Modern business today moves lightning fast, with information zipping through the internet as soon as you hit the send button. Customers love the speed and ease of electronic transactions. Two-thirds of B2B buyers surveyed say they’ll choose remote interactions or digital self-service over face-to-face meetings.
Yet even in this digital age, paperwork — you know, words printed on actual paper — persists. Many organizations insist on hard copies of sales contracts or wet signatures — a physical signature on a piece of paper — to finalize a deal.
Let’s face it: traditional sales methods and reams of paperwork just don’t cut it anymore. Newer technologies such as e-signatures let you improve sales efficiency in your daily workflow and gain an edge in the marketplace.
Barriers to Sales Efficiency
In any vertical, it’s already hard enough to close a sale. The last thing you need is to add more obstacles to this difficult process by resisting digitization. A few potential documentation pitfalls can slow down your sales team or even kill a major deal.
Disorganized Salespeople
With so much on their plate, it’s no wonder that salespeople today feel disorganized. Keeping track of paperwork and appointments is a lot of work, and juggling several documents at one time between several teams means a greater possibility of missed opportunities, delays, or lost contracts.
Lack of Process and Documentation
A fast-moving work environment can make it difficult to slow down enough to create sales process best practices, much less document them. Yet without documented processes, everyone on the sales team ends up doing their own thing. It’s vital to have processes and follow them, especially if your industry has extra legal requirements you have to meet, like including certain disclosures in your contracts.
Poor Follow-Up or Inconsistent Communication
A poorly documented sales process leads to an inadequate system for following up and communicating with prospects and customers, making it hard to build trust and nurture client relationships. Inadequate follow-up can also result in a contract sitting in someone’s inbox for weeks or months, delaying the completion of a deal.
The Importance of Technology in Sales Efficiency
Technology has revolutionized how all industries do business. It empowers salespeople to connect and engage with customers efficiently, drives lead generation, improves e-commerce and online sales channels, and enables better data tracking and data-driven insights.
While countless technologies can improve sales efficiency, e-signatures have been a game changer across the board. Here are seven ways that e-signatures can transform your sales efficiency metrics.
7 Ways E-Signature Transforms Sales Efficiency
- Eliminates process friction — E-signatures cut out the need for physical paperwork and streamline the signing process making it faster to close a deal. This reduced friction eliminates potential bottlenecks that might lead to a frustrated customer or a lost deal.
- Enables customers to sign from anywhere, on any device — The convenience of e-signatures gives salespeople the ability to expand beyond their local territory and provide a seamless, efficient customer experience.
- Automates follow-ups and reminders — E-signature software that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform makes it easy to automate emails and reminders so you can keep deals on track, rather than waiting for that one party who “meant to do it later but forgot.” These help salespeople stay in touch with prospects and keep warm leads warm.
- Provides templates for the sales team — Your e-signature software should have customizable templates to help speed up document creation and ensure the accuracy of all contracts and enclosures while providing consistent branding across all documents. Software that supports dynamic content allows you to further customize your templates by choosing or excluding clauses or components from your own content library.
- Pulls in data from Salesforce — When you use the Salesforce platform, it makes sense to use e-signature software that’s built on the same CRM that your salespeople use. Software such as S-Sign is already integrated with Salesforce and lets you pull key details into contracts automatically, with no copy or paste required. Having Salesforce autofill the fields speeds up contract creation, so your document is done and ready to sign in record time.
- Reduces typos and errors — Mistakes in a sales contract can result in disputes and even lost sales. E-signature software that automatically completes fields will improve accuracy and reduce typos and other errors while projecting a professional image for salespeople and your organization.
- Gets your contract out faster — All parties appreciate efficiency and speed at the end of a deal. With e-signature software to automate signature collection, you can expedite the signing process to get your contract out the door faster.
A Simple, Modern E-Signature Solution
Embracing technology isn’t an option — it’s a necessity in today’s business environment. Your customers expect you to accelerate and simplify the sales cycle into a fast, frictionless experience. Give your salespeople an edge with automation to boost your sales efficiency and document creation and make it easier and faster to execute documents and close sales, all while tracking sales efficiency metrics.
E-signatures are transformative by enabling speed, accuracy, and efficiency, bringing order to even the most chaotic sales environment. When you’ve already invested in Salesforce, it makes sense to use e-signature software that’s purpose-built for the platform you use every day. S-Sign is a powerful, secure e-signature solution that provides fast and seamless agreement execution. Since it pulls in information directly from Salesforce, you’ll have all the customer data you need at your fingertips, ready to populate your agreements with the touch of a button.
It's difficult enough to get a prospect to the point where they are ready to sign. Let S-Sign help you get them over the finish line and make that final signature as easy as possible. Request a demo today and see how S-Docs can transform your day-to-day operations.
