If your sales team's goal is to close more deals—and what kind of sales team wouldn't aim for that?—one of the best ways to achieve that is to use the right set of tools. A powerful CRM and a robust e-signature solution are two of the most crucial components.
In fact, integrating your CRM with the right e-signature solution is a particularly impactful combination, because it enables your sales team to move faster and be more efficient in negotiating deals and signing contracts—and not spend countless hours editing PDFs or attaching them to emails.
In this article, we'll discuss the benefits of using these two tools in combination and also help you choose the right e-signature solution for your CRM. That way, you'll be able to make the right choice and start creating stunning proposals.
Let's dive in!
What are the benefits of using e-signature software with your CRM?
The buyer's journey can span many channels—especially today—but clients expect a seamless, unified experience in all their interactions with a business.
So it's the companies that manage to provide a smooth and personalized experience to all customers, rather than those who fixate on individual touchpoints, who can generate the most value.
Having the right CRM tool is instrumental in providing the right customer experience at all times and across all interactions—from the first point of contact to signing a service agreement.
But how can you optimize the use of your CRM even further?
By connecting it to a powerful contract management application. Doing so enables you to shorten the sales cycle by increasing the amount of completed docs per month and reducing the amount of time your sales team spends on creating proposals, thereby enabling sales reps to concentrate on what they do best: selling.
Let's examine in more detail the benefits of using a powerful CRM in combination with the right e-signature solution.
Automate processes and sell smarter
About 30% of sales processes can be automated—but for this, you need the right tools.
By collecting everything in a single location (your CRM), you have all customer data at your fingertips, including preferences and previous communications, which helps shorten and simplify the sales process.
In fact, you can automate your entire sales cycle by connecting Zoho CRM with a contract management software. You'll be able to create quotes, offers, proposals, and contracts from a single location. Plus, collecting signatures becomes much easier, too.
Close deals faster
Being able to negotiate, update proposals and contracts, and get them signed in a fraction of the time you'd otherwise need helps you close deals much faster.
This, in turn, transforms your CRM tool into a true sales powerhouse and generates additional sales opportunities—for example, cross-selling or upselling products—and makes you fully attuned to your customers' needs.
Plus, customers love efficient businesses that don't need days to make changes to contracts, but can move fast and can send them updated versions within minutes—and ones that use convenient e-signature solutions they can use anywhere, on any device.
Free up your sales reps' time and mental space
One of the best advantages of building optimized processes with the right tech is that you free up your salespersons' time and mental space, thereby enabling them to concentrate on their core tasks: communicating with customers, building strong relationships, and finding new sales opportunities.
It's obvious not very efficient if each sales representative spends two hours preparing a proposal, another hour creating the draft contract, and then an additional hour in back-and-forth communication with a prospective client on how to sign the contract.
If the process is shortened to minutes instead of hours—which is absolutely doable with the right contract management solution and a powerful CRM—this helps free up key resources they can invest in other, more impactful initiatives.
Enable your customer service team to serve your customers better
Customer-centric businesses are over 60% more profitable than those who aren't as focused on their customers, so everything that can help you provide a better customer experience is invaluable. And one of the most crucial components of maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is, of course, providing excellent customer service.
If your CRM and your contract management software are integrated, the customer support team can easily check customers' profiles, transactional info, and documents to provide 360-degree service to everyone who gets in contact with them.
If a customer has a question about their contract, for example, the customer service representative could simply check their profile in your CRM, pull the contract in question, and help them understand its terms.
Make your marketing more impactful
An essential part of each successful marketing strategy is the way your brand presents itself to the world—and especially in strategic documents that you send to customers. Needless to say, such documents are much more impactful if they're personalized and aligned to your customers' specific needs.
The best way to achieve that is to analyze the data that's collected in your CRM software and use it to inform your choices when providing a personalized service to your customers, including the documents you send to them. And personalization is key in providing a service that delights your customers and deepens your bonds with them.
Pull data from your CRM to populate your documents automatically
We all know the pain of endlessly copying and pasting the same information in a form, but sales teams who are at the forefront of the contract negotiation process know it especially well.
So what's a better way to streamline this than to have your contract management software automatically pull data from your CRM and populate all documents automatically?
Track documents from inside your CRM
If you send a draft contract, you want to know what happens to it, right? With the right e-signature solution, you can track the progress of each document from inside your CRM and see who interacts with it and how.
If you're using the right systems, you can get real-time notifications in Zoho when a customer opens, comments, completes, or signs a document so you can jump into action at the right moment.
How to choose the right e-signature solution for your business
Now that we've discussed the benefits of connecting your CRM to a robust e-signature solution, let's see how to choose the best one for your business. Below are some of the features you need to look for.
Seamless integration with your CRM
The first and most important criterion when selecting an e-signature system to use in combination with your CRM is how easily the two integrate and can exchange data between each other.
In other words, you need a platform that has an existing integration for your CRM.
The integration needs to have the right functionalities, too, such as the following:
Automatically populate documents with data from your CRM
Send real-time notifications between the two systems
Enable effortless collaboration between team members and stakeholders
Automate and speed up your sales workflows
PandaDoc's integration for Zoho CRM has all of these features and helps you get the most of both systems.
Automated document creation
Having a large library of templates for different use cases can shorten your sales cycle and enable you to send proposals and quotes faster than ever.
With the right e-signature and contract management solution, you'll be able to use on-brand templates and control every aspect of the documents you send, from the look to the tiniest details of the terms and conditions.
Collaboration capabilities
To provide excellent service, team members don't just need to work with others within their team, but often with other teams as well. The ability to cooperate is crucial for customer relationship management.
One of the most important touchpoints in the customer journey is the moment when a deal is negotiated and signed, which also means collaboration from all sides needs to be synchronized.
Regardless of the size of your team or your customer's team, your contract management software should be powerful enough to accommodate all stakeholders and have them work together seamlessly.
Mobile application
To collect signatures faster, you need to be considerate of your prospects' time and energy, and enable them to sign docs conveniently anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
For that, choosing an e-signature solution that has a stable, well-functioning mobile app is key. So check whether the solution you're choosing has a mobile app for both iOS and Android and make sure you also check user reviews of the app. Ideally, you should opt for a solution that has at least a 4-star rating.
Engagement analytics
Contract negotiation is a process that can provide you with tons of insights on customer behavior, preferences, and needs—but do you have a way to collect all this data efficiently?
Look for an e-signature platform that tracks document engagement and can provide useful insights about how your prospects interact with documents and integrates this information into your CRM to centralize all your data (which is one of the most important benefits of a CRM, after all).
This can help you see what's working and what isn't and further optimize your processes to make them more efficient for your sales team—and smoother for your customers.
Level up your CRM by connecting it with the right e-signature software
Let's face it: When you have a single source of truth (such as your CRM), instead of working with disparate data and systems, you're able to move faster and be more effective. With companies today using over 100 business apps in their operations, it's crucial to make the right technological choices and ensure that your systems are well-connected.
Your CRM system is irreplaceable in helping you put your customers first and provide a unified experience to each one of them each time they interact with you. One of the best ways to decrease friction even further is to enable them to sign deals with you in the same streamlined fashion with the help of the right e-signature solution that you can connect seamlessly to your CRM.
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