How to work remotely - remote Collaboration Tools for Sales Teams

How to work remotely - remote Collaboration Tools for Sales Teams

Remote work is on the rise, and so is the demand for remote team collaboration tools. The need for people to work from home has increased rapidly in response to the global COVID-19 health crisis, but in the last five years, the number of people working remotely has steadily grown by over 44%. (Analysis from  FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics about remote work.) The trend is expected to continue long after the current pandemic ends because of the multiple benefits remote work can deliver to business owners and employees, including increased productivity and a better work/life balance. In this post, we discover some of the best ways to facilitate collaboration when your sales team are working remotely.

How to work remotely - sales team collaboration

If your sales team are increasingly working from home, they will benefit from using tools that enable smooth communication, help them to share work easily and stay connected. Here are some top tips and tools to use for team collaboration:

1. Keep your sales team connected and help to increase productivity instantly

When your team are transitioning to remote work, there are a few essential tools that play a critical role in collaboration and productivity. Get these basics right, and you’ll instantly improve the sales team workflow. 

• Ensure you have an electronic signature tool in place like DocuSign eSignature for secure remote signing.
• Ensure easy file sharing via tools like Google Drive or DropBox so your team can collaborate on documents and files.
• Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams can help keep everyone connected.
• Project Management Tools can ensure your team know what’s coming up and when they need to complete tasks.
• Instant messaging tools like Slack can help your team communicate quickly and easily.

Help your team to store and retrieve documents easily, communicate in real-time and get visibility of workflow for all members of a team. Even when your team are apart; with these tools, they can still communicate and collaborate with ease. In many cases, productivity will increase.

2. Routing contracts for electronic signature 

An electronic signature solution allows your sales team to send a contract instantly via email. There is no need to print, sign, scan, fax or mail a contract. For complex sales signing processes with multiple approvers, using eSignature allows teams to identify where agreements are in the approval process and who is yet to sign. This feature makes tracking of the process so much easier. Hundreds of thousands of businesses already use DocuSign eSignature, and 82% of agreements are approved in less than one day. Find out more about the benefits of using DocuSign eSignature.

3. Invest in a successful remote agreement workflow

Organisations that want to deliver better employee experiences for their sales teams and better experiences for their customers may want to automate more of their agreement processes. Digital transformation allows teams to work remotely with ease and can help your sales team offer more personalised customer interactions and accelerate the speed with which they can close deals. Here are a few examples of solutions that can streamline the sales experience for both customers and employees: 

• Contract lifecycle management (CLM)
• Document generation
• Contract negotiation
• Customer relationship management (CRM)

4. Use a contract lifecycle management tool 

A CLM solution helps sales team to store and manage their library of contracts. Gartner has recognised the importance of this product category, and have released the CLM Magic Quadrant report in which DocuSign CLM was named as a leader. With DocuSign CLM, you can create an automated digital workflow that allows the sales team to store, tag and organise contracts. The tool helps to streamline the process of approvals and makes it easier to collaborate with legal and procurement teams to manage clauses. Sales can use an easily accessible library of pre-approved legal clauses for selection. 

5. Easier document generation and sales contract creation

DocuSign’s State of Contract Management report 2019 surveyed 802 employees who play a role in the contract process, and 94% said that human error impacts the contract process and 65% said they led to a delay in closing deals. Sales teams can now have the benefit of using contract generation tools that pull information directly from existing CRM systems to automate the creation of draft sales agreements which will reduce errors and increase productivity. DocuSign Gen for Salesforce works natively within Salesforce CRM, so sales reps do not have to switch between tools. 

The average contract might go through three of four changes or versions before it is finalised. If a contract is generated and needs to be changed as part of the contract negotiation process, those changes are often managed manually. However, this process can be automated with a tool like DocuSign Negotiate. Managing reviews and redlining contracts can take several hours, but with DocuSign Negotiate, your sales team can automatically generate agreements from customer data within Salesforce. Content can be automatically inserted or excluded based on business rules or Salesforce data such as the size of the deal. The sales team can use Negotiate to collaborate with internal and external reviewers for negotiation and approval. Everything is tracked centrally with version control and an audit trail provides evidence of the activities that have taken place. Find out more about DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce.

Successful sales teams can work remotely and with the right tools can stay connected and increase productivity. Find out more about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud and solutions that can help your sales team to work remotely.