team's tasks. Task owners need to then manage them and ensure they get completed so that you can track progress and report back to the client/stakeholders.  All too often though, you may find yourself doing more task management than project management, and before long the people management, issue and risk management and worse still, delivery of the project start to slip! Zoho Projects newest feature improvement can help you keep task management time to a minumum and can help you focus on delivering the project.

A major upgrade to Zoho's online project management solution Zoho Projects was released about a year ago and since then Zoho have been listening to users and have recently released some major improvements in their project management solution, this latest release being in the task management functions.

Inline Task Editing

What is this?  Well, apart from sounding really cool, it means a lot less clicking for you!  Editing is made a lot easier as you can now edit many parts of the task without leaveing the task list. Previously, you could edit priority, owner and status, but now you can also edit the start, end date and percentage completed for any task in the list, without ever leaving the list.

Task Editing

Due to popular demand you are now able to move task lists across projects, ie. from Project A to Project B, in just a few clicks.

Bulk Task Movement

Previously a project manager / team lead would have to edit single tasks to move them from one task list to another. Now you can grab a whole bunch of tasks and move them across to another task list, saving yourself a lot of time to oversee tasks or actually work on and finish tasks to achieve your goal.  

We'll make a video about these latest functions shortly and post it on our YouTube channel . Stay tuned.

CRM Asia Solutions use Zoho Projects in all of our client projects, so we are excited about this improvement.

As a small business offering professional Zoho implementation services to clients as far afield as Australia, Thailand, Singapore and United Kingdom, we need a tool that allows us to do this as efficiently as possible, and Zoho Projects helps in numerous ways:

It helps us track multiple projects running at the same time
Issues are centralised and discussed online
Documents are centralised, accessed at any time, no more searching through reems of emails for attachments
Tasks are managed and discussed on a task specific basis
Task status is easily exported and sent to clients for review in familiar excel format

If you are interested in using Zoho Projects in your organisation, please let us know here, or via email on sales at crmasiasolutions.com

Why Less is More when Doing Email Marketing

In our experience of doing many email marketing campaigns in Asia, Europe and Australia for various kinds of companies in all manner of industries, the one common underlying misapprehension many people have time and time again is that 'size matters'!

All too frequently, people think that the larger the size of their email list, the better results they will get.  In our years of experience though, we have learned this just isn't true!  And as part of our email marketing services in Australia and the Asia region we try to make clients understand that when doing email marketing, 'carpet bombing' just doesn't work and can actually get you marked as a spammer.  

When doing email marketing, strategy is key.  And 'less is more'.

Think about it... how many times have you received emails for products or services that you are in no way interested in?  What is your reaction?  Say you work in IT... How do you react when receiving an email selling fake drugs or watches or something similar, compared to an email that speaks of something you are really interested in?

When you pick up a newpaper, what do you do? It is unlikely you read it from cover to cover. You likely skim to the interesting bits and disregard the rest.  Our brains are perfectly tuned to doing this and it is the same when we are confronted with full inboxes every morning.

If an email targets people who are REALLY and GENUINELY interested in what you have to say then you will get far better results. That is, the recipient is far more likely to open it, read it, and impotrantly, click something inside it.

The importance of taking time to build your email list with genuine opt in readers and specific lead/customer details gathered by your sales teams can never be underestimated.  

Sure, this will take time and it it very tempting to say "I don't have time to gather all this information, I'll never get started!" But there are ways to gather details on leads, to advertise your newsletter and segment campaign lists - eg. links in email signatures, mentions in standard email templates, active telesales campaigns drawing in subscribers, and so on.

Also, if your lead lists are a mess and from various sources, then you can do a simple email blast to ASK them if they are interested in receiving emails from you... and if so, what they are intrested in.  If you use a CRM you can capture the respondents easily through a web to lead form, then you can start to design your subsequent email campaigns from there.

If you use email marketing software such as Zoho Campaigns, Connect or Mail Chimp (there are many), then you can also use the bounce results of the first campaign to assess the quality of the email list you are starting out with.

Better still, if your email marketing software and your CRM software is integrated, for example as Zoho Campaigns is with Zoho CRM, then you can get the campaign results (reads, clicks etc) on the leads in the CRM for immediate analysis, no need to switch back and forth between two apps.

In addition, you can use custom fields in the CRM to filter leads that are really relevant for the campaign you want to do. For example:

You are based in Sydney Australia and want to run a campaign that will involve some face time, a personal visit.  Why send an email to people all over Australia when you cannot and have no intention of visiting them?  Send the campaign only to those people in the relevant region. How do you segment your list to target those people in your city only?

You are promoting a specific product X. Why target people who have never shown any interest in that product, and especially people you are not sure about? How do you segment your list to filter out those people who have bought or expressed interest in Product X?   

You want to target a specific TYPE of person - tradesmen say. You have a list you acquired in a previous ad hoc system with 10,000 names. How do you know who falls into this category?  How can you show various TYPES of lead?

