4 digital tools that will make your sales teams more successful

For most companies, the sales team are the primary source of growth. Finding ways to make your sales teams more successful can then drive improved profitability.

If you want your sales team to succeed, it’s essential to make agreement processes run as smoothly as possible.

Make your sales teams more successful

The sales team have several responsibilities as part of the sales agreement process. These include building a rapport with customers, preparing contracts and closing deals. Many processes that are associated with sales teams are still manual.

A new study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Docusign, The State of Systems of Agreement 2019 confirms sales teams need to improve agreement processes to improve overall performance.

In this article, we look at four digital tools that will help to automate processes and make your sales team more successful.

1. Electronic signature

Today, hundreds of thousands of organisations worldwide have adopted the number one eSignature tool, Docusign eSignature. Docusign eSignature is part of the Docusign Agreement Cloud™. Up to 82% of agreements are signed in less than a day with eSignature.

The technology allows sales teams to send sales contracts anywhere in the world from virtually any device. Sales teams can work on the go, even if they don’t have internet access. It also lets the team track where their agreements are in the sales process, making the whole signature and approval process faster and more secure.

2. CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management)

If you’re serious about sales, you need CLM. Docusign CLM gives you exposure to the sales that are going through your business. After all, you don’t want to lose out on lack of visibility or delays. CLM also helps reduce sales dependence on legal during negotiation, thanks to an easily accessible library of pre-approved contract clauses.

There’s only so far you can go without it.

In the Forrester State of Systems of Agreement 2019 research, 54% of businesses report having a good level of integration between their business systems. The other 46% of companies are still spending significant time manually inputting information from one system to another.

Sales teams can experience a lack of integration at every stage of the agreement cycle and they often waste time by rekeying information or using outdated contract templates. The advantage of using Docusign CLM is that it’s rich with integrations and APIs that allow contract tasks to take place within the tools your sales team already use.

The tool can also pull in data to generate preconfigured template agreements and it auto-populates contracts with data from other systems.

With Docusign CLM, sales teams can automate manual work, saving time and reducing dependency on legal. It also helps reduce contract errors and risk.

Legal and compliance teams can create an easily accessible library of pre-approved clauses and options for non-legal users to leverage during negotiation. Sales teams can also send contracts for review and track changes across multiple versions. It allows both teams to see who did what and when.

49% of Forrester research respondents currently have trouble finding and managing their agreements and verifying they are secure.

With Docusign CLM you can store, tag and organise all contracts in a single, searchable place.

It also allows teams to create workflows based on stored contracts metadata, for example, renewal reminders. Renewal reminders help to maximise the success of the renewals process.

3. Document generation

Docusign Gen for Salesforce is an excellent tool for small and medium-sized businesses as it lets you automatically generate polished agreements directly from Salesforce records, with just one click from an opportunity. Saving sales team members valuable time that can be focused on sales tasks instead of administration.

When your ability to generate documents is automated, intuitive and self-serviced, your ability to do business is much faster.

Learn more about Docusign Gen for Salesforce:

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4. Redlining tool

If you don’t have the right tools to do contract redlining in a live document, during the editing and negotiation process, you’re losing time. You’re also risking inaccuracy. Redlining is an important phase and it’s the best solution for mitigating risk. Any errors at this stage in the process can alter the meaning of the contract and cost your company further down the line.

Docusign Negotiate for Salesforce enables sales teams to send contracts for review and approval, directly through Salesforce. Docusign Negotiate for Salesforce bridges the gap between generating a document and sending it out for signature. Reviewers can collaborate directly, and changes are automatically detected and appear as redlines. The entire version history of the contract is tracked, allowing sales teams to identify any bottlenecks and look for opportunities for optimisation.

Many sales organisations suffer friction needlessly, because their current process for document generation, negotiation and approval is entirely manual through email and Microsoft word edits.

Automating the agreement process with digital tools can increase productivity for sales reps and lead to better job satisfaction.

The streamlined process can also accelerate the time to close deals. Automation can free up time for your sales team to ensure that they can focus on generating new leads, following up inbound enquiries, and ensuring existing clients receive first-class customer service.

Help your sales team spend less time on paperwork and more time selling.

Docusign can help companies of all sizes by automating processes with the Docusign Agreement Cloud.