PandaDoc - Peace and Harmony in Document Creation
July 13, 2018
PandaDoc - Peace and Harmony in Document Creation
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PandaDoc
PandaDoc is being used primarily by our sales team to generate proposals, quotes, and statements of work for our customers and prospective customers. We use PandaDoc as an integration with our HubSpot CRM to allow sales to create proposals much faster. What used to be a manual, time-consuming process that would take several days to complete now takes less than a single day, including going through 2 different levels of approval before being sent to the customer. In addition, using PandaDoc has allowed us valuable analytics into what our clients and prospective clients are interested in by showing us what pages of the proposal they are viewing, how long they spend viewing that page, and how many times they have viewed the page and proposal overall. Finally, PandaDoc sends automatic reminders until the document is signed, taking some of the follow-ups off of sales.
- Efficient - PandaDoc is a very efficient and easy to use tool to create a variety of documents and send them electronically for review and signature. By using their template to document hierarchy, you are able to create base templates that drive your documents, allowing you to save a significant amount of time in the document creation process. In addition, the built-in, customizable approval workflow removes the manual task of emailing a document for review/approval and automates this task.
- Integrations - Currently we use PandaDoc as an integration with our CRM, HubSpot. This allows our sales team to use one system to manage the customer relationship and create quotes from the Company, Contact, or Deal record within HubSpot. This provides incredible visibility into the entire relationship with the customer by minimizing the systems that are needed, thus saving time. Analytics - PandaDoc does an excellent job of providing detailed analytics on documents that are created and sent. This applies to not only internal audit trails but external analytics around whether the prospect has viewed or downloaded the document. In addition, you can drill down to see how many times the document has been viewed and/or downloaded as well as detailed, page by page analysis of how long they spent on each page of the document. This helps guide follow up conversations for our sales reps as they have the insight to where the customer is spending a majority of their time and can prepare for any potential objections that might come up.
- Automation - In today's business environment, doing more with less is a way of life. By using PandaDoc, we took a very manual, labor-intensive process and automated 95% of the proposal creation process that we go through. As a small company, we generate several hundred proposals a year and by automating this process, we dropped the time it took to develop a proposal and get a proposal approved by our QA group down from 2-3 hours to less than an hour. That increased time savings based on automating a majority of the tasks related to creating a proposal allows our sales team to spend more time face to face with our customers, leading to an increase in sales.
- Analytics - PandaDoc does an excellent job of providing detailed analytics on documents that are created and sent. This applies to not only internal audit trails but external analytics around whether the prospect has viewed or downloaded the document. In addition, you can drill down to see how many times the document has been viewed and/or downloaded as well as detailed, page by page analysis of how long they spent on each page of the document. This helps guide follow up conversations for our sales reps as they have the insight to where the customer is spending a majority of their time and can prepare for any potential objections that might come up.
- Customization - While you can customize your templates and documents very easily, customizing the user interface of the program is a bit challenging. For example, before our proposals go out to a client, they must go through 2 levels of approval before being sent. On the dashboard, there is a tab for "Approval" but for our unique situation, having the option to customize and add a second "Approval" box would be nice. Certainly not a deal breaker by any means but would just be nice.
- Editor - The editor to create templates, documents, and your content library isn't the most user-friendly unless you have some basic CSS knowledge and feel comfortable digging into the code. For example, when you add a table to PandaDoc, you cannot easily manipulate the cells to merge some but not others without going into the CSS. Again, not a deal breaker but the ability to have more features in the editor would be nice.
- Limited Roles - Unless you are on the Enterprise version, you are kind of stuck with the standard roles that PandaDoc has in their system. The challenge with this is that these roles are not editable at all. An example of this is for the "Member" role, which would be like a user type of role. This role is pre-configured so that members cannot see other members documents. There is no way to change this unless you either upgrade to Enterprise or you enhance everyone's member role to Manager. The problem with this is that Manager provides a significant amount of functionality that we are not completely comfortable with providing to our sales reps. There should be an easier solution to adjusting small permissions like being able to see other documents that have been created.
- Time Savings - By using PandaDoc, we were able to cut our time from document creation to being sent to our prospect by 66%
- Productivity - In the 3 months we have been using PandaDoc for all of our proposal creation, we have actually increased the number of proposals that we have created by about 30%
- Cost Savings - Before PandaDoc, we were considering building an in-house solution to create proposals. By the time that we figured in development costs, we are able to use PandaDoc for the next 16 years and reap the benefits of their continued product support versus developing version 1 of our own solution in-house.