The answer is effective use of your CRM, and a strategic email marketing plan.  

Also important is training for sales people on the ground, who are often the best people to get the segmentation information you need.  Sales people need to see the big picture and understand what Marketing departments need in order to generate leads. This is especially true in larger organisations - we often see a gap between what marketing WANT to do and what sales ACTUALLY do.  And the opposite is true too - there is often a gap between what sales CAN do and what marketing are DOING, which results in frustration on both sides.  In worst case scenarios sales and marketing do not have any synergy whatsoever.  The best campaigns are those done when both parties are aware of what the campaign is, what is being promosted, who will be targeted, what the desired outcome is and what their role is in the campaign.

This leads us to the next point: communication and process planning.

There is no point in doing an email campaign if you have not planned

calls to action for the readers
the follow up process and communication templates
resources for a sudden influx of leads
and so on.

All teams or people in each stage need to work together and be fully aware of when the campaign starts and what their role is and importantly: what the KPI is and how to measure resulting ROI.

But the initial list - that thing that often gets the least attention, in preference to a beautiful looking email template or a fancy gift or prize for the campaign - is so important and more time spent getting this right will yield better results.

This is why we do not recommend buying lists - although list sellers will claim their lists are up to date and relevant, how do you really know?  Ask: what do I want from this campaign? What is my key performace indicator? Reads? Clicks to a website? Registrations? Here are a few simple examples:

Scenario 1: You want people to register for an event.  Your KPI is the number of people who register. You have a list of 10,000 names, some of which you purchased from a list provider, others you had from a previous manual excel based system but you only really 'know' 10% of the people. After the email blast you see 2,000 names bounced.  Of the remaining names 1,300 read the email and from them 100 click a link to your site out of curiosity.  Only 10 complete the registration becasue they were interested in what you had to offer.  This equates to a total 'conversion rate' of 0.1%.

Scenario 2: You want people to register for an event.  Your KPI is the number of people who register. You have a CRM system and have spent a couple of months gathering important data from the leads in the system via various means: phone, visits, 'probing' emails etc.  You create custom fields to filter your leads to be as relevant to the campaign as possible.  The result is a small list of 100 highly targeted leads, who you know match a specific set of criteria. No emails bounce because you validated them beforehand.  73 people read your email, 30 people click your website registration page.  Of those who clicked to the website, 20 continue through to registration because they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and want you to follow up. The total conversion rate of 20%. The end result is you have achieved far better results for your campaign with a much smaller email list.

This is a simple example we know, however the concepts are very valid and it really does pay to spend more time preparing your list, than blasting to everyone in the hope it yields better results. (And, the financial savings of doing this are whole different story given most email marketing solutions are based on email volume!)

Email list segmentation and the 'less is more' concept of email marketing. Food for thought.

CRM Asia Solutions offer personalised email marketing services in Australia and Asia Pacific regions as well as Zoho Campaigns (online email marketing solution) and Zoho CRM implementation services in Australia and SE Asia.

For more information, please see the links below:

Zoho CRM - powerful and popular online CRM solution
Zoho Campaigns - Zoho's latest online business tool - an affordable email marketing solution
Connect - our own email marketing solution
Using Email Marketing in a Slow Economy
Four Steps to Successful Email Marketing

Or contact us here for a free no obligation quotation / demo, or via:

Email: sales at crmasiasolutions dot com

Ensure that YOU Stand Out From the Masses on Facebook

A Facebook page has become an essential marketing tool that can connect a business with current and prospective customers in ways that were never possible before. That is why Facebook is already home to over 1.5 million business pages and 10,000 new businesses launch a presence on Facebook each day.

When launching a presence on Facebook it is important that you do so in a way that will ensure your business stands out from the crowd:

1 – Create A Professional Appearance - Your Company Page should be customized to reflect your unique business. It is important to use color, images, and your company logo to ensure that your Facebook presence matches seamlessly with your company website and other marketing materials. Building a social presence that is professional and appealing is what will allow you to generate interest from potential customers.

2 – Include A Call to Action - Your design should answer that important question, “What’s next?” for your customers. Strategic placement of your contact information, calls to action, and the inclusion of a prominent “Like Us” banner are key items your Page must include. This will allow your Page to truly work for you by generating business or product inquiries.

3 – Update Frequently - This certainly applies to status updates, which should be done on a regular basis, but it also applies to the content of your Company Page. Similar to your company website, for your Page to be effective you need to provide regular updates to your content. New photos, recent customer testimonials, and special offers are great ways to maintain the interest level of your community. Don’t forget to encourage your fans to spread the news about your business by sharing with their friends.

Building a Facebook Company Page

Creating an effective Company Page is very different than creating a personal Facebook page. Just like a business website, your Company Page needs to be expertly designed to ensure that it looks professional and contains the critical information that customers are looking for. Register.com has a team of trained Facebook experts that know what it takes to create a professional Company Page that will work for your business.