There’s a need for speed in sales. But are your sales teams as productive as they could be?

Research suggests sales teams spend only 39% of their time actually selling, with much of the rest tied up in admin and other tasks.

Physical contract processes remain a weak link in the sales chain. Why? Because it takes sales teams five to six days on average to manage the contract signing process, costing your business time and money.

eSignature is a tool that allows sales teams to cut down on admin and other mundane tasks, improving their performance to quota by 45% versus the average sales team.

Here’s five other reasons sales leaders are turning to eSignature technology.

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Try as we might, humans make errors.

But unnecessary errors add up. Ineffective control and management of contracts currently costs businesses more than $153 billion per year. And beyond the financial cost, errors slow down the sales cycle, increasing the number of touch points required to close a deal, meaning more inconvenience – and maybe a bad impression – for your customer.

With eSignature technology however, human error is a thing of the past. With Dropbox Sign, for example, contracts can be templated by legal, meaning salespeople only need to fill in the blanks.

If you do make a mistake, however, you can edit contracts live and have your customer agree revisions on the spot, without reissuing. Panicking because you sent it to the wrong person? No need. Comprehensive security features mean you can grant – or withdraw – access permission instantly.

With avoidable mistakes taken out of the contract process, you can keep the process hassle-free for your customers while boosting contract turnaround times.

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Close deals faster

Few sales leaders would disagree that many traditional sales cycles take far too long. In fact, according to Mary Grothe, CEO at House of Revenue:

“One sign of a top performing salesperson is that they’ve found their own ways to shorten the sales cycle.”

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Slow sales cycles matter, because they hamper the efficiency of your business and inconvenience your customer. With every additional touchpoint you create, you’re really creating an additional chance for a deal to fall through.

Signature can help to build an efficient sales process. It takes on average just five to six minutes to turn around a contract, meaning both salesperson and customer can get right back to what they’re doing.  

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Reduce admin and improve productivity

Admin is the thief of time. And with so many names, dates, contact details, meeting times, and other information to track and verify, it’s a huge burden for sales team efficiency.

And yet, the more time sales teams spend doing mundane admin work and tidying up databases, the less time they have to spend on actually selling.

Of course, the personal touch is vital to sales. Not everything can be automated – so don’t rush to throw away that phone. But some things definitely should be, and lining up, chasing, and confirming signatures is definitely one of them. So here’s how to make a sales team more productive.

By automating the eSignature process, sales teams can do away with the cumbersome admin associated with paper contracts that require drafting, printing, packaging, posting and waiting for their return.

Populate contract templates, email them for signature, schedule a digital chaser, receive and store the signed document automatically and voila - all in just a few clicks.

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Ensure legally binding audit trails

While the physical contract signing process takes time and costs money, they’re also a security risk. Once a contract is posted, you have very little control over what happens to it. There’s always the chance a sensitive document could get lost, delayed, damaged, or even intercepted.

By integrating eSignature technology into the process, sales leaders can mitigate that risk entirely by having total oversight of where a contract is, whether it has been received, seen and signed.

Additionally, built-in time and date stamping within eSignature tool offer an audit trail of every conversation, contract, or edit.  

And thanks to he E-SIGN Act, esigned documents also have the same legal protections as those signed with a physical pen.

So, as long as you’re using an eSignature and digital document management tool with strong legality and security features, online sales contracts are as legal but more secure than physical ones, allowing you to stay organized, maintain confidentiality, and guarantee security.

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Integrates with SalesForce

No sales tool is an island.

While digital transformation is offering countless opportunities for an efficient sales process, all those gains in time and speed are lost if your tools don’t integrate properly, or, worse still, the last mile in the process is a physical one.

Luckily, the best eSignature tools now integrate directly with Salesforce, meaning sales teams can nurture prospect relationships and manage customer accounts and renewals, all in one place, harnessing synergies between both platforms.

Dropbox Sign is just one example. Our tool integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, providing management with a complete overview of contracts out for signature, average time to sign by rep, signature conversions, and any other critical measurements you need. And with the possibility to automate much of the process, contracts can be sent out, received, and stored, from Salesforce, in as little as a single click.

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Conclusion

It’s no exaggeration that technology is transforming sales team efficiency, with eSignature making one of the biggest impacts in the process.

With eSignature, sales teams can make the contract-signing process faster, more accurate, more secure, and easily integrable with other sales and marketing tools, meaning more time to spend on doing what they do best: selling.

To find out more about how an eSignature tool could benefit your sales operations, download our latest guide ‘6 ways to streamline your sales cycle, activate velocity and increase revenue.’