When working with a sales team, it is very important that everyone is tracking their deals in a central location. This ensures that the individual sales reps can stay organized and make them more efficient, but it also allows the entire team to be more efficient as a group.
Highrise is a great CRM that allows your entire team to track prospects, deals, and communication. From sharing contacts with team, to seeing progress towards closing a deal, Highrise can be an instrumental part of your sales process.
As with all sales organizations, a lot of documents are needed as part of the sales process. From presentations and quotes, to contracts and invoices, there are a number of documents that a sales person will need to generate by hand. There’s a better way!
With Formstack Documents, sales teams can automatically generate all types of documents right from their Highrise account. There’s no need to search for a template or copy & paste information from Highrise!
In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically populate a customized quote from Highrise when a deal is marked as “Won”. With the help from our friends at Zapier this process happens behind-the-scenes without us lifting a finger.
To get started, we’re going to setup our quote template in Formstack Documents. We’re going to use the online document builder to setup your template, but you could also use a Word document or PDF as the template. On the Documents page inside Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and type in a name. On the next step, pick the Build Your Own document type and click Next.
Next, you’ll be taken to the Document Builder where you can setup your template. You can add your logo, address, and then you’ll want to add the merge fields. The merge fields are text tags that look something like {$Name}, {$Phone_Number}, etc. These merge fields indicate where in the document you want your information from Highrise to be inserted. You can name these fields anything you’d like as we’ll “match” them up later with Highrise fields using Zapier.
Here’s what our template looks like:
Once you have your quote template finished up, go ahead and click the Save & Next button. You’ll be then taken to the Settings tab where you can change settings like the name of the document, the type of document that is generated, and more. For this example, we’re just going to create a PDF and then we’re going to add the customer’s name to the name of the output file (the file that is generated).
After you’ve updated your settings, it’s time to setup the delivery of our quotes when they’re generated. Go ahead and jump over to the Deliver tab. You have a number of options when choosing how to delivery your merged documents, but we’re just going to email the quote directly to our customer.
By default, there is an email delivery already setup, so we’re just going to modify those settings. For the “To” address, we’re going to pick the email merge field that was in our quote template. If you don’t have an email field in your document, just pick the <
You can also add merge fields to just about any setting you see (From, Subject, Message, etc). Go ahead and customize the rest of your email and then save.
Great job, we’re done with the setup inside Formstack Documents! Now, we’re going to connect our Highrise account with Formstack Documents using Zapier.
Inside Zapier, click the New Zap button. For the Trigger, you’re going to want to pick Highrise as the app and then “Changed Deal Status” as the trigger.
On the next step, you’re going to be asked to authenticate your Highrise account, and then Zapier will attempt to grab a recent deal with a status change. If you don’t have one, go ahead and create a deal then change the status to “Won” and continue with Zapier. Once Zapier finds a deal, click the Finish button.
In order to only trigger the merge when a Deal has a status of Won, we need to setup a filter. Between the Trigger and Action items on the Zap Overview page, click the Add Filter button. For the filter, we want to pick the “Status” field, when it “Exactly Matches”, the value “won”.
Once you’ve setup the filter, go ahead and click the Finish button.
Next, we’re going to setup our “Action” with Formstack Documents. Go ahead and pick Formstack Documents as the app and then pick “Create Document Merge” as the action.
As with Highrise, you’ll be asked to authenticate your Formstack Documents account before you continue. Next, you’re going to be asked to pick the document that you’d like to merge. Pick the quote template that you just setup and you should then see a list of the merge fields that are in your document.
For each of those merge fields, you need to pick the corresponding fields from Highrise. To add the Highrise fields, click the little button on the right side of the text box.
Once you’ve matched up all the fields, you’ll be asked to run a test to make sure everything is working correctly between Zapier and Formstack Documents. If you see anything that needs to be fixed, go ahead and do that now.
After the test is done, click the Finish button and you’ll be taken back to your Zap Overview. Which looks something like this:
That last and final piece of the setup is to turn your zap “on” so that everything will start happening automatically. Go ahead and click that big button to turn your zap on.
Now it’s time to run a test of our own! Log into Highrise and pick on of your deals. Change the status of that deal to “Won” and then go check your email. You should see an email with your customized quote attached!
Here’s what our merged quote looked like:
Congrats, you’re all done! Now, you can generate documents automatically without lifting a finger. Can you think of any other ways that you can use Formstack Documents with Highrise to simplify your paperwork process?