The Buyer’s Guide to
Document Generation Software for Salesforce
Salesforce is by far the largest CRM provider in the world, with a vast variety of Apps in its ecosystem that extends functionality to just about anything you can think of.
In fact, there are over 300 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in the Document Generation category alone on the Salesforce AppExchange, each flaunting their own tricks of the trade around document creation. So, picking the right one can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Document Generation software is essential for automating the creation, customization, and distribution of data-driven documents. To assist Salesforce Admins in navigating this terrain, we've created a trusted Buyer’s Guide to serve as your compass through the constantly evolving document generation landscape. In this guide you will learn how these tools can offer AI-powered document automation through cloud-based solutions. Thus, enhancing simplicity, accessibility and scalability - leading to what we all want most... happy customers!
Document Generation
The Document Generation Software Comparison Matrix breaks down the whole space into categories, and shows who uses what App, and what they use it for:
Why Do You Need a Buyer's Guide?
A Buyer’s Guide is useful because the ecosystem of Document Generation Applications is a very confusing space. Some of the reasons this is a hard type of software to get a firm grasp on are as follow:
Categories - There are 4 different Categories of Document Generation software and 18 companies. And it's hard to tell which companies do what exactly in terms of their capabilities. They all use very similar marketing messaging (“Doc Gen Apps will help you be more efficient”), and while it is true that they all help you be more efficient, they all help you do so by doing different things for different users.
Marketing Creep - Sometimes a company that has always focused on one Category starts to do a little tiny bit of another Category, and their marketing materials start saying that they do both categories. Even if a company as big as Ford starts to make boats, they aren’t going to compete with MasterCraft on the open ocean anytime soon (this actually happened, true story). This is pretty common in software in general because the people that do the marketing are told to bring more eyeballs to the site, and they do this by making the product seem relevant to a broader audience.
They All Look the Same - Document Generation software all has something in common. They all have the automation of document creation capabilities. The functionality is all built in an interface where data is displayed on a document along with other functions that allow you to perform different business tasks. There is a lot of feature overlap, but when you dig into the actual workflows, it becomes apparent that these different companies are doing different things for different users on top of documents.
Mergers - Some companies that are in one Category of Document Generation Apps have bought companies that are in another Category, but then they have put them under the same name, when really, they are two separate apps with the same name that you buy together or separately.
We decided to compile a Buyer’s Guide to clear this confusion up and to help IT Teams get where they wanted to go. There is not one App that fills every Document Generation need, so IT teams need to figure out which apps from which categories will help them the most. At MatrixPlace, we’ve been working with Sales and Marketing Teams since 2015, and we’ve seen a ton of them benefit from different types of Document Generation Apps. However, we realized that the Document Generation space was very confusing for an IT leader who is just starting to look at the different types of tools available to them.
After we built a focused version of this analysis for one use case, we decided to make this broader guide to pass on some of what we’ve learned over the years and make it available to everyone. Of course, if you like our analysis here, we’d love for you to take a few minutes to look at what we do at MatrixPlace to support Sales Teams with our Marketing Consulting Services:
Our Methodology for Evaluating Document Generation Apps
We initially did this evaluation as a part of a consulting engagement where a large customer of ours wanted us to do a full analysis of the Document Generation space. We learned a ton about the different tools in the process of doing this research. Our research team reviewed demos of products to actually evaluate the experience from a customer's perspective. We talked directly to our customers about what kinds of Document Generation apps they were using and what their results were. We sifted through publicly available information. We spoke directly with the companies to hear what they had to say about their products and the space. We evaluated review sites to see what other actual users had to say about their experiences and what they had found.
In general, we found that it was impressive how far this space has come since we first started looking at it 10 years ago, and how truly advanced some of the tools are. An IT Team can really get their Document Generation problems solved today. The results through automation that a company can get from these solutions can save them time and money, which in the end means their Sales, Marketing and Operational teams can achieve more. If you don’t give them a Document Generation solution, your team is truly flying blind!
Tips and Tricks to Buying a Document Generation App:
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Understanding Integrations
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Deep-Dive Category Analysis
of Document Generation Apps
Now we begin our in-depth analysis of the different software options available within each of the categories:
Forms and Workflow Automation
Personalized Marketing and Communications Documents
E-Signature and Digital Agreements
1) Document Generation and Automation Apps
Category Summary:
The apps in this category….