This post has been written by Ana Yardley, a Certified Zoho Partner at pickSaaS, and originally published here.

Zoho Opens Remote Toolkit To The World — And We Help You Navigate How to Use Them

Zoho was one of the first corporations to open their premium tools for free in the face of the current Coronavirus pandemic. Knowing that most businesses around the world need to have their employees working from home, mastering the right set of tools is essential.

The Gravity Marketing team embraced flexible work and working from home since its creation in 2009, but recently we adopted a 100% work from home policy, which also meant some changes in our team routines.

We’re sharing with you our experience using all these tools, and how you can get them for Free.

What is Zoho Remotely?

Zoho Remotely is a bundle of 11 Zoho apps (web and mobile) that is being offered for Free until September 1, 2020. Zoho hopes the Coronavirus crisis tides are over by then. This is a true offer to help businesses strive in these tough times.

You can use Zoho Remotely for at least 100 Employees.

How to Signup for Free Zoho Remotely Apps?

Signup for the full bundle of Zoho Remotely (11 apps) Here. If you’re already a paid user of one or more Zoho apps, reach out to us and we’ll help you set the apps you need for Free.

SIGNUP ZOHO REMOTELY FOR FREE

Meet and Communicate Online

• Zoho Cliq
• Zoho Meeting
• Zoho Showtime

Collaborate and track projects

• Zoho Projects
• Zoho Sprint
• Zoho WorkDrive

Assist clients, employees and colleagues remotely

• Zoho Assist
• Zoho Lens

Build Documents in the cloud

• Zoho Writer
• Zoho Sheet
• Zoho Show

Our Top Picks from Zoho Apps

At Gravity Marketing we don’t live without:

• Zoho Cliq for daily communication and quick calls with team members
• Zoho Projects management of everything you need to keep people accountable and set realistic timelines. Also great to track time for projects/employees if you need it
• Zoho Meeting for larger meetings and webinars where you control users interaction (one-way or two-way conversation)
• Zoho CRM — to track all sales leads and open opportunities. We know it’s not included in Zoho Remotely, but you can try it for free
• Zoho Desk — For HelpDesk and Customer Service teams- Not included in Remotely, but you can try it for free
• Zoho Campaigns — For all mass email communication, especially useful to let your customers and prospects know about your current status, updates, new online services/products you’re promoting, or to simply keep your normal email communication going. Not included in Remotely bundle, but you can also try it for free, and it integrates with all other Zoho apps (Zoho CRM integration is especially useful).

All Zoho Remotely Apps in a glance:

Meet and Communicate Online

1. Zoho Cliq — Simple chat, audio or video

Zoho Cliq is perfect for real-time conversation –messaging with your team through text, audio, or video calls. We have found the best use of this tool in everyday project-related communication — faster and cleaner than sending emails.

Tips:

• Create Channels for #Daily Status Meetings or for your weekly #Sales Meeting
• Invite only key people involved in the topic of the channel
• Create channels for specific projects/clients

Zoho Cliq also allows you to run video calls. If you want to use video calls, Zoho Cliq behaves really well up to 4 users. If you want to run a larger video meeting than go for Zoho Meeting — A more robust tool for video conferencing.

2. Zoho Meeting — Schedule Meetings across time zones, include larger audiences, share your screen, record sessions. You can also use this tool if you want to record your screen with simple instructions on how to do something. Creates a light video you can share easily with your team.

3. Zoho Showtime — For businesses with the need to conduct online training courses.

Collaborate, Track Projects, Employees and Time

4. Zoho Projects — One of our favorite tools to project manage any type of project, from recurring tasks to end projects with internal and external team members

5. Zoho Sprint — For those who follow agile, create customized scrum boards and incorporate live feedback while executing projects, the agile way

6. Zoho WorkDrive — If you don’t have Microsoft Office 365 for all your files, or shared Servers and everyone with VPN access, Zoho WorkDrive can be the quick solution for your next months. Create team drives, share documents with members, and collaborate in real-time to get things done.

Assist Clients, Employees and Colleagues Remotely

7. Zoho Assist is an easy tool to gain remote access to a desktop. This can be a lifesaver especially when you are helping your team in the firsts weeks of working from home. Take control of their desktop and help them configure everything without any face to face contact.

8. Zoho Lens is a recent tool that incorporates a dose of augmented reality capabilities that help annotate images and draw deeper insights when delivering remote assistance. It’s available in the US and EU.

Build Your Own Documents In The Cloud

We would advise using these tools if you don’t have Microsoft Office or Google docs in place.

9. Zoho Writer is a simple word processing tool that enables your real-time writing, remote feedback, similar to Google Docs.

10. Zoho Sheet makes simple spreadsheet creation easy by letting different collaborators contribute with data in real-time.

11. Zoho Show is an easy-to-use presentation builder, that allows multiple people to work on the same slides at the same time, no versioning required.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

Working Remote with Zoho Tools — Now FREE was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re still deciding which sales CRM you’re going to use in your business, here are some questions to consider to make sure you choose the right CRM. In this video, I discuss how to evaluate different CRM’s and how Pipedrive stacks up against in each area (this video was made in partnership with Pipedrive):

1. Can the CRM grow with my business?
2. How simple is it to use and onboard my sales team?
3. What kind of support does it have?
4. What kind of customisation does it offer?
5. What kind of reporting capabilities does it offer?

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

Questions to ask before choosing a sales CRM and how Pipedrive compares [VIDEO] was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you ever have a feeling that collecting quotes and managing work with freelancers/agencies is difficult and time-consuming?

Or maybe you would like to quickly find the right person based on the tech needs/skills and experience?

An obvious thing to do for software-related issues is to hire external software support to help you through the most demanding tasks and teach your team how to utilize the solution properly — someone with experience in the field. It may be an individual expert or a whole team and our goal here at SoftwareSupp is to help you estimate work and hire people with the right set of skills and experience.

36% of the US workers (57.3 million) are freelancers who work from home. They collectively contribute $1.4 trillion to the economy every year. It’s a 30% increase since 2016. (Freelancers Union)

And there area couple of platforms to help you bringing massive numbers of freelancers together offering you a wide variety of experts, but employers are often bothered with a couple of things. Apart from many low-quality freelancers and hard recruitment processes, they complain about the further work process — especially the lack of rules and support from the platform’s side and poor customer service.

Issues companies face when hiring external specialists themselves

No matter if you hire a whole super-professional team from an agency or a single freelancer from your network. Depending on the solution you choose, there is a strong chance you will come upon some difficulties. Based on the things we hear from the entrepreneurs and our own experiences, here are a couple of common problems coming from hiring external specialists for the job.

