How DocuSign & Salesforce Accelerate Quote to Contract

Our step-by-step guide on how you can accelerate your quote to contract by integrating DocuSign and Salesforce—written by Jessica Stern, Senior Marketing Manager, 4C  

Today, the B2B sales process is more competitive than ever—from the initial NDA through quote generation and negotiation to the final sales contract. This means that any headstart you can gain over your competitors is invaluable. There are larger buying teams with greater buying power, and they have higher expectations for their sales experience. Sales reps are expected to be a trusted advisor, with insight into other functions within the company, and they must satisfy customers who expect a high degree of personalisation, similar to B2C sales.

All of this contributes to longer sales cycles, especially if organisations are managing their quote-to-cash processes as disjointed functions. Sales organisations can no longer be successfully driven by solo sellers reaching out to various parts of their organisation to find contract details, customise quotes, negotiate, and obtain approvals. Instead, it takes one selling team, and one integrated contract management solution to deliver on buyers’ expectations, automate workflows, and ultimately accelerate the sales cycle. An integrated contract lifecycle management solution has a direct impact on the success of your sales team and the profits of your business.

How can you give yourself serious leverage over the other businesses fighting for the signature? By integrating your contract lifecycle management software CLM with your CRM.

These joint offerings enable you to:

• Pre-populate sales data into contracts and send contracts for electronic signing directly from Salesforce— closing deals quicker and more easily

• Enable customers to sign agreements and make direct payments on any device, obtaining revenue quickly

• Track the status, archive and store all of your agreements in one platform

Why is this combination so effective?

Sales cycles right now are longer than ever, especially when targeting more enterprise clients. The idea of solo sellers handling every part of the process, reaching out to various parts of the target organisation is simply an outdated process.

There are a lot of tasks that need to be completed as part of the modern sales process, by streamlining your sales process and completing the sale within Salesforce can save you hours of valuable time.

• Initial contact and pitch

• Negotiation

• Completing contract details

• Customising quotes

• Obtaining stakeholder approvals

Is this integration necessary...surely all sales are digital in 2021?

You might be surprised. Despite the incredible breakthroughs in digital technology made in the last decade, manual quotes are far more common than you might think.

A Forrester study commissioned on behalf of DocuSign found that 56% of sales managers admitted that their quotes were still either fully or partially manual and that 87% of sales agreements are still prepared using manual processes.

In other words, if you choose to integrate your CRM software with your CLM software, you can still give yourself a big head start over most of your competitors.

So, in real-world terms, what are the benefits of integrating DocuSign with Salesforce?

Let’s go through the specific benefits you can gain:

• You’re able to configure your price quote.
• Salesforce grants you access to unparalleled and invaluable data on your potential prospects. 

• Using the DocuSign Agreement Cloud means that you can automatically generate both quotes and proposals using the existing data within Salesforce, and then send the agreements through to the prospect to be signed.

• Given that creating a sales quote from scratch can take several hours, this is a massive time saver. Especially if you’re a larger sales organisation that pitches multiple times each week.

• The more you quote, the more time and money this will save you.

• Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software can also allow you to store and search your relevant contracts, which is both a potential money saver (document storage software can be expensive) and far more convenient.
• Having a centralised single document storage option is far less complex, especially in a larger company. Having to manage multiple software packages for a single function is incredibly inefficient.

Let's look at Flexential’s story and see how they’re using DocuSign eSignature and CLM for Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ.

Multiple device access improves contract signing speed

Whether it’s the sales team, legal team or the prospect, integrating CRM with CLM software means that it’s possible for contracts to be generated and signed at any time, using any device. In 2020, mobile traffic is just as important as desktop traffic, so any business not using the latest CLM technology is likely hindering their own sales processes.

As we mentioned earlier, it also means you can accept payment from any kind of device, increasing speed to revenue. Put simply, if your customer is able to pay directly rather than having to wait until they’re back at their desk, the sale gets completed faster.

