As a sales person, staying on top of your leads, deals, and accounts is very important to your success. A good CRM can be crucial in ensuring you don’t let anything fall between the cracks and you maximize your efforts day in and day out.
One great CRM you can use is called Pipeliner. Built as a hybrid-cloud solution, Pipeliner allows you to work from an app that runs on your computer and then syncs with the cloud (instead of logging into a website). With Pipeliner, you can keep track of all your leads, opportunities, accounts, and more.
As comes with most sales processes, there’s always paperwork that needs to be filled out, but with all of your data saved in a CRM, you have to manually type (or copy & paste) the information into templates. There’s an easier way! With Formstack Documents you can setup templates that are auto-populated from your Pipeliner account.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to use Formstack Documents to automatically generate a Sales Proposal when we add a new Opportunity to Pipeliner. No copy & paste required!
To get started, we’re going to setup our proposal template using a Word document. In this document, we’re going to have our normal proposal information, but where we want the opportunity specific information (customer info, price, etc), we’re going to use merge fields like this: {$Name}, {$PhoneNumber}, etc.
Here’s what our proposal template looks like:
Once we have the template finished up, we’re going to upload it. From the Documents tab, we’re going to click the New Document button. In the popup, enter a name for the document, then on the next step select I have a document I would like to use. Lastly, select the proposal file from your computer and click Next.
After you upload your template, you’re going to be taken to the Settings tab. Here, you can update different settings like the type of document that you want to produce, and even the name of the file that is generated. For this example, we’re going to produce a PDF document and we’re going to add the First and Last name to the file name.
In order for our customer to receive the proposal, we need to setup the email delivery. Jump over to the Deliver tab and you’ll see an email delivery already setup (by default). Click the Edit button, then we’re going to update the “To” address to go to the merge field for the customer’s email address. Feel free to customize any of the other settings.
Once you have the email delivery setup and saved, we’re ready to setup the integration with Pipeliner! To help with the integration, we’re going to use a service called Zapier. With Zapier, you can connect hundreds of services without any coding (it’s awesome).
Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a New Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose Pipeliner as the service and then “New Opportunity” as the trigger.
On the next step, Zapier is going to have you authenticate your Pipeliner account. Follow those steps and continue on to the next step.
You’ll be taken to a page that will allow you to filter the Opportunities so that only specific Opps trigger the action. In our case, we’re going to only care about Opportunities in the “Proposal” stage.
On the next step, Zapier is going to have you create a new Opportunity so it can test the connections to make sure everything is working smoothly. Follow those steps then click the Finish button.
Next, we’re going to setup the integration (the “Action”) with Documents. Go ahead and pick Formstack Documents as the service and then choose “Create Document Merge” as the action.
Next, Zapier will have you authenticate your Formstack Documents account. Follow the steps and then move on to the next page.
You’ll be asked to select the Documents template you want to merge. Go ahead and pick the proposal document that you just set up. Once you pick the document, Zapier is going to load a list of the merge fields that you have in your document.
For each of the merge fields, you need to add the corresponding Pipeliner fields to the box below it. This will tell Zapier how to send your Pipeliner data to Documents so that it is put in the correct spot on your template.
Once you’ve mapped all of the fields, click the Continue button and Zapier is going to have you send a test merge just to make sure everything is working. If there are any issues, go ahead and fix them now.
If everything looks good, click the Finish button and then turn on the Zap from the Zap Overview page. Now, your Zap is activated and every time you add a new Opportunity in the Proposal stage, Zapier is going to automatically send that information over to Documents and your proposal will be emailed to your customer.
Here’s what our merged proposal looked like:
That’s it! You’re now one step closer to completely automating your entire sales process. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?