Difficult recruitment process

Carrying the communication with multiple candidates for the job, browsing through their portfolios, setting up calls — these all take time. To make sure you hire the best expert for your project, you often must spend a lot of time you would rather consume in some other way.

Long and unpredictable time of waiting for a quote

Freelancers and companies often tend to make you wait for their proposal for a really long time. That makes the recruitment process even longer.

Bad communication

Communication is not always as easy with contractors as it would be with your own employees. In some bad scenarios your questions may get missing, your calls ignored and the release time postponed.

Poor service quality

Also, with external specialists, you can rarely get a warranty about the quality of work. And mostly, if the effect does not satisfy you in the end, there is no option to get your money back.

Dishonest contractors

That’s an extreme scenario, but when hiring a freelancer with no real background and trusting him with the money, you may end up with no freelancer, no money, and no work completed.

Hiring experts in a traditional way has many flaws, there’s no doubt. Here at SoftwareSupp, we all heard or experienced some of the above situations. And of the need we all knew, we decided to come up with a way of hiring software specialists for projects and help companies from all over the world get the job done, nice and quickly. All they need to do is sign up at the SoftwareSupp.com platform and post a job. We take care of the rest.

How does it work?

It’s really simple. You submit a job listing on the platform that describes the project’s scope and the position you are searching for. As soon as your listing is published, we consult with our network of experts and send you a detailed estimate of your project in less than 24 hours.

After you get your proposals, you can accept it and start working with one of our experts right away.

For any project, we also personally suggest a dedicated specialist from our base, who has the best experience working in the selected technology.

What do you get when posting your job at SoftwareSupp?

Post your job

Submit your first job or support ticket for free, collect quotes, find the right contractor for your job, and plan your work.

You get your own dedicated Project Manager

You never have to worry about the communication or the progress of your project. Hiring a SoftwareSupp expert for your job means getting an experienced Project Manager in the package. Say hello to the regular project’s status, milestones updates, and regular meetings according to your needs.

Access to the experts with know-how in a specific domain

We already know some stuff about technology, sales and marketing processes, and people. This helps us verify our experts’ know-how within specific domains and assign them to projects based on their know-how in the field.

Reduced labor costs

Hiring with SoftwareSupp, you can hire on-demand: part-time, full-time, or only for the specific project. Save time and cash you would spend on recruiting freelancers or having a long-term contract with an agency.

Get an upfront quote in 24h

Get a proposal for your project, get connected with an expert or a team that is hand-picked by us, and kick off your project — all within 24 hours.

Convenient ticketing system

The platform offers a built-in ticketing system that allows you to submit smaller tasks that need to be done quickly. Our team guarantees a response within 1 hour, taking immediate care of your request. Having a more complex integration or a consulting project instead? Submit a job to receive a detailed estimation.

Quality assurance

To make sure our clients are 100% satisfied with their contractors, we monitor the quality of our experts’ services with regular NPS scoring, conducted weekly or monthly, depending on a project’s size. Our average NPS? + 8.0 on average. All of our experts must follow certain rules when it comes to response or delivery time. If cooperation needs improvement, we involve our internal tech team in the project.

Secured process of passing the access to your software

We believe that safety comes first. The whole process of passing the fragile data and access to your project and software is secured and managed by us. Of course, we also sign NDA agreement as part of every project with customers and freelancers.

Flexible billing

As you get an upfront estimation for your development and integration projects, you won’t get surprised at the end of implementation. We offer a flexible billing system for teams any size — you can choose to pay per project or a task, omitting big contracts and settling for the tasks at hand only, or buy an hourly support subscription for a constant backup for your team. And support doesn’t have to be pricey — our pricing plans start at $999/mo for the whole company.

Your payment is safe and secured

Although you pay for the job upfront, your payment will be assured by SoftwareSupp’s safe escrow mechanism and won’t get to the freelancer until he completes the job.

Wide technology range

You can choose from hundreds of software solutions these days and, to be honest, the choice can be confusing. Based on our experience, we will help you find the right technology stack tailored to your business needs, features, and sales model. And before the implementation, you can request a demo for selected software — you and your team will be the ones using it, after all!

We love to share our know-how

Don’t have any time to browse through new software trends and releases? We will do it for you. Get regular updates on new technology trends and tips on growing your business’s technology stack so you could constantly improve your sales and marketing processes and grow.

Reliable communication

Hiring an expert from SoftwareSupp, you will get regular progress updates and a warranty of an immediate response to your notes and requests. We run the set of tools to support our freelancers when they work with customers.

Invite your team/co-workers

By hiring through SoftwareSupp, you get an option to collaborate with your freelancer within your whole team. Just invite another team member once you purchase the service with us.

Legal hiring

Every expert joining SoftwareSupp needs to accept terms and conditions joining our platform. This includes respecting data security standards and transparent communication with the customer.

-> Learn more about our customer service and project deployment rules

For every project, we also sign a 3-sided agreement to secure each party’s needs and expectations.

When posting a job at SoftwareSupp, you get the reasonable costs, just like when hiring a freelancer, combined with the convenience of a professional agency.

Why should you post your job at pickSaaS? was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The success of a sales team comes down to building habits that support your sales goals. For example, being really diligent with following up on leads or keeping in touch with clients on an ongoing basis.

In this video, I talk about some of the daily habits every Pipedrive user should follow. When you log in to Pipedrive each day, here are the following habits you should try and adopt to ensure Pipedrive is being used effectively.

1. Start by reviewing the ‘Activities’ tab.

If you’ve been following the best practices that I’ve outlined in previous lessons, each day you should have a todo list of follow up emails, calls etc. to complete. Click on the Activities tab to review your work for the day. As you complete an activity, always be asking yourself ‘What’s next’ for that deal. Schedule another follow up if needed. Even though you may be waiting on a reply from a client, you still need to take the initiative to follow up.

2. Process your email into Pipedrive.

As you go through your main email, get into the habit of using Pipedrive to organize your next actions. i.e. create new activities for things you need to do (e.g. follow-ups, quotes), add notes from emails into relevant deals, add email attachments to relevant deals etc. The key here is to consolidate all information about a sale into a deal in Pipedrive.

3. Keep deals up to date.

As you work on deals, check that it’s in the right stage (or mark as Won/Lost if you need to) and that you have any relevant custom fields filled in. Keep Pipedrive open and up to date. If you only work in Pipedrive once a day, you’ll find it gets out of date very quickly and is, therefore, less useful. Rather than having to go through a big clean up once a day, refer to it regularly and update activities and notes as you go in real-time.

