Document management and customer relationship management are two components that can make or break a team’s productivity and impact. Each serve a different purpose, but together you can better manage the infinite business docs you need to do business andenable sales and marketing teams to do their very best.
In this guide, we’ll take a close look at how a CRM system with document management can boost your team’s productivity. While we’re at it, we’ll see how you can leverage monday.com Work OS and its intuitive features — for CRM, document management, and workflow creation — to unlock powerful productivity boosts. But first, let’s find out what document management is all about.
What is document management?
Document management is the process of using a computer to store, organize, and search for documents. Documents might be PDFs, electronically written, or image-based. Proper document management can save you time, money, and frustration by ensuring you can find what you need, when you need. It also reduces the risk that crucial documents get lost or misplaced.
What is a document management system?
A document management system is a tool used to manage and store digital business documents. Think images, spreadsheets, Word documents, and PDFs — pretty much anything organized as a single unit of information. From a business perspective, these documents could be things like datasheets, invoices, or contracts, just to name a few. All in all, even the smallest of businesses need to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of documents.
On top of keeping track of all those documents, businesses also need to manage who has access to which ones. They also need to have processes in place for scanning paper documents and keeping different versions of every document that’s created for legal reasons. Needless to say, it’s a lot of work.
Businesses save considerable time and money by using document management systems to provide centralized document storage, security, access control, and versioning for auditing trails.
A good document management system is a bastion of productivity for the entire business. But this same functionality gets even better when it’s paired with other tools, such as a customer relationship management system.
Why choose a CRM with document management?
On its own, a simple CRM does an amazing job of managing all your customer information. It’s a powerhouse database that stores your clients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and interactions. A great CRM also offers the ability to add notes to specific clients and deals. It’s a powerful sales and marketing tool for improving sales and enhancing the customer experience.
But while CRMs are great at handling structured information, some of the most important pieces of data sales teams handle are unstructured documents, such as product brochures, whitepapers, and datasheets. Not to mention documents close to the sale, such as invoices, order forms, statements of work, and contracts.
A CRM with document management puts all the unstructured data that sales and marketing teams use on a daily basis right at their fingertips.When you integrate document management into your CRM, your customer database becomes a centralized library for all of your sales documents — everything you need to nurture leads and seal the deal is a click away. This allows you to:
- Easily associate the appropriate documents to leads or deals
- Reduce precious time spent tracking down contracts.
Simply put, everyone benefits from a CRM with DMS integration. It can speed up just about every interaction your team has with customers, whether it’s sales or customer service. Even better, a CRM with document management supports effective cross-team collaboration that can increase productivity across the board.
If you’re wondering what the catch is, rest assured, there isn’t one. But there are a few best practices you’ll want to keep in mind.
Read also: Data enrichment: Benefits and best practices
Best practices for maximizing your CRM with document management
When you’re looking at CRMs with document management, understanding a few best practices can help. These include:
- Optimize workflows: Organize your documents in a way that makes them easy to find and access by defining a structure and sticking to it.
- Capture documents early: Store documents in your CRM as soon as possible, whether its scanning a paper or adding a contract file from a client email
- Minimize multiple document versions: Choose a system that allows multiple team members to edit the same document so you can improve collaboration, save editing time, and maintain a single source of truth for the whole team.
- Set unique permissions: Be sure to use a document management system that allows you to assign access rights to specific teams and individuals to keep things relevant and protected.
The goal of adding document management functionality to your CRM is to streamline your workflow by putting everything you need in one place. An intuitive solution like monday.com has integrations and features to help you do just that.
Using monday.com as a CRM with document management
As a CRM, monday.com boosts your productivity by bringing all your sales workflows into one unified Work OS. From pipelines to product management, monday.com’s intuitive interface makes juggling leads, crossing off to-do list items, and spinning up new sales campaigns easier than you thought possible.
Better still, monday.com also serves as your team’s document management reservoir. Whether you’re onboarding a new client or using monday.com’s powerful project management features, adding the right documents to the right set of data is as simple as a click. And once they’re in a task, you can easily access them from visual task boards to quickly see all the docs your team needs at a glance.
With monday.com’s work docs, you can collaborate on documents in real-time to streamline work processes. Additionally, you can save, share, and print work docs as needed.
Collaboration is a breeze, too, with monday.com’s simple document annotation features. No need to download the file, drop out of your Work OS and open an editor just to add a quick note. And with real-time updates, your teammates see your comments as soon as you add them.
Already using another CRM? No problem. With dozens of CRM integrations, including Salesforce and HubSpot, monday.com can merge your existing customer data with powerful document management features. With a couple of clicks, you can import customer data and start using monday.com’s powerful document management features to streamline your workflows and supercharge your sales and marketing efforts.
See also our other blogs about the different features a CRM can offer:
- CRM with Project Management
- CRM with Inventory Management
- CRM Gmail Integration
- CRM with Order Management
- CRM with Marketing Automation
- CRM with quoting
FAQs
What do document management systems manage?
Document management systems are used to save, manage, and track digital documents. These documents can originate digitally or be electronic versions of paper documents. Put simply, teams working with large numbers of docs, be it sales, marketing, or software development, can benefit from tracking files via a document management system.
Can you store documents in a CRM?
In most cases, CRMs don’t have dedicated document managing features, though you can store documents as notes attached to clients or deals. The problem is that these documents aren’t managed in a way that allows easy access across other systems or departments. And there usually isn’t any kind of versioning applied to these documents, so every user is responsible for tracking any changes they make. However, monday.com is unique in that it does offer a CRM with built-in document management capabilities.
Effective document management in your CRM
If you’re looking to simplify your sales and marketing workflows, using a CRM with document management features is one of the best ways to streamline access to collateral, sales documents, and other pertinent files.
Considering 80% of pros have a hard time finding a document when a client is on standby, making those docs easy to find is a good idea. And when everything you need is in one easy-to-use Work OS, you turn that good idea into a brilliant one.
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