Eight digital best practices for Sales
1/ Look for paperless opportunities in core tasks
Many sales leaders who have achieved the greatest digital efficiencies began the journey with small initiatives. A good place to start is to review customer touchpoints to determine which tasks would most benefit from digital transactions. In a recent survey, sales leaders identified the most common ways in which their teams are reducing paper-based processes using digital documents, modern agreement processes and automation. Here are examples of traditional paper-based tasks that can be made more efficient with digital capabilities:
- Client-facing sales.
NDAs, contracts, T&Cs, POs, financing, licensing agreements, and end-user agreements Sales operations. Order authorizations, T&E policies, deal split requests compensation agreements, and event registrations
- Partner and channel sales.
Partner and reseller agreements, distribution agreements, channel partner scorecards, and referral agreements
- Account management.
SOWs, MSAs, contract renewals, corrective action reports, benefits reviews, and account change requests
2/ Engage across teams to identify revenue friction points and solutions
Up to 50% of a sales rep’s time is spent on administrative tasks associated with closing, processing and fulfilling orders. Automating tedious day-to-day tasks allows for a greater focus on customer-facing sales and strategic relationship-building. By talking with your sales team, you will quickly identify the most time-consuming tasks that can be streamlined with digital processes. Using simple calculations of time saved per task multiplied against the hourly value of sales time, you can prioritize the processes that will deliver the best return. As end users in sales identify pain points, it’s also critical to bring in legal and IT teams to assess software options, compatibility with existing systems and security.
3/ Increase visibility into your sales funnel
Businesses rely heavily on sales forecasts to make decisions about budgets, hiring, sales targets and broader corporate strategy. The key to good forecasting is good data that’s complete. According to Forbes.com, the key to good sales forecasting is making sure your pipeline process addresses all key milestones. While customer data is often centralized in a CRM, certain opportunity stages can be a black box throwing off forecasts.
Adopting digital agreement technology can give you better visibility into the status of deals nearing completion, letting you see who has—and has not—signed critical paperwork at each step of the process. This lets you more accurately gauge your sales funnel and provide reliable revenue forecasts to the executive team. Automating the broader agreement process can also increase deal velocity through the funnel significantly. This can involve one-click contract generation, real-time redlining during negotiation, post signature workflows like entering key data back into the CRM, and searchable storage accessible to the right people.
4/ Learn from best practices in consumer services
Inc.com recently highlighted a study revealing that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 75%. The transactional experiences we have in our daily lives— online shopping, communication and support—are setting a new bar for expectations in professional services. Trends in the consumer realm that are fueling digitization include:
- Increasing prevalence of mobile technologies
- Demand for instant access to information
- Stringent identity and authentication standards
Look for ways to mimic consumer services best practices. As an example, reducing the number of clicks required to sign and store documents, and providing automatic “you are here” progress tracking will mirror the customer friendly aspects of e-commerce transactions.
5/ Fully embrace mobile technology and workflows
Fast response time is crucial to every sale. Equipping your sales teams with the best technology to do their jobs helps boost overall efficiency and effectiveness. A mobile enabled digital workflow is essential to flexibility and on-the-go responsiveness. Enable your team to complete agreements from virtually any mobile device, almost anywhere in the world helps ensure that salespeople can stay on top of all opportunities as they arise.
6/ Understand geographic standards and regulations
It’s a reality of today’s economy for sales teams and customers to be located around the world. This creates challenges in managing document execution given strict national and international security laws and standards. You’ll need to be certain that your agreement processes are legally binding, and comply with laws such as:
U.S. federal ESIGN Act and UETA
EU Regulation No 910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services
Further, you’ll want to know that your agreement process is compliant with leading privacy regulations and security standards such as:
- EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
It is important for teams to align with client processes and technologies. As an example, a digitized agreement process from document preparation to signature and storage is rapidly becoming the de facto standard in corporate transactions. Using this technology can help your firm more effectively conduct business.
7/ Digitize to improve sales team retention and new hire acquisition
Top salespeople are always in demand, with skills easily portable from one company to the next. In a study about retaining and motivating top talent, Entrepreneur.com cited a lack of modern tools enabling salespeople to do their jobs effectively as one of the key causes of sales team turnover. Sales & Marketing Management magazine also recommends adopting digital technologies to help improve rep onboarding and provide clearer insights into performance.
One success story is Salesforce, who digitized their offer letters using Workday and DocuSign to provide a better experience in a competitive job market. They also sped up offer letter completion from 5 days to less than 1 and reduced costs by 80%. It was a win-win.
8/ Make your new (and old) digital tools accessible
As more data is available to make decisions and new technology is purchased, ensuring adoption and buy-in can be a challenge. Making new tools easy to use is key to getting the expected ROI. To make the most of your digitally powered salesforce, be sure to:
Bring in sales ops to ensure data gathered is put to use Engage with enablement and IT to train sales teams on new tools, resources and processes Get sales leadership involved in the inner workings of the tech stack Generally what’s easiest for sales is staying in their CRM system, so that connection is a critical part of the success of any new technology that is rolled out.