If you’d like to learn more about my Pipedrive coaching and support options, click here.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

Daily habits every Pipedrive user should follow [VIDEO] was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post has been originally published on the blog of Meghan, a Certified HubSpot Partner at pickSaaS.

Forecasting is one of the “holy grails” in the sales and marketing world. Perfect forecasting affords perfectly timed budget decisions, investments, new hires … you get the idea.

Sales leaders and executives examine specific data points to drive their business decisions. This type of analysis covers everything from hiring new team members to prioritizing product innovation. Accurately forecasting sales shines a light on important data that lets you make effective decisions about hiring, marketing, and growth.

Building a HubSpot Forecasting Model

We will be putting together a very simple sales model and process that utilizes a single forecasting property and captures projections on a quarterly basis. We are including five deal pipeline stages (Developing, Working, Proposal, Closed Won, Closed Lost).

All of this assumes you already have a sales process (as well as a forecast methodology and philosophy) in place or at least identified.

PRO TIP: If you want to be able to segment your forecast by product or business unit, be sure to include properties that are easy to differentiate from one another. This is essential to ensure that your reporting is accurate and valuable.

1. Custom Properties Required for Forecasting in HubSpot

You can’t measure what you aren’t measuring. HubSpot captures a lot more data than is readily available to use in segmenting and reporting. Luckily, there are ways to get to it if you know what you’re looking for.

Team Forecast Values

You’ll need to create a set of custom properties for the forecast metrics you want to be tracking. These should reflect the numbers and projections your team is using. Make sure you create these as drop-down selects.

Our example here includes just one forecasting property.

This property will be updated manually by your reps / sales team, and it should indicate how likely a deal is to close. This will be based on a mix of available engagement and demographic information, as well as the “gut feel” of the rep.

It is best practice to include the forecast value as soon as a deal is on the board. For this reason, include the forecast values among the required properties when creating a new deal. We will talk about the process in more detail below in section four.

(Alternate Approach: You can also use a number as your custom forecast property, but know that reporting and filtering / segmenting will present additional challenges.)

Custom Properties for Forecast Time Periods

The vast majority of companies use a combination of monthly, quarterly, and annual forecasting. In order to accurately measure your forecasting, you need to capture the forecast values at each of these intervals. This example is only covering quarterly forecasts. Click here to request a monthly forecast system.

Date Picker Properties for Your Deal Pipeline Stages

HubSpot automatically records the time when a deal changes stages, but this data is not recorded onto a property. This limits its accessibility using tools such as workflows, lists, and certain types of reports.

To solve this, you need to create a date picker custom property for each deal stage in your pipeline. These properties will be updated automatically with the workflows that we build in the next section. For our example, we will need:

Forecast Value Properties for Each Deal Stage

In order to know how your deals are progressing and where they are getting held up, you need to capture the forecast at the time when it changes from one deal stage to the next. This will provide yet another layer of data to determine where deals are falling behind or what needs extra attention.

2. Create HubSpot Workflows to Automate Your Forecasting System

Now that you’ve created the properties that you need for accurate tracking and forecasting, you need to automate your new system using workflows!

Forecasting Workflows for Each Deal Stage

Pick a deal stage and create a new workflow. Ultimately, you’ll need one workflow for each deal stage. So, if you have six deal stages, you’ll need to repeat this workflow six times.

ENROLLMENT TRIGGER: Deal Enters [Deal_Stage_Name] Stage

Create a new workflow that is triggered by a deal entering a stage of your pipeline. Do not allow re-enrollment for this workflow.

WORKFLOW ACTION: Date Stamp Each Deal Stage

Set the date stamp for the corresponding custom property.

WORKFLOW ACTION: Copy Forecast Value

Copy the current forecast value into the deal stage forecast value.

Forecasting Workflows for Current Time Period

It is not possible to trigger a deal workflow based on a date. Currently, this is only possible for contact and company based workflows. Instead, we’ll create a workflow that will need to be updated at the beginning of each time period you want to be tracking (it will need to be updated on the 1st of the month, 1st of the quarter, etc.). For example, you’ll need to select the new Time Period property of “Forecast Q2 2020” on April 1, 2020.

ENROLLMENT TRIGGER: Forecast Value is Known

Create a new workflow that triggers when the value of your custom forecast property is known. Enable re-enrollment for this workflow so that each time the forecast value is updated by the rep, we will capture the value every time it changes.

WORKFLOW ACTION: Copy Forecast Value

Copy the current forecast value into the time period forecast value.

3. Build Reports in HubSpot to Track Your Forecast

Why did we need to create all of these custom properties and workflows? To get accurate, detailed reporting of course! Measurement and reporting depend on the data inputs. Without the different values in place, we would not be able to assemble the metrics into a series of reports.

Forecast Reports by Time Period

Compare the total deal amounts for high, medium, and low likelihood to close this month versus the previous month.

Forecast Reports by Rep

Determine which reps are the most accurate in their forecast by comparing the deals marked “highly likely to close” two months ago (or whatever makes sense for your buying cycle) versus what has closed today.

Closed Lost vs. Closed Won Forecast

Report separately on the closed won and closed lost deals and compare them by likelihood to close. Is your team consistently identifying the more likely to close prospects? Knowing this number will help you assess if your sales reps are over or under-confident.

There is no limit to the different types of specific reports that you can build. Prioritize creating reports and developing dashboards that align with your goals and strategy and that help provide transparency, accuracy, and measurement of your sales process.

Stop and ask things like “why would a rep change the forecast?” and “how long should a deal take to move stages?”. Here are a few more ideas on actions you would want to analyze:

• Completed a successful presentation
• Call or email from a prospect
• Engagement with marketing or sales content on website or email
• Urgency/critical timing

4. Document and Communicate Your Forecast Process to Your Team

Make sure your team is all on the same page when it comes to the sales process. Agree whether you will change forecast values before or after a deal changes stages.

Taking the time to document a step-by-step process for your team is essential. You’ll need a detailed playbook for the sales process and forecasting.

You’ll also need a flowchart for your forecasting automation system. This will ensure you don’t miss a single re-enrollment or trigger.

Follow the steps above, and you’ll have a measurable forecasting system in HubSpot for your B2B sales team, resulting in incredible transparency into your pipeline.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

How to Create a Measurable Forecasting System in HubSpot for Your B2B Sales Team was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post has been originally published on the blog of Shriya, a Marketing Strategist at pickSaaS.

CRM forms the foundation of an organization’s sales, marketing, and client management processes.

A lot of businesses spend a ridiculous amount of time tracking their customers and leads — compiling data points across managers, sales teams, and even finance teams. As a business continues to expand, it becomes crucial to have a strong foundation for managing customer relations.

