In an increasingly digital-first sales environment, there’s no question that sales automation is good for business. There are numerous ways that adopting a digital sales process will improve your sales team’s productivity, success rate, and earning potential. 

But, like many things in life, getting started is often the biggest hurdle to digital transformation. Whether you’re looking to dip your toe or dive right in, how do you take your sales operations from analog to automated?

In this article, we’ll look at how you can build and implement digital sales workflows that support your organizational goals. But first, a quick refresher on just how powerful digital sales tools can be for your bottom line.

How Digital Sales Tools Drive ROI

These are some of the most powerful benefits of digital sales automation that have the biggest impact on your sales results and ROI.

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Reduced Costs: Save an Average of $20 Per Contract

Sales automation saves time (thanks to faster contract turnarounds), but it can also save you a pretty penny (thanks to digital workflows).

By cutting out costs associated with printing contracts (to sign, amend, scan, and resend to the client), digital contract management allows your team to save money with every sale. More specifically, streamlining sales workflows with eSignatures reduces overhead costs by an average of $20 per sales contract signed.

Shorter Sales Cycle: Reduce Turnaround Times by up to 80%

Research shows that digital signatures can reduce turnaround time by up to 80%, emphasizing a direct link between sales automation and your ability to increase revenue and growth potential via a shorter sales cycle.

Faster turnaround times mean faster closes—which in turn means earning more revenue in a given timeframe. Plus, the quicker a sale moves through your pipeline, the more likely it is to close successfully.

Increased Clarity and Better Forecasting

End-to-end digital workflows mean you always know exactly when and who reviewed each document. With eSignatures and digital timestamps, you can see when each party receives, opens, amends, and signs a contract.

Not only does this guarantee delivery and streamline communication between your team and the client, but it also makes it easier to estimate time to close.

Increased Revenue: Grow 5X More Revenue than Competitors

Not only does switching to a digital sales process save money by reducing costs, but it can also boost your income potential.

Embracing digital transformation is linked to increasing revenue. According to McKinsey research, B2B digital leaders generate 8% more shareholder returns as well as 5X more revenue growth per year than competitors.

Getting Started with Digital Sales: Opportunities for Digital Transformation

Of course, digital transformation is most effective when it’s approached holistically, enabling end-to-end digital content workflows for every type of document your sales team needs, including contracts, forms, order forms, NDAs, and more. That said, it’s often less intimidating to start with digitizing a few specific processes and build from there. The following sales workflows are some of the best candidates for upgrading from analog to digital.

Lead Generation

As the first step in your sales process, lead generation is key to filling up your pipeline with viable opportunities. From sourcing leads to researching key decision-makers, many of your most time-intensive prospecting tasks can be simplified with the right digital sales tools. 

For example, there are tools that will help you find and verify anyone’s current email address to ensure your message makes it to your mark. There are also plenty of tools that help source lists of relevant contacts, scrape data from the web, or can give you access to pre-vetted leads. 

Lead Scoring

Without an effective lead scoring method, your team will struggle to identify viable leads and high-value sales opportunities. You can use AI-powered sales tools to score leads based on your custom criteria, including how they interact with your website, whether they view or click on an email, and filling out a form on your website to get in touch with your team.

Pipeline Management

The most effective way to manage your sales pipeline is to leverage a CRM platform that pairs well with your favorite sales tools. The better your tools work together, the easier it is to get a clear picture of your sales process from within your CRM and create end-to-end digital workflows.

That’s why DropboxSign’s Salesforce integration allows you to send contracts, request eSignatures, and finalize documents without ever leaving Salesforce. Now your sales team can access customer data and pre-fill contracts before sending them as well as update deal status as soon as agreements are sent, signed, or renewed.

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Friction kills deals faster than you can say “sign here.” You want to make it as easy as possible for prospects to finalize a purchase. With an eSignature tool like DropboxSign, your prospects can sign contracts from anywhere right from their mobile device. You can simplify contract management and close deals faster with eSignatures.

Sales Contract Workflows

Beyond adopting eSignatures, there are plenty of ways that digital sales tools can streamline your document workflows. Every step from creation to completion—including reminders, amendments, and transaction tracking—can be simplified with workflow automation. 

You can streamline your contract management workflows even further with contract templates and pre-populating forms that pull data into the appropriate fields on your sales contracts and customer agreements. This makes it faster and easier for your sales reps and customers to fill out agreements, while also minimizing the risk of human error.

A Few Tips for Implementing Digital Sales

If you’re still not sure where to begin, here are some tips to help you decide which areas of your sales operations to focus on digitizing first.

Talk to Your Sales Team

Your sales reps know better than anybody what tasks and processes take up most of their time. They’ll also be able to tell you where there’s an obvious opportunity for improvement. Plus, your team will be more on board with any changes if you involve them in the process early on.

Look for Opportunities to Automate

Automation can save you oodles of time and energy that could better be spent on high-value knowledge work, like strategizing or finalizing contract details.

Generally speaking, it’s best to prioritize time-intensive tasks (like scheduling, maintaining and updating records, and contract workflows). Whatever the task at hand, if there’s an opportunity to automate or streamline the process instead of handling it manually, you can give your sales reps back valuable time that can be spent on actually selling.

Make All of Your Sales Documents Electronic

Thinking about going paperless? There’s never been a better time to make the leap. You can digitize all sorts of documents and complete agreements more quickly with the help of an eSignature tool like DropboxSign. This includes NDAs, sales contracts, order forms, and more. By adopting end-to-end digital content workflows, you can ensure your team gets the maximum possible benefits out of the digital transformation process.

Pay Attention to the Data

Choose a few core metrics to guide your updates. Ideally, these should be metrics that are easily measurable and aligned with specific processes linked to tangible ROI.

For instance, if one of your goals for sales automation is to cut down your customer acquisition costs, you would focus on the factors that impact that metric: how much time the sales rep spends moving opportunities through each stage of the pipeline, how much nurturing is required to get the conversion, and how much back and forth it takes to get the contract signed.

Plus, looking at your sales metrics can also help you decide if your sales team needs more training in certain areas—and it’s likely worth the investment. According to HubSpot, ongoing training can increase net sales by up to 50% per sales rep.

Put Digital Sales Automation to Work for Your Team

With the right digital sales tool stack at their disposal, your team can excel at every step of the sales process. Digital sales automation enables your team to be more productive, efficient, and effective in their methods.

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