As a property manager you spend most of your time prospecting, meeting with clients, showing properties, and managing your leasing agents. With all of these things going on, you need to be as efficient with your time as you can when handling your prospects and clients.
A great way you can really improve your lead management is using LeadSimple. With LeadSimple, you can track a lead all the way from start to finish. Track your communication, tasks, and everything you need to convert them to a signed lease.
As you know, there are a lot of documents that come along with the rental process. With Formstack Documents, you can automate a lot of your documents from templates. In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically generate a Rental Agreement when you update a lead to the “Verbal Commitment” stage in LeadSimple.
Our first step is to setup our rental agreement template in Formstack Documents. We’re going to use a Word document as the template, so we’re going to build the template using Word. We’ll add the normal agreement information and then we’ll add merge fields where we want the tenant’s information to go. Merge fields look like this: {$TenantName}, {$PropertyAddress}, etc.
Here’s what our agreement template looks like:
We’re going to be streamlining the signing process as well using DocuSign. This will allow us to be 100% digital. With that in mind, we need to add DocuSign “anchor tags” to our document so that DocuSign knows where to place the signatures.
These anchor tags are simply text (like any other text in your document) and look like this: \s1\ - since we have more than 1 signer, we’re going to use \s2\ as well.
Once you have your template all set, we’re going to upload it to Documents. From the Documents tab, click the New Document button and then give the document a name. On the next step, you’re going to choose I have a document I would like to use and then select the file from your computer.
Next, you’re going to be taken to the Settings tab. Here you can update settings, such as the type of file that is generated and the name of the file that is generated. For this example, we’re going to output a PDF and add the tenant’s name to the merged file name.
After we’ve updated our settings, it’s time to add the DocuSign “delivery” option so that our merged document is automatically sent off to DocuSign for signature. Jump over to the Deliver tab and click New Delivery.
Pick DocuSign from the list and you’ll be asked to log in to your DocuSign account. After you log in, you’ll see the settings for the delivery. You’re going to need to define who you want to sign the document. In this case, signer #1 is going to be the tenant and signer #2 will be the landlord.
Once you’ve finished up the DocuSign delivery settings, go ahead and save. This is the last step in our Documents setup! Now it’s time to set up the integration to LeadSimple so that our lead data is automatically sent to us.
To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier, which can handle the communication between LeadSimple and Formstack Documents.
Inside Zapier, let’s create a New Zap. For the “Trigger” service, we’re going to choose LeadSimple and then we’re going to use the “Changed Lead Stage” trigger.
On the next step, Zapier is going to have you connect up your LeadSimple account. Follow those steps and finish the trigger.
Next, we want to set up a Filter to only continue if the “stage” is set to “Verbal Commitment”. From the Zap Overview page, click Add Filter between the Trigger and Action boxes. For the first box in the filter, we’re going to choose “Stage Name”, then “Equals”, and type in “Verbal Commitment” into the right box.
Once we have the filter set up, it’s time to add the action that will send data to Documents. Setup the Action and choose Formstack Document as the service then “Create Document Merge” as the action.
Once you pick the action, Zapier will ask you to authenticate your Document account so that it can pull a list of your documents you have setup. Go ahead and follow those instructions.
Next, you’ll be asked to pick the document template you want to merge. Go ahead and pick the rental agreement that you just setup. Zapier will then load a list of the merge fields that are in your template.
For each of the merge fields, you need to add (map) the corresponding LeadSimple fields so that the data is passed over to Documents correctly.
Once you finished mapping all of the fields, click the Finish button, then turn on the Zap from the Overview page. Your Zap is now ready to go and it’s time to run a test!
Log into your LeadSimple account and update one of your leads to “Verbal Commitment”. Shortly you should see an email from DocuSign with your rental agreement ready for signature.
Here’s what our rental agreement looked like ready for signature:
Congrats, you’re finished! You can now automate all types of documents from your LeadSimple account. Can you think of other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?