Salesforce and Docusign Accelerate Quote to Contract

From the initial NDA through quote generation to negotiation to the final sales contract, the B2B sales process is more complex and competitive than ever. Larger buying teams with greater buying power have higher expectations for their sales experience. Sales reps are expected to be trusted advisors, with insight into other functions within the company—including service and finance—and they must satisfy customers who expect a high degree of personalization, similar to B2C sales.

All of this contributes to longer sales cycles, especially if organizations are managing their quote-to-cash processes as disjointed functions. Sales organizations can no longer be successful with solo sellers reaching out to various parts of the organization to find contract details, customize quotes, negotiate, and obtain approvals. Instead, it takes one selling team, and one integrated contract management solution to deliver on buyers’ expectations, automate workflows, and ultimately accelerate the sales cycle.

An integrated contract lifecycle management solution has a direct impact on the success of your sales team--and the profits of your business.

Scalable contract lifecycle management for sales

Flexential, a company that delivers secure and compliant IT infrastructure services, saw the need to modernize firsthand. Faced with separate legacy quoting and contract management systems, sales reps were struggling to customize complex quotes with the right products and terms. Negotiations were slow and painful. Data was decentralized in an unstructured and complicated file share, and getting completed contract data where it needed to be was manual and error-prone. Systems were disconnected, and they needed to connect their agreement processes into Salesforce, where their sales team lived. As a fast-growing organization, they knew they needed a better way to manage complex agreements with an automated process to enable the business to scale.

They needed an all-in-one solution that could make the sales contract process more centralized, accessible, and transparent. 

Manage contract workflows within Salesforce

There are myriad B2B sales technology options, which can be both advantageous and overwhelming to sales leaders. That’s why it’s critical to grasp the totality of what your sales organization needs. For Flexential, they needed a better way to manage complex agreements through the sales process and connect with systems they already used, like Salesforce and ServiceNow. 

By connecting Docusign eSignature and CLM with Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ, Flexential now launches legal document workflows from within Salesforce, and content that is created in Docusign CLM is visible in Salesforce. Having on-demand information in one place empowers the Flexential customer team with an up-to-date status of documents and requires significantly less administrative effort. 

Simplifying quote-to-cash operations

Flexential sought a contract management solution that would pull in data to eliminate data entry and kickoff workflows from integrated systems. It needed to be simple enough that they wouldn’t need to bring in much developer support, and it needed to help their quote-to-cash ops team reduce their level of effort so that they could focus on higher-value activities. 

Generating complex documents and orchestrating multifaceted workflows isn’t complicated for Flexential anymore. A simple user interface helps the requestor create content and customize sending options to deliver a more personalized customer experience. On the backend, Flexential leverages Docusign’s workflow builder to automate their complex agreement processes across contributors, reviewers, and approvers.

Business process changes made easy

New workflows maintain full visibility and control throughout the review and signature processes, providing critical business insights. With the drag-and-drop workflow builder, they’re able to make business process changes as often as they need to—and almost entirely without developer support.

Centralizing, simplifying and streamlining processes, and enabling governance with the ability to accelerate change has meant a better experience for the sales team and, most importantly, customers.

The impact of Docusign and Salesforce

Flexential transformed their B2B sales processes and experienced a 25% faster sales cycle, zero document errors, 75% fewer manual transactions. 80% of the Quote-to-Cash Ops teams’ time is now focused on higher-value activities. They eliminated the risk of losing contracts, substantially increased partner sales, and can now keep on top of upcoming renewals.