Initial HubSpot Proposal Template Made Easy

Initial hubspot proposal template

well sprocket talk viewers and listeners I gotta be honest I'm excited for you because we're gonna talk about HubSpot we're gonna talk about pandadoc and we're gonna talk about hub do and all the things that you can do when you have them alive hey you know what time it is are you a hub spot user looking for fun and interactive education that helps you be better at HubSpot man welcome to sprocket ah and thanks George it's great to be on sprocket talk so Pete Nichols I'm the founder of pub - hub do is an agency for agencies we started originally as a hub spot partner with end users but as of 2015 wanted to completely focus on supporting a partner ecosystem it's kind of my background I was in Cisco for for around 16 years and that was all about the channel so that's what we do we support agencies and a lot of those are hubs for partners I love it Pete so what I want to dive in today which has always fascinated me and so I'm glad we're getting to have this conversation is I want to talk about a piece of software that's out there in the world that I think some people know about but a lot of people don't know about and even the people that know about it might not know the value that it can give to their business and that is pandadoc so again kind of starting a ground level for people who may be watching this and haven't heard of it or don't know exactly what it is or what you can do with it why don't you start out by explaining what is pandadoc and how would they use it to impact their business yeah absolutely well so panda dog is proposal software some years back that was known more as quote roller and yeah as agencies we do a lot of proposals I hate doing proposals and there are a lot of agencies you just you'd rather reorganize your sock drawer and put a proposal together but you know that when the time comes you want to put something together that's really professional really slick and has embedded video is is really important now to a lot of agencies use Google Docs use propose a Phi yeah there's a few tools pandadoc is the the only sales add-on to HubSpot that's in the top 20 of add-on apps to the HubSpot platform so it kind of makes sense that a HubSpot partner would at least what pandadoc is so what we've been doing with pandadoc is a company to make things easier for agencies is to get a discounted version of panda dog so that's kind of why hub do particularly over the last six months we've become really close to pandadoc as a company they love that we're supporting smaller agencies using that talk so I love it and there's two two things that I want to pull out of that little section one Pete mentioned HubSpot user or HubSpot agency and then also Pete mentioned video video yung your proposals and we're going to talk about some of the things that Pete thinks is amazing with panda Docs later on in this interview so make sure you stick around for that but Pete I want to really go into us as humans we love things that save us time and so maybe talk about the velocity of proposal creation and the saving of time by using panda doc and HubSpot together yeah Tom saving is a huge one that's where we started in using panda doc because there's any nature of the business where you're sending out something that is kind of 80% similar from one customer to the next and you still want to heavily customize it but you can start with a template in our case I know it saves me a ton of time I can put out a proposal that previously would have taken me maybe an hour or two at least to put together and I can now do that within click click a few seconds literally because it's connected to my HubSpot CRM so it takes the data from my CRM it avoids me using my fat fingers to go on miss type peoples names and things which I just hate doing that it takes the data from the CRM puts it through the document and then I can focus on what's different about what this client needs and then send that off so that saves me a ton of time the agencies that we've helped with this the Panda doc software I know a rich for example in in Melbourne he's telling me it takes him about 20% of the time now that it used to take to do a proposal so he can get back to his client a lot faster and we're all short on time so just any tool that saves a lot of time like that I think is worth having a look at yes if you're the type of professional that likes to save time then pandadoc might be right for you and of course if you're looking at pandadoc you want to look at hub due and definitely get Pete and their team to help you with that but Pete I want to kind of step back a little bit and talk about Panna doc and really dive into your brain and because you mentioned the word that sparks this question by the way viewers and listeners is Pete mentioned templates and so Pete if you can maybe highlight two or three elements or pieces of the Panna doc tool that you're just like oh man that's the best thing ever so that the viewers and listeners can get kind of some insight into what they would have at their fingertips yeah well I think so templates I know that's one of the biggest lead conversion tools that HubSpot themselves use is that say hey templates everybody wants more templates pandadoc we've got I think at last count is around five or six hundred of the example templates you can just download them and add in so that goes across different industries that's a good starting point to have a document that gets you partway there that's where you're using a template as a whole document what I love using even more is a Content library content library is it's