Empower your sales teams to seal the deal, wherever they are

Your sales team may not be able to seal deals with a handshake right now. But they can get contracts signed, sealed, and delivered using a range of online tools that are geared for sales teams that are working from home.

Here, we take a look at some of the tips and tools that businesses should consider if they are keen to give remote sales teams every chance of success. The best news? These tools are designed to help sales teams in all working conditions – so even after the current crisis abates, they will still prove to be incredibly useful.

Support instant connectivity and productivity

To support your remote workforce, you need a swathe of tools that enable them to connect and collaborate. Critical business solutions that can be up and running in an instant to support your sales team include:

• File sharing

• Video conferencing

• Project management

• Instant messaging

Tools like these give your employees some direction: there’s a place to store and retrieve documents; a way to communicate in real-time, virtually face-to-face; and visibility into workflows for all members of a team.

Enable electronic signatures 

With remote working the new normal, you need a quick, secure way to get important sales contracts signed without physical contact. Electronic signature solutions give your sales team the ability to send contracts for signature to anyone with an email address. Rather than waste time and money printing, signing, scanning, faxing, and mailing contracts for completion, agreements can be digitally sent and signed from any computer or mobile device.

Docusign electronic signatures are easy to integrate with all of the common productivity tools and platforms, like Microsoft, G Suite, and many others. Once set up, your sales team will be in a much better position to get their agreements signed from anywhere.

Improve your agreement workflow

Beyond electronic signatures, there are other ways you can improve the workflow for all agreements in your sales lifecycle. The Docusign Agreement Cloud is proving a game-changer for remote and flexible workforces – supporting everything from the preparation of sales agreements right through to managing their end-of-life.

At the heart of this is Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), which transforms previously manual (hence, slow and error-prone) processes into automated systems. It’s ideal for sales teams that are on-the-go; need to access and generate agreements fast; and can’t gain access to physical office files. Docusign CLM centrally stores and manages a broad library of contracts – they are stored, tagged, and organised in a single searchable place with granular permission controls, making it easy for remote workers to find exactly what they are looking for.

Give sales teams the tools to amend contracts

Once a contract is generated, changes inevitably occur. A sales rep will negotiate shrewdly with a customer, working through three or four versions of a contract before everyone is ready to sign. In the past, many businesses managed this process manually with tools that aren’t made for the job, like spreadsheets and word documents. Using manual tools, it could take more than 30 hours per contract for sales reps to manage all the versions and approvals.

Docusign Negotiate is another great tool to add to your remote sales team’s arsenal. With this easy-to-use platform, your sales reps can automatically generate agreements from customer, product, and pricing data in Salesforce; and they can collaborate with internal and external reviewers for negotiation and approvals. Everything is tracked centrally, with version control and an audit trail of who did what and when.

Beyond the current lockdown

The tools we have talked about above are incredibly helpful – not just when teams are forced to work remotely due to health crises, but during normal operations, too. Indeed, today’s most successful sales teams are using technologies like these to stay connected, boost transparency, and remove manual processes.