I was inspired by our CTO’s eloquent post on how our development process has evolved over the years and I thought I would add how we start the dev process with a written specification for …

It does not look like it at first but there is some solid business advice somewhere around the end of this post.
This is my first real post since my unfortunate mishap in November. At …

I saw this post in CE Pro today. Electronic Systems Consultants: Making Data-Driven Decisions.  I like this article for a number of reasons.

Process first.  They identified a number of areas where software (not ours BTW) could …

Right arm still in a cast but I have thinking a lot about the current economy and how it affects our customers.  Since I can’t blog about it at the moment I thought this post …

I broke a small but important bone in my right wrist last week dirt bike riding, or maybe I should say dirt bike falling.  In any case I have a full cast on my right …

I received this email from Ryan Brown with Media Environment Designs, one of our D-Tools certified partners. MED is switching from another CRM System to Zoho and Ryan asked me a few great questions …

Introduction here: So far I have spent most of my time re-engineering our Zoho CRM system on the Leads side of the process. Before I started I thought we had a pretty good system but I noticed some pretty serious gaps and have worked hard to correct them and refine the process. At this point I am very happy with the Leads aspect of the system and more importantly the sales team is happy as well. In fact the new processes are already generating revenue and positive customer feedback.

I just read this post, Not All Leads are Created Equal by Bob Brauer, President of StrikeIron a Data as a Services software company. I thought it was interesting and relevant because he came up with a formula for scoring leads similar to my Pre-Qual score approach as documented in this post on Explaining the D-Tools CRM System – Lead Management.

Introduction here: For the most part I have spent the last five weeks in front of my computer, listening to Sirius Radio (The Vault), eating seeds (Art’s Sunflower and Pumpkin) and deconstructing the D-Tools/Zoho CRM system. In tough economic times sometimes the only thing you can do is to fine tune your internal business processes to stay ahead. This has the double advantage of making your company more competitive and efficient and when the economy improves (it always does) you will be in position to immediately capitalize on it. But before you can fine tune your processes you need to make sure you have the right tools for the job.

Introduction here. I changed the title of this series from Explaining the D-Tools Zoho CRM system to Deconstructing the D-Tools Zoho CRM System because I realized that as I was trying to explain it I was tearing it apart an re-configuring it as I was explaining it. Just the act of explaining it made me realize it could be improved. In fact that explains my silence for the past few weeks. I have been deep inside our system trying to make it more reliable, easier to use, easier to explain, more accurate and ultimately more productive for all the users.

Introduction here. As I have stated at least twice now we have a LOT of leads in our system and we needed a solid process to manage all of these leads. In the previous post on Sales Roles I explained how each person on the D-Tools sales team has a specific role and and how we use our Zoho CRM system to manage the job function for each specific role.

As I previously mentioned we have a lot of leads in our CRM system. Without some sort of solid process for managing these leads we would never be able to see the forest through the trees. Good lead management is a critical aspect for our company (really, all companies) because nothing happens without the sale and most of our sales start out as leads. The reality is the future of your company hinges on how you currently manage your leads. You need to plant your seeds before you are hungry.