A Gartner report highlights that the CRM market is growing at a rate of 16%, making it one of the fastest-growing markets for business-related software. Also, this level of growth indicates that these CRM solutions are positively contributing to businesses, and helping seal more deals at the end of the day.

Needless to say, your CRM is imperative to all the operations and successes, and choosing the best CRM to suit your business is critical. In addition, you would want to ensure that you get it right the first time to save you on unnecessary switching costs and retraining of your team at a later stage if you are forced to change your CRM platform.

To help you make an informed decision between the two popular CRM options — HubSpot and Zoho — let’s take a deep dive, comparing them side-by-side, and straightening out the ever-complicated strands between these powerful solutions.

If you are looking for a brief overview of all the features, here’s a comparison table highlighting the quick facts, CRM features, notable integrations, and the platform features.

What are HubSpot and Zoho CRM?

Both HubSpot and Zoho CRMs are designed to help companies track their customer relationships, nurture leads, and identify opportunities for seamless conversions.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management solution that serves as the underlying layer for the entire suite of HubSpot offerings. It allows businesses to manage and track their interactions with their prospects and customers at all touchpoints with the help of a single tool.

Zoho CRM

Similar to HubSpot, Zoho CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management tool well suited to the needs of small and medium businesses. While Zoho does offer features identical to that of HubSpot, one major point of difference is that multiple apps are present in Zoho for different tasks as opposed to HubSpot, which has a single portal for all the features.

Availability

In addition to being accessible over the web, both HubSpot and Zoho CRM also have mobile apps available for iOS and Android. This allows users to access the features on the go. Their apps possess certain functionalities to promote ease of use — for instance, allowing the addition of contact by taking a photograph of a business card!

Comparison by Price

The significant point that differentiates HubSpot from Zoho CRM is, without a doubt, pricing.

HubSpot CRM

Unlike a lot of software solutions, where free refers to either a trial version, it places restrictions on the number of users or offers a bare-bones version of the product. HubSpot CRM is a free product that provides all you would want from a CRM solution and more. This includes support for unlimited users, 1 million contacts, and specific features of the 3 HubSpot hubs.

To truly harness HubSpot’s power, you would want to take one of the paid versions which give you features like social media management, revenue attribution, sales and marketing automation, Landing Pages, knowledge management, and much more. This depends on the tier you choose to go with (for a full list of features and comparison between the different tiers, visit https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/). In addition to the paid seats that you get as part of the subscription, you can still have an unlimited number of free users who will have access to HubSpot but with limited features.

As a free product, HubSpot CRM gives a glimpse of the overall functionality and serves as a stepping stone to the paid versions. The CRM offers many must-have features like conversational bots, forms, live chat, email marketing, contact management, list segmentation, ticket management, deal management, and others. Not bad considering it comes with a 100% free tag!

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is available for free; however, only for teams of up to three users. That means that any company with more users than that would have to pay a subscription fee of $10 per user per month. Also, unlike HubSpot, Zoho does not give you the option of having a combination of paid and free seats.

However, Zoho does bring with you a broad set of features that can help you manage your customers, email marketing campaigns, introduce process automation with the help of workflows, and integration with GSuite (no integration available for Office 365 in the free version).

While Zoho offers certain features in its free solution that HubSpot doesn’t, it also lacks on others. Based on features, it is definitely up to you to decide which features are more relevant and how much you are willing to pay for those features, especially with larger team sizes.

Takeaway: When it comes to pricing, your business might do ten-on-ten with the freemium, HubSpot CRM, if you have up to ten or twenty sales representatives. And even if your business expands with several or more representatives, you can choose the additional features in Hubspot’s Marketing Hub.

Comparison by Features

HubSpot and Zoho, both the CRMs vary widely on the basis of the features, and this makes the comparison a bit complicated to handle. For example, HubSpot CRM provides task management, whereas Zoho CRM does not, and Zoho CRM provides sales forecasting, whereas HubSpot CRM does not.

To make your entire selection process simple and less overwhelming. Let’s break down the features in a side-by-side comparison table.

This table is, undoubtedly, easier to digest, but if you are seeking for more. Here’s a comprehensive look at both the CRM features to make your selection process a percent simpler.

Hubspot Highlights:

• Lead generation tools like forms, chatbots, ads, etc.
• Efficient contact management.
• Well integrated with G Suite, Office 365, Gmail, and social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to capture more leads.
• Live chat option to connect you with your audiences in real-time.
• An efficient reporting dashboard with a drag and drop feature to display sales, productivity, deal forecast, plus, and closed deals.
• Easily track your sales opportunities and revenue pipeline with deal records.
• Organize and collaborate on support and service issues/requests with ticket records.
• Create email templates that allow you to spend less time writing emails and avoid embarrassing situations where you forget to replace the [INSERT FIRST NAME HERE] text when sending them.
• Creating meeting booking links that directly connect to your calendar so you spend way less time going back and forth with people via email trying to find the perfect time for a phone call/meeting.
  Keep all of your sales collateral documents in one place so they are easily accessible and easy to keep up to date so your salespeople spend zero time looking for the most up to date version of them.
• Calling over VoIP directly through your web browser to your contacts.
• Send up to 2,000 rich marketing emails to your prospects and customers per month.
• Keep track of the success of your Facebook/IG, LinkedIn, and Google AdWords ads, and see how they contribute to your net new lead generation and deal creation.
• Segment your prospects and customers into Lists to use with Email Marketing Campaigns.
• Set up a team email inbox like “support@company.com” or “sales@company.com” so you can get emails sent to those team inboxes to show up in the same place you are responding to live chat inquiries.
• Bots that can do the basic legwork of ensuring prospects or customers that are live chatting with you get routed to the right human.
• Access to boatloads of integrations that allow you to make HubSpot CRM your central record of truth for your business data.

Zoho Highlights:

• Platform user-interface customization for a personalized user journey.
• Powerful sales automation characteristics to manage accounts, leads, and opportunities.
• Complete productive workflow control with scheduled actions, assignment rules, and email notifications.
• Chatbot Zia to address personal assistance.
• Extensive analytics and reports charts.
• Well integrated with diversified social media platforms such as Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
• Marketing automation with email marketing by sending and scheduling mass emails, crafting marketing campaigns, and creating email templates.
• Zoho Projects enables teamwork with calendars collaborations, follow-ups, messages, and status updates.
• Systematic business inventory tracking.
• Third-party tool integrations with Microsoft, Slack, Zoho suite, and an array of others.

