Create the same proposals over and over again can be a boring and time-consuming task, but it is an important part of the sales process.  Across your entire sales team, you need to present a consistent message and value prop to your customers. 
 
With that in mind, you’ve setup templates for your sales team to use to generate proposals, quotes, and more, but over time those templates slowly change as each sales person makes small modifications.  Before you know it, you’re back to square one with everybody using different versions of documents.
 
With WebMerge, you can ensure everybody is using the same version of documents and you can easily integrate with your favorite sales CRM like Zoho CRM.  WebMerge can take your templates and automatically populate information from Zoho CRM as events happen (new contact, potential closes, etc).
 
In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically populate a proposal when we add a new Potential to Zoho CRM.  We’ll then send it off to DocuSign to collect a signature from the customer.
 
To get started, we’re going to setup our proposal template using a Word document.  Simply open up your normal proposal template in Word and then where you want information from Zoho to be populated, put in merge tags like {$FirstName}, {$Email}, etc.  These merge tags can contain letters and numbers, but no spaces.
 
Here’s what our proposal template looks like:

Since we’ll be collecting a signature from the customer using DocuSign, we need to add a signature tag to the document.  This tells DocuSign where to overlay the signature on our document.  This signature tag is plain text and looks like:  \s1\

After you’ve finished up your template, let’s upload it to WebMerge.  From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button then enter a name.  Next, click on the Office Document type and then pick the file from your computer.

Once you’ve uploaded the file, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify settings like the type of document that is produced and even the name of the file.  For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and we’re going to include the name of the Potential in the file name.

Next, we’re going to setup the delivery to DocuSign so that we can collect a signature for our proposal.  Jump over to the Deliver tab and then click the New Delivery button and select DocuSign.  You’ll be asked to login to your DocuSign account.
 
After you’ve authenticated your DocuSign account, you’ll see the settings for the delivery.  You’ll need to define a Subject (the subject of the email your customer will receive from DocuSign), and then the name and email address of the signer.

Next, we’re going to go to the Merge tab where we’ll find our Merge URL for our proposal.  This Merge URL is a unique endpoint for our document and that’s where we are going to send our data from Zoho in a few steps.  Go ahead and copy this for later.

To integrate WebMerge with Zoho to automatically send data from Zoho when a new potential is added, we’re going to utilize the webhooks feature inside Zoho.
 
To setup a new Webhook in Zoho, go to the Settings page and click on the Automations page.  First, we need to setup a new Workflow rule to detect when we add a new potential. 

Go ahead and click the Create Rule button.  On the next step, pick Potential as the module and give the rule a name like “New Potential”.

Next, you’ll be asked when you want to trigger this rule.  We’re going to pick “Create” so that every time a potential is generated, this rule will be triggered.

The next step allows you to add a filter to the rule.  We’re going to only want to trigger the merge if the potential is in the Proposal stage so we’re going to select the Stage field then “is” and then pick the “Proposal/Price Quote” stage.

On the next step, we’re going to setup the “Action” for our rule.  Go ahead and click the + button next to the Webhook.  Enter a name for the webhook, then enter your Merge URL in the URL box.  We’re going to add “?_use_get=1” to the end of our Merge URL so that we can pass the merge fields using query parameters (defined in the next step), so our Merge URL will actually look like

https://www.webmerge.me/r/2458/abcdef?_use_get=1

To add our merge fields to the URL, we’re going to “Append Entity Parameters” using our merge fields as the name and then the corresponding fields from Zoho as the value.  Go ahead and add all of your merge fields.

Once you’ve finished up all of your merge fields, click the Save and Associate button at the bottom of your page.  This will make your webhook live and ready to test!  Go ahead and add a new Potential in the Proposal stage.
 
You should receive and email from DocuSign pretty quickly with instructions and a link to sign the proposal. 
 
Here’s what our proposal looked like ready for signature in DocuSign.

Congrats, you’re all finished!  You can now automatically generate all kinds of documents right from your Zoho account without typing a single letter.  Can you think of any other ways that you could use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?

