Pipedrive’s Smart Docs automates sales workflows and helps close deals

Pipedrive, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for salespeople, has launched new smart documentation features designed to automate the process of creating, sending, and tracking sales documents. The rollout comes as much of the world has retreated to remote work, which means teams across industries need new tools to carry out their day-to-day tasks.

Founded in 2010, Pipedrive helps teams plan all their sales activities, including recording their customer conversation history and tracking their deals from inception. It also integrates with more than 200 third-party apps, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Trello, and MailChimp. The company, which counts Salesforce and Hubspot as competitors, has amassed a number of notable clients, including the mighty Amazon, leading to Pipedrive’s acquisition by Vista Equity Partners a few months back.

Pipedrive quietly launched Smart Docs earlier this month as a rebrand of a beta product called Sales Docs it launched last year.

What’s up, Doc

Smart Docs enables teams to send trackable quotes, contracts, and proposals to clients and prospects so they can know when a customer opens a document and follow up at a suitable time. More than that, sales teams can use Smart Docs to create templates that automatically pull in Pipedrive field data to reduce the amount of manual work required to generate new documents from scratch.

For example, rather than creating largely identical sales quotes every day, companies can use the Smart Docs template editor to construct a standardized document by adding the relevant Pipedrive fields (such as company name, job titles, and addresses) from a panel on the right. Then all a salesperson has to do is choose the template to auto-fill the document with data from Pipedrive — it’s all about being able to send quotes faster, reducing the need to copy/paste from other documents.

Above: Pipedrive: Smart docs template editor

Smart Docs is actually split into two components — Smart Docs Basics, which is available to subscribers on the Advanced pricing plan, and Smart Docs Pro, which is available to Professional and Enterprise users.

With Smart Docs Basics, users can create document templates and quote tables that automatically pull in product data related to the field, receive notifications when a third party views their document, and automatically share new document links with recipients if they update that document.

On the Pro plan, users can remove the Pipedrive logo from the document before it’s shared with a third party. The plan also offers support for e-signatures, which is particularly useful in a remote-working world. This plan includes a feature that automatically requests signatures from all relevant stakeholders, who receive an emailed request for their signature — as well as a transparent audit trail that shows the sender who has signed and who hasn’t.

Above: Pipedrive: Who’s viewed, and who’s signed?

Smart Docs Pro also ships with granular permission settings so that only specified individuals at a company can access specific templates.

While Smart Docs Pro is currently restricted to Pipedrive’s Professional and Enterprise subscribers, it will also be made available for Advanced plan users as an add-on later this year.

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