Contact and Lead Management

HubSpot CRM

It allows you to hold up to one million contacts and company records. You can either choose to enter contact information manually, or you can have the information migrated from CSV files, spreadsheets, or other CRM you were previously working on. A contact is created automatically when someone fills in a connected form on your website or sends an email to your HubSpot connected inbox.

A contact’s information is listed on the left-hand side of the page, and an activity timeline shows you the history of your relationship with that contact. In addition, you can see the contact’s associations with other objects like company, deals, and tickets in a single view.

As you would expect from any suitable CRM, it automatically renews the record when you add a contact from a new company, or alters the company information from a proprietary business database. Additionally, the CRM lets you get in touch with your customers via email and call contacts without having to leave the CRM. However, the reporting and dashboard features are available as a paid add-on.

Zoho CRM

When compared with HubSpot, Zoho CRM offers you to store up to 100,000 contacts records regardless of the pricing plan you choose. Like HubSpot, Zoho provides its own account management feature for storing details about the companies you are engaged with.

The contact information is easy to digest in a horizontal box across to vertical columns. Additionally, you can overview your interaction history. The CRM extends social listening, so you can see from the CRM whenever a contact reaches to you via social media.

In the context of lead management, Zoho seems to offer more capabilities than the free version of Hubspot. With Zoho, you can assign criteria based leads to sales reps, experiment with your own lead scoring rules, and convert cold leads to hot deals. However, with HubSpot’s supplementary hubs to enhance its features, you get a lot more!

Comparison by Implementation

Among other mindful considerations, you would want to consider when choosing between Zoho and HubSpot is implementation time. This is the amount of time, from start to finish, you will require to migrate from your old CRM to a new one.

Good preparation is imperative to implementing a new CRM on time. Irrespective of the CRM solution you choose, the preparation time for the migration to a new CRM will be much longer than the actual migration process. This depends not only on factors like the number of records you need to migrate, the size of your team, and the customizations that may be required but also on how feature-rich your chosen CRM is.

The implementation time for HubSpot CRM is generally lower than the implementation time for Zoho CRM. It depends on how many records you have and whether you choose HubSpot’s free CRM or one of the paid tiers (In case of the paid tiers the additional time is to set up the expanded list of features not available in the free version). You can expect the implementation time of HubSpot CRM to take from one day to a couple of weeks. In contrast, Zoho takes anywhere from 30 days or longer to implement.

The Bottom Line: HubSpot CRM versus Zoho CRM

• Ease of Use

Zoho’s CRM is pretty intuitive, especially with its first-tier plan. A minimalist look, with smartly placed buttons and tools at user-accessible spots, but the CRM gets a little complicated with higher-priced packages and needs a lot of customization at setup.

In contrast, user reviews on HubSpot CRM highlight its ease of use, with its well-designed dashboards that exhibit everything you would need to know from the moment you sign in.

While the ease of use can vary from user to user, we found the HubSpot interface to be much simpler and faster to get used to. That being said, we would like to declare this as a tie since Zoho also offers a pretty great interface.

HubSpot: 1 Zoho: 1

• User Access

HubSpot (unpaid version) does not place a limit on the number of users you can have, while Zoho (unpaid version) allows up to three users, making Zoho strictly suitable for small businesses. Even for the paid plans, HubSpot allows you to have a mixture of paid and free seats while in Zoho all the seats can be either free or paid.

Also, Zoho automatically assigns all its users’ super admins, which can lead to managerial issues. However, HubSpot is tuned; you can grant control and access in an organized manner.

HubSpot takes this one by a mile.

HubSpot: 2 Zoho: 1

• Contact Management

​HubSpot CRM offers two-way sync. So, you can create a contact in your CRM, load email templates, and automatically log sales activity without leaving Gmail or Outlook. Also, sales teams can track website activity for all new contacts, including sales activities, page views, and form submissions.

Zoho offers related contact management features but, unlike HubSpot, the number of users is restricted at three with its free plan. Moreover, it offers one-way sync from Outlook and Gmail, so you have to continuously switch between CRM and your email.

HubSpot: 3 Zoho: 1

• Software Integrations

If you choose to go ahead with Zoho’s unpaid plan, you can integrate with only Facebook and Gmail, and forget about integrating with any other businesses or social media platforms for lead generation.

Hubspot’s free plan integrates seamlessly with Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, and G Suite. For social integrations, it can accommodate Instagram and Facebook as well.

HubSpot: 4 Zoho: 1

• Customer Support

HubSpot offers support via email, chat, phone, and online communities for the paid versions. However, for the free CRM version, you can only depend on the online communities and the help articles (which, admittedly, are pretty extensive and straight-forward). Zoho on the other hand provides support through email and a customer portal in addition to knowledge base and online communities.

The availability of more support options makes Zoho the winner in this category.

HubSpot: 3 Zoho: 2

To sum up…

Even though it was close, as expected, since both of these are incredible solutions, HubSpot manages to eke out Zoho. We feel we are uniquely qualified to answer this because we’re a small business ourselves and dealt with the same problem. In the end, we decided to go ahead with Hubspot, just because it was free. And if it didn’t suffice, we felt we could later migrate to Zoho. We’re happy to report that the need never arose!

Hubspot integrates seamlessly across your marketing, sales, and services teams — and provides you with scarily insightful analytics.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

HubSpot Vs Zoho CRM — Which CRM Is The Best For Your Business? was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Marketing and sales teams are swimming in data, and in available tools to collect, analyze, and visualize their data.

But what’s most important for marketing and sales teams is often data that’s right in front of us, and right within our HubSpot portals. In order to drive growth, it’s important to hone in on the most critical data that impacts your bottom line. All that’s required is knowing where and how to look for this information.

Here are six key reports you can create in HubSpot to measure the impact of your marketing and sales efforts, along with step-by-step directions on how to create them.

1. Conversions by Original Lead Source

The most direct way to measure your marketing efforts and ad spend is to tie each conversion and each closed deal back to its original lead source or campaign. Knowing and understanding this data is critical to planning and managing your sales and marketing functions.

HubSpot uses a default property named “Original Source” to capture how a customer first enters your database. This makes the first touch attribution reporting very easy in your HubSpot CRM.

Analyzing this data in HubSpot allows you to maximize your team’s efforts and budget. For example, if you’re converting a high percentage of your customers from social media channels, but not from paid search, maybe it’s time to pause your AdWords spend and put some more resources behind a social campaign that combines a mix of boosted and targeted posts.

Make sure you take the time to understand the differences in visitor behavior among your various audiences. Take note of which personas engage on specific channels or mediums, and design content that speaks to them.

