Managing your deals can be a daunting process if you don’t have the right software in place to keep your team organized and efficient. You need to be able to track the progress of multiple deals, keep track of the stage those deals are in, and close the deal.
With PipelineDeals you can keep track of all your prospects, the deals that are currently in progress, and a history of the deals at every stage. You can manage every aspect of the sales process with PipelineDeals, but with Formstack Documents, you can take it a step further and automatically populate documents (contracts, invoices, presentations, etc). You’ll never have to copy and paste again!
In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically generate a contract (with specific information about the deal) when the stage of the deal is updated to “Won”. With the help of our friends at Zapier, the integration doesn’t require any coding or technical knowledge. Let’s get started!
Our first step is going to be setting up the contract template in Formstack Documents. For this example, we’re just going to use the online document builder to create the contract, but you can also use Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF files as your templates.
From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and then type in a name for the document. On the next step, you’re going to want to pick the “Build Your Own” document type and then click next to go to the Document Builder.
Once you get to the Document Builder, you can set up your contract template. We’re going to add a logo and all the normal contract language. The important part is adding your “merge fields” to the template. These merge fields indicate where you want the information from PipelineDeals to be inserted into the document.
The merge fields have a specific format and look something like this: {$FirstName}, {$Phone_Number}, etc. You can use any letters, numbers, and underscore, but no special characters or spaces are allowed. You can name these fields anything you’d like – we’ll “match” them up to the correct PipelineDeals fields later.
Here’s what our contract template looks like:
Since this document is a contract, we’re going to need to collect a signature from the customer. Formstack Documents provides integrations with many popular e-signature services, but we’re going to use DocuSign for this example.
With DocuSign, you can enter “anchor tags” in your document and that indicates where you want the information to go. For more information on the anchor tags, please read this. To collect the signature from our customer we’re going to enter the following anchor tag: \s1\
Here’s what that looks like in our template:
After you’ve finished up your template, go ahead and save, then go to the Settings tab. On the Settings tab, you can update options like the type of document that is generated, the name of the file that is generated, and more. For this example, we’re going to just generate a PDF and we’re going to include the name of the customer in the file name.
Once we’ve updated the settings, it’s time to set up how we want the merged/populated documents to be delivered. As mentioned before, we’re going to be collecting a signature via DocuSign. From the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and then pick DocuSign.
You’ll be asked to log in to your DocuSign account and then you’ll see the settings for the integration. You’ll need to indicate who the signer of the document will be by name and email address. If you don’t have an email merge field in your template, pick the <
Once you save the DocuSign delivery, you’re done with the setup in Formstack Documents! It’s time to set up the integration with PipelineDeals using Zapier.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a new Zap. For the “Trigger” we’re going to pick PipelineDeals as the app and then we’re going to pick “Moved Deal” as the trigger.
On the next step, you’ll be asked to authenticate your PipelineDeals account and then you’ll be taken to a step to pick the stage you want to fire off this trigger. We’re going to pick the “Won” option from the Stage dropdown.
As a last step in the trigger process, Zapier will allow you to test the trigger to make sure everything is working. Go ahead and run a quick test and fix any issues that are found.
Next, let’s setup the “Action” which is where we are going to pick Formstack Documents as the app and the “Create Document Merge” as the action.
On the next step, you’ll be asked to authenticate your Formstack Documents account and then you’ll be taken to a page to select the document you want to merge. Go ahead and pick the Contract template you just setup in Formstack Documents. When you pick the document, Zapier is going to load a list of all the merge fields that are on your document.
For each of the merge fields that you see listed, you need to select the corresponding PipelineDeals field from the list (click the button on the right side of the text box to see a list of the PipelineDeals).
Once you finish mapping all the fields, Zapier is going to allow you to test the action. It will take your sample deal from PipelineDeals and send it over to Formstack Documents. If you see any changes that you need to make, go ahead and fix them now. Then, save the Zap and you should see something like this:
Once you’re ready, all you need to do is activate the Zap and Turn it On! Click that big orange button at the bottom of the screen and that will do it.
Now that your Zap is active, you can run a real test! Simply log in to your PipelineDeals account and open up a deal with test information. Update the stage of the deal to “Won” and that should fire off the merge of your contract! Shortly, you should receive an email invitation from DocuSign to sign the document.
Here’s what our contract looked like ready for signature in DocuSign:
Great work, you’re all done! Now every time you update a deal as “Won” in your PipelineDeals account, Formstack Documents will automatically populate a customized contract and send it off to your customer for their signature. Can you think of any other ways that you could use Formstack Documents with PipelineDeals to simplify your paperwork process?