We have to admit something – we’re a bit in love with DocuSign here at Devicedesk. And it’s not because we get kickbacks via some scheme.
DocuSign is close to our hearts because it helped us win our very first customer project and it was the first platform we fully integrated with. We also use it internally for everything. We’ve been paperless since the beginning.
What is DocuSign?
For those living under a rock, DocuSign is the world’s leading electronic signing and document management platform. For one key reason; it just works. Anyone can upload a document, place boxes where you want someone to fill out information, place a signature box and send it to whoever needs to sign it. Everything is done electronically, and it’s super simple. But that’s enough free promotion…
Proposal building sucks
We’ve seen it countless times. The poor salesperson having to construct a quote manually. Starting with a template (if they’re lucky) or more likely, opening the last quote doing the old “find and replace”. They spend hours combining content from all over the place – prices from suppliers, images off the web, solution diagrams from the tech team – and doing their best to come up with a polished looking document which their customer may or may not choose to buy anyway.
And the scariest part? For some opportunities, the cost of this exercise may not even cover the margin on the sale itself!
Time to bring in the big guns: Devicedesk and DocuSign
Devicedesk automates every step of the configure – price – quote process. We actually go a lot further, but we’ll leave that for another time.
Firstly, there’s the Devicedesk catalogue. This is where you keep all of your products and services, descriptions, options, pricing and costs – centrally. Even if you have other systems which hold this information, we can take a feed and ensure everything is always up to date.
Secondly, there’s your proposal recipe; how you want your sales documents constructed. Perhaps it’s a cover page, a bill of materials (the quote detail) and an acceptance page? Or maybe something more complex including product specs, and individual customer pricing and T&Cs? This can all be handled.
And finally, there’s the actual proposal build. Salespeople can login and request quotations on behalf of their customers, or customers can self-serve quotes themselves.
Devicedesk combines all the content into a cohesive document (or envelope, as DocusSign calls it), and sends it over to the customer for acceptance.
But that’s not all, we keep going
A lot of CPQ (configure, price, quote) systems stop at this point, as they’ve done their bit and generated the quote. Devicedesk goes much further than this, again thanks to the rich integration we have with DocuSign.
Once a proposal has been sent out, we monitor the progress via DocuSign which send triggers when actions such as “acceptance” are taken. In this case we’re able to follow on the process and raise work orders on team members or place orders on external suppliers automatically.
In fact, a customer can self-serve their own quote, sign it off, have their goods sent to them and receive an invoice without anyone in your business having to lift a finger.
Now that, is digital working.