With a marketing automation tool like SharpSpring you can easily track all of your leads, market to them, and close them as new customers. Add Formstack Documents to your marketing automation and you can instantly populate all kinds of documents like letters, contracts, and more.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a quote when we add a new opportunity to SharpSpring. We’ll then automatically email the quote directly to our customer for their review.
To get started, we’re going to setup the template of our quote using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to add our repeating information like our logo, contact info, and services description. Then for the spots that we want to insert our customer/opportunity details, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Amount}, etc.
These fields can be named anything you’d like, but no spaces or special characters.
Here’s what our quote template looks like:
Once we have our template ready, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, choose Office Document and select the file from your computer.
After you’ve uploaded your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can change various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to produce a PDF and include the name of our customer in the file name.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document so that it is automatically emailed directly to our customer. From the Deliver tab, click the Edit button under the default email delivery and then choose the merge field for your customer’s email address.
If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the email address, choose <
Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.
Once you have your email delivery saved, we are done with the setup process inside Formstack Documents and we’re ready to integrate with SharpSpring. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a New Zap. For the trigger, we’re going to choose SharpSpring as the app, then New Opportunity as the trigger.
Once you authenticate your SharpSpring account, Zapier is going to load a test opportunity to make sure everything is working correctly. Follow those steps and continue.
Next, we’re going to setup the Action of our Zap. For the app, choose Formstack Documents, then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier will load a list of the documents in your Formstack Documents account. Go ahead and pick the Quote template that you just setup and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.
For each merge field, you need to pick the corresponding fields from SharpSpring by clicking the button on the right side of each box. This tells Zapier how to send the data over to Formstack Documents so that it’s populated in the correct spot on your template.
Once you have matched up all of your merge fields you can save your Zap and turn it on. We’re ready for a test! Login to SharpSpring and add a new opportunity, then Zapier will send the data over to Formstack Documents and your quote will be generated.
Here’s what our document looks like ready for our customer:
Congrats, you’re all finished! You can now instantly populate all types of documents from your SharpSpring account. Can you think of any other ways you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?