Which B2B Sales Tools Do Sellers Really Need?

As a child, you may have used your pinky to make a promise. Today, we still use our fingers to seal deals, albeit in a greatly evolved fashion. With the click of a mouse, signatures can be signed from virtually anywhere– on nearly any device–with modern technologies.

Those tools aren’t just eliminating the need for hardcopy signatures. They’re vastly changing the way today’s professionals work, creating numerous efficiencies in the process. The digital transformation of the contract process has expanded beyond e-signatures to accelerate the entire contract lifecycle.

Did the pandemic accelerate digital transformation or digital confusion?

Recent events–including the pandemic and permanent shift to hybrid and remote working environments–have only accelerated the shift to online sales. Businesses during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic advanced the digital transformation by three-to-five years by deploying new technology and introducing new sales models to meet customer demands.

Yet more than two years later, sales teams may still be struggling to reach their quota if they’re reluctant to fully embrace new technologies.

Making CRM solutions work harder for your sellers

A Forrester study found that 82% of organizations believe CRMs are a necessary expense, yet, the same Forrester analysis found less than five percent of sellers use all of the CRM stages to manage deals.

It seems that many of the sales tools available aren’t being used by sellers to execute deals because those tools are adding unnecessary steps and pushing sales reps to adapt to unfamiliar technology.

Take a look at the typical contract generation process, sellers often are…

• Searching elsewhere for the right information

• Retyping and reformatting content

• Copying and pasting from outdated systems 

• Adding confusing variables to produce a quote for customers quickly

• Waiting for internal teams, such as legal and finance, to review contracts

• Meeting with clients in the field to handover contracts and waiting for those agreements to be returned without a clear timeline

This makes closing a painfully slow and disorganized process, one that’s rife with opportunity for human error or delay. Not surprisingly, those delays can slow buying cycles, cause poor customer service and hurt the bottom line.

The right approach to B2B sales

Whether you’re hiring a new salesperson or sending an NDA for a new partnership, agreements are everywhere. They are the foundation of every business. With that in mind, it’s time to embrace technology that can actually help sales teams accomplish their goals.

Many sales teams have adopted e-signature technology because it helps them close deals faster, simpler and more cost-efficiently, while delivering a better experience for customers, partners, and employees. These benefits can be extended by connecting e-signature to other stages of the agreement process, such as preparing, acting on and managing agreements.

The Docusign Agreement Cloud has applications and integrations to help sales teams connect and automate the entire sales contract process, from NDA through quote generation to closed won and contract renewal. This allows sales teams to spend less time managing paperwork and more time developing relationships with customers.

By bringing Salesforce CPQ and Docusign CLM together in an integrated workflow, KORE made it possible for internal teams to automatically generate proposals and contracts with a single click. After quotes are built in CPQ, they’re automatically brought over into CLM templates—so sales users can guide deals through to signing with greater accuracy and efficiency. The contract team does a quick quality control check, and standard contracts are out the door in less than an hour.

Read more about the benefits other sales organizations are experiencing with Docusign CLM in the Forrester TEI for CLM Spotlight for Sales.

Simplifying the sales process

Docusign Gen for Salesforce allows sellers to generate error-free quotes, and to send documents for signature directly from Salesforce. Docusign Gen lets sales reps automatically generate professional, customizable agreements with just a few clicks. Customer, product and pricing data can be merged seamlessly into the contract from the Salesforce record. This gives sellers more time to focus on generating leads by eliminating tedious tasks and unnecessary work.

Gen can also include or exclude content based on business rules that reference Salesforce data, such as deal size, product selection or country of sale. The resulting document can be sent for signing with Docusign eSignature (sold separately) and stored back with the opportunity in Salesforce. The entire process can be configured and controlled from Salesforce, saving reps time, eliminating errors, and clearing the path to “Closed-Won.”

Closing the deal means a contract that can get complex fast: customizing the right template, negotiating with the customer, getting through layers of legal approval on both sides, entering data in multiple systems, making sure services are delivered, and on and on. If your sales team needs to centralize your contracts, standardize agreement processes and eliminate busywork with automation, consider getting started with Docusign CLM Essentials, a contract management tool specifically built for growing organizations. It has all the tools your team CLM Essentials is designed to get you started with a CLM solution in weeks not months, offering fast results and the opportunity to expand further if needed.

By automating how you make agreements, you can do business faster, with fewer risks, and lower costs. You can also make life easier for yourself, your employees, and your customers. You can do so by closing deals faster.