Avantio sends proposals in 10 seconds and boosts sales with PandaDoc

The challenge

Docusign was causing unnecessary disruptions in Avantio’s sales process, slowing down how quickly they could get documents to customers. Without a document template builder, they had to upload and send each document manually whenever a signature was needed. 

Docusign also lacked other key features, like pre-determined fields, which added upwards of 30 minutes of document prep time for the team. This outdated process took hours away from building relationships with their customers and made it challenging to handle the rapid growth of their customer success department.

The solution

With PandaDoc, Avantio creates professional document templates that can be edited instantly without manual intervention from the marketing department. With templates, they can quickly spin up a document with pre-determined fields, saving their team from manually adding necessary information. To address the need for visibility on document status, Avantio integrated PandaDoc with their Salesforce CRM, ensuring their team can track when documents have been viewed, signed, and completed.

The ideal customer experience

Avantio started as a property management software to unify rental operations onto one platform. They offer thousands of features that help automate the vacation rental business and consolidate tools, eliminating the need for property managers to manually update various portals and software separately. 

Working closely with property managers, Avantio recognized that many of their customers desired additional services and support, like web design and marketing services, and Avantio delivered by expanding their service offering to provide a larger scope of offerings to their customer base.

But with new service offerings comes new challenges. Avantio needed to integrate their managed services into their buyer experience and effectively communicate how Avantio services can work together to help drive their customers’ business forward. 

This proved to be difficult to achieve with their existing process:

• Avantio’s marketing team designed customer-facing documents for the Customer Success team.
• Customer Success met with customers to go over the different service options, answer any questions, and finalize the services the customers want to proceed with.
• Customer Success would then edit the proposal manually based on the services the customer wanted.
• The proposal was then uploaded to Docusign, and a manual process of adding signing fields would take up to 30 minutes.

“Our team was at the whim of marketing to update client-facing documents. This year alone, our documents have changed 15 times, and each time we needed a signature, we had to upload the .pdf to Docusign and set up the fillable fields for every single proposal,” said Marija Mise, Customer Success Manager at Avantio. “Setting up the fillable fields for each document took upwards of 30 minutes per proposal, and with the broad scope of services we offer customers, it just wasn’t efficient.” 
Avantio’s Customer Success team also struggled with the repetitiveness of communicating their service offerings to customers. They often summarized their product and service offerings via email to customers, which made their first few touch points with customers prone to errors.

Avantio knew they needed an e-signature and proposal solution that would help them better communicate their services to customers, reduce the time it took to prepare and send proposals, and streamline their deal cycle.

A strategic partnership with PandaDoc

Avantio was drawn to PandaDoc when they realized they could build professionally designed proposals directly in the platform. They could choose from thousands of pre-designed templates — or create their own — and use it as a template for every document they send to customers. “We no longer have to rely on the marketing team to create documents for us. We can easily create a document in PandaDoc from a template, add or remove service offerings, and send to customers in as little as ten seconds,” Marija shared.

Another time saver was having pre-determined fillable fields added to each template, eliminating the need for their team to add fillable fields to each document. “All of these things have become 90% faster than they were before, and the rate of errors is significantly less”.

Not only did Avantio see time savings creating and sending documents to customers, they also benefit from a more streamlined customer experience. With PandaDoc, they can better communicate their service offerings and that helps close more business for services like web design, digital marketing, and API integrations.  

“Digital marketing services can be hard to explain on paper, and with three different service tiers for digital marketing, PandaDoc helped us refine how we communicate these options to customers,” Marija noted. “Our digital marketing sales improved two months into using PandaDoc. Within one month, our digital marketing sales doubled.”

Integrating PandaDoc with their CRM

It was critical for Avantio to consolidate technology and minimize the time spent switching between platforms to manage customer relationships. With PandaDoc’s Salesforce integration, their Customer Success team no longer has to spend extra time switching tabs or uploading proposals and documents to Salesforce, allowing them to track customer interactions — such as viewing, signing, and completing documents — directly in their CRM environment.

Automated reminders are configured to notify signatories as well, cutting down the time spent on follow-up emails and ensuring prompt action from customers. This has made managing customer documents easier, elevates the customer experience, and lets Avantio maintain timely communication with their clients.

Faster document creation time and more sales

For Avantio, enhancing the customer experience was top of mind when choosing a document management solution. PandaDoc has helped them achieve a 90% reduction in time spent creating sales documents, sell more digital marketing services than ever, and elevate the quality of their customer interactions. By streamlining their document processes, Avantio has been able to focus more on personalized service and clear communication, ensuring that their growing list of offerings always puts its best foot forward with prospects.