Document creation is core to processes across all lines of business. While things like contracts and agreements usually come to mind first for most folks – because those documents represent the big wins of work getting done – document creation happens in every department in your organization.
It’s integral to more business processes and areas of an organization than many people realize, including marketing, customer success, human resources, legal, and the back office. Employees across these departments regularly create presentations, proposals, reports, letters, spreadsheets, agreements, invoices, tear sheets, and more – and it’s absolutely killing their productivity. But how can we improve this?
The Impact of Document Automation
Let me give an example: I have a friend who’s a product leader and they were telling me how stressed they were about this big presentation their team pulls together every month. It dives deep into the performance and the roadmap for their product, and every month, they dread creating it. While it’s always the same presentation in the same format, going into Salesforce and pulling all the updated information, reformatting it, and adding analysis takes three or four full days every month.
If they could automate the creation of this document, they would recoup more than a month’s worth of workdays every year. And that’s just one example of a document that one person creates.
Take the concept and multiply it across your company, and you’ll see how document creation is a thief of your organization’s productivity. So why aren’t more organizations maniacally focused on document automation?
Most often, it’s because they simply can’t wrap their arms around how document-heavy their businesses are, so they don’t recognize that manual document creation is absolutely destroying their efficiency. These time-intensive processes hide in plain sight and are so common that they’re easy to overlook.
And even if organizations become aware of them, they’re not sure what to do next. It’s time to break away from the manual pack and start tackling your document creation challenges today.
Here are four ways to get started and make the most of document generation in Salesforce:
1. Identify Opportunities for Document Generation Automation
There are two primary ways to identify opportunities for document generation automation, and I see organizations using both successfully.
The first is leveraging a process discovery solution that monitors how people work, gathers data around document-centric processes, and delivers insights into what it really takes to generate and ship a single document. The value of this approach is that it’s passive and objective. It doesn’t take up peoples’ time and it doesn’t get bogged down in reasons or excuses. It allows organizations to take an honest inventory of their current state and provides a holistic look at processes beyond creation. It’s also easy to run post-automation, which provides valuable insights into how newly automated processes are performing.
The second approach is manually collecting ideas for document generation automation from employees. Start by asking them about the broken document processes they’re already aware of. When does it feel like their hair is on fire or they’re just playing hot potato with another team? They’re likely to have some top of mind. Ask them about the documents they build and rebuild regularly, like monthly reports. Then ask them for their ideal scenario – ask them “what if?”. Empower those creative thinkers within your business to submit ideas on documents or document processes that could be better.
Finally, pull ideas from low customer satisfaction scores. Often you’ll find that where there’s an upset customer, there’s a document tied to it. Maybe they didn’t receive the document on time, maybe the document had the wrong information in it, or maybe they expected a document and received nothing at all. This manual collection approach, while more time-consuming, is great because it’s free other than the effort of collecting the ideas and because it helps employees feel included in any changes coming their way.
Both approaches require a culture of innovation – the desire to actively identify opportunities to improve and automate. But the result of both is the same – you come up with ideas and targets for documents or document processes that could be automated.
2. Start Strategically
After you have ideas on which document generation processes could be automated, what’s next? You need to determine which ones you want to pursue first. We find it’s most effective to gather a diverse group of people who are involved in document generation, approval, and usage – ideally with folks at multiple levels who can contribute diverse perspectives, as well as an executive or executive sponsor who can agree to action a project.
Dedicate a few hours to meeting with the group and weighing the document generation ideas you came up with in step one on a scale of high value to low value and high complexity to low complexity. Discuss what’s involved in each document and plot them as a group.
When you think about high value versus low value, think about things like peoples’ time or revenue that’s being impacted.
When you think about high complexity versus low complexity, consider things like where the data resides and how it needs to be used – is it only in Salesforce or many systems, is it in multiple languages, is there heavy conditional logic required to accommodate the use case?
Typically, the low-complexity, high-value targets are our no-brainer choices. The low-hanging fruit. They’re easy to automate and provide a lot of value to the business. Those are the ones where you’ll likely see the most ROI and the quickest time to value, which then opens the doors to solving more complex problems with document automation throughout the business.
Beyond that low-hanging fruit, the group can discuss and choose additional use cases that affect multiple lines of business and align with business priorities.
3. Choose Your Solution Carefully
Organizations looking to centralize and automate document generation usually see the most success when they focus on these five pillars:
- Agility: The product can be easily built and managed by non-developer resources for lean teams and quick-start improvement initiatives.
- Governance: The product allows for flexible, centralized management of access and permissions across teams.
- Compliance: The product enables and ensures adherence to critical regional and vertical-specific regulations and standards.
- Scalability: The product is built on enterprise-ready infrastructure supporting repeatable solutions within a region or business unit. It can easily generate a single, massive, complex document with hundreds of pages, a simple invoice at a massive scale, and everything in between.
- Integration: While the administration and management of document generation and automation are ideally centralized in Salesforce, you should be able to leverage that same single solution through and across your entire tech stack.
With a product like Nintex DocGen for Salesforce, which seamlessly integrates with your existing data in any Salesforce instance, you can generate dynamic, complex documents quickly and easily – no coding required.
4. Focus on Experience as the Outcome
I find a North Star for exceptional document automation is to focus on document processes that will materially affect employee experience and customer experience.
When we focus on employee experience and customer experience, it allows us to deliver these exceptional experiences from across the business. We can deliver consistent documents with consistent branding, in a consistent format, every time. These documents should be easily and centrally managed and then deployed in multiple ways across both internal and external users.
When we assess the documents that are being deployed across multiple experiences or stakeholders, it becomes easy to identify operational efficiencies so we can address them. The documents that reach many stakeholders both internally and externally often have a material impact on your organization. Focus on centralized document automation efforts that lead to great employee and customer experiences and elevate the organization.
Keep track of:
- The work that was done
- The results
- The amount of time that it saved your team
- How long it took to deploy
- The use case
- The frequency it’s being used
- Customer and employee sentiment scores
When your team have to make difficult decisions around limited bandwidth and budget, it’s helpful to have a track record to point back to and say “This works, it was easy to do, it’s made a significant impact, and we can take this same approach and replicate it to solve other problems here across the business.”
Summary
Having the ability to efficiently create and manage documents within Salesforce is often the biggest hurdle standing in the way of getting business done. Manual, time-consuming document management leads to prolonged sales cycles, poor customer service, and unhappy employees.
Document automation speeds up the process of creating, managing, and delivering the documents you need to drive operational efficiency and get stuff done.
Reclaim the time that manual document generation is stealing from your business and reap benefits beyond what you had imagined. Learn more about Nintex DocGen for Salesforce – the leading no-code document generation solution to instantly transform data stored in Salesforce into mission-critical documents.