Media Company Accelerates Deal closures with Zoho CRM.
Process
A leading media and entertainment company that telecasts diverse content such as news, debates, culture, tourism, entertainment, and more topics leverages Zoho CRM's automation features like Blueprints, workflow rules, approvals, functions, and more to automate their sales process for faster deal closures.
Advertisers like ad agencies, product companies, and distributors reach out to them through various channels like email, phone, and their websites to secure ad slots during their programs. The company considers them as leads and assigns an appropriate sales agent to their inquiries. As a primary requirement, sales agents have to qualify leads through a set of processes. Sales agents collect advertisers' requirements, negotiate deals, manage quotes, secure release orders (ROs), and schedule ad content to be broadcasted. However, in cases where the requested discount exceeds permitted limits, sales agents create approval requests and send them up the company hierarchy for approval.
Once the additional discount requests are approved, the advertiser receives a quote, which they review, sign, and send back to the media company as a release order. Upon receiving the RO, the assigned sales agent verifies it with the quote for discrepancies and, if none are found, schedules the ad content for broadcasting via a third-party ad scheduling application.
Requirements
CRM as a central database
In the past, the company didn't have a centralized system to manage information like client profiles, deal specifications, distributor details, contracts, and quotations. Sales agents had to refer to multiple data sources to derive the full context of the customers' requirements. Data scattered across various business functions—like leads, deals, quotes, and release orders—resulted in significant dependencies. Having to create deals, quotes, and release orders manually made it difficult to map ROs with their respective quotes and address any discrepancies between them. Therefore, the company needed a CRM system that not only acts as a central database but also provides complete customer context.
Lead qualification
To qualify leads before converting them into opportunities, the company's sales agents perform a set of tasks like background checks, credit score checks, and ad file reviews. Accordingly, a step-by-step guided process that requires sales agents to qualify their leads before converting them into opportunities would be hugely helpful for the company.
Criteria-based approvals
Sales agents had to create and send approval requests to approvers manually under certain circumstances—for example, if the discount requested is greater than the maximum discount sales agents are permitted to offer. Additionally, they had to follow up with approvers manually to secure approvals on time. This resulted in unnecessary delays and hindered productivity. To address this, they needed a system that automatically routes approval requests to the right decision makers for approvals.
Automatic quote creation
Sales agents manually create quotes when approval requests are granted, which often resulted in duplicates and incorrect value inputs in many cases. To mitigate this, the company needed a system that automatically creates quotes upon approval by pulling the necessary information from the system.
Converting quotes into release orders
Once quotes are created, the relevant advertisers need to review and sign them. They send the signed quotes back to sales agents by email as ROs, which serve as the de facto "thumbs up" from the advertiser and allow the content to be broadcasted. In the absence of a central system, the company managed the quote-to-RO conversion via emails. However, in cases of discrepancies, they had to search through endless emails threads to locate specific ROs and verify them with their respective quotes. This proved to be a chaotic and time-consuming process for the company, who therefore needed a system that maps ROs with their respective quotes.
Release order verification
Sales agents need to verify that the ROs they receive accurately reflect the quotes they send advertisers. To do this diligently, they had to manually go through the entire document field by field to check for discrepancies, and therefore needed a system that automatically checks for discrepancies between quotes and ROs.
Solution
Features in use
Zoho CRM's module customization and email integration
As a first step, the company configured various modules in Zoho CRM to store their data, like the Leads, Contacts, Deals, Quotes, and Release Orders modules.
Using Zoho CRM's layout builder, they customized their module layouts to be more efficient in fetching and storing data such as contact information, deal specifications, contracts, distributor commission percentages, and media files. Additionally, by customizing modules and fields, they were able to align Zoho CRM's interface with their internal business terminologies.
Module- and field-level access permissions enable them to implement fine-grained access controls for their records and ensure that only authorized individuals are allowed to modify the data.
The company added all their offerings to the Products module, along with their unit costs. A lookup field connecting the Products and Leads modules ensures that data flows seamlessly between both.
They also added a subform to the Leads module layout to enable sales agents to select products quickly rather than manually type their names while creating leads.
They used formula fields to calculate total costs per component, as well as aggregate fields to calculate the total costs of ad campaigns.
Next, in order to send and receive emails from advertisers in their respective records, they configured their email client in Zoho CRM to map email conversations to records automatically, which eliminates the need for sales agents to use multiple communication platforms.
After importing their lead data into Zoho CRM, they created a lookup field and used it to link various modules. Sales agents use related lists to access contextual information about their customers, prospects, distributors, deals, contacts, and more.
Using blueprints to qualify leads
Using Zoho CRM's Blueprint feature, the media company implemented a guided lead qualification process consisting of four steps, which include initial engagement, campaign confirmation, budget confirmation, and lead conversion. The idea behind this configuration is that during every transition stage, sales agents are expected to perform a set of tasks to collect certain information to affirm the ad campaign.
After every transition stage, they configured Zoho CRM to perform certain functions automatically, like scheduling calls, tagging records, sending email notifications, and more.
Here's how the four transition stages have helped sales agents qualify leads:
Once a lead is created in Zoho CRM, the blueprint is triggered based on certain criteria.
The initial engagement transition stage starts once the blueprint is triggered.
The first step sales agents must perform involves collecting and confirming the information regarding the ad campaign.
Once they save the record, it moves to the next transition stage—campaign confirmation.
