When working with customers and documents, most small and even large sales and marketing teams do it woefully inefficiently. Employees store documents on hard drives and exchange them via email. If they’re lucky, they have access to tools like Dropbox or Google drive to centralize documents internally – but this still leaves much to be desired when it comes to working with customers. For example, sharing documents with customers means downloading docs and uploading them to email. Collaborating with customers on those documents is done through email chains that are painfully long. Identifying how much of a document a customer has actually read to ascertain what to say in a follow-up conversation is impossible. And collaborating internally on documents to improve use, or the documents themselves, is too friction-filled a process to actually happen. These are just some of the challenges that businesses with a growth mindset are faced with – but are often left with no elegant solutions in sight.
When we set out to rethink how businesses should use documents, these among many others were the challenges that we took aim at addressing. That was a few months ago. Today we’re pleased to take the wraps off and announce the future of sales and marketing document management in Vtiger with the document management solution.
Document Management solution in Vtiger CRM
Vtiger’s document management solution tackles a number of key challenges that were an affront to the high potential value of documents when working with customers. Let’s run through the list.
Find the documents you’re looking for faster, with the new document library
When documents aren’t all in one place, finding and using them is tough. That’s the first challenge the document management solution addresses. Users can upload documents to the centralized document library directly, or from tools like Dropbox and Google drive. Once a document is in Vtiger, it can be organized into folders, for, say, different products, or services. Then, documents can be searched based on any document metadata, like the assigned title, upload date, a custom tag, or even a comment on the document record (more on that later).
Once a sales or marketing document is in Vtiger, it’s meant to be shared, and this is where the power of the new document management solution really shines.
Share documents right from the email composer
When you’re ready to share a document with a contact, you can do it from the document, or right in your workflow when you’re reaching out via email. To do that, just open Vtiger’s email composer where you’ll see the “insert document link” button. Clicking it lets you select a document to embed its document URL in the email. That link eliminates a few key frustrations around document sharing. First, if you’re sharing a document with many customers, you won’t need to re-upload the document to multiple emails since it’s already in Vtiger – the link is all you’ll need to share. Second, your recipient doesn’t need to download the document to view it. The link opens the document in Vtiger’s in-browser document viewer – and if the recipient needs to download the document, they can do it from there.
Collaborate online with customers on sensitive documents, with document rooms and comments.
Vtiger’s document viewer is a tracked, collaborative space for viewing and discussing documents. This is particularly helpful when sales has to obtain consensus from customers on a contract or an agreement. Customers viewing the document can comment directly on it in the document viewer, which sends an in-CRM notification to the salesperson who shared the document. Sales can then reply in the viewer, notifying the customer via email of the reply. This keeps everyone in the loop, and the conversation organized concisely in one place. If more people need to be involved in the conversation at any time, they can be added to the private document room via a share button. Altogether the new document viewer drives deals forward faster.
Behind the scenes in the document room, Vtiger tracks all recipient interactions with a document. This helps guide the next set of conversations with data-driven insights.
Have more productive sales conversations, with to-the-second and page-level document engagement metrics
Sales conversations are more productive when they’re guided by customer engagement with documents. For each customer that a document is shared with, Vtiger displays real-time opens and engagement to the second on every page. So, if a prospect hasn’t opened a document, then the next sales conversation might focus on exploring if the document was useful at all. Meanwhile, if they opened the doc and spent most of their time on a page about a particular product, then the next conversation might instead be focused on exploring needs that product satisfies. The story that the data tells is up to you to interpret and drive your engagement forward.
While document stats are shown on the document record for all contacts that a document has been shared with, a documents widget shown on contact records shows a list of documents shared with that contact, as well as related engagement stats.
Collaborate internally to improve documents, with internal document comments
As people use documents, useful internal knowledge is gained about how those documents can be better used, and improved. That knowledge might be of an ideal customer scenario in which to use a marketing document, or a new idea for how the document can be improved to improve customer engagement. The document record’s comments box allows CRM users to add notes, and @mention people or teams to draw their attention to the conversation, helping the document more fully realize its potential value.
From improving how people find documents, to sharing, visibility into consumption, and collaboration both with customers to close deals, and internally to help improve documents, the new document management solution radically increase the value sales and marketing teams get from documents. Try the document management solution in a 15-day free trial of Vtiger. If you have any questions about it, read the docs, or contact us at [email protected].
To understand how Vtiger CRM helps your sales team, watch this video:
