Accelerate your sales cycle by integrating contract management and CPQ

By Caleb Bauers, Commercial Sales, Docusign

In the early stages of growth, most businesses implement a CRM system to give sales departments a unified view into customer data. As companies grow and expand their customer base, contract lifecycle and workflow becomes a more prevalent conversation. Many organizations add an e-signature solution to accelerate what can often be the longest part of the sales process, getting the customer to sign the deal. 

Integrating e-signature into Salesforce can accelerate the sales cycle by as much as 7 days or more. Docusign eSignature for Salesforce allows your reps to automatically pre-populate sales data into contracts, improving productivity, reducing errors and saving significant costs. But it’s not enough. A recent Forrester study commissioned by Docusign found that 56% of sales managers say their quotes are still fully or partially manual and 87% of agreements are still prepared using manual processes.

Configure Price Quote 

As your business  grows, the increased volume and complexity of contracts makes it more and more inefficient to manually quote deals. Many organizations turn to CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software to provide accurate pricing for any given product configuration. With Docusign eSignature for Salesforce CPQ, you can automatically generate quotes and proposals with Salesforce data and quickly send them for signature.  

Contract lifecycle management

Even if you’ve streamlined the quote process with CPQ, there are still things that need to happen before and after the signature. That same study found the most inefficient part of the contract process is finding completed agreements that may be stored in different places throughout the organization.

Contract management tools make it possible to: 

• Automatically generate new contracts with Salesforce data

• Centralize negotiations and redlining

• Create sophisticated workflows across the organization

• Store and search agreements from within Salesforce

A nanotechnology company based in the Bay Area chose Docusign CLM for Salesforce paired with Salesforce CPQ to scale their fast-growing business with customers who traditionally relied on pen and paper.

They initiated their digital transformation journey with Salesforce and Docusign eSignature. The company saw faster turnaround times, but their agreement generation was still largely manual, and completed contracts were typically stored on sales reps’ hard drives. They needed a solution that would give them a more standardized process and provide better visibility and security across the lifecycle of their contracts. With Docusign CLM they not only eliminated the manual creation of contracts, but also gained additional oversight and control by centralizing contract storage. As a result of implementing Docusign CLM for Salesforce, they saw a 45% increase in agreements processed per sales representative.

Learn more about how your organization can reduce contract lifecycle times and errors and increase renewal rates with Docusign CLM for Salesforce.