The CRM Zen Show Episode 252 – I Blessed the CRMs Down in Africa

Zoho News

• Zoho Expands New Office In Kenya
  • Expanding their presence in Africa with offices also in Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa.
• Zoho Analytics May’23 Updates
  • ChatGPT integration and incremental fetch for databases are the big updates from this month’s batch.
• Zoho Flow May’23 Updates
  • Finally, folders are here!
• Zoho Recruit May’23 Updates
  • We covered all of these last week, here is a brief recap.
• Zoho Workplace April’23 Recap
  • And same with Workplace, in case you missed it, here is a snapshot of all of April’s updates.
• Chatbot for Zoho Recruit Optimized
  • This looks a lot like a Zobot, but is not a SalesIQ Zobot.
• New Zoho Mail eWidgets
  • Jira, Evernote, and Zoom eWidgets are now available for Zoho Mail.
• Zoho Writer Bigin Integration
  • This is a major update for those using Bigin. 
• More Writer Integration Tasks in Deluge
  • Using the API working with Writer just got a little bit easier.
• Mandatory Updates To Zoho Desk’s Instant Messengers
  • If you use WhatsApp Business with Zoho Desk, you will want to update your buttons and templates.
• Zoho Desk Partners with Microsoft’s M365 Copilot
  • You can now create a Zoho Desk Ticket directly from the Copilot app.
• Zoho Forms Introduces WhatsApp Communication
  • And can now send a code in order to access the form.
• New Integration Connecting Zoho Checkout and SalesIQ
  • Customers can now make a purchase directly from the SalesIQ chat.
• And to wrap up the news, a couple of products had birthdays this past week.
  • Zoho Vault Turns 10
  • Bigin Turns 3
    

Implementation of the Week

• XML Related List in CRM to Show Purchase Orders Related to a Deal
  • In this implementation, we were working with a customer that uses Zoho CRM and Zoho Books to manage their sales processes
  • They don’t carry any inventory, so all Sales Orders need to be back-ordered. This works great in Books, as we can create a Purchase Order directly from the Sales Order for this use-case
  • However, in CRM, you can only see Estimates, Sales Orders, and Invoices from within the Deal view. This causes a problem when the customer calls in to check on order status, as the sales-person would need to access Zoho Books to answer
  • To solve for this, we first used a custom Deluge function in Zoho Books to assign the Deal ID to the Purchase Order when it is created from a Sales Order (the Sales Order stores this for us natively via the integration)
  • Then, because we have our Deal ID assigned to the Purchase Order, we can create an XML related list that can display all relevant Purchase Order data for the Sales Orders related to that particular Deal

Code Share of the Week

• Use RegEx to Find an Order Number In a Desk Email Body 
  • This code uses the “Get Latest Thread” API call to get the last message associated to a ticket and searches for an order number with the prefix DP (ignoring case) followed by 8 numbers. There may be any number of spaces or dashes between the DP prefix and the numbers.

This Week’s Read

• 17 key SaaS metrics your company should track
  • Most of these are pretty common, but nonetheless, a useful article by Zapier of maybe a metric that you should be tracking that might have been overlooked.

New On Zenatta

• Zenatta Blogs
  • TVS Pro – Case Study
    • Huge shoutout to TVS Pro over in Salt Lake City for this month’s case study and a fun Zoho Inventory build-out.
  • Zoho Forms vs. Gravity Forms: Which is the best for you?
    • Unsure which form builder is right for your business?  We break down the differences between Zoho Forms and the industry’s other top form builder, Gravity Forms.

Tips and Tricks

• Automate Internal Notifications Based On Email Actions In Zoho Campaigns
  • In this week’s tip, we take you through how to set up an internal notification through Campaigns.  Next week will show you how to run this process through the CRM.