How can digital sales innovation drive better customer experience?

Whether your sales team is responsible for the sale of insurance, houses, or other complex products like private equity - digitising complex processes can help your team deliver with speed, transparency and expertise. Results of the McKinsey & Company 2019 B2B survey showed that those suppliers who provide outstanding digital experiences to their buyers are more than twice as likely to be chosen as primary suppliers than those who provide poor experiences and about 70 per cent more likely than those providing only fair ones. So how can you help your sales team shine?

Taking care of customers is a top priority for sales leaders

For sales leaders, customers are always a top priority. Delays or difficulties in the sales process are often a point of frustration for customers and employees. Digitising those processes helps to smooth out pain points that arise from printing and posting paper-based documents or managing complex approval processes. In today’s world, whether it’s a business or consumer transaction, customers often have a preference to transact online, but keeping things simple can be trickier when dealing with high-risk contracts or because of legal requirements.

Similar to what we’ve seen in the B2C environment, the importance of digital channels for B2B companies has grown significantly in the past few years. Customers increasingly expect to complete sales orders online without following manual or paper-based processes.

Leading companies are embracing new ways of working to remove delays caused by manual processes. For example, law firm Hugh James recently took the opportunity to push their sector towards digital transformation when they took part in a pilot to complete the first property deal with a digital electronic signature for HM Land Registry. Buying a property can be one of the most substantial financial decisions a person can make, so it’s important for it to go smoothly and that delays are avoided. Wet ink signatures have long been a bottleneck for a booming property sector, so Hugh James embarked on the pilot, working with DocuSign to replace ‘in-person’ signing. 

Creating this new process avoided postal delays, increased speed and minimised risks. In the UK and Europe, a Qualified Electronic Signature is a type of signature deemed legally identical to a wet signature. The DocuSign pilot provides buyers with quick and easy access to their documents, ready to access and sign through a link when they are ready. Nicola Evered, Specialist Digital Transformation Manager at Hugh James, says, “Hugh James is keen to be at the forefront of digital changes in the property world, and the QES pilot really allowed us to demonstrate that. We’re passionate about innovation, customer choice and removing blockers from processes.” 

Organisations are already seeing the positives of remote digital processes

Customers’ preferences for digital sales interactions have increased, and many businesses are already seeing the positives of shifting to remote working and digital processes. You can leverage technology to provide the information your customers need seamlessly. 

Remove bureaucracy

Removing bureaucracy is beneficial for any business. Start-ups, in particular, cannot allow bureaucratic processes to impact growth and are constantly looking at how to accelerate sales processes. 

For example, in the private equity industry, long contracts of 70-150 pages are not uncommon. Moonfare, a private equity start-up, wanted to improve the process around these long contracts that couldn’t even fit in one envelope in the mail. The current process was slow, unproductive and unscalable. Moonfare partnered with DocuSign to use a qualified electronic signature, or QES for short, in document management and thus digitised their entire contract process. Yuri Narciss, Managing Director of Moonfare, says, “We are one of the first and few companies to have fully digitised the private equity sector, and now bureaucratic processes are a thing of the past.” 

Gain a competitive edge and reduce costs

For many organisations, remote working and digitised processes are helping their company to maintain a competitive edge and provide better customer experiences. German wealth management organisation DWS recently modernised its insurance order process. The previous process was outdated, requiring printing, hand signing and faxing of documents and a complicated approval circuit. DWS were able to digitise the entire process using DocuSign’s qualified electronic signature solution, and now the whole process is completed in hours rather than days. This gives the organisation a competitive edge with less room for errors, increased transparency and cost savings.

Use automation to free up strategic time for employees

Forward-thinking companies are embracing automation as a way to free up time for their employees to minimise administration and maximise their time working on more strategic work. For example, German tax consultants milia were able to create an automated, paperless process that employees and customers love. Tilman Walch, CEO at milia, says, “All of our processes are now digital and paperless. The tax offices are enthusiastic about the automated processes, and their clients are happy that they no longer have to scan, sign and send countless documents by post.”. The milia platform is the "digital employee" for tax offices. milia use qualified electronic signatures (QES) for co-operation agreements and annual financial statements.