App Solve, as a certified Salesforce implementation and consulting firm, has developed Propose2Project, a new product geared to Service Firms, especially Professional Service Firms. It is an end-to-end implementation package that addresses 80% of what a service business needs. We then customize the rest for the specific needs of the individual businesses. After hundreds of Salesforce implementations with Service Firms, and using this system ourselves, we at App Solve know their business and what they need. From a Product perspective, Propose2Project is composed of the following:
- Marketing Cloud or Pardot for lead acquisition and conversion
- Salesforce Sales Cloud for CRM
- Conga Composer for In-CRM auto-proposal creation
- DocuSign for electronic signature
- Automated downstream automation upon sales opportunity win
- Auto-creation of invoicing
- Auto-creation of a project to provide the service to your customers
- Auto-creation of a Work Order; if required for a field-business
- Accounting Seed for full financials management and time-keeping
- Humi for fully-integrated HR, Benefits, and Payroll
Let’s examine each of them to know what exactly Propose2Project does.
Marketing Cloud or Pardot
Marketing Cloud and Pardot are both marketing automation tools from Salesforce. Marketing Cloud is geared to B2C businesses and Pardot to B2B. Marketing is important to any business. A marketing automation tool is essential and the first step to generate better, hotter leads to send to the sales team. Moreover, customers’ behaviour changes, and so does the volatile marketing environment. That’s where marketing automation tools come into play to make marketing easier for you and your business. Marketing Cloud and Pardot are platforms built on Sales Cloud from Salesforce. Let’s examine Sales Cloud now.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is the foundation of Propose2Project. If you are not familiar with Salesforce or Sales Cloud, let’s go over that first. Sales Cloud is the world’s #1 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution and it has been in the market for over 20 years helping market leaders transform their business. If none of this rings a bell to you, let’s first unravel it as all the next applications are based on this platform. Basically, Sales Cloud is a cloud-based software intended to help salespeople sell smarter and quicker by centralizing customer information, logging their interactions with your company, and automating many of the activities sales representatives do on a daily basis. What does cloud-based mean? It’s a technology that allows you to use applications and information stored on the internet rather than on your own computer. There are so many advantages related to cloud computing, that it would take another article for that. However, many companies still rely on spreadsheets alone to do their auditing and controls. Moreover, to fuel their decision-making. This not only exposes companies to poor analysis, but also to breaches of customer data. On the contrary, businesses that invest in cloud, mobility, and security expand their revenue up to 53% faster than their rivals, according to Dell. Now that we set the foundation, let’s move on to the first application: Conga Composer.
Conga Composer
Conga Composer from Conga is a document generation and reporting tool built specifically for Salesforce. We all know documents are central to any company, whether they are marketing docs, welcome letters to new customers, quotes, proposals, order forms that bring in new businesses, presentations, reports, renewals which keep existing customers coming back year after year… The list goes on. The magic of Conga Composer is that not only gets rid of the outdated, tedious, and paper-heavy process that requires manual copying and pasting, but it also creates beautiful and sophisticated documents, reports, or presentations by automatically populating pre-built or customized templates with data from Salesforce. They can be created using a web browser, a mobile device, or both. In addition to streamlining document creation, Conga Composer also automates entire business processes by using workflow rules resulting in having shorter business cycles and reduced workload.
DocuSign
DocuSign is an application to collect and manage digital signatures. It offers eSignature, a way to sign electronically on different devices. Documents like sales contracts, approvals, new hire documentation, expense reporting, purchase orders, invoice processing, and more can be completed in minutes instead of days. With DocuSign you can:
- Cut costs: By lowering hard costs and increasing employee productivity, each agreement saves an average of $51.
- Increase efficiency: Because it removes manual tasks and improves customer and employee convenience.
- Do business quicker: Agreements can be safely sent and signed from practically any device.
Some of its additional features include providing support for more than 40 languages, the possibility to sign from anywhere, even when you don’t have internet access, and using the strongest data encryption technologies available to meet some of the most rigorous security requirements in Canada, the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the world.