like slices of a template so I start within the template of the document but then in my content library I've got templates of video that I want to drag in or customer testimonials that I want to drag in or descriptions of how to solve a particular problem those are sitting in the library and I know I can drag those into the template that makes each document still really custom for the customer but takes me no time to just drag in what's the most appropriate thing for that particular instant I hope everybody was paying attention to that part like modular but being able to be customized and personalized I love that about pandadoc now Pete when anybody picks up a new piece of software there's always this learning curve talk to me about the ability to learn pandadoc quickly maybe some resources are out there how you guys are helping just the viewers and listeners to do that part yeah that is part of a living learning curve I think with a Jorge because if you used to word or just Google Google Docs where it's kind of just a word processor construct that's really flexible but when you want to get things together really quickly and make sure that the formatting is clean and is on brand and using all the right colors and fonts and so forth what we do to help speed this up for agencies when they take this tool and use it in-house and also providing it to end users is to take a style guide template that means that you you don't have to learn all the intricacies of the creation and management of fonts and placement you kind of lean on the web skills so pandadoc has two different editors in there we particularly like the CSS editor because if you're comfortable in designing websites you can then make a document that kind of looks like the website carries the brand through and that means there's a learning curve if you drag a testimonial or anything like that into the document that already has that theme applied it will automatically stylize it for you I see a lot of time wasted resizing images and so forth in in tools that let you do that but I think each time that I've taken through like I spent some time with an agency in Australia on a call last week and we we shortcut the process of how they're doing their proposals today and and she was like wow well actually this is just gonna save me a ton of time now a little bit of knowledge goes a long way I'd say give yourself a good hour to familiarize with the tool George the their help pages at pandadoc are really good for that and then we also have design videos and setup videos that we're using to try to take the pain out of just getting up and running and then get the time so updo taking the pain out of getting going I love that that's a tagline right there sprocket talk viewers and listeners you know it's fun Pete because what I heard in that section is you can keep it super simple or you can get really nerdy it just depends on the level in which you want to use the tool and I love tools that allow for that flex ability especially for the sales marketing business proposal things that you need to do and use panda dot for now I do want to dive into because we are at sprocket talk we're speaking to HubSpot users right and so I want to talk about the integration between HubSpot and pandadoc Pete maybe talk about you know why it's good in panna doc what you can see in HubSpot how easy it is to integrate it's kind of the mixed bag of what you see people maybe leaning into as they're getting ready to integrate the two together actually that's way there there are a lot of tools that you can plug into HubSpot clearly and just in this this document creation space alone though there's quite a few generally it involves going and getting like an API key and pasting it into the right place I like the fact so with with pandadoc if you have that license and you've got hub spot you just go and switch on the integration if you're already logged into your hub spot you just click in it and it joins up to your your hub spot ID what that means straight away from that connection is it plugs into three main parts of your HubSpot CRM so it means that on a contact record so if I bring up your record George I can create a pandadoc and just send it to you personally on there without any deal or any other component I can bring up the company and anybody who's attached to that company again I can send a document to them and include the properties so the details that are there in the properties on the hub spot for the company and for the contact they can populate in and then the most common use the most popular use of pandadoc is on a deal on a deal record in HubSpot CRM now this doesn't matter if you're on the free version starter pro or Enterprise any level of HubSpot integrates with pan it up so you're on a deal and you get to the deal stage where I need to send a document so it might be a proposal but it could be an NDA it could be a contract it could be that you're hiring a staff member and you want to send an HR document that they're going to fill out so you just on the person record or the deal record and you click create pandadoc it then presents you with what template do you want to use so you choose that and then it populates from the the CRM in brings up that document with all the the names and things in the right places and then you just start editing before you hit Send so that that's usually how people would use it I love that you don't have to go over to pandadoc and you start messing about you just stay in the CRM click there and it comes up in a modal pop-up window over the top of the CRM screen which sales guys it just stops them getting lost in other