Determine how businesses manage their key documents using Salesforce, what this process looks like and how you can optimize it in 2024.
What is Salesforce document management?
Salesforce document management describes how people create, store and organize documents within Salesforce. These are usually documents that share important information with prospects or customers and can be instrumental in closing more deals.
Salesforce is an extremely popular customer relationship management tool (CRM) and is likely used across multiple departments within a business, which may track and manage their documents in different systems. Because of this, Salesforce has a range of document management features.
However, the platform can also be limited when it comes to document management. This article focuses on the ways you can plug these gaps and manage documents more effectively within Salesforce. Read on to find out more.
Which documents can you manage in Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM, which means a majority of its users are sales team members. Hence there are a few common types of documents that can be uploaded and stored within the tool, including:
- Sales contracts
- Invoices
- Sales scripts
- Quotes and proposal templates
- Email marketing attachments
- Product marketing materials
This article will zoom in on the documents used to capture revenue and close more deals, including sales agreements, invoices and proposals.
Salesforce document management: how does it work?
Salesforce isn’t just a CRM, it can also be used for certain elements of the document management process.
Compared to other CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce performs well when it comes to the document management process with many built-in features supporting this. Built-in features include storing, sharing, organizing and tracking documents.
1. Document storage and sharing
Salesforce has an area named ‘Files Home’. This is where personal documents can be uploaded by a user and shared with the wider team for communal use. These files can be vired and customized from all devices.
If you want to work more collaboratively on stored documents, then the ‘Salesforce CRM Content’ space is for you. The tool allows users to create a number of different document types, share them with team members, collaboratively edit them and share them with colleagues or external users via the online platform.
Users can also create and add attachments from within Salesforce for various types of data records, such as contracts, invoices and quotes.
2. Document organization
When it comes to organizing your documents, Salesforce Files is the tool to look out for. It allows you to share and collaborate on files uploaded into the platform, store files privately, manage version updates and follow files that are important to you.
This is linked to ‘Files Connect’ which, as it says on the tin, allows you to connect external file systems to the Salesforce platform. With both options, you can move documents across folders easily and decide who can access key documents - an important feature for maintaining confidentiality.
Although this is a fairly standard option for document organization, it does offer the functionality needed to sort and store documents securely and limit risk.
3. Document tracking
Salesforce also can track when a lead opens or forwards a document, this can then be set up a as deal approval process within Salesforce.
This can provide insight into what a prospect's decision-making process looks like and how successful your outreach has been.
Increased document visibility is integral to the success of the sales process, as you can decide when is best to contact them. For instance, if you see a lead keeps opening and closing a contract without signing, it may indicate that you need to contact them and check if they have questions regarding the contract's terms.
This is a feature offered by Juro, where contract owners can see if a counterparty reviews or edits a contract. This can even be set up as a notification in Slack using Juro’s native integration.
Explore more about setting up contract notifications on Slack using this guide to Slack contract management.
Limitations of Salesforce document management
As useful as it can be for document management, it's important to remember that Salesforce is not a native document management platform. This means that it lacks some features and has several limitations. Below, we explore these limitations alongside some solutions and workarounds.
1. Less useful for document creation
You can’t create files directly in the Salesforce platform. This means they need to be created and uploaded in a format that the platform can understand, this includes:
- PDF (.pdf)
- Microsoft Office (Powerpoint.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlxs, and .ppx)
- Images (.jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .gif, and .png)
- Rich text (.txt, .rtf)
The problem with this is that it can make the process of managing documents such as business contracts more complex. For congrats like this, speed and efficiency are key to closing the deal and more revenue.
Switching between tools to create, redline and share legal contracts can create friction between teams, especially legal and sales. It can be frustrating for legal as they’re obliged to draft these contracts in Word, then pass them onto sales reps to upload - and that's before any negotiation can even take place.
This issue is very solvable. Legal teams can enable sales to generate contracts without leaving their CRM, all they need to do is integrate Salesforce with a contract lifecycle management tool like Juro.
Using an integration with a platform like Juro, you can automate contracts using pre-approved templates in just a few simple steps. To see this in practice, hit the button below to book a demo of Juro.