Automated downstream automation upon sales opportunity win
One of the biggest mistakes of project management is inefficient invoicing management. It can be very difficult to handle project finances for service companies who use a range of contracts or have varying invoicing processes at different phases of a project. The whole financial process of a project – from the original proposal to invoicing the customer – is prone to human error. Automation cuts those errors significantly. With Propose2Project, whenever there’s a sales opportunity win, the following will happen:
- Auto-creation of invoicing
- Auto-creation of a project to provide the service to your customers
- Auto-creation of a Work Order; if required for a field-business
This will increase efficiency and save a huge amount of work and time.
Accounting Seed
Accounting Seed is a robust financial software solution for accounting. It is built from the ground up on Salesforce. Accounting Seed is the first-ever accounting platform and it works with small, medium, large enterprise companies, and across all industries. Accounting Seed provides the following features:
- Billing automation: Recurring billing and subscription billing can be tailored to your specific requirements.
- Expense management: Credit cards, accounts payable, and purchasing can all be managed on one single platform, making payment to vendors easy.
- Strong general ledger: It gives the extensive accessibility, flexibility, and scalability you need to expand and change your company as you see fit.
- Financial dashboards: A user-friendly customizable dashboard and interface give the ability to quickly access and build reports.
- Inventory and order management: Inventory, order management, and accounting can be controlled from a single financial management platform.
- Project accounting: Tracking customer engagements and events are easy tasks as project accounting is automatically included in the general ledger system.
- Tax accounting: It compiles taxes more accurately and quickly, and fulfills government regulations.
- Data security: Designed to give you high-level data security, right out of the box.
- Easy configuration: Configuration doesn’t need coding knowledge. Also, you can create translations for your organization’s configurations enabling your global users to see your company’s verbiage in their language.
Accounting Seed is the industry’s most reliable and secure API, making it a trusted application.
Humi
Humi is an All-in-one HR, Payroll, and Benefits solution that helps businesses to ditch the paperwork and concentrate on their employees. Humi enables the following:
- Recruiting: Custom hiring funnels creation, applicant auto-scoring, workflow-based auto-emails, and hiring analytics and reporting.
- Easy onboarding: Streamline one of the most important stages in the employee lifecycle by automating onboarding documents, signing with digital signatures, tracking salary history, and assigning predefined tasks to new employees.
- Storing employee data: One single source of truth for every employee. Store employee documents, salary history, give customized access to managers and employees, and more.
- Time off tracking: Track vacation and leave types, create time-off policies, get team absence reminders, and timebox your accruals by adding expiration dates.
- Performance management: Create one on one reviews, collect feedback from employees from anonymous surveys, and set goals for the team and employees to evaluate performance.
- Reporting: Auto-generate reports, see missing employee data, and create custom filters and reports.
- Training tracking: Store training information, notify employees when training needs to be done, and receive notifications about upcoming trainings until they are overdue.
- Asset tracking: Assign company assets to employee profiles and see historical asset logs.
- Payrolls: It provides payroll history and reporting, automatic T4 generation, direct deposit, custom pay bonuses, and payroll digest for accountants.
- Benefits: Create multiple levels to your benefits plan, partner with any benefits carrier, and provide a tax-free health allowance.
Not only Humi stores all HR info in one secure place making it very handy but also Humi is an extremely user-friendly HR solution that enables HR, payroll, and benefits to be in sync so as to focus more on your business strategy and culture. 87% of Humi clients have reported a positive ROI after their first year with it.
So, should I be using Propose2Project?
If your company is a service business that wants to ditch manual document generation, get over operational and service level inefficiencies, or have the ability to turn existing data into actionable items, then yes, Propose2Project is the right approach. Running your entire service business on one platform allows for massive efficiencies; from marketing, sales, proposals, and full-service delivery all in one system.
Once a customer electronically signs-off on your proposal, the system automatically readies your team to review an invoice to send to your customers, begin aligning resources for your project or begin scheduling field technicians to the calendar, based on your specific work rules. Using financials within your CRM allows for easy real-time access to gross and net-margin insights while having the security to segment the data – even administer payroll, benefits, and HR through the same platform.
This creates massive efficiency by completely eliminating duplicate entry, ‘swivel chair’ by moving between applications, fully eliminating data errors, and enjoying an automated super-efficient team while delivering world-class service to your customers.
Ready to take your service business to the next level? Connect with one of our Salesforce experts here to start your business transformation.