Also, the record is tagged as "initial check completed" and an SLA is applied. By applying an SLA to this record, the company requires that sales agents complete necessary tasks within a particular time frame.
During the campaign confirmation transition stage, sales agents are required to collect the necessary information and the potential ad file for review.
Upon saving, the record moves to the next transition stage—budget confirmation—and is tagged as "campaign confirmed".
The next step is to confirm the budget of the advertiser's ad campaign.
Upon saving, the record moves to the next transition stage—lead conversion—and is tagged as "ready for conversion."
However, the company doesn't want their sales agents to convert records into deals without verifying advertisers' credit scores and getting clearance from their legal team. Therefore, they mandated this process by adding a checklist to the transition stage of the blueprint.
Leads are ready to be converted into deals once sales agents complete the checklist.
A comprehensive approval process
Using Zoho CRM's approval process, the company is able to implement their approval workflows for various requests, like additional discounts, contract creation and modification, distributor commission negotiation, media file modifications, and more.
For example, if an advertiser needs a discount more than the authorized limit, the sales agent has to create it as an approval request and submit it for approval to the proper authorities.
To achieve this, the company added rule criteria to their approval process based on a picklist field, and then configured approval stages and appointed approvers. Once a record matches the criteria, the approval process is triggered, the respective approval authority is automatically notified via email, and is required to act on the approval request in a reasonable time frame.
The company also configured automated actions that execute upon approval or rejection, such as assigning certain tasks, sending email notifications, and executing functions and webhook calls. In this case, upon approval or rejection, the record's status is automatically updated accordingly. Additionally, an approval email notification is sent to sales agents and advertisers.
As part of this process, the company configured email notifications that automatically notify stakeholders with regard to the progress of approval requests. They also assign process admins who manage approvals end to end and help expedite this process. This configuration serves as a trigger for further automations, as shown below:
Creating quotes automatically using functions
Using their configured approval process, the company setup a workflow to call a function they wrote using Deluge (Zoho's scripting language) that executes when a request is approved. Once approval is granted, the record's approval status is used as a trigger to call the function, which creates a quote in the Quotes module and updates the deal's stage automatically.
The function establishes a connection between the Deals and the Quotes module and passes values between them. Records in the Deals module have a subform with product lookup and quantity parameters. The function creates the quote such that these line items are automatically pulled from the subform.
The quote created has all the line items present in the Deals module's subform, including the quote discount value from the "Discount Requested" field. The total cost of the ad campaign is calculated based on the line items selected and their respective unit costs. Formula fields subtract the approved discount amount from the total cost of the ad campaign to give the final campaign cost.
Managing quotes and digital signatures with Zoho CRM's Zoho Sign integration
The media organization integrated Zoho Sign with Zoho CRM via Zoho's Marketplace in order to send quotes to advertisers from within CRM records.
With the applications integrated, all of the company's CRM modules—including the SPA and Inventory modules—feature a button labeled Send with Zoho Sign.
Through this integration, sales agents don't have to send quotes to advertisers separately as email attachments; all they have to do is click the Send with Zoho Sign button, choose a template, edit the details, configure the notification, reminder, and validity settings, drag and drop the details they need from the advertiser as fields (in this case, the signature field), and send.
See below to learn how quotes are sent from within CRM records.
The company finds the following details in the related lists once a quote is sent to an advertiser in this way:
Zoho Sign Document Events shows the document's status, which they can also find under each record in the respective CRM modules.
Zoho Sign Documents lists all the documents sent from Zoho CRM.
Zoho Sign Recipients shows the list of recipients to whom the documents were sent.
This integration prevents quotes from being altered by anyone after they're approved.
When a quote is sent to an advertiser for signature, the application updates the quote and deal stages automatically.
Release order conversion using Zoho Sign and mapping using functions
According to their process, the media organization requires its clients to verify and sign quotes they receive—a process made seamless through the Zoho Sign and Zoho CRM integration.
From the advertiser's perspective, they receive requests for signature as emails from the media organization and can easily verify quotes by adding their digital signatures in just a few seconds, as shown below.
Once signed, all advertisers have to do is send the documents back as emails and wait for acknowledgement.
Upon sending an email, Zoho CRM creates a new record in the Release Orders module, which can be accessed through a related list.
Also, Zoho CRM stores signed quotes as attachments in the Release Orders module.
Upon receiving an RO, the application updates the stage of the quote and deal automatically with the appropriate values. Within a deal, they can access quotes, attachments, and ROs.
This is how the company fully digitized and streamlined their quote and release order transactions.
Release order verification and approval
Once records are created in the RO module, sales agents must quickly verify the ROs to ensure they're free of discrepancies. If they find none, sales agents then approve the ROs, which triggers Zoho CRM to push the ad content automatically to a third-party ad scheduling software tool. Using a function, Zoho CRM also updates deal stages automatically when the ad content is scheduled for broadcasting.
Otherwise, automatic email notifications are triggered to the respective stakeholders, such as advertisers, sales agents, or approvers, to resolve discrepancies.
Result
By implementing Zoho CRM, the media organization was able to consolidate their data into a single platform and automate business-critical processes to expedite their deal closures.
"Please note that the solution described here is developed for a real use case of a Zoho customer. All names, identifying details, and screenshots have been anonymized to retain privacy."
Contact Us
Fill out the form below and one of our product experts will call you to understand your requirements better.
By submitting this form, you agree to the processing of personal data according to our Privacy Policy.