Blueprint Overview
Every business has a unique business process followed across different departments/functions. A business process is a collection of structured, related activities and a set of tasks performed by people to deliver a service or products. The business which has well defined business processes achieves an improved bottom line, improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change.
Blueprint in Zoho CRM helps you/your team to execute the business process in a systematic and well-defined manner. With Blueprint you can achieve process automation by automating most of the repetitive tasks. The Zoho CRM Blueprint is simply an online replica of your unique business process with mandates & validations at every stage, automations. It is a sequence of state and transitions, you can think of state as a step in your business process and transition as an action(s) performed at each stage in order to move to the next stage.
Sample Blueprint
The following diagram shows a sample flow of a software services organisation’s well defined Lead nurturing process. This organisation aggregates leads via various channels into the Zoho CRM, the lead will be in status none when created, once the lead is received they send a welcome email immediately and carry out prospect research to gather the background of the lead, their decision makers, requirements, competitors.,etc in order to make a tailored sales pitch. After complete prospect research their sales team arranges a prospecting/discovery call to gather requirements and pitch services, they have a well defined follow-up process before The following diagram shows a sample flow of a software services organisation’s well defined Lead nurturing process. This organisation aggregates leads via various channels into the Zoho CRM, the lead will be in status none when created, once the lead is received they send a welcome email immediately and carry out prospect research to gather the background of the lead, their decision makers, requirements, competitors.,etc in order to make a tailored sales pitch. After complete prospect research their sales team arranges a prospecting/discovery call to gather requirements and pitch services, they have a well defined follow-up process before they qualify the lead. During the process they will clean-up the unauthentic/ junk leads.
This blueprint is created for the ‘Leads’ module and the states are based on the Lead Status. In the blueprint white rectangular boxes are Lead status (states), greens are transitions and blues are common transitions (associated with more than one state).
Points to note,
- Blueprints are module based
- Different blueprint can be created for different layouts of the same module
- Multiple blueprints can be created for a module based on the different fields. The execution order will be based on the order of the blueprint.
Automations with Blueprint
Assignment
Assignment rule is designed to automate the lead assignment, based on the Lead Status we can assign leads to each representative. By using this assignment process we can save a lot of time, effort and manual errors. Zoho CRM has advanced workflows and a scripting engine that uses Deluge.
Notifications(Email, SMS, Whatsapp)
With the help of alerts, get instant alert notifications about the changes through Email,SMS,Whatsapp.
Email Open rates at about 20%, SMS open rates are at about 30%, while WhatsApp has an open rate of around 95%
Tasks
Blueprint lets you automate the tasks by setting up the workflow. We can design the workflow for your task. We can also execute the tasks based on a blueprint.
Field Updates
Field Update helps the users automatically update certain field values in the records, when the associated workflow rule is triggered.
Webhooks
Webhooks facilitate communication with third-party applications by sending instant web notifications every time an event occurs in your Zoho CRM With Webhooks, you can configure HTTP URLs and associate them in workflow rules to automate the entire notification process.
Custom Actions
Custom actions let you add workflow actions to your application in addition to those available by default (alerts, tasks, field updates, webhooks, and custom functions).
Steps to Design a BluePrint
Building a process in to a 3 step procedure
1. Enter Basic Info: Specify the module, Layout, Field in which the process has to be created.
2. Define the process flow : Define the process flow from the start state to exit state
3. Configure Transition settings : Configure Before,During and After Transition settings between different States in the process as required.
Step 1. Enter Basic Information
- Go to setup > Automation >Blueprint
- Create Blueprint
- Create Blueprint popup, you can choose the module, layout, field for which the process has to be created.
In our scenario, since the process is Lead Flow, let us choose the Deals module, Standard layout and Stage field.
Step 2. Define the Process Flow in the Blueprint Editor
In Blueprint Editor , drag and drop all the States (stages) that form a part of the process.
- Establish the process flow between the States by connecting the nodes in the State buttons .
- Note that the Start State is the equivalent of the " None " value of the chosen pick list field.
- Create Transitions by clicking on the + button between two States.
- The white buttons represent States in the Blueprint (Deal Stages).
- The green buttons represent Transitions (Conditions required to complete each stage).
- Each Transition you configure is displayed as a button on the record's details page.
- On successful completion of the Transition, you will move to the next State in the Blueprint.
- The blue button is called a Common Transition and will appear at all States of the Blueprint.
Step 3. Configure Transition settings
“Transitions” refers to the change of state in a process. It is the connecting link between two States, where the conditions for the change are clearly defined.
A transition is made up of 3 states
Before Transition
- Specify people responsible to execute a Transition.
- Owners > Record Owner. When you choose Record Owner, only the Record Owner (and those above the record owner in the role hierarchy) will be able to view the Transition.
- Define Criteria that dictates exactly when this Transition should be available for the records in a process.
During Transition
This section guides the Transition owners in completing a particular stage in a process by prompting them to enter specific fields, notes, attachments and other information contextually.
Following are the details that you can mandate in the During Transition section.
Mandatory Notes, Attachments, Tags, Fields, Checklists, Widgets, Messages and Associated Items
After Transition
Actions to be automated at the After a transition is completed. Actions that can be automated in the After Transition section are:
- Send Email Notification
- Assign Tasks
- Make a Field Update
- Trigger Webhooks
- Trigger Custom Functions
- Convert Record (Applicable for the Leads and Quotes modules)
