This is a guest blog post by Bhupinder Singh. He's a Product Marketing Lead at SignEasy, an electronic signature solution that helps individuals, professionals, and businesses to expedite paper work, save costs, and be more productive.
Ask a sales professional to tell you a “so close, yet so far” story, and he’ll talk about the pile of paperwork between him and the next deal closure.
Sales professionals almost live a dual life: swift and agile while pitching the value proposition to a prospect, but held back by paperwork when sealing the deal. Some of the challenges that a sales professional faces towards the end of the sales cycle could be inevitable. For instance, a delay in additional approvals and compliance sign-offs. However, others are known and easy to avoid, the biggest of them being the delay in completing all the sales-related paperwork. With multiple prospects and opportunities in the pipeline, a sales professional encounters a great deal of paperwork, not to mention the daily print-fill-sign-scan routine.
On average, salespeople spend more than 36% of their time on administrative tasks, which leaves them with less time to focus on what matters most: closing deals. Our customers across companies of all sizes at SignEasy have frequently come back and told us how their sales team was able to get past these stumbling blocks and bring down the deal closure time from almost a week to just a few hours. It only made sense to put together what we've learned combined with their experience, and share it here. In this post, I'll talk about how going paperless with electronic signatures benefits sales professionals and teams of all sizes.
Bring in the revenue, faster.
After a contract is written up, getting it signed by the client and all the associated parties can take days or weeks. By choosing electronic signatures to get the deal through this last leg, you can turn weeks into hours and reduce the time to revenue. In fact, electronic signatures users are 18% more likely to shorten their sales cycles. As Robert Couture, Managing Partner of S&C Homebuyers—and a SignEasy customer—puts it, “With SignEasy, paperwork that took 12-24 hours now takes 2-4 minutes. That means, what used to take an entire workday is now completed in a tea break. Deals are saved because they can be secured in real time."
Delight your customers.
By making paperwork less burdensome and using electronic signatures that let the client sign sales contracts anywhere from their preferred device, you create a smooth and efficient experience for the customer. That’s why 68% of best-in-class sales teams have made the switch to electronic signatures to improve the customer experience and close deals faster.
Build a productive sales force.
Electronic signatures allow sales professionals to take their attention off paperwork and operational tasks and instead focus on the key outcomes, such as building a healthy pipeline, improving the lead-to-win funnel, and growing revenue.
Improve the visibility of closure status.
51% of sales managers admit that documents are either misfiled or lost, and 46% of them say that they aren’t sure they have copies of all the signed customer contracts. With a huge amount of paperwork around, getting visibility into the status of sales contracts and maintaining them becomes an operational challenge. Electronic signatures free sales teams from this burden by completing the last step in an end-to-end digitized workflow. In addition, electronic signatures integrate with critical business applications, including Zoho CRM. Send sales contracts for signature to customers, no matter where they are, directly from Zoho CRM.
With all the points stated above, it is evident that paperwork turns out to be a barrier for sales professionals that gets in their way of closing deals faster and offering a positive experience to customers. As customers evolve and continue being in the center of business and expecting a great experience, the switch to electronic signatures is more imperative than before.
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