2) The ‘Retail Spin’ on Doc Gen
Document Generation Podcast Series
Episode 2 of 4: The ‘Retail Spin’ on Document Generation
Watch Podcast Episode on YouTube (here)
Podcast Transcript
Introduction:
In this second chapter of the Document Generation series, the host, Preston Hurd is going to be telling real world stories about Retailers illustrating each of the four categories of Doc Gen for Salesforce.
We’ve also created a complete corresponding Buyers Guide to Document Generation for Salesforce (here) on our website.
It begins with Document Generation Automation where Nike automates B2B sales proposals and Best Buy streamlines partner onboarding through Salesforce driven workflows. Next is Electronic Signature and Digital Agreements featuring ASOS and Sephora who use eSignature tools to manage influencer contracts and employee onboarding. The third category, Forms and Workflow Automation, spotlights Patagonia, which automates nonprofit grant applications. And Zara, which uses forms to manage customer feedback and returns. Finally, in Enterprise Content Management, Target centralizes vendor contracts for compliance while Nordstrom manages marketing assets and cross team content collaboration.
So grab your cup of coffee and get ready for some rich strategies that are brewed for Retail - but can be served up to any industry.
Body:
Preston, let's get started with the first category. Take it from here...
Let's dive right into it.
Within Doc Gen we've got Document Generation Automation, the closest aligned category to Document Generation. And let's look at a couple of different stories. Let's look at one brand and let's look at one retailer, right?
Because you've got brands that sell OEM manufacturers, vendors that sell to retailers. So let's look at Nike as a brand. Nike sells its shoes across a bunch of retailers, right? So Nike, how would they do this?
Nike has a B2B business to business sales team, and this sales team manages literally thousands of wholesale accounts globally across all of their sales reps. And these reps that could be manually creating custom product order forms, you know, seasonal pricing proposals, etc.
For each regional distributor that they're selling to B2B, Now with document Generation integrated within Salesforce, remember we're talking about Salesforce - can with a click of a button automatically generate tailored custom looking personalized sales proposals, order confirmations populated with all their latest pricing product SKUs, account terms, etc.
So that's one example. Retailers, right, take an electronics retailer, take Best Buy. Best Buy has an online marketplace, they with their E commerce marketplace. So now we're talking about the.com side of best Buy, not the brick and mortar - works with hundreds of third party electronics sellers.
And what Account Managers used to do is manually draft these partner agreements, onboarding guides for each of them, monthly sales performance summaries for each seller, and now with Document Generation they're able to take their Salesforce data again and then automatically generate customized packets, onboarding packets that have sales reports, that have renewal contracts and then each one of these is dynamically pulling in seller specific product SKUs, revenue data, compliance terms, etc.
through Doc Gen and automation of Doc Gen specifically. All right, the next category two, eSignature - So ASOs don't know if you've heard of them, they are really, I would say beyond emerging as far as a fashion brand to the younger demographic, that's really who they focus on.
And they're always partnering with other fashion brands and influencers as well. And back when I was working at Yahoo, before this I actually went to a really cool ASOS store.
It was a pop up store where they did this. They, they were actually within a Nordstrom at this mall. It was really a neat outdoor mall, where there was a Nordstrom in Los Angeles, it was called The Grove. If you're ever in LA, I highly recommend you go there.
They had some really unique concepts bringing in DJs and music and custom embroidery and all that to reach a younger Gen Z demographic within this ASOS / Nordstrom store. And just like this example of ASOS and Nordstrom coming together and signing some sort of digital partnership agreement, I'm sure they did, or licensing contract or something along those lines they need an array of documents with influencers, they need NDAs for example.
And all of these things happen with eSignature. So ASOS automates the whole sending, signing, storing of these agreements, all these partner agreements, allowing partners worldwide literally to quickly review, sign contracts all from their mobile device.
And then Marketing and Legal teams can track signature status in real time, ensure campaigns to launch on schedule without chasing paperwork across time zones. All because that's buttoned up through an eSignature process. So there's one example, another, another fashion retailer is within the beauty category, Sephora.
Let's look at Sephora opening up a new store. So across all these different regions they're doing new store openings. When they do that they need to hire dozens of associates and their HR team in particular needs to streamline that process.
