Automate your sales document process for purchasing

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all righty so hello everyone welcome to today's session today we're going to be talking about document automation and how it can greatly improve your sales efficiency our first housekeeping items um to submit any questions you might have use the questions tool our format is going to be a 30-minute conversation and then we'll do q a at the end and i am recording this session i will share this after the event so first i'd like to introduce our presenters today my name is kaylee stenberg and i'm a sales engineer for woodward studios we also have adam austin adam would you like to introduce yourself sure my name is adam austin i've been working document automation for the past four and a half years and i'm a product manager at windward studios working on our doc auto products all right thank you adam so some topics that we're going to talk about today include some common issues that get in the way of efficiency and consistency how to solve inconsistent sales document processes with automation and uniting data in multiple systems we're going to highlight these topics utilizing a live document automation and demonstration for you as well with that i'm going to hand it over to adam yeah so to look at an idea of what we're going to be talking about first thing we'll be talking about is inaccurate documents and the problems these can cause especially with how they slow down delivery of those documents to the end recipients we'll also be talking about multiple systems and how do you unite disparate data in a system especially as it pertains to documents and document automation and then lastly how overcoming these issues can actually boost your revenue growth i'll go the next slide daily okay so three terms that kayla and i will come back to throughout this uh webinar is the three cs compliant correct and complete we'll look at these more the next slide but just to give a quick idea compliance has to do with both internal and potentially external compliance of your documents internal might be branding so on and external might be even legal requirements for the documents correctness has to do with the data being accurate for the recipient and up to date and complete needs to um has to do with all of the actual content that needs to be in the output document existing there nothing getting lost between the document production and the recipient um okay please go to the next slide okay so let's dive into these a little bit more we're first talking about compliance risk anytime you're assembling documents manually all these risks you see on the right side will come into uh into the picture and compliance is the first one will address so to start with some internal compliance which might be brand compliance these are things like your logo brand colors messaging as your company uh is changing and you know your marketing is changing you need all of your branding to be consistent not only across your website and other marketing materials but also into your sales documents um keeping all those up to date is a risk you you have when you're doing manual documents next we have formatting compliance now the reason this is important is especially with documents where the documents have some legal implication especially in legal applications things like margins font how data is formatted like in columns and spacing all of this can actually have legal repercussions if the document is compliant or not compliant lastly is content compliance content compliance has to do with the correct content existing in a document you might have different versions of your documents that are applicable to different audiences and depending on the audience maybe what they're purchasing maybe what you're selling you may have legal terms or boilerplate that needs to be included or excluded and having that in the final document is very important next we'll talk about data loss so data loss is a little bit different data loss um first to define data loss this is the loss of customer data through a data leak so this is actually the same risk you worry about um when you protect your company against a hack you know you're protecting your customer data your prospect data a risk you have when you're manually assembling documents especially if you're using a past version of that document that was intended for one recipient and now you're copying and pasting over that document for a new recipient if you forget to replace a piece of data you can reveal uh either the identity of a prospect or customer what that person is purchasing or other you know confidential information about your customers so this is a very big risk again this is the same risk as a security breach why you put all that security in place around your data okay for the next item we'll talk about the incorrect content risk especially today we use crms and other technologies to curate and regulate information on product costs products names availability subscription cycles when you're generating sales documents like quotes proposals contracts you need to be sure that the correct prices are showing up in those output documents the correct product names all that information and it's the same story with other sources of data you might be using in your automated documents if you have internal employees manually assembling these documents you have a large risk of an incorrect number being input even if they're copying that info out of the crm you're losing control of the regulation of that data and there's an opportunity for the data to change either intentionally or accidentally as it goes into the final document now all of these slow down the sales process why is that well there's two options you can take when you're making these documents either you can ignore all these risks which is not advisable it might work if you get lucky okay so it works but more often than not what happens is companies have to put in approval processes to curb these risks or they outsource the assembly of the document outside of the sales department maybe in accounting or legal and then you get a delay in the document being finished and delivered to the sales rep so that it