Close Deals Faster with a Digitized Sales Process

How can your business optimize sales processes, generate more leads and close deals faster and more efficiently? Today, the traditional buyer's journey has been disrupted - more of your potential customers are researching and making purchasing decisions before ever talking to sales. According to an Accenture study, 94% of B2B buyers conduct online research at some point in the buying process. Forrester has also found that 59% of buyers prefer to do research online instead of interacting with a sales rep, feeling that reps push sales agendas rather than help solve problems. We have a solution: The Digitized Sales Process. That's exactly what Kadence Collective, eSignLive and Salesforce are discussing at our event, Digitize Your Sales Process: From Lead to Deal, on September 20, 2017 in San Antonio.  

Get More Leads

Through a lead generation strategy, you can attract more potential buyers, provide them with the information they need, when they need it, and let them come to you when they're ready. To get started, here are 6 key points Kadence Digital recommends including in your lead generation strategy development:  

• Consider Marketing Automation Software: Using marketing automation software like Pardot greatly improves efficiency, helping your team make data-based decisions and automating lead nurture processes that would normally require more resources and budget to execute. Keep in mind that even though Pardot makes things much more efficient by removing a lot of manual work, we recommend having an experienced team and strategy in place to execute strong lead generation programs with marketing automation software.

• Defining "Leads" and The Lead Process: When building a lead generation program, it's important for the sales and marketing teams to be involved in a lead process discussion. What does marketing define as a lead (a Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL), and what does sales define as a lead (a Sales Qualified Lead or SQL)? Defining this helps to create a lead process for when marketing hands leads off to sales.

• Know Your Buyers: Researching your prospects through interviews and external sources, gives you all the details you need to know: exactly what information prospects want and how they want to receive it. Once you've done the research, use personas to bring it to life and better illustrate your target audience.

• Revamp Your Website for Lead Generation: With a strategic lead generation website, every page has a specific purpose. Think about the questions your buyers have as they are considering a purchase and moving through the buyer's journey. When your website speaks to each of these needs, buyers will be able to find all their information in one place and speed up the process of making a purchase.

• Create Lead Generating Content: Content that supports quality lead generation needs to be personalized to the right people, at the right time. With this strategy, all content is mapped according to:
  • The person who is reading it - i.e. your buyer personas
  • The buying cycle stage -  i.e. if they are just learning more about your business or if they are ready to buy

• Promote Content Directly to Your Audience: Why spend time and resources creating quality content if no one sees it? To expand the reach of content assets, most successful marketing strategies focus on a combination of paid, earned and owned media promotion.

  Close Deals Faster with a Digital Sales Process

  Once your marketing and sales teams have attracted, nurtured, and guided your lead to the final stages of the sales process, the last thing you want is to lose a sale due to a delayed quote or signature. And with only 35% of a sales rep's time available for selling, there's not much time left for closing the deal! Enter Salesforce CPQ. When CPQ is deployed and used correctly, most users report an average of 15% increased efficiency. That's 6 hours out of a 40-hour work week! eSignLive now integrates with CPQ to support the closing stage of a deal, further improving efficiency when delivering quotes and obtaining signatures. Let's back up a bit. Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick), is a sales tool that allows companies to efficiently and easily manage the entire sales process from configuring orders, generating quotes, to even collecting cash. Available as part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, Salesforce CPQ enables companies to close deals more efficiently. When paired with eSignLive, it's even easier to sign quotes, proposals and contracts securely and quickly from any device. eSignLive for Salesforce CPQ adds e-signature capability directly inside Salesforce CPQ, so your users can continue to use the interface they are already familiar with. No need to learn an entirely new application. Once signed, your sales team can access the document as well as its audit trails within Salesforce where they are automatically archived. Here are several ways CPQ and eSignLive optimize the sales process so you can close deals faster:
  • Deliver Accurate Quotes Faster: With the CPQ application, every possible configuration, price, discount, and scenario can be pre-determined. This ensures full transparency between the company's product configurations and options, and the customer.
  • Easier to Create Complex Quotes: CPQ's automation turns time consuming, complicated quotes (e.g. bulk pricing, discounts, complex options and configurations) into easy-to-generate quotes that can be quickly delivered to the customer.
  • Strategic Cross-collaboration: With CPQ, every department in your organization can be involved in planning pre-determined configurations. This allows experts in each department to suggest ideas for product configuration - ideas that sales might have not thought possible or desirable by consumers. When cross-collaboration happens between departments, your product becomes more solution-based and customer-centric.
  • Streamlined Sales Process: CPQ can be integrated with ERP systems, connecting sales and operations. Sales can monitor the status of deliveries, executives can monitor the sales process, and operations can monitor trends to plan for new deals. Sales and Operations can work cohesively with customer needs in mind, creating a more efficient process. In conclusion, combining CPQ with ERP leads to a reduction in operating costs.
  • Efficiently Close and Sign The Deal: With eSignLive for Salesforce CPQ, you can quickly obtain secure and compliant electronic signatures for sales quotes, proposals, contracts and invoices generated in Salesforce CPQ, manage transaction status in real-time, and obtain comprehensive audit trails of who signed, in what order, when and where.

Want to know more about how to generate more leads and close more deals?That's exactly what Kadence Collective, eSignLive and Salesforce are discussing at our event, Digitize Your Sales Process: From Lead to Deal, on September 20, 2017 in San Antonio. We'll cover strategies for using digital tools to generate more leads and close more deals. RSVP here