So they do that with digital offer letters and onboarding paperwork through automated workflows and eSignatures as a part of that process where candidates can review sign documents right on their mobile device and then HR can track the completion status in real time, eliminating any delays, bringing everybody in quicker without the formerly paper-based contracts.
Scan a PDF, send it in and that helps them open new stores faster and staff their stores with a bunch of new people. It's new store people, seasonal people, whatever it may be. Third category, Forms and Workflow Automation.
Here's a brand - Patagonia collects a lot of grant applications from other nonprofit partners that work in these environmental initiatives and they use a form automation platform to do that. So the brand built this online grant application form feed and it feeds directly into Salesforce from the data on the form and then each app is tagged, routed for review, structured for the reporting without any manual data entry.
It's all an automated workflow process. From these forms it can notify reviewers when submissions are ready and then trigger different status updates or other workflows to the applicants. Totally streamlining the process of grant making and improving the applicant experience as well from a transparency standpoint.
Another example of Forms Workflow Automation - Zara is a fast fashion retail subsidiary, Spanish company of a bigger retailing group and it's the Zara brand. They have their own brand, they don't sell other brands.
I don't know if you're familiar with them or not, but they have an E Commerce division that streamlined customer feedback and the issue resolution process specifically with form automation. So a customer submits a return request or a product quality complaint comes in, it's the wrong size or defective or whatever it may be, automatically that creates a Salesforce case and then routes it to the correct team for the correct action for follow up.
So you can trigger an automatic follow up Email, satisfaction surveys are triggered automatically in this form driven workflow reduces the customer's wait time. The customer is happy, they're getting better service. It gets rid of feedback loops over and over again and then improves the whole post purchase experience.
Fourth category, Enterprise Content Management. And I'm flying through these - Target. One of the biggest mass market retailers. We became a vendor of record and we submitted all this paperwork. Well that's all changed. It's now. these vendor contracts are all stored in a centralized Doc platform called an Enterprise Content Management platform.
Target can ensure that all these are stored securely and they're searchable. So keywords you can search, expiration dates you can search. It's a secure repository where Legal can look up when's the renewal, what are the terms?
It's only accessible to certain parties, so maybe just certain people within Legal that are overseeing that particular division. And so there's a lot of compliance things to consider there. And it's robust, it takes all that into account. All of these agreements, these vendor agreements are centralized, but there's more to it than that.
Within Enterprise Content Management you can have product image assets, you can have marketing usage rights within the ECM system. Nordstrom, which does a lot of advertising, anything in the apparel beauty categories does a lot of advertising and it's E commerce and in store teams have access to the latest approved content.
Product teams can quickly locate things for seasonal lookbooks that they're creating. Marketing teams can pull licensed brand imagery, think about advertising and wanting to create a lookbook for a certain season. And through Enterprise Content Management, Nordstrom can have role-based access and controls across very sensitive vendor specific contracts.
And all of the creative teams can work efficiently as well, to be able to have creative content for their advertising, across departments through Enterprise Content Management. Really making that a fast, seamless process to give whichever department what they need when they need it and the right access to do their jobs.
Hopefully for each of these four categories. Me just running quickly through all these retailer and brand examples was helpful to see in the real world how these different aspects of Doc Gen are used.
Conclusion:
Thanks Preston for putting that “Retail Spin” on Doc Gen.
It really helps our listeners to better understand the software. And up next we've got a quick deep-dive on the sub-category Document Generation Automation, really breaking down the tech. So be sure to check that out next.
And thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Filtered Brew podcast. We hope you enjoyed the Retail stories and took away some insights that you can apply to your own digital strategy and within your own industry. Be sure to visit TheFilteredBrew.com - it's the place to go for the latest software tech insights and where you can find more episodes and additional resources.
If you liked what you heard, don't forget to follow, rate and share the show. It really helps us grow and reach more listeners like you. This has been the Filtered Brew Podcast where conversations are crafted, refined and brewed to perfection.
Catch you in the next Deep-Dive episode and keep those ideas percolating.