tools you know Pete my mind kind of went sideways for a second in that last section and so I want to dig in a little bit deeper we we positioned this as a proposal software for the most beginning part of this interview but you started listing out other documents that you could actually create here and I was like well it almost seems like any document that you would need sign or maybe not even signed and so Pete maybe dive into like what are some of the most useful documents you use personally through pandadoc or you've seen other companies that you're helping and hub do use inside a panda dog yeah so it's a good question so a few examples would be earlier in the sales process sometimes you you just want to send a document through to to a client to read a often we would attach like a PDF file or link to a web page and that's okay you kind of lose sight of what happens with that so what I like using I've got a few templates where they're just informational they're the same as you would use a PDF for but there's a lot of embedded video so I bring that document up just send it straight out of the CRM so it'll personalize it where it needs to but the videos are already in that document maybe I'll drag a couple of others in before I send it once that's gone instead of me being blind to what the what the receiver does with that I can see first of all pandadoc alerts me when they open it and then I can have a look to see what pages ever looked at they might be spending a lot of time on page three and there's maybe some videos in there around security or East signatures and I know they're spending more time looking at that so that that's one that's like a pre-sales visibility sure in the sales process send off a proposal send up a contract and then say Sara good all at tribal impact which is a company on the south coast here in the UK they use pandadoc for a lot of things including all of the hiring though the companies are really growing fast so the they're putting all the HR documents through pandadoc as well it's like well why wouldn't we because it's just covers all those bases uh so Pete man first of all I leaned into one question only to have another question or maybe it's not a question but a statement Sprocket talk viewers listeners I want you to rewind this section because Pete was talking about having insights to the documents that you're sending and if you're sitting you're watching this and you don't have insights to the documents after you send them PDFs proposals whatever it is like even your HR like everything that Pete just talked about then this is a good solution for you Pete I want to rein it back in I want to talk about proposals for a second because that's where we kind of got started and what pandadoc is really known for and I'm wondering if you have one two maybe even three tips that you would share with the sprocket talk viewers of either just proposal tips in general or proposal tips inside of pandadoc what words of wisdom what you have for the community you've heard a lot about video I still see folks really putting video into what they're sending it's one thing to paste in a thumbnail of a video but when the person clicks on it takes them off to some other viewing page so use a tool that lets you put video in the document just keeps keeps the user focused on what you've sent them the second thing is what's the right length of a proposal I mean I don't know pick a number how many pages should a proposal be what do you reckon oh my gosh like I I maybe three maybe seven I have no clue to be honest with you it's only the kind of the law of large numbers if you like because pandadoc in close to 20,000 businesses so there's a lot more user than that that they get to see the the data of which documents tend to close so with proposals they can see just through their data dashboards that 7 to 8 pages is there's a sweet spot there the documents are tend to close and on closing what's a little bizarre is what day proposals close best they close best on a Friday send your proposals on a Friday statistically you've got almost a 30 percent higher probability of that document closing then on a Wednesday or a Thursday which is weird but maybe that's when people have got time to sit where the viewer and actually read that thing that is interesting and by the way I said 7 so who I got lucky and I said three before that with jaws way off I think they would prompt you that yeah yeah but the fact of Friday like that's that is 7 pages and on Fridays what will be interesting sprocket talk viewers and listeners dead seriously you've watched this you start using pandadoc you try seven pages and on Friday you need to hit us up at sprocket ah calm and let us know the the increase in your actual proposals being closed I'm super like I'm just a numbers guy I'm geeking out right now but here's what I want to do because Pete you have done a lot of work in this interview of explaining what pandadoc is why you think pandadoc is amazing how Panna doc can save time how it integrates with HubSpot I really want to give you some time to just talk about hub do the relationship with panda doc why people who are watching this instead of just going straight to pandadoc should come to you should start the conversation with you about being a panda doc user like why what value are you just not just ready to give the world when it comes to this project because like we don't paint it outright oh we're here for particularly helping agencies and helping those agencies help end users of HubSpot be really successful with it so the reason that we got involved with years ago and then particularly in the last year of