Sales Enablement at Scale
This is our final post on how to accelerate deals and win more revenue with contracts.
Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three in our series.
Sales Enablement at Scale
When an organization is under $10MM in revenue, chances are all decent-sized deals draw attention from executives and Legal. This level of attention moves approvals and contracts along quickly, pushing them from negotiation to close. But at a certain point, usually between $10 million and $50 million in revenue, a wrinkle starts to appear in the sales cycle. The high-velocity deals that used to be all hands on deck in the early days start to slip. Either they’re not closing or they’re getting pushed to the next month or quarter.
Even if close rates are still high this trend should be worrying for executives and sales teams. By $10 million in ARR, there’s a repeatable sales process and scaled team with A-players. By all means verify this, but more often the issue is elsewhere. A quick check of sales velocity, specifically late stage deal velocity, may reveal the problem. The metric to focus on— time between contract proposal and signature. If this number is going up month-over-month you have a problem and if it’s static there’s an opportunity to unlock revenue.
In companies with an increasing time from proposal to signature, the issue isn’t that the sales team has forgotten how to close. It’s that the company hasn’t learned how to enable them at scale.
The solution is working smarter, not harder. Instead of throwing more bodies at the problem, look to technology. Implement a contract management platform.
Now, not all contract management platforms are created equal. A contract management platform that is integrated into a CRM, like Salesforce, streamlines the contracting process, putting all people, processes, and documents relating to the contract in one place, and enables sales to natively generate contracts without leaving the CRM. Those capabilities that accelerate deals—pre-approved templates, online redlining, and approval workflows—become integrated into already existing systems and quickly standardized across the organization.
From within an Opportunity, with the push of a button sales can create a pre-approved contract from a template, choose who should be included on that contract, and send the contract for signature. A rep can then check the status of the contract, review signed contracts, and stay on top of renewal dates 18 and opportunities for upsell. Because a platform is connected seamlessly, all this can be done in seconds, without learning any new tools or systems.
Regardless the size of the team or the size of the deal processes are automated and repeatable. Sales teams are able to move fast, and stay in loop, accelerate deals, and build the business relationships that deliver bigger deals, without opening up the business to risk.
Conclusion
Research from CEB Global–famed for writing The Challenger Customer and The Challenger Sale–posit the average B2B buying committee is 7.8 stakeholders and rising. If a deal is at the point of putting pen to paper, it’s safe to assume there’s executive sponsorship and the majority of said committee is onside. What’s key at this point? Building momentum through a smooth negotiation process and quick signature. This is where technology–specifically contract management– can help augment your sales strategy.
Best-in-class sales organizations leverage contract management platforms to automate contract creation, quickly process redlining, get signatures faster to reduce sales cycles, and win more, and bigger, deals. Are you?
You wouldn’t dream of doing sales without a CRM. You shouldn’t do sales without integrated contract management either. Bring in a platform to get more deals, and close them faster.
Enable your sales team!
Concord’s mission is to help companies achieve scalability and efficiency by automating their most central process, contracts. The cloud-based solution enables over 300,000 users around the globe to create, collaborate, sign, store, and manage their agreements all in one place. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, Concord is built by business for business.