YouTube Video Chapters:
[Music]
0:24 Introduction
0:24 Hello. Get ready for some tech talk over coffee where we filter through the latest digital tech one sip at a time. Welcome to the Filtered Brew, a tech podcast all about software. Your host is digital consultant Preston Hurd. So join us for a cup of coffee and let's get into what's brewing on today's menu. In this second chapter of the Document Generation series, the host Preston Hurd is going to be telling real world stories about retailers illustrating each of the four categories of DocGen for Salesforce. We've also created a complete buyer’s guide on our website, so we'll be sure to include a link to that in the podcast description. It begins with document generation automation where Nike automates B2B sales proposals and Best Buy streamlines partner onboarding through Salesforce driven workflows. Next is electronic signature and digital agreements featuring ASOS and Sephora who use e- signature tools to manage influencer contracts and employee onboarding. The third category, forms and workflow automation spotlights Patagonia, which automates nonprofit grant applications, and Zara, which uses forms to manage customer feedback and returns. Finally, in enterprise content management, Target centralizes vendor contracts for compliance, while Nordstrom manages marketing assets and cross team content collaboration. So grab your cup of coffee and get ready for some rich strategies that are brewed for retail but can be served up to any industry.
2:20 Body
2:20 Preston, let's get started with the first category. Take it from here.
2:26 Let's dive right into it. Within Docgen, we've got document generation automation, the closest aligned category to document generation. And let's look at a couple of different stories. Let's look at one brand and let's look at one retailer, right? Because you've got brands that sell OEM manufacturers, vendors that sell to retailers.
2:51 So, let’s look at Nike as a brand. Nike sells its shoes across a bunch of retailers, right? So Nike, how would they do this?
3:02 Nike has a B-2B business-to business sales team. And this sales team manages literally thousands of wholesale accounts globally across all of their sales reps. And these reps that could be manually creating custom product order forms, you know, seasonal pricing proposals, etc. for each regional distributor that they're selling to B2B.
3:28 Now with document generation integrated within Salesforce, remember we're talking about Salesforce can with a click of a button automatically generate tailored custom looking personalized sales proposals, order confirmations populated with all their latest pricing, product SKs, account terms, etc. So that's one example. Uh retailers, right?
3:53 Take an electronics retailer. Take Best Buy. Best Buy has an online marketplace. They with their e-commerce marketplace. So now we're talking about the dot com side of Best Buy, not the brick and mortar, works with hundreds of third-party electronics sellers.
4:13 And what account managers used to do is manually draft these partner agreements, onboarding guides for each of them, monthly sales performance summaries for each seller. And now with Document Generation, they're able to take their Salesforce data again and then automatically generate customized packets, onboarding packets that have sales reports that have renewal contracts. And then each one of these is dynamically pulling in seller specific product SKUs, revenue data, compliance terms, etc. through Doc Gen and automation of docs specifically.
4:53 All right, the next category two, e signature. So ASOS, don't know if you've heard of them. they are really I would say beyond emerging as far as a a fashion brand to the younger demographic. That's really who they focus on. And they're always partnering with other fashion brands and influencers as well. And back when I was working at Yahoo before this, I actually went to a really cool ASOS store. It was a pop-up store where did this. They they were actually within a Nordstrom at this mall. It was really a neat outdoor mall where there was a Nordstrom in Los Angeles. It was called "The Grove. If you're ever in LA, I highly recommend you go there. They had some really unique concepts. bringing in DJs and music and custom embroidery and all that to reach a younger Gen Z demographic within this ASOS Nordstrom store.
6:03 And just like this example of ASOS and Nordstrom coming together and signing some sort of digital partnership agreement, I'm sure they did, or licensing contract or something along those lines. They need an array of documents with influencers. They need NDAs for example and all of these things happen with e signature. So ASOS automates the whole sending, signing, storing of these agreements, all these partner agreements allowing partners worldwide literally to quickly review sign contracts all from their mobile device. And then marketing and legal teams can track signature status in real time, ensure campaigns to launch on schedule without chasing paperwork across time zones, all because that's buttoned up through an e signature process. So there's one example.