how we've been helping companies out with it is that we've been able to create us a license of pandadoc that end-users can buy they generally would buy that through their agency so talking to to hub do about these these seats so the way that they're different George from just going and buying pandadoc I mean panda dog have a great team you can engage with them directly the the version that you buy from them directly is for a company to use themselves when you're collaborating with an agency often you want the agency to be helping you out with it so maybe creating a templates putting them on brand really short cutting how the the end user gets up and running quickly with that so the versions that we have allow that agency to have access to the customers pandadoc for as long as they want that to be the case to publish templates in there we've got shared folders so you can push templates across into the clients workspace I've client needs a hand agency can log in the normal version for customers who who have the straight off-the-shelf version from pandadoc they either have to give their password to the agency to let their agency in or need to buy an extra seat for the agency well which it kind of doesn't make sense when all you want to do is they connect those those together last point from an agency point of view George as well if you're an agency you do not want to be using customers log in to log into customer a and then coming out of that and they're logging into customer B and hang on which which one am I logged in to right now oh I need to send something I've got a log out of the customers to log into my own pandadoc that's crazy so the version that we've got is designed to operate like HubSpot does so you just step into that customers portal step out it's deputy the other customer and step back to your own that's the main difference its full-blown pandadoc the same as you'd buy direct but this version is designed for agencies and companies to work together again streamlining your process saving time everything that all of us well should be looking for Pete are there any other words of wisdom around pandadoc around hub spot around hub do that you want to share with the community before we close this interview out I think friction comes to mind George as a final point because the in built integration of using the HubSpot CRM we've panned it out that's really slick right you can send things out real quick but automation is what takes the friction out of this so you you send the document really easy but you can then easily set up further automation so that when their documents complete I really like having HubSpot setup and we use zapier to do this there's a set-up guide on automating that so when the customer has completed the document you can have the deal in HubSpot automatically move on to the next stage and you know George you can do deal automation off the back of that so you can have HubSpot to a bunch of things because the deal is moved to the next stage and that happens with with no human hands on it if the customer has paid on the pandadoc because it can collect the the payment as well like full full amount or deposit that you can move the deal on to another stage you're paid and closed and so you know ought to make ringing a deal bell if you like so automation I think you get to you to know the tool first but then just automate the ones who out of that because that's just a beautiful thing when you see this take care of itself you can push the envelope so it even sends the proposal automatically as well but the other that's getting into freaky territory but you can have proposals going out with your name on I mean or while you're asleep that's just we don't be afraid of freaky territory though here's the thing get up to speed and then get ready to take your proposals and documents to the next level Pete I want to thank you for taking time to do this interview with us and I do want to give you the opportunity to let the sprocket talk viewers know where should they go how can they reach out to you if they have questions about HubSpot pandadoc the automation process taking their document sharing to the next level where would you like to send them well there's any one place really that talks about this special version of hub spot which is for pandadoc sorry for hub spot partners and that's on the hub do website you go to dub dub dub dub do comm at HQ BDO calm and on our on our software menu which is um do cloud so all of our software is on hub do cloud there that you'll see menu item that relate to panda dog so if you're an agency you can go straight to paradox but partners fill out the enquiry form and we can talk about whether it suits maybe upgrading the version that you've got we do a lot of that or just trying out a trial if you're an end user of HubSpot feel free to reach out to us anyhow we're glad to talk to you about whether this might fit and then any agency that you're working with that means that we can get them plugged into your version if you decided to use this tool as well hub do commas place to get hub smart agencies have SWAT users if you've got documents if you want to send them if you want to see visibility then make sure you talk to Pete thanks Pete sprocket talk viewers and listeners was that interview not amazing there are so many nuggets along the way Pete Nichols from hub do is totally passionate about HubSpot pandadoc and helping users and agency streamline their process make sure you reach out to Pete Nichols at hub do with any help or questions and of course as you continue on with your day make sure you're doing some happy hub spotting [Music]