Three Tips to Help Your Small Business Thrive

Your small business creates jobs, drives innovation, and supports your community every day. But customers are now expecting the same simple, professional, cohesive buying experience from your smaller shop as they do from larger organisations.

Why? Today, you're much more discoverable through social media and online rating platforms such as Yelp and TrustPilot. And remote work has driven more people to do business online, so you're likely considering digital transformation for your processes and tools.

If you're like most small businesses, you're probably strapped for time and resources, and are always looking for ways to do more with less. Automating many of your processes, like electronic agreement signatures and ID verification, is a step in the right direction.

Taking advantage of online collaboration tools such as Google Meet, and cloud-based invoicing and accounting tools such as QuickBooks Online, can help you efficiently stay in sync and avoid redundant data-entry efforts. These tools can change your small business game to compete in the new socio-economic environment.

Whether you're looking to streamline operations, expand your digital footprint, or simply deliver a better user experience, here are some tips to help you thrive:

1. Build Brand Recognition

Odds are, your company has worked hard to create a professional identity you're proud of. That's smart. People trust brands they recognise. At the end of the day, many decisions consumers make are influenced by emotion, despite best efforts to be logical and practical. By presenting a consistent identity across the customer experience, you make your brand feel more dependable and credible.

A consistent brand look-and-feel can extend to all functions of your business, including contracts, invoices, and other documents. Docusign's Branding feature allows you to showcase your logo and brand colours along the entire agreement process, adding a level of professionalism to your envelopes and emails—without any extra cost or hassle.

When you set up branding in Docusign, your custom brand will replace the default Docusign brand. This customisation applies to all users on your account and every recipient for every envelope sent from the account. With just a few configuration changes, you can reinforce your brand presence and reassure signers that documents sent to them through your Docusign eSignature account are legitimate and originate from your organisation.

2. Automate Manual Tasks

Manual tasks tend to distract from the work you love. Even if you're passionate about getting into the nuts and bolts of processes, why not let digital tools free you up a bit?

Digital tools that automate work not only save time, but also help your business scale and reduce the risk of error. Docusign and QuickBooks offer solutions tailored to small businesses, and are built to take care of backend busywork in a safe, reliable, and compliant manner.

One way to streamline and automate tasks is through the Docusign and QuickBooks Online Advanced integration. Manual tasks associated with preparing estimates are often inefficient and take away from your core mission of serving customers.

If you're already using QuickBooks to manage business accounting, you probably have to wait for signatures and contract approval, which can impact payment and cash flow management. By connecting these functions, you can speed up contract and invoice processes by digitally signing estimates with Docusign eSignature directly from QuickBooks Online Advanced.

3. Foster Better Collaboration

Today, you need to be able to work with employees and customers around the clock and around the world. How can you unlock this capability to fuel growth for your business? By using the power of mobile tools and collaboration platforms.

Customers are constantly on the move, using phones, tablets, and laptops—so you should be able to let them interact from anywhere. Docusign eSignature enables signers to work in the way they prefer, from nearly any place around the world, on almost any device. Docusign automatically transforms the document viewing experience with responsive signing, based on your signer's device type. Also, our top-rated mobile app allows for sending documents for signature, tracking progress, and getting real-time status updates.

Whether you have one or 100 employees, you want them to seamlessly work together to get work done, ideally in one online spot. That's where tools like Google Workspace come in—it's an integrated set of productivity applications that allows your team to work from anywhere, on any device (even offline) to meet your small business's unique needs. Workspace lets employees collaborate with everyday tools like Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, and Drive.

Even better, Docusign integrates with Google Workspace to make it easier to send and sign work documents without leaving Gmail, Docs, or Drive. With the time savings, your employees can focus more on keeping business moving forward and less on managing the agreement process.

While this certainly isn't an exhaustive list to take your small business to the next level, we hope these tips are a good starting point. Want to learn more?