To create this report in HubSpot:

1. Create a new SINGLE object CONTACT report.
2. Update the filter to your desired date range (optional: select only certain forms to include in your report).
3. Select the “Form Submission” and “Original Source” properties in the data step.

Bonus Tip: Segmented Reporting by Original Lead Source in HubSpot

You can build a number of different reports to segment your contacts by the original lead source. Once you create the base report, consider what questions you can answer using the data breakout by the original lead sources such as average sale price and time to close.

Want Better Pipeline Metrics?

Map your lifecycle stages, lead statuses, and deal pipeline using this HubSpot automation blueprint.

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2. Conversion Rates by Lifecycle Stage

This report tracks your subscribers, leads, MQLs, SQLs, Opportunities, and Customers. These are the default HubSpot lifecycle stages, and they represent the various stages of your sales and marketing funnel.

These metrics might seem a bit rudimentary to advanced digital marketers, but it’s essential to benchmark these numbers on a monthly and quarterly basis (or any custom interval). Why bother measuring traffic and conversion rates if you aren’t paying attention to these metrics first?

Set a goal of “X” number of customers or “Y” monthly sales attributed to your website. Setting specific lifecycle stage-based goals will help keep your entire team focused, contributing, and accountable.

You should also measure conversion rates between these different lifecycle stages. This is incredibly valuable in helping you laser-focus on areas of weakness where you can improve your overall marketing and sales functions or processes. This Reporting also provides you with the data to identify exactly how many leads you will need to hit your lead generation and revenue goals.

To create this report in HubSpot:

1. Create a new FUNNEL report and select CONTACTS object.
2. Add the stages you want to include in the report.
3. Update the filter to your desired date range (optional: select only certain forms to include in your report).
4. Configure your funnel report to show contacts that have been through ALL of the selected Lifecycle Stages or ANY of the selected Lifecycle Stages.

3. Average Sale Amount and Time to Close by Original Source

The average sale amount and the average time to close are two common metrics sales teams closely monitor. Marketers need to focus on this data too, especially when there are significant variances between channels.

Give your marketing team access to time-to-close metrics in your HubSpot CRM. Tying sales and revenue directly into your CRM lets you measure what works on your website to drive revenue and what doesn’t (same goes for ads, social media, email marketing, etc.). If you don’t have this today, your marketing ROI is somewhat of a mystery. Solve this!

Even if it means taking the time to manually add deal amounts after they have closed, determine what will illuminate these numbers for you and your team.

Segment your customers from the last quarter by lead source to see if there is a significant difference between the sale amounts and the time to complete a sale.

To create this report in HubSpot:

1. Create a new SINGLE object CONTACT report.
2. Update the filter to your desired date range (optional: select only certain forms to include in your report).
3. Select the “Days to Close” and “Recent Deal Amount” properties from the data step.
4. Change your “measured by” metric from “total” to “average.”

4. Month-Over-Month Organic Traffic

If you create compelling, engaging content for your audience, organic traffic has the potential to be your strongest contributor of qualified leads and a consistent source of great new business opportunities.

New HQ blog — published 36 posts between July 2018 to July 2019

Over time, by continuing to produce new content and returning to optimize past content, you’ll begin to experience compounding growth. Your new blogs benefit from the established page authority and search traffic, and the old blogs benefit from new content with fresh internal “link juice.”

How to Measure Month-Over-Month Organic Growth

This one is pretty straightforward. In the traffic analytics section of HubSpot, simply set your date range at the top of the page, and then filter to only show organic traffic.

SEO is a long-term tactic, so we recommend looking at a six-month view as well as a two-year view. Keep in mind that dips and peaks for seasonality are quite common in certain industries.

5. Highest Ranking Keywords

You can use HubSpot’s content strategy tool to easily identify topics related to your business and your existing content, plus long-tail keywords, which are necessary to help elevate your position in search results.

Keep in mind that this is a long-term strategy. Investing in original and compelling content today will deliver qualified leads 6–12 months from now (after the SERPs pick up your new pages and posts). This is true for all but the most well-established websites.

Review the keywords that provide you with the highest organic search engine ranking. Determine which words provide the best opportunities to establish domain authority. Then, based on this data, pursue a content strategy designed to bring in marketing qualified leads. Your strategy should include developing a mix of content an including gated offers to help drive lead generation/capture. But it all starts with attracting the right type of traffic!

To explore this report in HubSpot, you will need to enable the free Google Search Console integration (learn how in this blog).

1. Navigate to the “Page Performance” view for one of your pages or blog posts
2. Select the “Optimization” tab
3. Filter by search queries, clicks, and impressions

6. Average Number of Page Visits per Conversion

Your marketing and sales teams need to know how often your customers and leads are engaging with your website before they convert or move down the funnel.

For example, if you know that a new customer will visit an average of 11 pages on your website before they convert, you can start honing in on prospects that already have 6–8 page views. This group of leads is primed for nurturing with highly relevant, educational content that provides thoughtful solutions directly related to their pain points.

To measure this, we are going to assess the number of page views each customer had before they ultimately became a lead (or a customer).

A similar metric could be centered around the number of email engagements or the number of sales team touches before each conversion. Don’t forget to include them in your lead scoring too!

To create this report in HubSpot:

1. Create a new SINGLE object CONTACT report.
2. Update the filter to your desired date range (optional: select only certain forms to include in your report).
3. Select the “Form Submission” and “Number of Page Views” properties from the data step.
4. Change your “measured by” metric from “total” to “average.”

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

Analyze Your Marketing and Sales Pipeline: 6 Key HubSpot Reports and How to Build Them was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

HubSpot CRM is a great tool to help sales leaders gain visibility into their pipeline and to implement measurable change in their organization.

Setting up well-defined deal stages is an important first step to gaining insight into your sales funnel and improving sales team performance.

What Are Deal Pipelines and Stages in HubSpot?

Deal stages represent the stages or steps in your sales pipeline that signify to your sales team that an opportunity is moving toward closing. Your sales pipeline begins where your marketing funnel ends.

Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise teams can create up to 50 different pipelines. This is useful for organizations that have products or services with distinctively different sales processes or multiple product offerings. You can also create a pipeline specifically for up-selling existing customers or a pipeline for annual renewals.

In HubSpot CRM, your deal stages are represented as lanes across your sales process, providing a visual representation of your pipeline.

As a deal progresses, it moves across the deals board. You can create and save filters to quickly view deals of a certain size, deals expected to close this month, or deals in a specific industry.

There is also a table view option, which is handy for sorting deals by the deal owner, current deal stage, or projected close date.

