Every company generally has endless documents associated with CRM—for opportunities, for particular sales process stages, and other uses. There are many different types of documents as well. These are stored by whoever creates them, however that person feels they should be stored. Others in the company may need them and not be able to find them, or may not even know they exist.
Because of the sheer quantity of documents, important ones can get lost and have to be re-created, or salespeople waste lots of time searching for documents that “I just know are there somewhere!” Unfortunately, these are often needed for vital sales opportunities.
Two Main Types
Introducing Pipeliner CRM’s new Document Management! We’ll humbly say that no other CRM vendor has such a system without adding on, usually at a cost. Ours is, of course, embedded right within Pipeliner CRM, and like other Pipeliner features, is the most flexible and easy to use available.
When designing this system, we carefully considered how documents should be organized based on how organizations use them. This system is structured so that there are into two primary types of documents:
- Company documents, which are shared with the whole company. These are all the documents used and shared with the correct roles within the organization. A person within the company would be responsible for creating the directory structure, which is most likely patterned after the company itself: for example sales, finance, executive, tech support, and so on. Particular document access would depend on user rights.
- Documents associated with particular accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, appointments, products, product line items, and projects. These are various documents that have specific uses, such as with a particular customer or type of customer. An example would be customer requirements.
Documents can be as large as 300 MB, and those with multiple uses can be available from multiple locations.
We took the dynamic visual approach we take with all of the other elements in Pipeliner, so that anyone using the system can instantly understand it. Directory views can be set up in thumbnails or list views.
Using the System
Like all other functions of Pipeliner CRM, our Document Management is extremely intuitive.
- Folders can be created and then dragged and dropped where needed.
- Documents can be uploaded from a hard drive, network, SharePoint, DropBox, and others. You can also upload a URL, such as for an ebook so that no space is taken up in CRM for storage. Virtual drives, such as Google Drive, can be activated as add-ons free of charge.
- A document’s path is clearly shown for reference or sharing with someone else.
- Documents can be downloaded easily to a hard drive or other location. If multiple files are to be downloaded, they can be zipped for convenience and speed.
- There are many ways the user can filter to find needed documents, including types, newest, owner, name, and much more.
Document Templates
Pipeliner CRM has had for some time integrations with Word, Excel, Google docs, and sheet formats, and with these, you can create templates. These can also be utilized within Document Management.
Pipeliner has also created many MS Office templates that you can use within CRM, and store and retrieve within Document Management, too.
For the Future
We have not created Document Management simply for convenience. As we march into the future, we know that business will be taking on a massive amount of documents, far more than we have today. These will need to be organized.
Everything in business in life is about organization and management. As we have often quoted from author and educator Peter Drucker, “What gets managed gets measured.” With Document Management, it’s all about measuring and managing the number of documents within a company, related to its many activities.
More and more, CRM is becoming the hub of the company. Therefore it is vital that, from CRM, documents can be efficiently and effectively managed.
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