can get out to whoever the end recipient is so kaylee if we can go to the next slide and we'll address how document automation can help not only curb these risks but also increase the time to send out these documents so for document automation since you have a single source of truth your templates you have a single template that contains all your branding all of your formatting all the content that needs to go out to that um and recipient and then the data is substituted in at runtime this protects you against data loss you always know that the correct data for this new uh instance of the document is populated into that template and it also keeps documents up to date with product changes as the data changes in your crm or your other data sources that will immediately be propagated in the document and while you're reducing all this risk through automation through the uh data actually automatically populating the into the document you're also increasing the speed that you can deliver these documents document automation depending on the solution you implement uh can take only seconds to generate your output document from all that existing data all right now we're going to switch over to talking about multiple data sources and different apps kaylee if you could please advance the next slide so in today's world companies are using a lot of different applications and this means that data for your documents is being spread across many different sources you really want to have technology document automation technology that not only unites all of these sources but makes your life easier instead of harder next slide so when choosing document automation you want to look for something that works nicely with your existing tools salesforce and hubspot is common crms are examples and outside of your crm you'll start dealing with the question of how do you unite data from different sources now there's two general approaches to this one is if you have data that's duplicated in different sources you may need to implement a technology that can sync that data across the two sources you may be able to consolidate them to one source as well but if they can't be consolidated so you may need to sync that data alternatively if you have data that's complementary in multiple sources what you'll want instead is a document automation solution that can actually query data from those different sources and assemble it in your output document this can be important for different sales documents where you're working with a secondary system that's relevant to those customers or prospects be the support system marketing or otherwise so being familiar with which of those um which those situations you're in can help you select a document automation solution that will uh work well with your existing systems now you also want to be wary that some document automation systems will actually store additional data especially on sales it can be additional customer prospect data in the document automation system itself if you're going with one of these solutions you're risking actually introducing a new source of data that needs to be synced or reconciled in addition to your existing sources so it's something to look out for when you're just choosing document automation that you're not creating more disparate data instead of improving the data you already have all right taking the next slide okay and now to talk for a second about designing so it might be a good choice to choose a document automation solution that is existing in the applications you already use specifically there's a lot of solutions that work in microsoft office plugins including windward solution these are typically the most advanced in formatting support because they use native office formatting support this can include stuff like charts images table of contents header footers page numbering all of those are pretty advanced features alternatively there's document automation solutions also that offer an online editor um an online editor can be convenient and also usable but they usually don't offer the same kind of formatting around features like i just mentioned um those advanced formatting features really do require a word plug-in to get those in your output documents uh custom designers may also deviate from the docx model of document so it's another thing to be aware of that if you're going with a solution that has a dedicated designer built for it you might be looking at more of like a block design for uh the template or some other um different model rather than the the traditional docx model we all know from word okay so now we've talked briefly about document designers okay we can go to the next slide so when choosing a document automation solution with all of these things in mind it's good to consider how the solution will grow with your use case having to replace a document automation solution in the future can be very difficult especially because a lot of solutions they don't have compatible template types so you may end up needing to migrate all of your templates so knowing that your document automation solution will work in the future um not only across your individual department for example if you were to add data from a new data source that you'd like in your documents adopt new technologies that you'd like to leverage in your new documents they also might be applicable if you have additional document automation use cases outside of your department for example if you start document automation sales and then you need documents also in marketing accounting legal so having a document automation solution that can grow with that use case where your existing templates can grow with you instead of having to replace them this is very important so consider the future something that might be able to grow with you down the line will it grow with your data will grow with your formatting needs will grow with your internal growth inside the organization all right with that being said i'm going to turn the demo over to kaylee um for a demonstration of document automation and applying these concepts all right thank you adam um so like you mentioned we're going to switch gears here and i'm going to show you a quick demo of document automation