Why you should integrate your document production software with Salesforce

Most people working in a position closely related to sales understand how important it is to have a proper tool to help track the sales process from A-Z. A good CRM system tells the representative how far along you are in the sales process, and guides you all the way from the initial first contact and allows you to manage the client once they have decided to sign up for your products or services. It gives your company a single platform to build on that includes all of your client history and contact information needed to properly service the client.

One other major benefit is that it makes the organization less vulnerable when having personnel turnover, ensuring that a new employee is able to fill the gap in the organization and immediately be able to see what's going on with the different prospects and clients they are supposed to be working with. Who to contact and when.

And all of this works really well in theory. 

Reality

In reality, this only works if the employees actually use the system correctly. And this is rarely the case. I know I am a sinner myself when it comes to adding all of the necessary information into Salesforce. Or at least I used to be.

I have never been so fortunate to step into a position and immediately have the benefit of my predecessors’ hard work skyrocketing me to the top of my game. It was always done halfway. So I never bothered doing it perfectly myself. When my opportunities were at the proposal stage, I would just open a word document, copy/paste from a previous proposal, make some minor changes. Perhaps add different pictures and pricing and hit the send button. I never uploaded the proposal to Salesforce, simply because I didn't have to in order to move the process along.

And I wasn't the only one doing this. This is a problem that most organizations are familiar with and are constantly striving to improve. But it is hard!

It's hard as a sales manager to continually have to have “the salesforce talk” to otherwise well-performing sales representatives. They obviously have the ability to drive home new sales and follow up with existing clients without adding everything to Salesforce. But for the company to retain the valuable information they possess is extremely important. So how do we do that?

The solution

My mind was blown away when I started in a new position at my current job and we had a document production software integrated with Salesforce. With the document production software integrated, I had to fill in all of the important fields in order for me to have a document be automatically generated on my behalf. Names, addresses and contact information were automatically pulled from Salesforce and populated my automatically generated proposal. And it looked so good! 

Not only did I get the benefit of having Salesforce work as it should, but I could also pull up all the relevant information. All documents generated to the client, be that letters, contracts or proposals, were suddenly available to me. And they were all perfectly formatted in accordance with our company’s corporate branding guidelines. 

The importance of ensuring that your team is communicating with the client in a way that is professional and consistent was not something I previously had given a lot of thought. 

However, the ability to create documents and reusing information from our document creation system ensures I never make embarrassing mistakes like having the wrong client name on page 2 of my contract or proposal because ‘Client name’ is pulled straight from Salesforce and formatted into a document so professional looking I, with my Word skills, would not be able to do it on my own without spending half a workweek tweaking the formatting. This has changed the way I work. I now spend the extra 2 minutes ensuring that the information I have in Salesforce is correct and save hours of work on the document creation process. 

And my boss rarely has to nag at me about updating Salesforce. Because let's face it, I am human. Not a Salesforce-logging robot.