Using a CRM like Base to keep track of your sales process can have a big impact on your business. From tracking new leads, to closing deals, Base can help you every step of the way.
Add WebMerge to your sales process and you can streamline your document generation to instantly populate quotes, letters, invoices, and more. You’ll never have to manually create a sales document again!
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a proposal when we add a new deal to Base and then email it directly to our customer.
To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our Proposal using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to insert our company information like our logo, services description, etc. The for the spots that we want to customize with deal/customer information, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$Description}, {$Amount}, etc.
You can name these merge fields anything you’d like, but no spaces or special characters.
Here’s what our proposal template looks like:
Once you have your template ready, we need to upload it to WebMerge. From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and then enter a name. On the next step, select Office Document and pick the file from your computer.
After you’ve uploaded your document, you’ll be taken to the Settings page where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the merged document. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and then include the name of our customer in the document name.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document so that it is automatically emailed directly to our customer for their review. Under the Deliver tab, click the Edit button under the default email delivery. Then for the “To” address, we’re going to use a merge field.
If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the customer’s email address, choose <<Other>> from the dropdown then enter something like: {$Email}
Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.
Once you have updated your email delivery, we are done with the setup process inside WebMerge and we’re ready to integrate with Base. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to create a New Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose Base as the app, then New Deal as the trigger.
Once you authenticate your Base account, Zapier will load a test deal to make sure everything is connected properly. Follow those steps and continue.
Next, we’re going to setup the Action of our Zap. For the app, choose WebMerge and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your WebMerge account, Zapier is going to load a list of the documents in your account. Go ahead and pick the Proposal document that you just setup and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.
For each merge field, you need to pick the corresponding Base field by clicking the button to the right of each box. This tells Zapier how to send your data over to WebMerge so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
After you have matched up all of your merge fields, we’re done with the setup process and we’re ready to test! Save your Zap and turn it on, then login to Base and add a new deal. Zapier will detect the new deal and send the information over to WebMerge where your proposal will be populated and emailed.
Here’s what our merged proposal looked like ready for our customer:
Congrats, you’re all finished! You can now automatically populate all kinds of documents with data from Base CRM. Can you think of any other ways you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?