Your company naturally becomes more environmentally friendly

People and organisations are more conscious of their carbon footprint and environmental impact than ever before. By digitising the agreement process, organisations are reducing their impact by minimising paper use, and cutting-down on transport.

You can modify your business processes with ease

Every team has different processes in place, and over time these processes evolve to become more efficient. By using the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, it becomes possible to alter processes as often as is needed.

The drag-and-drop workflow builder is easy to use and makes developer support to the sales team almost unnecessary. Of course, the end result means a more flexible environment for the customer, improving the chances of retention.

Compliance

Of course, the most vital thing to consider when it comes to contracts is that they’re legally binding. Electronic document signing is still a relatively new tool, so it pays to use industry-standard software, which is exactly what DocuSign is. 

Scalable contract lifecycle management for sales

If this sounds like a small scale issue to you, think again. Figures have shown that by integrating the DocuSign Agreement Cloud with your CRM, you can accelerate the sales cycle by as much as seven days, and often more. Integrating your CLM software with your CRM massively cuts down your contract lifecycle, making you more attractive to customers and giving you competitive advantage over your competitors.

Flexential, a company that delivers secure and compliant IT infrastructure services, saw the need to modernise firsthand. Faced with separate legacy quoting and contract management systems, sales reps were struggling to customise complex quotes with the right products and terms, and negotiations were slow and painful. Data was decentralised in an unstructured and complicated file share, and getting completed contract data where it needed to be was manual and error-prone. Systems were disconnected, and they needed to connect their agreement processes into Salesforce, where their sales team lived. As a fast-growing organisation, they knew they needed a better way to manage complex agreements with an automated process to enable the business to scale.

They needed an all-in-one solution that could make the sales contract process more centralised, accessible, and transparent. By integrating The DocuSign Agreement Cloud with the world’s #1 CRM software—Salesforce that’s what they got.  

Manage contract workflows within Salesforce

There’s a myriad of B2B sales technology options, which can be both advantageous and overwhelming to sales leaders. That’s why it’s critical to grasp the totality of what your sales organisation needs. For Flexential, they needed a better way to manage complex agreements through the sales process and connect with systems they already used, like Salesforce and ServiceNow. 

By connecting DocuSign eSignature and CLM with Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ, Flexential now launches legal document workflows from within Salesforce, and content that is created in DocuSign CLM is visible in Salesforce. Having on-demand information in one place empowers the Flexential customer team with an up-to-date status of documents and requires significantly less administrative effort. 

Simplifying quote-to-cash operations

Flexential sought a contract management solution that would pull in data to eliminate data entry and kickoff workflows from integrated systems. It needed to be simple enough that they wouldn’t need to bring in much developer support, and it needed to help their quote-to-cash ops team reduce their level of effort so that they could focus on higher-value activities. 

Generating complex documents and orchestrating multifaceted workflows isn’t complicated for Flexential anymore. DocuSign’s simple user interface helps the requestor create content and customise sending options to deliver a better and more personalised customer experience. On the backend, Flexential leverages DocuSign’s workflow builder to automate their complex agreement processes across contributors, reviewers, and approvers.

Business process changes made easy

Docusign CLM workflows enable Flexential to maintain visibility and control throughout the review and signature processes, providing critical business insights. With the drag-and-drop workflow builder, they’re able to make business process changes as often as they need to—and almost entirely without developer support.

Centralising, simplifying and streamlining processes, and enabling governance with the ability to accelerate change has meant a better experience for the sales team and, most importantly, customers.

The impact of DocuSign and Salesforce

Flexential transformed their B2B sales processes and experienced a 25% faster sales cycle, zero document errors, 75% fewer manual transactions, and 80% of the Quote-to-Cash Ops teams’ time is now focused on higher-value activities. They eliminated the risk of losing contracts, substantially increased partner sales, and can now keep on top of upcoming renewals. 

Learn more about how you could use DocuSign & Salesforce to accelerate quote to contract by speaking to an expert.