Hi and welcome to this video on Blueprint. A blueprint in Zoho CRM is
designed to help you execute a business process in a well-defined systematic
manner. With the blueprint, you can define every stage in a process and associate
people with each stage, guide your team's through the execution of the process,
mandate and validate and portion information contextually, and automate
routine actions. In simpler words, it's an online replica of your offline process.
Consider a scenario, Zylker Inc, a software development company follows a
deal follow-up process. Whenever they have a deal in CRM, it goes through a few
stages: Qualification, Negotiation, Discount approval, Contract and Deal
Closure. Let's see how to design a blueprint for Zylker's Deal follow-up
process. The first thing is to navigate to the Setup page and click Blueprint.
When you click to create a new blueprint, the system pops up a window where you
can enter the name for the blueprint. In our case, let's call it a Deal follow-up
process. Then, choose the module layout in the field for the blueprint. In this case,
let's select the deals module, standard layout and stage field. If you want this
process to be executed only on specific records you can define the appropriate
blueprint entry criteria. For example, this blueprint is applicable only for
big deals that is deals whose amount is more than $50,000. Click Next and you
will be in the blueprint editor.
Here are a few points to remember before you start creating a blueprint. A
blueprint is created using States and transitions. State refers to each stage
in your process in this example qualification, negotiation, contracts sent,
are different stages in the blueprint. Transition defines the conditions to be
met in order to move from one state to another.
It forms a link between two states. Drag-and-drop the available States into
the blueprint editor. As mentioned earlier, in Zylker Inc, deals pass
through various stages such as qualification, negotiation, discount
approved or rejected, contract sent, and deal won or lost. Now connect the nodes
between the states to define the process flow
and these small plus buttons right here, these are the transitions we mentioned
earlier. Transitions help you define the conditions for the record to move from
one state to the next. For example, as per Zylker's policy, a
Sales rep has to associate a note about a customer's requirement before they can
qualify a deal. So, right before the qualified stage, you create a transition
called 'Qualify'. Add a description and save. This gets displayed as a button on
the respective deal's details page. A sales rep would have to click this
button and enter the required notes in order to move the record to the
qualified stage. Now, let's navigate back to the Blueprint editor. Go ahead and add
transitions in a similar manner throughout the process. Once this is done,
you must define the transition settings. Each transition is divided into three
sections: Before, During and After transition. Now, let's look at defining
transition settings for the Negotiate button. First, we have the before
transition section. This defines who is responsible for executing this
transition. Let's say you choose Record owner. Criteria defines which records
this transition is applicable for. For this Deal follow up process we want the
negotiate transition to be applicable for all records entering the process. So,
let's skip criteria. Next, you have the during transition. This is the space
where you guide your sales team on what is to be done at a particular stage and
mandate the required information. Let's say as Zylker's policy, sales teams
need to enter an acceptable product discount review and attach negotiation
documents at this stage. Let's see how to map these conditions here to specify
this. First, let's add a message to the sales reps 'Enter the product discount'
Then, make the discount field mandatory and enter the validation criteria for
this field. Discount should be less than or equal to 15%. If the value entered
does not meet the criteria, then specify an error message to be displayed, 'sorry
discount cannot be greater than 15%'. Let's also add a checklist.
This works effectively as a to-do list for your teams. They would have to score
off each item on the checklist in order to proceed to the next stage.
For example, finalize discount, attached negotiation document. Next, make
attachments mandatory. Without attaching the relevant document the deal cannot
move to the next stage. So the during transition section essentially allows
you to guide your sales teams at every stage of the process and also mandate
and validate important information contextually. In the after transition
section, you can specify actions to be automated such as an email notification,
task management or field update among other actions. Let's say for every deal
after the sales rep enters a discount at the negotiation stage, an email alert
needs to be sent to the sales manager who has to approve the discount. This
action doesn't need to be done manually for every deal so you can simply
automate the action at the end of the transition. Simply, click email
notification and associate the email template. So, to sum up transitions allow
you to specify the conditions, validations and action for every stage.
Your sales teams will have to perform these actions in order to move from
stage A to stage B etc. You'll define three types of settings for every
transition: Before transition, in which you define who owns a particular stage
in a process. During transition, in which you specify what is to be done at each
stage and the instructions to be followed and After transition, in which
you define routine actions to be automated at the end of every stage. In a
similar matter define the settings for all the transitions in the process. The
deal process blueprint for Zylker Inc is now ready. Now here's something else. If
you look at the completed process we have something called the Deal lost
transition here. This is typically seen only after the contract sent stage, but
in reality a deal can be lost at any stage of the process. For instance, a
customer may lose interest in your business god forbid at the qualification
stage itself. In such a case, you should not have to traverse through every stage
just to mark the deal is closed and lost. You should be able to drop a deal right
at the qualification stage and take the record out of
the process. This is where you can make Deal lost a Common transition. Once you opt
for this, it gets linked to all the states which means this button will be
available in all stages of the deal process. By default, all stages are
selected. If you uncheck a few states, the button will not be available in those
stages of the process. Now go ahead and save the process. And, now let's see the
blueprint in action. Navigate to the deals module. This is a
deal worth $54,000 which meets our blueprint criteria. So this deal should
go through the blueprint process. On clicking each button you can progress
through the subsequent stages. You'll also notice in the record detail section
that the stage field is locked. This record cannot move to the next stage
unless the defined process in the blueprint is met.
Click qualify and enter the details to save. Now Click negotiate. You are
prompted to enter the discount as mandated in the transition settings. Say
you enter a discount of 30 percent, you see the error message. Now, say you
entered 12 percent. The system now accepts this value as it meets the
validation criteria of less than or equal to 15 percent. Switch to the
checklists and now score off each item in the checklist attach the negotiation
document as prompted in the transition pop-up. Now you are through to the next
stage. Notice that as you complete this transition, an email has automatically
been triggered to the sales manager for discount approval. A blueprint thus helps
you design a systematic process, guide your team through it every step of the
way and automates routine actions in the process. Go ahead and start designing
your very own blueprint right away. Thank you so much for watching this video.
For more resources on Zoho CRM please visit us at www.zoho.com/crm/resources