Sales document automation solutions are software tools set to streamline the creation, management, and distribution of sales documents.

The global market for sales automation software was valued at $9.25 billion in 2022 and is expected to nearly double by the end of the decade.

In step with the explosion of AI integrations, such growth is no surprise considering the value document automation brings to sales reps.

In this post, we’ll detail what these solutions are, explain how you can tap into this value, and discuss ways to leverage automation software to up your team’s wins.

How automation software helps sales teams

The adoption of sales document automation tools is a double win for salespeople.

First, document management is streamlined: proposals, quotes, contracts, and invoices are generated more accurately and in less time.

Second, as the most time-consuming manual tasks are automated, team members get more hours to focus on their key objective — closing deals and enhancing customer relationship management.

Key benefits of document automation software for sales teams

No matter what you’re selling, adopting document automation software helps you gain competitive advantages through:

Improved collaboration

Document automation solutions enable team members to communicate directly in sales documents.

Leave comments, collectively resolve issues, address feedback from stakeholders — in general, make collaboration more efficient.

Faster sales cycle

Optimize the whole sales process by automating repetitive tasks like monthly sales reports or customizing proposals.

This allows sales representatives to respond to requests faster and meet tight deadlines, improving overall efficiency.

Enhanced accuracy

Manual data entry is always prone to human error, whether you transfer customer information from your CRM or ERP system into sales templates, or copy financial data to a legal document.

Document automation mitigates the risk of typos, miscalculations, and omissions that come with manual data entry.

Increased customer satisfaction

Personalized branding and rich media on sales docs, faster response times thanks to task automation, and accurate information delivery — with automation tools, sales teams are empowered to wow customers even more.

Consistency and compliance

Document automation tools also ensure those docs are reliably consistent.

Template libraries, interactive pricing tables, and other document generation elements are easily adjusted to ensure your docs always look pro.

Equally important: automated solutions ensure that compliance remains consistent.

Sales teams working in healthcare or financial services benefit from software automation that has legal compliance standards baked in.

Sales automation use cases

Automated workflows are applicable to several types of sales documents.

• Proposals: Create proposals in minutes using customizable templates and drag-and-drop elements such as e-signature fields, pricing tables, text snippets, images, and videos.

• Quotes: Generate and personalize quotes for each prospect based on CRM data, tax peculiarities, and service timeframes, eliminating manual calculations and approval requests.

• Contract management: Simplify contract management with collaboration and audit trail features, artificial intelligence-powered data extraction, legally-binding e-signing, and renewal notifications.

• Invoices: Create, send, track, and securely e-sign invoices through an automation platform that provides payment gateways.

• Sales order forms: Automation software instantly produces forms for sales teams, speeding up order processing and enhancing the customer experience.

• Sales reports: Generate reports to accurately gauge sales teams’ performance on leads, closed deals, and revenue, streamlining workflows and uncovering new market opportunities.

• Purchase orders: Document automation solutions help sales departments speed up internal approvals, streamline procurement, and maintain financial control.

• Renewal notices: Automatically trigger the contract renewal process, generating new contracts with secure and accurate data transfer.

How to choose the best sales document automation software

Here’s what to look for when choosing a solution that will put your document creation process on autopilot and streamline sales activities.

Document editing

Your document management software of choice must not only provide an extensive library of templates for different document types but also offer a drag-and-drop editor for customizing branding, blocks and fields, multimedia, and more.

Seamless integrations

Secure, native integrations with CRMs and ERPs are key to automating administrative tasks like customer data import into a sales doc.

Also, make sure your automation tools can smoothly pair up with different payment systems and collaboration solutions.

E-signature tech

In order to accelerate your internal approval process and customer check-out experiences, your automation software requires legally binding, ESIGN, UETA, HIPAA, and SOC 2 Type II compliant electronic signing.

Collaboration features

Reliable automation software allows multiple users to effectively collaborate on the same documents: tag and follow up with team members, leave inline comments, collect and address feedback in real time, and create annotations — while keeping every record accounted for.

Version control

With an audit trail feature, sales reps can easily monitor all the actions and changes made to sales documents (from draft to completion) and restore particular document versions.

Another advantage here: you can boost data security through the elimination of unauthorized document access.

Analytics and reporting

By analyzing document user behavior such as total time spent, last view, PDF downloads, links clicked, etc., you will understand how your documents perform, gauge team engagement, and know exactly when it’s time to follow up.

Quoting capabilities

You’ll close more deals with a document management solution that provides advanced quoting functionality.

Features here include drag-and-drop template editing, built-in payments, ESIGN and UETA compliance for fast electronic signing, and knowing when the quote was opened, viewed, and completed.

Security

Choose a sales process automation solution that is security-first, i.e., offers robust encryption, role-based access control, 24/7 system monitoring, automated daily backups, and security standard compliance.

Approval automation

This software allows you to automatically create custom approval workflows to ensure your documents are approved by the right people in the right order — securely and on time.

Mobility

In today’s world, all sales personnel need a solution that has a reliable mobile app, giving you the ability to manage sales documents anytime and anywhere, rapidly respond to issues, receive real-time alerts, and speed up signature approvals.

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Disclaimer

PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.