4 Ways Technology Can Accelerate Your Sales Cycle

By Caleb Bowers, Commercial Sales, DocuSign

The most successful sales teams leverage technology to accelerate the sales process. So it makes sense that digital leaders drive 5x more revenue growth than their peers according to McKinsey. Regardless of where you are in the digital transformation journey though, every sales organization should have a strategy in place to leverage new technologies.

Early in the digital journey, it’s a challenge to determine which area to “digitize” first. Should the focus be on the front-end of the sales process like adding robust CRM tools or does it make sense to focus on operational sales workflows around billing experience and invoice management?

To overcome this prioritization challenge, we have distilled several best practices for a range of company sizes (from small businesses to the Fortune 100) in the whitepaper, "Eight Digital Best Practices for Sales Professionals."

Here are the top ways technology can help accelerate sales:

Look for paperless opportunities in core tasks 

Paper-intensive sales procedures dramatically increase conversion time and burden your operations team with additional manual steps. While your sales team may have implemented some digital capabilities, are there other areas in the workflow that are still manual? There are always opportunities to digitize wherever you find paper - the more, the better. 

Here are just a few key sales agreements that can be completed faster using e-signature:

  • Client-facing sales documents (NDA, contracts)
  • Sales operations forms (Order Authorizations), 
  • Partner and channel sales agreements (Distribution Agreements, Referral Agreements).

Increase sales funnel visibility

Without accurate and time-sensitive insight into your sales funnel, your business will not be able to accurately predict budgets and build effective strategy. Tools such as CRM and electronic signature help with visibility into the status of deals and customer pipeline, resulting in reliable forecasts for leadership.

Identify revenue friction points

With up to 50% of a sales rep’s time spent on administrative tasks, too much time is spent not selling. It’s critical to find the most time-consuming tasks for these teams and add digital tools that can replace and automate cumbersome, repetitive responsibilities, get you to revenue faster, and give you a leg up on the competition.

Learn from best practices in consumer business

The convenient experiences we have in our daily lives as consumers—online shopping, returns and multi-channel customer support—are setting a new bar for expectations in the business worlds. Look for ways to mimic consumer services’ best practices, because this is increasingly what business buyers expect.

Comcast Business put many of these best practices into action to improve customer experience and save time.

With a large outside field sales team utilizing tablets for mobile operations, Comcast found they still had steps that required reps returning to the office to prepare and print contracts for customers. These additional steps not only increased customer conversion time but also increased costs for printing, faxing, scanning, and filing these contracts.They needed a solution that could cut down on these expenses and enable their sales teams to be completely mobile. 

To modernize, they implemented a robust electronic signature solution that allowed their reps to complete customer agreements in-person in seconds instead of weeks. Much of this benefit was due to the ability to meet with a customer, draw up a proposal and contract right there, and then sign on the tablet in just one meeting. Adding eSignature empowered the sales team to become 100% mobile.

Where is your team in the digital transformation journey? Whether you are just getting started, or fine tuning, the digital practices outlined in our whitepaper are valuable for completing your transformation. Read all eight best practices in full detail in our whitepaper.

Learn more about Comcast’s digital sales transformation here.

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