Reducing Contract Turnaround Time by Going Paperless in the Field
A company’s survival in a competitive market landscape is determined by the performance of its sales team. It is in the hands of the sales team to ensure that customers do not stray to the competition and keep coming back month after month to sign up for your services. As a discipline, sales is highly demanding and the many stages a skilled salesperson has to navigate through to sign a new contract requires both stamina and resilience. But from delivering the pitch to negotiating an agreement, one condition remains true — the best performing sales teams close deals out in the field, not in the office.
Sales Teams Shouldn’t Be Chained to Desks
While generating and prospecting leads, updating the CRM system and processing paperwork are inherent in the day to day tasks of any sales organisation, it also means that your sales teams are spending less time out in the field at client meetings where they can influence a sale, and more time in the office doing admin. Fortunately, there are technologies and tools available today which can reduce the sales teams’ office time and get them back where you need them — in front of the client. And your sales team will thank you for it, seeing as the reason they joined a sales organisation was to get away from desk type roles.
One solution is shifting the workflow from offline to online. For example, converting quotes, invoicing, presentation materials and contracts into interactive PDF forms online. Imagine a scenario where the salesperson has to print off a document, get the client’s signature in person, return to the office to scan and upload the contract to a computer and finally reformat it to send on to the sales operations team and client separately. In some cases, as you very well know, the delay between contract agreement and processing can be 2–3 days. Having your documents live online eliminates the problem through reducing office time spent on admin tasks by digitising the workflow, making it accessible from outside the office.
The Sales Dream — Little Admin and a Shorter Cycle
Imagine a scenario where your sales team has access to up-to-date information such as presentation material and quotes which they can download directly to their mobile devices during a client meeting. With time saved and trust gained with the client, your sales rep can have the needed support in delivering a sales pitch. Having the necessary information available when the client requests it empowers the sales team to move the conversation forward to the negotiation stage in less time. This eliminates the need to schedule a second meeting at a later date, which can cause delays in contract negotiation as well as reduce the client’s readiness to buy.
Moreover, once the negotiation is complete, processing the paperwork can take up to 2–3 days. This delay negatively impacts the organisation in two ways; one, work can not begin on a project until paperwork is finalised, and two, the sales rep is prevented from prospecting and approaching new business development opportunities until the post-sales processes are complete. By digitising the paperwork flow, you can resolve this problem and allow the sales rep to submit a contract to the next step of the workflow automatically from outside the office.
Simply Go Paperless
Thankfully, there’s already a solution for these problems on the market. Fluix has been designed to automate and simplify your office work. One of the main advantages of introducing Fluix is that the tool is easy to use and requires no training. The idea behind Fluix is to improve efficiencies and reduce the time your sales teams spends in the office. With this one tool, you can speed up your sales cycle, empower your sales reps, free up their time and catch up to the digital age by saying goodbye to pen and paper.