Determining the Right Deal Stages for Your Pipeline

Each deal stage should signify that an action has been taken by your sales team, such as “Presentation Scheduled” or “Proposal Sent.” You do not want any ambiguity here. Make sure there are obvious indicators that align with the various stages. We usually recommend companies start off with between 6–8 stages. Some will simplify to as few as 4, and others expand to 15 or more.

Here is a very simple example of a pipeline with five deal stages.

• Discovery call completed
• Meeting scheduled
• Proposal requested
• Closed /Won
• Closed/Lost

For each stage, you can specify the percentage likelihood-to-close, providing a streamlined view of your revenue forecast. Update these regularly to ensure your monthly, quarterly, and annual projections are accurate.

When moving deals from one stage to the next, you can also require additional deal properties to be entered. For example, when moving to the “closed — lost” stage, you should require a reason that the deal was lost. Think through other transition points, and whether there are any specific data points that you want to inject along the way.

Want to fill your deal pipeline?

Lead scoring drives revenue by identifying more qualified leads for your sales team.

GET THE TEMPLATE

When to Create a New Deal in HubSpot CRM

It’s important that your deal stages are well-defined and that everyone on your sales team understands them.

One of the most common questions companies have when beginning to use deal stages is when they should create a new deal. Your first deal stage should be the first action committed to by a lead to start your sales process. “Discovery call scheduled” or “initial appointment booked” are common initial deal stages.

Resist the urge to create new deals too early. Doing so will drag down your close rate and muddy your sales data. Your CRM system should be used for active sales pipeline management, not as a list of every company you hope to work with one day.

Default HubSpot Deal Stages and Win Probabilities

Default settings in HubSpot CRM include seven deal stages with preset win probabilities.

• Appointment scheduled (20%)
• Qualified to buy (40%)
• Presentation scheduled (60%)
• Decision-maker bought-in (80%)
• Contract sent (90%)
• Closed won (100% won)
• Closed lost (0% lost)

Examples of Pipelines Deal Stages for SaaS and Manufacturing Companies

We find that slight modifications to the default deal stages help sales teams better understand and adopt HubSpot CRM. Of course, the right deal stages for you will depend entirely on what your sales process is, what your sales team looks like and what your goals are.

Here is an example of a SaaS sales pipeline:

• Demo requested
• Decision-maker brought in
• Proposal requested
• Proposal sent
• Closed/Won
• Closed/Lost
• Delayed/Deferred

And here is an example of a manufacturing company:

• New opportunity
• Initial meeting scheduled
• Assessment
• Decision-maker brought in
• Sample requested
• Sample delivered
• Proposal requested / RFP
• Proposal sent
• Closed/Won
• Closed/Lost
• Delayed/Deferred

Again, it is most important that the deal stages are well understood by your sales team, and provide your leadership team with a clear view of your pipeline or any potential obstacles.

How to Set Up or Modify Your Deal Stages in your HubSpot Portal

Step 1: Log into HubSpot. Click “Sales” and “Deals” from the main menu.

Step 2: Select your pipeline.

Note: Only HubSpot Professional + Enterprise users can set up multiple pipelines.

Step 3: Add or edit your deal stages.

Here you can make edits to your pipeline’s stages.

1. Click to the left of a stage and drag to change the order of stages in your pipeline.
2. Change the name of any stage by clicking the Stage name field.
3. Click Delete to delete a stage.
4. Use the Win probability dropdown menu to change the percent of closing a deal at that stage.
5. Edit properties that are presented to users when a deal is moved to this stage.
6. Create a new deal stage by clicking Add a deal stage and set the stage name and win probability. Any newly created deal stages will appear in the deals view for all users in your account.

That’s it! Start creating deals and drag them across your deals board to the appropriate stage. You’ll instantly get a visual representation of your sales pipeline and be well on your way to improving revenue generation performance.

Bonus Quick Start Implementation Tips:

• Think through your whole sales process, lifecycle stage transitions and lead statuses strategically before you begin.
• Start with HubSpot’s templated deal stages or our recommended modification if you’re not sure where to begin.
• Ask your sales team for input on close rates and win probabilities.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

How to Set Up Your Deal Pipeline and Stages in HubSpot CRM was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I often get asked about how I manage all the contacts in my business and how I market to these people using email newsletters and automation.

In short, I use a combination of Pipedrive and ConvertKit (affiliate links) to manage my database and email communication with potential prospects and clients.

I explain the system in the following video:

The problem I see all the time

A lot of the clients I talk to don’t have a centralized system for managing their contacts. They usually have this information spread out over a number of sources like Outlook/Google Contacts, various spreadsheets, or old CRM tools. This makes it very difficult when you want to do something simple like:

• See a list of all your previous clients (let alone clients who have purchased specific services or products).
• Email prospects or clients to send periodic updates about your business.
• Nurture important relationships and cross-sell or up-sell your products or services.

My email list is the most valuable asset in my business. This is why I put such a big emphasis on maintaining an organized database of contacts and syncing this with a tool like ConvertKit.

Maintaining a central database of contacts

To start, it doesn’t make a massive difference what tool you choose but you should decide where your ‘point of truth’ is going to be (i.e. the master list for your contacts).

For example, Pipedrive is my point of truth. This means, whenever someone reaches out to me about my consulting service, I add them to Pipedrive. From there, I can sync that person to Google Contacts or to my ConvertKit account if I want to add them to a newsletter list. Pipedrive is the hub of my system and these other tools are the spokes around the edge.

To maintain the qualify of my Pipedrive account, I don’t have any form of two-way sync set up with this database. Some tools let you create two-way sync where if contact is updated in one place, it updates in the other. While this may work, I’m very cautious with my contacts and the only way to update Pipedrive (my ‘point of truth’) is for me to update it myself. i.e. changing a contact in Google or ConvertKit will not update Pipedrive. This means contacts can’t get updated, changed or deleted by mistake if the sync goes wrong.

Segmenting your database

I’ve chosen to use Pipedrive as my ‘point of truth’ as it’s the system with the most amount of data about my contacts. Besides contact information, as a sales CRM, there’s also a lot of data about the services I’ve sold to clients and a client's lifetime value.

For example, I’ve created some filters that use the metadata in Pipedrive to segment my contacts:

• ‘All Clients’ shows me any contact that has at least 1 ‘won deal’.
• ‘High-Value Clients’ shows me people who have a deal value greater than $5,000.
• Or I can filter by product to find people that have purchased specific services in the past.

I also use a custom field called ‘Groups’ to manually tag contacts into different categories, for example:

• ‘MP Client’ for people who are actively subscribed to my Master Pipedrive course.
• ‘VIP’ for manually tagging important relationships.

This means when I have an important update to share with previous clients or if I want to try and up-sell my services, I can tap into these various filters or groups to find just the right list of people to contact.

