PandaDoc Announces Its Add-on Store

PandaDoc, a provider of proposal and contract management software, today launched its Add-on Store, a marketplace where companies can select extensions that allow them to customize transactional documents. According to Mikita Mikado, PandaDoc's CEO, the Add-on Store will allow for smoother integrations with a company's legacy technologies, including CRM, ERP, payment processing, and industry-specific systems.

Running on an open-source, HTML format, PandaDoc's document automation platform is designed to speed up the sales process by giving sales professionals access to the contract materials they need during the late stages of the customer buying cycle, offering document creation, analytics, configure-price-quote (CPQ), and e-signatures in one package.

However, "the thing about transactions is that there are a lot of elements that are embedded," Mikado says. "Different companies have different CPQ modules, price configuration logic, different workflows—different parts of the transactional document, [and] different payment process systems." Some companies might require signature authentication capabilities, for instance, and others might need industry-specific qualifications within the documents they send to customers.

With Add-ons, users can configure PandaDoc's applications to meet the needs of various departments, as well as the types of projects each is undertaking. For instance, Mikado points out that a bank might wish to check a customer's credit score within an application for a card. If the bank has a module within its CRM system that measures credit scores, it can embed the module within the document so that when the application is sent, a client can enter his information and be approved or rejected on the spot.  

"With the introduction of the Add-on Store, we are making a strategic move towards becoming a developer ecosystem," Mikado said in a statement. "The Add-on store will significantly expand our offerings, allowing us to deliver add-ons created by third-party developers."

Mikado emphasizes that the goal for PandaDoc is to expand its ecosystem and ultimately do for document automation what Salesforce.com did for sales automation, or what Marketo and HubSpot did for marketing automation. He notes that PDF products are not designed for the types of improvements a platform allows for. "That’s our competitive advantage," Mikado says.

"PandaDoc's are Web applications," Mikado adds. "So as long as you have an app that outputs HTML—which is almost every app out there—you can embed your app into PandaDoc."

According to Mikado, third-party developers will help solve some of the industry- and vertical-specific challenges that companies face. Over the next two quarters, PandaDoc will be releasing add-ons and modules for payment processing applications such as Stripe. The vendor's long-term plans are to collaborate with developers to support a range of complex CPQ modules, enable authentications, and analyze the content within documents.    

All add-ons are free to subscribers of PandaDoc's Enterprise plan. But "there's a difference between the enterprise subscription and the basic subscription," Mikado says. "Moving forward, I can imagine us enabling our add-ons that are going to cost extra, and third-party add-ons that will cost extra."

PandaDoc's document automation platform integrates with Google Apps and Documents, in addition to various CRM and marketing automation systems, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle, SugarCRM, Base CRM, SugarCRM, Insightly, and HubSpot.

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