Putting together a sales contract is an administrative pain for your sales team. Having to wait to get it approved and signed-off is problematic in a vertical that is often target-driven. When your sales team must worry about drafting paperwork and waiting for clearance, they are wasting precious time that could be spent closing more deals. This is bad for their productivity and for your organization’s bottom line.
Leading organizations are always trying to find ways to boost productivity and efficiency; your sales cycle is an important area in which to do so.
The Problems with the Sales Contract and Approval Cycle
- Generating contracts manually is time consuming
- Getting approval for the contract relies on several people
- When numerous people are involved, delays happen
- Delays can lead to lost deals
- Time performing admin could be spent on tasks of higher value
- Extends your prospect’s buying cycle
Wasted time, frustrated employees and lost opportunities each take a toll on your bottom line. But what if you could design a process that took the pain out of the repetitive admin tasks and drastically reduced the time it takes for a contract to get approved? This would allow sales to concentrate on selling, buyers to get what they want faster and create an easier process for management to approve contracts.
What a Sales Contract and Approval Process Looks Like
Nancy is a great salesperson. She knows her product, communicates her organization’s vision clearly and understands her customers’ needs. This makes her great at her job and one of the most valuable members of her team.
Yet, she could reach higher goals faster if she didn’t have to spend so much time dealing with the sales contract process:
- Drawing up sales contracts for her prospects from old templates
- Copying and pasting information from her email into SharePoint and into her contract document
- Sending the contract off to be approved by her line manager, Geoff
- Geoff, in turn, suggests edits, sometimes referring to his higher-ups for approval; sometimes he can be delayed in getting back to her
- They conduct the whole process via email—threads can get complicated and information can get lost
- Documents are printed, signed and scanned and emailed again
- Once the contract is approved it is emailed to the customer to sign and return, which they sometimes forget to do or change their mind
- Nancy must spend more time chasing outstanding contracts
What Would Automation of the Process Look Like?
- Nancy closes a deal with a prospect over email
- The account already exists in her SharePoint library which is also synced to her Salesforce CRM tool
- Using Nintex Document Generation, she clicks a button and a sales contract is automatically generated. It ‘autofills’ with the customer’s details and up-to-the-minute information, like discounts, from the deal. It is then automatically sent to Geoff for approval
- Geoff casts his eye over the details and if needed can reply in a word (‘Approve’), comment on the document or send it forward to someone else to be approved, all from his email client
- If he forgets he is reminded through a series of automatic notifications to say that Nancy is still waiting for approval. Geoff can click an approve button from his email
- This sends Nancy a notification that the contract has been sent to her customer
- They can sign the contract directly using DocuSign
And just like that, Nancy has another deal completed!
Automate the Sales Contract Process
By ending the dependence on manual document generation and sign-off, you cut the chances of delays, errors and time wasted. Nintex provides sophisticated workflows that make generating a customizable sales contract fast and easy. It also automates the approval process—one less thing for your sales team to worry about. They can simply get on with higher value work and close more deals.
Ready to automate your most painful processes? Download your free trial of Nintex today, or request a demo.