In Pipedrive, you can use the bulk email feature to contact up to 100 people at a time. Or you can use a third-party option like me.

Using ConvertKit for my newsletters

Using Zapier you can link Pipedrive to email providers like Mailchimp, Active Campaign or ConvertKit.

Because I consult on a few tools like Asana, Pipedrive and Zapier, I want to add all my paying clients to one of these newsletter lists when they start working with me. I have my system set up so that when a deal is ‘Won’ the person linked with the deal is added to ConvertKit and tagged with a newsletter tag related to the service they’ve paid for. e.g.

If the deal has the ‘Asana Consulting’ product attached to it, you get added to my ‘Newsletter: Asana’ tag. This is a tag I use to send periodic updates when I release new videos or have useful tips to share and is great for maintaining ongoing communication with clients.

With my new online courses, I’ve set up guided emails so that when you start the course, you get an email each week explaining what to do next. I’ve actually set up this sequence so that you can be fast-tracked through these emails if you mark the appropriate lessons as complete and progress through the course really quickly.

Having a sequence like this means I can automate the client success portion of my business but still maintain good communication with those paying clients.

People who buy my course also get added to a ‘List: Pipedrive Coaching’ tag so that I can easily email all my members when I share updates about that product or am hosting a group call.

—

As you can see, throughout my system, I have many ways to segment my contacts using filters, tags or custom fields. This means, no matter what kind of email or update I want to send, I can segment my contacts in Pipedrive or ConvertKit and email just the right group of people.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

-> Start your 7-day free trial

-> Estimate your CRM project

Better contact management and email automation in Pipedrive was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Measuring Goals in Today’s Remote and Distributed Work Environments.

Let me ask you this: would you rather pay for “service hours” or for achieving a specific goal? If you are an employer, would you rather pay for an employee’s output and effectiveness or for the time they are sitting in a chair in your office?

I’m going to wager that most people would rather pay for results and effectiveness instead of time. So, why is the subject of remote work still so controversial?

Could it be because many business are unsure of how to focus on the end result they produce — and how to measure it in a meaningful way?

Think of it like this — do you buy a drill because you like having tools in your garage, or because you need a hole? Too many businesses focus on the drill, when what they should be selling is the hole.

Our long-time Clients know that at Diaz & Cooper, we focus on meaningful results. What some may not know is that we are so committed to this approach that we became the first advertising agency in the US to become certified as a ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) back in 2012.

At the time, our agency principals were looking for a way to boost productivity, align goals with our Clients, and increase job satisfaction for our employees. After researching several “work culture” and productivity workshops we came to the radical (at the time) conclusion that ROWE was the answer.

Here’s a video from back 2015, explaining why we chose to become ROWE — the philosophy behind it still relevant today.

What is ROWE?

Results-Only Work Environment is the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. ROWE is a management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence. Ressler and Thompson formed a consulting firm, CultureRx, to help employers like Diaz & Cooper transition to ROWE.

With ROWE, people focus on results and only results.

Forget flex time. In a ROWE, employees get to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. It may sound crazy, but ROWE has a proven track record of success.

The Evolution of Remote Work

Back in 2012, around 24% of employees were spending 40–80% or more of their time working remotely, by 2016 about 43% of US workers were working remotely at least some of the time.

Nowadays, remote or flexible work is actually seen as the norm. In fact, a study conducted in 2019 by FlexJobs shows that 74% of respondents believe that flexible working has become the “new normal” and 80% of U.S. workers say they would turn down a job that didn’t offer flexible working. The middle market is onboard: a 2018 survey by Indeed found that 67% of middle-size companies have instituted a flexible working policy.

Increased job satisfaction and employee morale are commonly cited benefits of adopting a flexible work environment — especially from workers lobbying the higher-ups to adopt the change.

But the fact is there are compelling business reasons to make the move to remote — including increased productivity, higher quality work, a bigger, better more diversified talent pool, reduced real estate footprint and improved ability to conduct business across multiple time zones.

In their best-selling business book — Remote — Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37Signals (makers of Basecamp) debunk some long-standing myths about in-office work showing that work rarely happens at the office, that meetings and managers kill productivity and working from home actually boosts the quality of the work. (it’s not true that the “magic” only happens when employees are all together.) They famously went head-to-head with Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, arguing that she made a big mistake when she announced in 2013 that employees no longer would be permitted to work from home.

The fact is that creative work, knowledge-based work that is meaningful requires focused sprints of uninterrupted time.

Unfortunately, in the modern workplace — rife with open plans and collaborative spaces — those long stretches of time just can’t happen. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another. That’s a huge drain on productivity when you factor in that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return focus to the original task after an interruption. (University of California, Irvine, 2013)

Measuring Results

HubSpot, the winner of Glassdoor’s #1 Best Place to Work in 2020, boasts over 200 full-time fully-remote jobs worldwide citing that they’ve “always believed that results matter more than when or where they’re produced.” As gold-certified agency partners, we completely agree.

We also think it’s time to define what “results” mean and provide concrete KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) both for employee evaluation and for expected results of Client work.

In the book “Why Managing Sucks — And How to Fix It” — we cited several ways for aligning employees with their position expectations and holding them accountable for results. These include:

• Deadlines met
• Projects adhering to expected standards
• Client acceptance rate of projects
• Number of mistakes/revisions
• Project adhering to the allotted budget
• Profitability rates per department
• # Client Referrals and Net Promoter score
• Performance against Position KPIs

Equally important to setting performance standards for Client work is setting goals
for the results of that work — that both Client and Agency can agree to achieve. Many have heard about SMART goals, but few use them effectively for marketing. In fact, successful marketing teams that always hit their numbers use SMART goals.

SMART goals for marketing are concrete and measurable targets that are relevant to your business (your bottom line) which you strive to achieve over a determined period of time. Each letter in the “SMART” acronym stands for a characteristic the goal should have: “specific,” “measurable,” “attainable,” “relevant,” and “time-bound” to ensure the goal can be reached and benefits the business.

Download Your Marketing SMART Goal Template here

Conclusion

Having KPIs for employee positions and using SMART goals for Client work will give you a clear outlook on expectations and set the stage for successful outcomes. The remote model aligns better with Client goals because you focus on your output and the results produced instead of counting hours.

pickSaaS is a community of high-quality Pipedrive, Zoho, HubSpot & Shopify experts, providing integration, support and development services, and helping all-size businesses reduce development costs, grow sales pipelines and work remotely.

Our pricing plans start at $249.

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It’s Time to Put the Results into Remote was originally published in SoftwareSupp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.