Since launching our B2B Commerce capabilities, Zoey has helped hundreds of businesses revolutionize their ability to support their buyers and salespeople, more efficiently capture and manage orders by moving from outmoded sales processes, and grow their business without needing to grow their staff.
As we’ve continued to grow along with our sellers, we’ve spoken with our sellers extensively, and they’ve outlined some specific capabilities that are required for them to further enable their B2B sales.
This year, we are working through a series of releases that will bring these features to light. With Zoey Admin 5.0 and Zoey App 3.0 for iOS, we are adding the first of these new capabilities to Zoey – Drafts.
Previous efforts by Zoey to offer Drafts capabilities offered some support but was not interconnected across our various offerings. With this release we have taken a 360 review of how Drafts should work across all of our experiences (including Zoey Admin, Zoey App and Zoey Web), and built a comprehensive solution that interoperates across all three parts of Zoey.
This approach ensures that buyers, salespeople and other internal team members can work together on Drafts as needed to ensure the ability to convert to a Quote or Order.
Introducing Drafts
With Drafts, you can begin to build a cart in any of our three components:
- Your buyers can create Drafts within the Zoey Web
- Your salespeople can generate Drafts within the Zoey App
- Anyone with access to the Zoey Admin can initiate Drafts on behalf of any Customer
Drafts created in one location are synced to be visible in the others; for instance, a buyer-created Draft on the Zoey Web will appear in the customer information displayed inside both the Zoey Admin and App.
Drafts include a communication capability for buyers, salespeople and other members of your team to communicate about a Draft while it’s still being worked on, before it’s converted to a Quote or Order. This allows for a collaborative process that is normally helpful in B2B-centric sales, and one that historically had to take place in person or outside the sales platform itself.
Benefits for your Buyers
For your buyers, any abandoned carts are automatically saved as a Draft, which allows Customers to pick up the order later (or ensure your team can see where carts have been left behind for potential follow-through later).
Buyers can have multiple Drafts going, including the ability to name them for easy organization. Drafts can be edited at any time, and products can be moved between Drafts for easy organization.
Drafts can be duplicated or deleted as needed; a buyer could use a Draft as a template for a regularly occurring order to reduce the time it takes to create their next Order.
Buyers have the capability of printing a Draft or sharing with others electronically, given many times a B2B buyer is not working by themselves.
Additional Features for Your Team
Although Drafts can be managed by your buyers in many cases, there are features that also benefit your team specifically and are designed to make your day to day work even easier.
For Zoey Admin and App users, you can have private Drafts that aren’t publicly visible to Customers – for example, a Draft could be a template for an Order that recurs periodically, so you can have an easy starting point when needed vs. starting from scratch every time. The ability to duplicate a Draft has been added to the Zoey Admin as well, to make such actions simple.
Zoey Admin and App users can reserve an Order ID to pre-set the order number that will be used when the Draft is converted to an order.
Your team can also email a Draft to a customer, to remind them about it or encourage the progression to a Quote or Order.
The Zoey App is able to sync Drafts created elsewhere, as well as sync Drafts created on the App to the Zoey Admin, as it can other Customer and Order information updated on the App.
We’re Just Getting Started
We anticipate Drafts will see evolution, like many Zoey features that get released to our customer base. Since Drafts is a new capability we don’t expect it to impact existing workflows, but if you encounter issues while using the new feature set, we encourage you to open a ticket.
We also have created release notes in our support documentation which dives into further detail about how to use Drafts in an active Zoey environment. If you plan on leveraging Drafts for your store, it’s a great way to get started.
A Taste of What’s Ahead
While Drafts is a key feature that many of our Zoey sellers requested, this wasn’t the only aspect they asked for. As such, we have other planned releases in the months ahead to further enhance Zoey around their feedback. Some examples include:
- Zoey App 3.0 for Android, with feature parity with the 3.0 release of Zoey App for iOS, which was also released as part of the Drafts update
- An overhauled CRM/OMS experience with a much better user experience for Zoey Admin users
- Additional feature parity between the Zoey App and Admin for day-to-day tasks
Join the B2B Commerce Revolution
If you’re not a Zoey customer yet, now’s a great time to talk. See how a 20 minute conversation can transform your business:
