Luckily, you don’t have to rethink your tech stack or stress over adding complicated solutions to bridge these gaps. With the DocSend + Zapier integration, you can build automated, hassle-free workflows between DocSend and your most commonly used tools in just a few clicks. Here are three easy fixes for eliminating unnecessary work effort and gaining back time in your day.

Fix #1: Send automated emails every time someone new visits your virtual data room

Love it or hate it, email remains a popular tool choice for connecting with everyone from prospects and customers to partners, vendors, teammates, and more. Because DocSend lets you see who’s visiting your data room and interacting with the content you’ve shared, it’s one of the first stops to see what your contacts have been up to.

By connecting DocSend to your email and/or calendar via the Zapier integration, you can save extra steps floating between tools when new contact names appear in your data room. It’s a popular Zap used to streamline touchpoints with new visitors, as well as add them as attendees to calendar events automatically.

Discover similar time-saving shortcuts in these email and calendar tools:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Calendly
• Microsoft Outlook

Fix #2: Seamlessly update team projects and documents with newly created links

Project management tools like Airtable, Asana, Monday.com, and others are huge for keeping track of your team’s tasks and managing cross-functional projects more efficiently. The trouble is, these tools can eat up a lot of time when you’re continuously porting over new information and links from your other tools.

The DocSend + Zapier integration delivers significant time savings when it comes to updating project tasks, progress, and statuses within these tools. For example, say your team tracks all of your DocSend links and content using Google Sheets. You can create a Zap to update the appropriate row in a Google Sheets spreadsheet whenever links are created in DocSend.

Explore even more productivity boosters with these project management tools:

• Airtable
• Asana
• Google Sheets
• Monday
• Notion

Fix #3: Automatically add new visitors to campaign mailing lists

Increasing efficiency is the heartbeat of every sales, marketing, and project management automation tool. Yet anyone who uses these tools will tell you that maintaining updated audience lists for email campaigns and marketing newsletters isn’t always the easiest thing to stay on top of.

You can save a serious amount of time (and headache!) by building a Zap between DocSend and marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp or HubSpot. New visitors can be automatically added to your audience lists in these tools, ensuring that no contacts are ever left behind. In a similar vein, you can also set up Zaps to update form questions and sequences in Typeform any time someone downloads content from your data room.

Dig even deeper into these sales, marketing, and eCommerce Zaps:

• Mailchimp
• HubSpot
• Typeform
• Facebook Ads
• Shopify

What would you do with more time back in your workday? Sign up for a free trial to see how DocSend can help you save time and understand how viewers engage with your most important documents.

The post Three DocSend + Zapier integrations to help you save time and boost productivity appeared first on DocSend.

This type of inefficiency is an absolute no-go for fast-moving sales teams. As the saying goes, time is money, and salespeople don’t want to lose either. As sales tech stacks across companies continue to grow, it’s easy to get caught up in the allure of the hot new tool. This is a slippery slope to reps spending more time managing tech than crafting a strategic follow-up. 

A sales rep’s tech can make or break the deal, but the answer may not lie in giving reps more tools, but rather in tools that do more with less. We’ve put together five simple ways to boost your sales tech stack and close more deals – with tools you’re likely already using.

1. Get notified instantly when a lead visits your DocSend link 

Outside of bluebird deals (an unanticipated, incredibly profitable sale), surprises have no place in the sales process. DocSend’s Zapier integration lets reps build automations between the tools they use most – keeping them in the know whenever a prospect has viewed their link. 

This customizable Zap brings prospect visibility directly to a place where it’s more readily available for the individual rep. Some reps never put down their phone. Some swear by email while others sleep in Slack. No matter your preferred communication method, you can receive instant updates when your shared link is opened.

It’s known that quick follow-up is key to closing the deal, but the best part of this Zap lies in its lesser-known benefit: the ability to identify new stakeholders as soon as they engage with your link. 

Imagine this scenario: your prospect says they’re the main decision-maker, but then forwards your collateral to their boss, the real decision-maker. DocSend lets you know when prospects engage with your collateral, and with whom they share it. You’ll know exactly when your documents are forwarded to and viewed by other stakeholders within the company.

Armed with this knowledge, sales reps can follow-up strategically and avoid being blindsided by unexpected stakeholders during the next call.

Top Zaps: 

• When a prospect visits your link -> Send yourself a direct message from the Slackbot
• When a prospect visits your link -> Send a message to a private Slack channel 
• When a prospect downloads your data room -> Send yourself a text
• When a prospect visits your link -> Create and send an email
• When a prospect visits your link -> Create and send an email

2. Automatically add new DocSend visitors to your CRM

Updating email lists and contacts within a CRM might be one of the most tedious tasks in existence. It’s definitely not something that reps should be spending lots of time on. 

Let’s say you’re a Biz Dev representative (BDR) and are sending out a ton of touches. Save yourself hours with a Zap that automatically adds or updates contacts based on how they engage with your shared collateral – all without ever leaving your preferred CRM.  

Automate email reminders, send prospect thank-yous, or add contacts to workflows as soon as someone engages with your DocSend content. If you’re feeling really fancy, you can even set up multi-step Zaps.

Favorite Zaps: 

• When a prospect visits your link -> Create or update contact
• When a prospect visits your link -> Add contact to a specific list, campaign, or workflow
• When a prospect downloads your data room -> Create or update contact
• When a prospect downloads your data room -> Add contact to a specific list, campaign, or workflow

3. Access detailed insights across mass email campaigns

The power of using DocSend to boost your sales tech stack doesn’t end with adding and updating contacts within your CRM. In fact, we’re just getting started.  

As a sales rep, you’re probably all too familiar with running email drip campaigns and sending mass personalized messages. Email outreach is an essential component of any sales process. But, tracking opens across sent emails isn’t enough to accurately measure prospect engagement. If that’s all you’re relying on, you’re missing out on analytics that give you real insight into prospect behavior. While a number of sales enablement tools have popped up to help reps scale email outreach, they don’t answer the critical question regarding how to improve deal negotiation. It’s impossible to track engagement with content you share in email sequences down to the target account and contact level.

To truly understand prospect behavior, you need detailed insight into not only when your collateral was viewed, but how often, for how long, if it was shared, and with whom. And you’re not going to get that by measuring email opens alone. 

DocSend’s document analytics gives sales reps x-ray vision into exactly how prospects are engaging with your collateral. This insight enables reps to craft compelling, strategic follow-up that speaks directly to their lead’s pain points. When sellers reach out at the right time, with the right content, it has the potential to win key accounts, and turn prospects into paying customers. 

DocSend not only gives you these detailed insights per viewer, but you can instantly access them at scale by leveraging our Mail Merge and Campaign links. 

“DocSend’s analytics really help you prioritize. If you’re reaching out to 100 people, you’re going to go after the first 10 that open that link. Just adding DocSend links into email campaigns gives me so much visibility into the individual that clicked, and how they engaged with the material. It’s so powerful.” – Paul Koelle, Dropbox DocSend

Mail Merge links

Use DocSend Mail Merge links directly in your message templates within your marketing automation tool of choice. Since Mail Merge links are tracked in the same way as DocSend links, you’ll get access to all the same insights, no matter how many leads you email the link to. 

It gets better: Collect in-depth visitor insights without having to prompt them for their email. That part is already configured on your marketing automation tool through the merge tag.

Campaign links

DocSend’s Campaign links take Mail Merge links to the next level. Reps can create a unique link to share content in their unique email cadences, without ever leaving workflows in either tool. Detailed prospect insights are now accessible at scale, and with virtually no effort. 

Campaign links function like robust Mail Merge links. You can target a specific set of prospects or accounts, which are configured within your marketing automation tool and mapped directly back to DocSend. 

DocSend Campaign links are available across a variety of CRMs, but if you’re using Outreach or Salesloft, the process goes from easy to ridiculously easy.

From inside either Outreach or SalesLoft, simply open the DocSend Chrome extension, select the content you want to share from the dropdown, and the Campaign Link will automatically be copied to your clipboard.

