Time is money, and many businesses are now looking to make purchasing decisions on an accelerated timetable. Each passing day increases the chances of something changing on the buyer’s side which sours them on the deal.
Simply put, whatever you and your partners can do to speed up the sales process has the potential to significantly improve your lead conversion rates. Moving towards digital sales, communications, and documentation processes is an excellent way to achieve this.
Step 1: Implement Digital Processes
There’s really no way of avoiding it: Paper is slow.If you or your sales partners are still conducting sales and contract negotiations
There’s really no way of avoiding it: Paper is slow. If you or your sales partners are still conducting sales and contract negotiations via paper, you could be adding days or even weeks to the overall sales process. Documents have to be emailed back and forth. They end up sitting in inboxes while other things take priority.
Moving towards paperless digital processes can significantly reduce these problems, as well as offering new opportunities to streamline the purchasing process.
Step 2: Improve Efficiency Via Digital Sales And Collaboration
By embracing digital methods of sharing documents and collaborating on their creation, the time needed to hash out the details can be dramatically slashed. Utilizing a document-sharing system, your sales reps and their buyers can work on a contract in tandem – or at least with a greatly reduced wait times in between rounds of revisions.
This could be accomplished with free tools such as Google Documents, although there are more robust digital communications and collaboration indirect-sales solutions as well.
Another nice side effect of going digital is that it often requires less manpower, on either end. A study recently conducted by our partners at Docusign indicated that over two-thirds of companies which previously needed two or more employees for contract negotiation and finalization found that, with digital processes, one employee was all they needed. It seems likely this effect would be true on the buyer’s side as well, reducing their own time and manpower commitments.
If a digital initiative were to be combined with other efforts at streamlining, such as combining proposals or simplifying contract language, the gains could be even greater.
Step 3: Promote Your Streamlined Format
Ultimately, digital sales processes are beneficial to buyers and sellers. As the vendor at the top of an indirect sales ecosystem, that makes them that much more beneficial to you. Being able to boast of your streamlined sales format and simple digital processes will make you more attractive to potential sales partners, who want to work with vendors who can make their own lives easier.
In turn, these digital initiatives will help prevent lost sales and see sales finalized before the buyer gets distracted by some other pressing need.
Check out FUSE!
FUSE drives collaboration and the exchange of information, leading to enhanced sales channel performance. If you represent a manufacturer, dealer, distributor, supplier, industry association, or trade school—or if you’re an individual looking to enter the manufacturing industry—FUSE is for you.
