Blog

Think about the last time you bought a car. Chances are you worked with a salesperson while reviewing the features of the car and negotiating price. However, as soon as you were ready to talk financing, contracts, and sign on the dotted line, you were ushered into the Finance Office.
Now, imagine for a moment that your salesperson didn't have a finance team. Imagine they had to alter contracts to match approved financing terms, special options you negotiated, and the like. The process would not be efficient. They’d have less time to spend on the dealership floor selling. Put simply, they would not be doing the job they were hired to do.
The same is true for sales teams in a wide range of businesses. In many cases, they do not have the luxury of the car dealership finance team, which is why so many depend on a document generator for Salesforce to streamline their sales process.

Don’t Worry, This is Not A Sales Pitch

We know what you’re thinking, “Oh boy — here comes the sales pitch.” Nope. Sure, the answer is a Salesforce document generator, but what app you choose is completely up to you. This article is not about us, it’s about a useful service. Really.
A quick scan of Google shows that most articles on this subject are written by companies similar to S-Docs. Unfortunately, a lot of them are thinly veiled sales pitches. We wanted to do the opposite. So for this article, we're showcasing the value of a document generator in general -- not just S-Docs. We asked the sales team to explain the benefits. After all, they're the ones in the field every day talking to users of different document generation solutions.
The following is what we learned.

Salesforce document generator benefits that will help your business

1. Lets sales teams focus on what matters: Allow salespeople to focus on sales as opposed to creating documents.
2. Compliance: Every company has business rules. The more control you have over documents created in Salesforce, the better chance you can enforce those rules.
3. Consistency in branding: We all know the marketing team cares a lot about layout, grammar, the proper logo use. When using a document generator, there’s less risk of straying from those standards by using approved templates all documents.
4. Faster close times: The less time a sales rep spends on the document, the more time they spend selling — which also means that when document approval, signing and editing process is easier for customers, close times are reduced.
5. Reducing mistakes: Since sales reps are not doing things manually or cutting and pasting from one document to another, they make fewer mistakes — and customers love that.
6. Reporting: Document generator data is aggregated, creating insights across the system. Admins/sales managers are a click away from seeing the entire book of business without delay.

You Might Also Like: Document Creation and the Salesforce Admin Hero

The Ultimate Benefit Is Happy Employees

Feature Functionality — the be all end all benefits. Yes, all of the above are great for the company — but the happy, thankful nature of your Salesforce Admins and daily users may top the list.
Just like the car salesperson is thankful to pass their customers off to the finance team to get their buyer through contracts, your team will thank you for the time you’re giving them to do other things — like selling.

You know those campy infomercials where an exasperated actor looks at the camera and screams out in frustration, “There has to be a better way!?” Then the announcer tells the audience that “there is a solution!” and we see the same actor happily completing their task? If you live in Salesforce, life without a document generation app is just as frustrating. Adding one to your Salesforce wheelhouse can change your life.

Once installed, daily users are one-click away from creating and emailing highly customized proposals, quotes and more.

Life without a Salesforce document generation app

While a document generation app is more complicated than the “Touch N Brush” in the video above, it’s just about as easy to use. Once they’re set up, they can increase efficiencies while making Salesforce’s day-to-day activities simpler and more seamless.

Without a document generation app, making custom documents like sales quotes and proposals have to be created outside the Salesforce environment. Oftentimes, this means using a template that was designed in MS Word long ago, then saving it as a PDF. Because of custom content, a user will inevitably spend more time than necessary making edits. And even after taking massive amounts of time formatting and trying to get it just right, they’ll then need to “Save As” and begin the process of uploading it to Salesforce. At that point, it can finally be sent to a prospect/client and tracked properly.

Only as a slightly better option, users can try templates supplied by Salesforce. While these allow users to generate a document with very basic templates, they don’t offer total control over formatting or basic features like conditional logic. For example, if the template has a discount field, but a salesperson does not include a discount in their quote, the field will not disappear when a zero percent discount is applied — making the client wonder why they are not getting a discount.

The right Salesforce document generation app solves these and many more pain points.

3 ways a document generation app will benefit a daily Salesforce user

1. Speed: It will put an end to the wasted time and mistakes caused by copying and pasting information from Salesforce into your existing documents, forms, emails or proposals.
2. Empowers End-Users: It gives document generation control to users that are no longer reliant on dedicated IT resources.
3. Security: While this may not be a concern of a daily user, a native solution like S-Docs  can be approved by IT much quicker.

