If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) organization, particularly a registered re-seller, you’re dealing not only with a wide range of customers but numerous vendors. You want to keep everyone happy with your operations, as well as make things easy for your own team so they can devote their time to the parts of their job that are most important. These goals can lead to a major problem for B2B organizations when it comes to accurate and efficient paperwork and record keeping processes, whether these relate to sales or tax forms, credit card authorization, or any other forms you need to run your day-to-day operations. While email makes things easier than the old days of faxes or traditional mail, it is not without its without its own flaws. These flaws relate largely to efficiency and human error.

The problem of maintaining accurate and efficient records is one that many of our clients have faced. Luckily, digital technologies, such as customer relationship management software (CRM), provide innovative solutions to these problems. On this front, Zoho CRM provides an automated email form solution to avoid the problems associated with email form submissions. Automation lets the contact lead form submission process operate in a streamlined fashion that avoids most of the problems associated with human error and saves you time.

Addressing Pain Points with Email Form Solutions

For our clients that used email form solutions, they have two major pain points.

Efficient Use of Time

The first pain point is efficiency or time spent trying to manage forms. Sales reps are required to spend a great deal of time ensuring that the correct forms are being sent to potential customers and vendors. This can be extraordinarily time consuming when vendors have multiple forms that need to be filled out and when sales reps have to deal with state tax forms for each individual state customers operate in. These forms have to be filled out manually, scanned, and emailed back. Completed forms also have to be forwarded to vendors. This often requires multiple emails, especially when individual vendors have numerous forms for their products.

Human Error

Manually filling out forms and emailing them raises the problem of human error, as it is very easy to omit forms or send the wrong ones. Additionally, it is not uncommon that customers have to fill out these forms multiple times due to incomplete submissions. This can make for inaccurate records if errors aren’t caught. It also reproduces the efficiency pain point, by forcing sales reps to re-send forms and go through the process again. This can make it difficult to track where you are with completing the necessary forms with the necessary information.

These are not insignificant pain points, as in some circumstances the laborious nature of the process can lead to deals falling through the cracks.

5 Steps to Automate Email Form Submissions in Zoho CRM

Along with the other benefits it offers, Zoho CRM offers the ability to automate the email form submission process to save time and avoid human error. Here are the steps to follow to set this up:

1. Customize Records in Zoho CRM

The Accounts, Contacts, and Deals modules have to be customized to store the necessary data for referencing and filling forms. This largely involves creating links between different records and making sure that once a vendor is selected for a customer, their forms are the ones that are going to be filled out. With this step, you’re ultimately establishing that data passes from one record to the next. You’ll also need to identify the person to authorize or sign-off on the forms and identify anyone who might need a copy of the forms once they’re completed.

2. Create Form Templates

All vendor and tax forms supplied by the client have to be converted into templates in Zoho Writer, complete with Merge Fields to pull data from Zoho CRM and Signer fields to accept input from customers. With this step, you’re ultimately setting up an automated form that requests all of the information you were using on the emailed PDF.

3. Create Custom Deluge Function

To create the process of filling and sending the forms from Zoho CRM, a custom function has to be created to merge the record data and send the forms for signature. With this step, you’re basically starting the process of sending out the forms that need to be filled out.

4. Zoho Flow

To ensure that copies of completed forms were properly stored on the Deal and Account records in Zoho CRM, create a Flow that will perform that action once the documents are signed. The person receiving the forms isn’t necessarily going to fill it out and sign it immediately. Zoho Flow can recognize when the document is completed and find the record that started everything off, as well as related records, and update the existing records. It can then make sure that everyone that needs a copy of the document receives it. This ultimately acts to tie-off the process you started with the custom Deluge function.

5. Create Blueprint in Zoho CRM

To bring all of this together, create a Blueprint in Zoho CRM. Blueprints control processes by providing limited options to users to advance a record through stages, and perform actions based on user input. For example, you can provide Sales Reps with buttons like ‘Send Vendor Application’ and ‘Send Tax Forms.’ If these are selected, a popup would display the required data for these tasks, providing an opportunity to review and update information if necessary. Clicking another button would merge the CRM record data into the appropriate form template and send the document off to the customer.

Once you have this set up correctly, you can avoid the pain points that come with emailed forms. All a sales rep has to do is click a few buttons and verify some of the details. Zoho CRM emails the forms, with existing customer information, to the customer and requests that it be filled out. Zoho CRM also ensures that all of the required fields are filled out before it can be signed and completed. Then, all the completed forms are sent to customers, vendors, and sales reps, who need copies. Moreover, copies are stored on the Deal and Account records in Zoho CRM for easy reference.

RFDM Solutions and Automating Email Form Submissions

Whether it’s saving your sales reps and customers time, avoiding human error to ensure accurate records, or guarding against deals falling through because of problems that emerge from a complicated process, automating email form submissions has major benefits for your organization.

For more information on implementing contact lead form submission or other Zoho CRM solutions, contact us for a free consultation.