Tech trends, transformations and a true partnership between Docusign and Salesforce

The business world is moving at breakneck speed right now. It’s hurtling toward a truly digital future, with no going back. And those keeping pace – from tech startups to stalwarts – have some great stories to tell.

To capture and share some of these stories, Docusign recently hosted a webinar in partnership with Salesforce that explored the role of technology in driving change. Here’s our quick recap on the key themes coming out of it – if you’re keen, you can always catch up on the full event on-demand.

Stories of resilience out of Covid-19

We love a silver lining. If there’s one good thing that’s come out of the global pandemic – apart from our collective obsession with baking – it’s the innovation we’ve seen in small business. Steph Palmer-Derrien, from SmartCompany, was our first speaker in the webinar and she certainly agrees. Steph has her finger on the pulse of all things new and innovative in the startup and SMB space, always following tech trends and tracking how small businesses use technology to elevate their business.

“It’s been a really interesting 12 to 18 months. We’ve had this huge shift to digital in all aspects of business. For example, there has been huge eCommerce growth in retail. Elsewhere, there’s been the shift to remote work,” said Steph.

To illustrate this shift, Steph shared some great examples of businesses that are using technology to thrive. There was the sweet shop, aptly called Sticky, which embraced TikTok during a lockdown to share Willy Wonker-esque clips of its sugar spinning magic. These clips captured the world’s attention and the business is now a global success story.

Another great example of adaptive innovation coming out of Covid-19 was an app called Spriggy. When Covid caused cash to become a dirty word – after all, who wanted to handle germy bank notes – Spriggy came along to help parents keep up with pocket-money payments to kids. Brilliant.

Tech is driving the change

As the examples above show, technology is the key driver of change. One of our next guests was Merlin Luck, who heads up SMB at Salesforce. “We’re seeing an unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship right now, and the move to digital business models is accelerating,” he said.

Merlin shared some interesting stats to help highlight this shift:

• Over 60% of consumer interactions are now digital, up from 40% a year ago

• Successful growth businesses are 38% more likely to have tech underpinning customer acquisition, and 33% more likely to have tech underpinning employee productivity, than stagnant ones

Yet some still have work to do in moving from semi-stagnation to success. The issue for many businesses, Merlin thinks, is that they face a “Frankenstein complexity” of apps and tools that prevents them from the holy grail: a single view of customer. To become the type of entrepreneurial businesses that thrives in today’s fast changing world, it’s more important than ever to consolidate and centralise systems and processes.

Together, Docusign and Salesforce make it possible

This is where partnerships like that between Salesforce and Docusign shine. Together, we help businesses do things faster, easier and smarter than ever. For example, on the Salesforce AppExchange, businesses can browse thousands of trusted apps, and add them to a unified platform that offers a single source of truth.

We’re pretty proud of the fact that Docusign is the third most popular app on the AppExchange, and we reckon it’s because our Docusign Agreement Cloud is so helpful in the pursuit of tech transformation.

As Merlin said, “Think about all the agreements you have with your customers, whether contracts, orders or co-marketing agreements. You can create seamless, frictionless interactions with them, but connect it all back to a single view of customer. Ultimately, you’re not only improving the customer experience but also the productivity and efficiency of your business.”

Sound good to you?  

If you’re interested in tech transformation and love hearing stories of those who are getting it right, then you might want to listen to the full webinar.