On 6th June 2012 Zoho announced some long awaited integration between ZohoCRM and Zoho Reports. Advanced Analytics for Zoho CRM brings the power of Zoho reports to your CRM data and provides a wealth of reports and dashboards 'out of the box'. Check the video for an overview.
Data is synced every 24hrs (admins can trigger a sync manually) and ensures that key modules are available for reporting. At launch this includes Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Potentials & Users. No word yet on other modules such as invoices, products, vendors or cases etc The addition of these modules would provide a really complete picture.
The synchronisation is a snip to set up and was completed very quickly. Your mileage may vary if you have tens of thousands of records.
Zoho have done a lot of the hard work for us in creating some pre-built reports and analysis from the CRM data. These reports align nicely under various headings:
- Top 5 lead campaigns by revenue
- Leads to potentials drop out analysis
- Average sales cycle in days (by Quarter)
- Existing v's new business
- Quarter over quarter revenue across years
- Monthly sales report
- Pipeline by count/stage
- Salesperson performance last quarter
- Sales pipeline history (Dashboard)
All example reports and charts are interactive and allow examination of underlying data by clicking through on chart and data areas. ;-)
Now for the clever part. As all these data tables, reports and dashboards are just a Zoho Reports instance you could also upload other valuable business data using any of the import methods. (CSV / FEED / Reports Upload Tool / Zoho Creator Sync) Perhaps you store warranty information for equipment you have sold or licences for software you've developed? Simply import it into a new table in the same database. This data can now be 'related' to your CRM data very easily by linking the Customer fields in the new warranty/licence tables to the accounts name field in the CRM Accounts table.
Viola! You can now create reports based on business data that is logically external and separate from your core CRM data to show for instance..
- Warranty expirations/renewals per account per month or quarter
- Software licence versions/upgrades per customer
- Maintenance visits and associated costs by customer, region or any time period
I hope this has been informative, if you have any questions please comment or contact me directly via the website
