“Anything that you do more than twice has to be automated.”
-Adam Stone, CEO, D-Tools
Our daily work pattern will have certain activities that we repeat on and off. And when I say ‘on and off’, it means several times that span the entire workday. Take this typical cold calling scenario, for example:
- You, as a sales rep, have a list of leads that you call on a daily basis.
- Now, every time a lead accepts your proposal, you send a ‘Thank you’ email to the person.
- You also update the ‘Status’ field in the lead’s details page to ‘Contacted’.
- And finally, create a follow-up task – To call this person after 10 days. The task reminder will let you know about this on the 10th day after the first call.
Now back to what Adam said: The activity of sending an email, updating the field and creating a task is something you do several times in a day. If this was automated, think of the time you’d save! Enter Zoho CRM Macros.
Zoho CRM Macros support Email,Tasks and Field Updates. So, by creating a macro for the cold calling scenario above, all you have to do is to select the contact, and then run the macro. Your work is done and you can focus more on Prospecting.
How do you create Macros? Here’s an Online Guide to help you.
– Sharanya R
Due date does nothing in this flow. The whole reason for me to create the macro is so that I can forget about the next step. I can't forget about it if I have to go in and set all of my reminders. The "due date" function is sort of like a dead function, where as "remind at" is a living function that you can count on to "do" something.
If a field is updated using macro then a workflow set to trigger when a field update happens will not work for some reason. Its like CRM doesnt recognise a field update unless it is made manually?
What Zoho dont tell you is that if you run a macro and you have a field update workflow contigent on a given task, the workflow wont excute. The same goes with the new "fast" edit feature in the new UI. Workflow only recognises the "old" method of going into a record in edit mode to change a field. Two emails to support both ignored. Pretty poor stuff Zoho. A workflow should not be capable of being bypassed.
Great trick! One thing that would be helpful is for Macros to enable reminders to be sent out when tasks come due. I always find myself having to manually turn on email reminders to remind me to actually do the 'due' task!Anyways, these macros are great