Five Zoho CRM automations worth stealing

Placeholder — outline below. We’ll flesh each of these out into a full walkthrough with screenshots.

Most of the value in a CRM isn’t the flashy stuff — it’s the dozen small automations that stop people doing the same thing by hand forty times a day. Here are five I set up on almost every implementation:

1. Round-robin lead assignment with a fallback when someone’s out of office.
2. Stale-deal nudges — a blueprint that pings the owner when a deal sits too long in a stage.
3. Auto-created follow-up tasks on stage change, so nothing falls through the cracks.
4. Data hygiene rules — normalising phone numbers, country names, and casing on save.
5. A Zia formula field to flag accounts that are quietly going quiet.

Each of these is a short walkthrough on its own. Tell me which one you want first and I’ll write it up.