While CRM is Zoho’s flagship product, you might be interested in something less complex when starting out. This is where Zoho Bigin comes into play. A lightweight CRM that allows you to track your deal flow, store your contacts, run basic workflow automation, and more.
Key Takeaways
General Overview of Bigin
Inside Bigin, Company is at the top of the hierarchy. If you compare it to CRM, there are a lot of other modules that come into play. Bigin keeps it simple with Company being the main module to store key information in one spot. The included fields in each Company are the basic info like website, phone number, location, and any tags you want to add. Within the Company, you will see the main sections are the related lists. These include the timeline, notes, activities, emails, social, deals, contacts, and files. You can create a custom view of the companies for easier organization and viewing. The Contacts and Deals modules follow the same setup and flow.
You can create a Deal from scratch by plugging in all the needed information. However, most of the time you will create a Deal from the Contact record. This will auto-fill certain fields and have you fill out the Deal-specific data. The Deals module default view is kanban, with the ability to drag and drop deals into what stage they are in. You can also organize by viewing only your deals or sorting by a specific stage or date.
Basic Customization and Settings
Fields & Pipelines
- While you might like the simplicity of Bigin, there is also the option to add custom fields. Within the Settings, under Fields, you can add a field within any of the modules. Click + Custom Field at the bottom of the module settings and choose which type of field you want to add.
- Customizing deal stages is a core step in getting Zoho Bigin up and running for your business. Underneath Settings – Pipelines and Stages, you can edit the pipeline and rename or add/remove the existing stages. You can also have more than one pipeline if needed, in this tutorial we use the secondary pipeline example of an Existing Business. This will create a dropdown option in the Deals module for you to flip between pipelines.
Customization of Settings
- You can build web forms inside Bigin that will insert data directly into the app. Find the Web Forms section in the Settings and build out exactly what fields you are looking for. The web form contacts can be auto-tagged as well.
- Workflows are an important component of Bigin, they are essentially an “If Then” statement that you can teach the system in order to automate certain processes. Create workflows based on any of the modules in the system to streamline your work process. For example, you can create a workflow that when a deal hits a specific stage an email gets sent out to the contact associated with the deal.
- The Data Administration suite within the settings allows you to migrate from a CRM, export the module data, backup data on a schedule, view the recycle bin, see the audit log, and track the storage.
- Integrate with some popular Zoho applications, Google, and Office 365, or build integrations with customized API. The Zoho CRM integration allows you to sync Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Activities, and Notes. Something we like to point out is that this specific integration is helpful to streamline your salespeople’s process by using Bigin which will auto-sync into CRM. Allowing you to still use the CRM integrations like Projects and other applications.
- Channels are where you can plug in and get email, social, and telephony options connected to Bigin.
Additional Resources
Want to learn more about Zoho Bigin and Zoho CRM? Check out our other resources which include videos, articles, and guides by clicking here to visit the Resource Library.
