Maintaining a business is more than just overseeing processes and teams. It requires a healthy integration of these two things and ensuring that both are performing well and efficiently. As with most business models, your company changes and ebbs and flows with each year. Your mission statement might shift each year, or maybe your product is improved upon every couple of months. As a result, your business model should reflect those same small changes so that the overall approach to your success is maintained. Processes should be tweaked, project management strategies must be constantly refined, and your team members should be receptive to new ideas and methods.
Adapting to a new strategy with your CRM software can mean quite a few changes at once, but Zoho can ensure that the integration heeds positive end results when it comes to project management. In any kind of business, there are processes in place that are repetitive and require multiple teams work together for the final delivery. These processes can often be delayed due to certain team members holding it up, other circumstances that halt the process (holidays, inclement weather), or even technological difficulties. Furthermore, human error is a very common contributor to delays, mistakes, or even final miscommunication or delivery.
To help remedy these common ailments, Zoho CRM offers workflow automations that help ensure more efficient project process and ultimate delivery. These automations arrive to team members in the forms of notifications, emails, or alerts so that every person involved in the project understands the task at hand as thoroughly as possible, allowing for better communication and collaboration.
There are extensive ways to automate your workflow depending on your company and what you may see as your biggest need, but overall, we’ve come up with 10 of our most popular workflow automations that can easily and universally be applied to any business model.
1. Blueprint
This is a very good one to consider starting with because it basically establishes how you’d like to see the processes implemented via automation. You can design how you’d like to see a scenario come to life, who is alerted, how long the project might take, etc. This automation sets the overall tone of every process that you’d like to automate.
2. Delegating Tasks
This is another basic one to discuss, as this allows the project manager to assign specific tasks to individual people. This not only holds each person accountable, but it alerts each person of upcoming deadlines, updates to any portions of the project as a whole, and provides a birds-eye view of all the team members involved for clarity.
3. Webhooks
This is one of my favorite pieces of the automation effort, as maintaining external relationships with clients is crucial for the development and growth of any business. This automation alerts users of developments from third parties, like other apps, email campaigns, or even a method to calculate commission once a deal is approved.
4. Schedules
This is another quite necessary automation should you choose to move forward with this aspect of Zoho. By creating these schedules, you can alert team members of upcoming projects, overall timing of the entire project, and how you forsee it come to life by the end. This also allows your personnel to prioritize as they see fit with as much transparency as possible.
5. Field Updates
When developing tasks and blueprints and schedules, the project manager has the opportunity to adjust the fields with which each job description is discussed. Each user will also have the ability to mark each task with a status so that other members know that the project is then being handed to them. This will help streamline process and expedite internal communication on the project at hand.
6. Approval Process
With any business, there is a clear chain of command and how certain developments get approved. If there is an instance in a project in which something requires senior or additional approval, this is an automation that can be added to a project’s blueprint. That requested party then receives notification of their approval, and once received, the key stakeholders in the project can continue.
7. Functions
This is a very valuable automation for processes that require third-party program help. The best example of this is at the end of the deal and the next step requires finance. In this instance, you can design this portion of the process to immediately connect with Zoho Books (or your accounting software) to update the sale here in order the project continues in motion internally.
8. Set Up Scoring
There are probably certain times of the year where your business is busier than other times of the year, which means that your employees are probably working on an excessive amount of projects. While you have no doubt that your personnel can complete their work, you want to ensure that they can easily prioritize. This automation will help your teammates better delegate their projects in order of importance without feeling overwhelmed.
9. Reorder Approval Processes
This automation is great for being proactive about deals that may require multiple rounds of approval. An example of this is when a deal is proposed for different tiers of revenue. The alert will be sent to the requested party for approval with the notation that are different levels of requirement.
10. Case Escalation
This might be one of my favorite aspects of the automation system. One of my biggest gripes is receiving an “out of the office” email and not knowing who to turn to in that person’s absence. It can feel very helpless, especially when you want to keep your projects in motion. Zoho has created this automation so that in the event of needing to dig further, the system will delegate a back-up. Not only will this further encourage greater teamwork, but it will guarantee that the established schedule will stay on track despite any personnel hiccups or surprises.