6:56 Another fashion retailer is within the beauty category, Sephora. Let's look at Sephora opening up a new store. So across all these different regions, they're doing new store openings. When they do that, they need to hire dozens of associates and their HR team in particular needs to streamline that process. So they do that with digital offer letters and onboarding paperwork through automated workflows and e signatures as a part of that process where candidates can review sign documents right on their mobile device and then HR can track the completion status in real time eliminating any delays bringing everybody in quicker without the formerly paperbased contract. scan a PDF, send it in, and that helps them open new stores faster and staff their stores with a bunch of new people. It's new store people, seasonal people, whatever it may be.
7:56 Third category - Forms and Workflow Automation.
8:02 Here's a brand. Patagonia
collects a lot of grant applications from other nonprofit partners that work in these environmental initiatives and they use a form automation platform to do that. So the brand built this online grant application form feed and it feeds directly into Salesforce from the data on the form and then each app is tagged routed for review structured for the reporting without any manual data entry.
8:34 It's all an automated workflow process from these forms. It can notify reviewers when submissions are ready and then trigger different status updates or other workflows to the applicants totally streamlining the process of grant making and improving the applicant experience as well from a transparency standpoint.
8:58 Another example of Forms Workflow Automation. Zara is a fast fashion retail subsidiary, Spanish company of a bigger retailing group. And it's the Zara brand. They have their own brand. They don't sell other brands. I don't know if you're familiar with them or not, but they have an e-commerce division that streamlined customer feedback and the issue resolution process specifically with form automation. So, a customer submits a return request or a product quality complaint comes in, it's the wrong size or defective or whatever it may be.
9:38 Automatically, that creates a Salesforce case and then routes it to the correct team for the correct action for follow-up. So, you can trigger an automatic follow-up email. Satisfaction surveys are triggered automatically. And this form-driven workflow reduces the customer's wait time. The customer is happy. they're getting better service.
9:59 It gets rid of feedback loops over and over again and then improves the whole post purchase experience.
10:07 Fourth category, Enterprise Content Management. And I'm flying through these Target. Uh one of the biggest mass
market retailers. We became a vendor of record and we submitted all this paperwork. Well, that's all changed. Now these vendor contracts are all stored in a centralized doc platform called an enterprise content management platform. Target can ensure that all these are stored securely and they're searchable. So keywords you can search, expiration dates you can search.
10:39 It's a secure repository where legal can look up when's the renewal, what are the terms. it's only accessible to certain parties. So maybe just certain people within legal that are overseeing that particular division.
10:55 And so there's a lot of compliance things to consider there. And it it's robust. It takes all that into account.
11:03 All of these agreements, these vendor agreements are centralized.
11:08 But there's more to it than that. Within enterprise content management, you can have product image assets. You can have marketing usage rights within the ECM system.
11:20 Nordstrom which does a lot of advertising. Uh anything in the apparel beauty categories does a lot of advertising and its e-commerce and instore teams have access to the latest approved content. Product teams can quickly locate things for seasonal lookbooks that they're creating. Marketing teams can pull licensed brand imagery. Think about advertising and wanting to create a lookbook for, you know, a certain season. And through enterprise content management, Nordstrom can have role-based access and controls across very sensitive vendor specific contracts. and all of the creative teams can work efficiently as well to be able to have creative content for their advertising uh across departments through enterprise content management.
12:15 Really making that a fast seamless process to give whichever department what they need when they need it and the right access to do their jobs. Hopefully for each of these four categories, me just running quickly through all these retailer and brand examples was helpful to see in the real world how these different aspects of DocGen are used.
12:42 Conclusion
12:42 Thanks Preston for putting that retail spin on Doc Gen. It really helps our listeners to better understand the software. And up next, we've got a quick deep dive on the subcategory Document Generation Automation. really breaking down the tech. So, be sure to check that out next. And thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Filtered Brew podcast. We hope you enjoyed the retail stories and took away some insights that you can apply to your own digital strategy and within your own industry. Be sure to visit the filteredbrew.com. It's the place to go for the latest software tech insights and where you can find more episodes and additional resources. If you liked what you heard, don't forget to follow, rate, and share the show. It really helps us grow and reach more listeners like you. This has been The Filtered Brew Podcast, where conversations are crafted, refined, and brewed to perfection. Catch you in the next deep dive episode and keep those ideas percolating.
