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As a small business, simplifying each interaction with your customers, partners and vendors goes a long way to making the process more efficient and enjoyable. A recent webinar titled, “Make it Rain Money: Close Deals Faster and Speed Up Collections” provides some great insights into how you can make this happen.
The webinar was moderated by Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends. Guests included Alice Bredin, President of Bredin Incorporated, and Jeff Perry, Vice President of Commercial Sales, SMB at DocuSign. The research covered in the webinar was conducted by Bredin Incorporated.
Three topics were covered in the webinar:
- Issues that delay cash collection.
- Common missteps that impede sales.
- How fast-growing companies close more deals faster.
To highlight these challenges, Bredin revealed the results of two studies conducted by her company with the participation of 500 small businesses across the country:
- How Small Businesses Can Invoice and Collect More Efficiently
- How Small Businesses Can Close Sales More Quickly
First, Bredin pointed out the challenges these organizations face. Manual work is expensive; 50% of the businesses surveyed indicated it takes two employees to process a single invoice. Bredin told Campbell, “For some businesses, the number of people touching an invoice got as high as five.”
This not only prolongs payments, but the cost of processing each payment is very high, which will cut into your bottom line.
Mistakes and confusion are common, and this goes hand in hand with manual processes. Forty-four percent of businesses said they lacked automated systems for invoicing and collections.
Time to cash takes longer than it should. Some businesses said it can take weeks with many follow-ups to collect.
The Key to Close Deals Faster
The key is streamlining the process with automation and digital technologies. As Perry said in the webinar, “DocuSign has learned 23 percent of the day of small businesses is spent imputing data.” This negatively affects all of the other processes for finalizing sales, generating invoices and collecting payment.”
The inefficiencies also come into play when a document needs to be located quickly to determine where in the contract cycle the agreement currently stands.
The solution DocuSign provides to help you close deals faster and get paid quicker has been designed to make every agreement and the approval process of those agreements totally digital — no matter where all the parties are located. Everything from electronic signing to payment collection can be performed in the office or out in the field on a mobile device.
This means all of your contracts can be accessed at anytime without having to worry about scanning and faxing hardcopies to move contracts forward.
The delivers improved customer service, better cash flow, more efficient processing time, faster customer payment, less paperwork and fewer errors.
This technology allows employees to focus on higher level tasks and automates manual processes. This will leave your employees to deal with tasks that deliver more value to the organization.
Watch the full webinar discussion below:
This article, “Experts Share How to Close Deals Faster and Get Paid Quicker” was first published on Small Business Trends