and action using our products called one word hub and designer windward integrates to both salesforce and hubspot but this demo will focus primarily on hubspot alrighty so first we're going to talk about compliance and improving your compliance some examples of document compliance that adam mentioned included branding formatting and content so imagine you had a team of 10 sales people and they were manually creating quotes they probably all have a copy of a quote on their local computer and copy and paste their data into that quote when they need to send it out they may have gotten employed over a span of five years or so and there could have been legal changes to terms on their quote changes to their company logo to any of the brand colors the brand identity or even their tax code by moving to a document automation solution you can consolidate all of your sales reps to use one single quote template document automation allows changes to anything like the brand logo to the legal terms formatting to all be immediately deployed to all the parties who are using this document so to showcase this example i'm going to use windward hub and let's say i have multiple versions like adam mentioned earlier every time a new version of my template gets deployed these changes will be reflected immediately across my organization and i can see what exactly was done for instance updated this logo updated the company's slogan in the footer things like that so next i'm going to talk about reducing risk all right so i'm going to show you how you can reduce risk by avoiding data loss and data loss is essentially a data breach equivalent to someone hacking your company and stealing your clients data there is an increased risk of data loss involved when creating your documents using methods like simple copy and paste this can be where you copy a customer name and their address from your internal database directly onto your document well what if you have multiple quotes or invoices that you need to send out this can lead to sending someone's personally identifiable information to a different customer resulting in their information being leaked so now that we've talked a little bit about compliance and data loss let's see those features in action for this example i'm going to use hubspot here i'm able to output my single quote template using any deal from hubspot all i have to do is click output for this deal and it's going to finish it's going to pull a finished report with my customers unique information all i have to do is click my quote template it's going to pull their unique information directly from my data without me having to worry about data loss i can also produce up-to-date quotes and every time in the past sales teams stored product prices on their own personal machines and may not have been notified when prices were changed today while crm tools can manage everything around your product costs there's still the issue of transferring the data into your quotes and having those quotes be accurate every time so every time a quote is generated it will be populated directly into your document without having to worry about losing any data loss and you can see my quote here and i can just download it and it reflects the information from that particular deal now let's switch gears and let's say you have a high profile deal and you want to get all the information regarding their deal not only the information that you have in their crm but if they have any outstanding support tickets that might be preventing you from closing this deal i'm going to pull up a different template here so your crm again has information pertaining to the quote or the price of that deal but it's missing the complementary data from your support ticket queue with document automation you can pull data from these two disparate systems without having to go through a huge level of effort manually extracting or copying data from both systems so here i have my finished report that is showing data from two different data sources in this case i have my product information from hubspot and i have my support ticket database as well by being able to connect to multiple data sources at once i can greatly reduce the time it takes to create my reports and know that they're going to be complete so as you can see by using document automation i can ensure that all of my documents are compliant correct and complete so with that i'm going to trans transition to our q a section of the webinar so please let us know if you have any questions about what you've seen or heard today or if you'd just like more information about our company in general okay so our first question that came in uh how much code is needed for implementation so great question uh the product that you saw today um windward hub that is completely ready to go out of the box it's our hosted sas solution that again it's hosted in our web browser and requires absolutely no code okay and next question can a single template create multiple output formats another great question yes so um again using the designer to create your templates you can output in docx pdf html um and that's also specific uh to word and in hub we can also output to docx pdf html we can also design an x excel or powerpoint so those templates would output as xlsx and pptx and next question is data stored by the doc auto solution so your data is um we connect to your data but solution is a read only tool so we do not store your private data we simply connect to it and return a well-formatted document next question can you do calculations within these templates yes you can so you can do all sorts of different conditional formatting logic if else statements we can also do you know different word macros utilizing the native features of microsoft alrighty well if there's not any other questions you can feel free to check out our website if you want more information the link you see on our screen is directly to our website you can even download a free version of word hub to start your document automation today so with that i would like to say thank you all so much for joining and again i will send out recording uh of this webinar for all of your reference later all right all right thanks kaylee yes