Managing your sales opportunities in Zoho CRM is a great way to keep your sales team focusing more on selling and less on the tedious tracking and data entry.  With that in mind, you can save your sales team even more time by automatically generate sales documents using WebMerge.

In this example, we’re going to show you how you can automatically generate an invoice when the stage of a potential is updated to “Closed Won”.  We’re going to use the Webhooks feature of Zoho to automatically send data to WebMerge.

To get started, let’s setup our invoice template in WebMerge.  We’re going to use the online document builder to create our template.  Form the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button, then type in a name.  On the next step, you’ll choose the Build Your Own document type.

Once you’ve picked the document type, click Next and you’ll be taken to the Document Builder.  Here’s where you can setup your template. We’re going to add a logo, business address, and then merge fields for all the data we want to pull into our invoice from Zoho. 

These merge fields look like {$CustomerName}, {$Address}, {$Amount}, etc.  You can use any names you’d like, but you can only use letters, numbers, and underscores in your merge fields.  No special characters are allowed.

Here’s what our invoice template looks like:

Once we have the invoice finished, we’re going to save it and move on to the Settings tab.  From this tab you’re going to be able to change things like the document output (ie the type of document that is generated), then name of the file that is generated and more document level settings.

Our next step is going to be setting up the delivery of our invoices.  Go ahead and jump to the Deliver tab.  We’re just going to email the invoice directly to our customer, so we’re going to edit the default email delivery to go to the merge field for the email address of our customer.  You can also edit any of the other settings for the email.

After you’ve saved the email delivery, we’re all finished with the setup of the WebMerge document and we’re ready to integrate Zoho CRM.  Before we leave WebMerge, let’s jump over to the Merge tab and grab the Merge URL for our document.  This is a unique URL for our document and we’ll use that in the Zoho Webhook setup to send data directly to our document.

Inside Zoho CRM, we’re going to use a Workflow to automatically detect when we update the stage of a potential and then we’ll fire off a webhook when that stage is “Closed Won”.

To setup the Workflow, click the Setup button in the top right of the page, then click the Automation link.  This will take you to the Workflow page.

Go ahead and click the Create Rule button so we can setup a new workflow rule to detect when we update the stage of a potential.  You’ll be asked to pick the Module (pick Potentials) and then enter a name for the workflow rule.

After you’ve entered that information, click the Next button.  You’ll see a section where you identify the Rule Trigger.  This is where you are going to tell Zoho to look for a potential that is updated to Closed Won.

From the “Execute based on” dropdown, pick the “A record action” option and then you’ll see options for the type of record action.  You’ll want to pick the “Field update” option and then pick your Stage field.

Click Next and you’ll be taken to a section that will allow you to define the criteria / logic for when this trigger should fire.  Here’s where we’re going to tell the system to look for Stage being “Closed Won”.

After we setup the criteria, the next step is going to be setting up the webhook action.  Under the Actions section, click the + button next to the Webhooks option.  For the “URL to Notify” we’re going to put our Merge URL (for our document) in that box, with an extra parameter at the end called “_use_get=1”.  In a second, we’re going to define the URL parameters for our fields, and this “_use_get=1” tells WebMerge to look at the URL for the data.

Example: https://www.webmerge.me/merge/12345/abcdef?_use_get=1

Next, we’re going to add the merge fields to the webhook URL Parameters setup.  For each merge field, add it in the box on the left then choose the corresponding Zoho field on the right.

Once you’ve finished adding all the fields, click the Save and Associate button to save the webhook.  That finishes the setup of the workflow rule, so go ahead and click the Save button at the bottom.

You’re all done!  Now it’s time to run a quick test to make sure everything is working perfectly.  Go ahead and open up a test potential and update the Stage to Closed Won.  You should then receive an email from WebMerge with your invoice attached!

Here’s what our test looked like:

That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?  Now you can automatically generate documents from Zoho without needing to lift a finger.  Can you think of other ways you could WebMerge and Zoho to simplify your paperwork process?