Published Date: September 14, 2021
Last Updated Date: April 22, 2024
Your CRM is one of the most powerful sales tools in your tech stack. Whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce, or any other platform, popular or niche, it’s your sales team's single source of truth and numero uno for managing customer information and deal stages. With so many potential applications, it’s no wonder over 91% of companies with 10+ employees now use a CRM. But as powerful as it may be, it becomes even more impactful when you bring other tools, like proposal software, into the mix.
Every team’s sales process is different. Whether yours involves multiple products, geographies, or pipelines, a streamlined workflow is the key to success.
While your CRM provides actionable data, it’s often just one of the many tools in your tech stack. Each individual tool serves a specific function at a different stage of the process. But when combined, they help you create a well-oiled machine that optimizes your workflow and keeps deals moving, all while giving you invaluable insights that power up your process.
This holds true for businesses whose CRM is the only tool in their stack. By adding and integrating other tools, you can get more value out of your source of truth and ensure that your team has everything they need to confidently push deals through the pipeline.
In order for your team to reach their full potential, you need a tech stack that complements your process. Creating a customizable CRM is a great way to achieve this. It lets you architect your business exactly as it appears in real life, helping you optimize your workflow and get more done.
What is a customizable CRM?
A customizable CRM is software that allows you to add or adjust features according to the needs of your business. It provides the flexibility to adjust pipelines, refine data collection, integrate existing tools, and more, helping you optimize all stages of your sales process.
Why you should integrate proposal software with your CRM
Sales teams are eager to invest in software that helps them optimize the top of the sales funnel—tools like Gong, Outreach, ZoomInfo, and, of course, your CRM. But when it comes time to seal the deal, willingness to invest in tools that optimize the bottom of the funnel often falls short. While your CRM can help set you up for the close, it’s not intended to create, send, and track proposals and other closing documents.
These final stages are critical to bringing in new business. But without that bottom-of-funnel software, you might find there’s a black box in your sales process. In other words, you won’t be able to see what’s happening with your deals once they’re sent to the prospect. No status updates, no notifications when proposals have been opened, nada. This blind spot can create a huge gap that puts your deals at risk.
Placing too much emphasis on the top of the funnel at the expense of the bottom can create a black box in your sales process.
That’s where proposal software comes in. It's the quickest and easiest way to regain visibility and control over your deals. It allows you to craft perfect proposals (with information pulled from your CRM), send them off to prospects, and track progress from sent to signed.
By integrating your proposal software with your CRM, you can bridge the gap between deal stages and eliminate that black box. It allows you to:
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Create and edit proposals directly from your CRM
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Share contacts between platforms
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Attach proposals to deals
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Export won proposals as PDFs
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View proposal activity and see real-time updates
A proposal software-CRM integration keeps you in the driver seat of your deals and ensures that your team has everything they need to crush the close.
Benefits of proposal software CRM integration
A proposal software-CRM integration helps you send proposals faster and more accurately, while helping you squeeze more value out of your CRM. But beyond the obvious, here are a few other benefits of integrating proposal software into your CRM:
Populate/sync your proposals with CRM data/details
Once you've linked your CRM to your proposal software, your contact lists will sync and automatically update. You’ll be able to pull information directly from your source of truth, right into your proposals, and you’ll eliminate room for error in the process. Now you and your sales reps can spend less time (and energy) chasing down deal details and more time selling.
Automate deal stage progression
Once you've linked a proposal to a deal in your CRM, the deal will automatically move along the stages of your sales cycle as the proposal progresses.
Get live updates/notifications
Beyond tracking proposal activity in your proposal software, the integration lets you view activity on your CRM timeline, including comments, proposal stages, and deals won.
Reps don’t have to leave their CRM
Between LinkedIn, prospect websites, outreach platforms, lead intel tools, and the CRM itself, reps already have enough tabs open. By connecting your proposal software with your CRM, you’ll be able to create proposals directly in the CRM, without having to bounce around multiple tabs or pages.
Keep sales documents attached to your deals
While you can certainly keep track of all of your sales docs within your proposal software, the CRM integration makes things even easier. Once you’ve linked your proposal with a deal, you can attach any sales docs directly to the deal to ensure nothing goes missing.
How to integrate your CRM with proposal software
Now that you know why you should integrate your CRM with proposal software, here's how to leverage the Proposify-HubSpot integration to reap the benefits we explored above.
Creating and Customizing Your Integration
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Link Your Hubspot Integration. Start the process by linking your Proposify account to your HubSpot account from the "integrations" page on the navigation menu.
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Customize Your Integration. Head to HubSpot integration settings to customize how Proposify interacts with your HubSpot account.
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Customize Your Stage Progression. Visit the HubSpot integrations settings page to choose how proposal stages move linked deals through your sales cycle.
Linking Deals to Proposals in Proposify
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Create A New Hubspot Deal from Proposify. Once you've created a document in Proposify, visit the document's settings page to create a new deal in HubSpot.
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Link To An Existing Deal. If you have an existing deal, you can visit the document’s settings page in Proposify to link the document to the active deal of your choice.
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Change A Linked Deal. Document changes automatically push to HubSpot, but if you want to do it manually, just click the notepad icon in the document's settings.
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Unlink Your Proposal From A Deal. To unlink a document from a deal, visit the document's settings, click the notepad icon, then select "don't create/link a deal" from the HubSpot Dropdown.
Using Proposify Within HubSpot
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Creating Your Document in HubSpot. Once your integration is set up, you can create a document in HubSpot by navigating to the deal and clicking "Create Proposal."
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Managing Your Document in HubSpot. Now that you’ve created a proposal in HubSpot, you can make adjustments directly from the deal by clicking "Actions" at the bottom of the document card.
If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a quick video on how to create and customize your integration:
If you want to take an even deeper dive, we've got a detailed breakdown on Proposify’s knowledge base which digs into the nuts and bolts of integrating Proposify with HubSpot.
Final thoughts
Your CRM provides invaluable data that can help your team improve customer service, enhance marketing efforts, and qualify leads, but it is what you make of it. To get the most out of it, you’ll need to ensure that your CRM is aligned with the existing tools you use to support your sales process. And to do that, you need a customizable CRM that’s tailored to the needs of your business.