Recommendation – Come to the table with a solution

One of the most common questions we hear from daily users is “how do I convince our Salesforce admin or IT director that a document creation app is worth exploring?” Leaders are always happier when users come to the table with a solution –  and there are several ways to solve this problem. This is where you want to focus on the WIIFM (what's in it for me) approach. While you, the user will clearly benefit, you should highlight the benefits of a document generation solution for the admin and the organization.

There are some common concerns raised whenever a new solution is proposed. You should be well prepared to help convince your organization that your recommendation makes sense:

• Explain “buy over build” benefits: Your admin could recommend a consultant or internal developers to build a solution. Development projects take time and compete with other internal projects. They also need ongoing and constant IT support. What happens when you need changes, Salesforce upgrades their platform, you want to add more docs, go mobile, add languages, or add permissions or workflows? Your organization would spend a lot of energy trying to maintain code when it should focus on selling. A native document generation app, like S-Docs, delivers on the four benefits listed above. Moreover, why build something new when someone has already done the work for you? You should point out that a turn-key solution will lessen the demand for IT resources, since this process will can be managed by end-users – not developers.
• Explain that you want to go with a trusted and proven solution: Read reviews of document generation apps in the Salesforce AppExchange. Talk to other users like you to see if they think a document generation app would make their life easier. Armed with this research, pull a list of benefits relevant to your organization thus demonstrating to management that it is a worthwhile investment. Most solutions offer an online ROI calculator that can help demonstrate the return on investment.

Taking the time to supply management with a well-thought solution will not only help move the process of getting a document generation app approved — it will also change your life. Really, it will.

There are many skills necessary to be a great Salesforce Administrator. Perhaps one of the most important is your approach to problem solving – listen first, understand and then provide a realistic solution. If a Salesforce users says they need a document creation solution, do they simply install one? No. A great Salesforce Admin cannot and should not deliver everything users ask for immediately.

Henry Ford famously quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” As a great Salesforce Admin, you pick up on clues and themes unnoticed by others. You took notice that people did not ask for a safer horse, nor a more comfortable horse. You heard their ask loud and clear – speed.

Your user feedback and suggestions can be invaluable when interpreted through the knowledge of a hero admin with the power to effect change. Salesforce Admins may not (always) wear capes, but they are often unsung heroes of the sales organization, because they understand and anticipate. Adding a document creation/generation solution for salesforce could help deliver your next cape (should you choose to wear it).

Heroic solutions for document creation and generation

If you’re looking to earn that cape and your company has not enabled a document generation app, look no further. The integration of a native app like S-Docs will not only help solve the pain points for users, it will solve some for you as well.

Salesforce user pain points solved by a document creation/generation app:

• By auto-creating documents, users are more productive and able to spend more time selling.
• With one click, the app creates a document, resulting in faster document generation.
• Document auto-generation results in fewer human errors.
• Users don’t need to take time painstakingly piecing information together from disparate sources outside of Salesforce to create their doc.
• They can better ensure things don’t fall through the cracks.

Salesforce Admin pain points solved by a document creation/generation app:

• By using a document creation app, you can empower your users. They’ll be able to make quick changes and edits to docs. As opposed to coding, users are able to use the interface directly, rather than being required to ask for IT help.
• In our experience, Ops teams typically have a LONG backlog of requests from various internal groups. They'll make investments in products like document creation/generation apps if they can automate parts of the value chain that are causing the most drag on the system. Since a document creation/generation app will help the Salesforce Admin keep their users focused on far more valuable tasks than document generation, it’s a win all around.

A real solution for document creation and similar problems

Put simply, the Salesforce AppExchange is the key to notching big wins.

Salesforce + third party app = solution

In the case of a document creation/generation app, getting set up can be quick and painless. If you choose a native app like S-Docs, you don’t have to integrate an external system. Install can even be done in 3-4 minutes. Go onto the AppExchange, download and install on a Sandbox to try it before you decide to use it in production. You can download a template from the template library (link) or create your own from scratch. Then add your "generate doc" button to your page and users can merge Salesforce data with your template in one click. Users will click a button, merge selected information and have a quickly compiled document.

We’ve seen users install S-Docs in 15 minutes and train others in 5 minutes.

The result – hero status!

After installing a document creation/generation app, the Salesforce Admin has checked off the “problem solver” job requirement. They have made a change that creates new efficiencies for users. In other words, they’ve reinforced their value and taken one step closer to hero status. And hopefully a real cape.