Recently, I have been implementing CRM solutions for clients and I wanted to share a use case that I think would be helpful for many companies. Automating proposals as well including pricing in the proposal, is a pretty common request I get when setting up a CRM in monday.com. In order to implement this solution, I used the Vlookup Auto-link app by Jetpack Apps and the Docugen App to help achieve the desired results.
Recent Use Case
Goal: Set up a CRM in monday.com that could automate proposal creation and sending, as well as automate the pricing list so prices do not need to be entered manually.
The Challenge:
- This firm wanted to automatically create and send out proposals from their CRM in monday.com
- The firm wanted to use the information from their monday.com board to be added to the proposal
- They also wanted to have prices in their proposal. Simply having a price column with the services would not suffice because they did not want to manually enter a price in each time.
- The price list would need to be easily editable since it is constantly changing and there are many services available.
The solution:
There are 2 main obstacles that needed to be overcome in order to set up this solution.
- How to create a price list that could be referenced in the proposals and can easily be edited.
- How to automate the creation and sending of proposals with pulling info from the monday.com board.
Creating a Pricing List
The first obstacle was solved by the following setup. The proposals were being sent from the deals board. We needed to have a column with the price and service that was being offered. However, the other issue was that this should be easily editable. Having it being easily editable, removed the option of doing this by an automation. An automation like “when status changes to X service, enter Y number in numbers column”. This would achieve our goal of having a price in the board, but it is hard to edit if you have a number of services as there would be many automations. Therefore, we created a pricing board so this information would not live on the deals board but rather in different board. This board listed all of the prices with the service that was being offered. This allowed for easy editing by the internal team.
The next question is, how do we pull that information into the deals board. If we pull it in via a connected board column and a mirror column, we have to add many more columns in order to accommodate for this. It is also leaves more room for human error. Therefore, we installed the Vlookup Auto-link app. We set up an auto-link that when the service changes to something, find that service on the pricing board, and pull in the price. The documentation for this app was very clear and easy to follow so the setup was completed in minutes. So as soon as we entered the service into the status column, the price was automatically pulled in from the pricing board. A really great feature about this app is that when the pricing board is edited, the updated price will automatically pull into the deals board and it can pull from a large variety of columns.
Automated proposal creation
In order to tackle the second obstacle, I integrated the Docugen App into monday.com. This app is from the app store and very simple to implement and setup. I have to say that their support was fantastic with any issues that I ran into and responded to my questions within record time. Once the app was added and I configured the settings, I created a status option that said “Create Proposal”. Then I added a Docugen integration on the board that said “when status changes to Create Proposal, then generate settings from Docugen view”. What this means is that when I changed the status column that I had to “create proposal”, a PDF version of my proposal was created and added to a files column.
During the setup of the Docugen settings, I choose which columns I wanted to pull into my proposal and added those columns to my document. This way, when I created the proposals, the information from my monday.com board was already there.
I finally set up an automation to automatically send out this proposal. The client did want to review the final proposal first, so I added another status column that said “send proposal”. Then I set up an automation that said “when status changes to “send proposal”, send email to client”. Make sure you fill in the columns that you want in the email. This automation allowed for an automated email to be sent with the proposal. You could also use the Docugen settings to automatically send the email to the client.
In summary by using the Docugen and Vlookup Auto-link app, I was able to create an easily edibale price list, which pulls into the deals board and creates and send proposals autaotmcially.