The best part? If you have a configured recipient list, you won’t have to ask visitors to provide their email before accessing your collateral, but you’ll still be able to see exactly who is viewing your content in DocSend.

Accessing unique prospect insights at scale (a note on Spawn links)

If you’re wondering what the heck a Spawn link is, we don’t blame you. Spawn links are how DocSend is able to independently track engagement and visits for each prospect under each target account. These new links are generated as visits occur with any Campaign or Mail Merge links emailed out. Don’t worry – you’ll still be able to keep track of which links are associated with which email blast, since each Spawn link’s URL will reference the original campaign link.

4. See exactly which collateral helps close deals

Having x-ray vision into prospect engagement with your content is game-changing. Being able to access those analytics at scale and identify macro-level trends? Sounds impossible. However, DocSend delivers both, directly within your CRM. 

At DocSend, we leverage our native Salesforce integration to track our content across every stage in the buyer’s journey. We can see how specific pieces of content (like our old vs new sales decks, case studies, whitepapers, etc) impact prospect engagement, and finally understand which pieces of content actually drive conversion. If you’re not using Salesforce, you can leverage our Zapier integration to pull similar reports into HubSpot, Marketo, or another CRM. 

The list of what you can track and analyze is endless. If you’re managing a sales team and you want to know when your reps are creating links, you can track that and get automated alerts. You can track how many visits are received for a particular rep, and then from a particular account and cohort. 

Once you get enough visit data, you can begin to build really interesting reports that correlate ROI with content pieces. For example, if you see that a specific whitepaper or case study generated 10 opportunities and 8 closed deals, you can make decisions based on that. It justifies greater spend on whitepapers or case studies since you can actually tie data to them. 

In the past, we would have no way of knowing the ROI on the sales content we were sending out. Now we’re able to track content throughout the entire sales process, all the way to deal size, win rate, and revenue attainment. We’re able to easily map all individual prospect activity in DocSend at the account-level back to our CRM. 

5. Get deals signed faster with a seamless eSignature experience

Ah, the moment of truth. If you’ve made it all the way to the final stage of a deal cycle the last thing you want is friction. Or worse: to be ghosted this late in the game. Our research shows that deals are closing faster than ever, with sales contracts getting signed about a day after they’re sent out for signature. 

DocSend arms sales reps with the power to securely share, track, and analyze critical sales documents and truly understand prospect behavior. Why not use the same tool to get those documents signed? Seamless and simple, DocSend gives you the insight you need to get your prospects through the funnel, and the speed you need to get them to sign. Within seconds, you can convert any document in DocSend into a signable one. It couldn’t be easier. 

Eager to explore what DocSend has to offer? Take our free trial for a spin.

The post 5 ways to boost your sales tech stack and close more deals appeared first on DocSend.

At a high-level, a sales enablement tool can do two things: help teach your sales team how to sell and enable their ability to sell by providing training, documents, and guidance. Essentially, sales enablement tools serve as a teaching aid or a repository for critical information that sales reps need to do their job.

A lot of what a sales enablement tool does is teach reps how to sell or store information they need to sell. These capabilities are a really great fit when sales managers want to choreograph how a rep should sell. Tools like these are most effective when the sales process doesn’t vary much and reps simply need a place to keep all selling collateral up-to-date and organized.

When do you need sales enablement?

If you’re looking for a sales tool that offers:

• Learning paths (guided learning). This enables you to train a sales rep by walking them through a pre-designed learning path in order to understand the topic at hand.
• On-time enablement. The idea here is that when a sales rep is working on a deal and moves it to another stage, you know it’s happened. You know a deal has been moved because the CRM has been updated to reflect that.
• AI-enabled content surfacing. An extension of the above feature, the tool will surface content that’s specific to the deal’s stage. This enables reps to access the right content at the right time.

Then you need a sales enablement tool. And DocSend is not it.

Consider what team will own the tool

Ultimately, whether or not sales teams need a sales enablement tool or a tool like DocSend comes down to which team will buy, manage, and own the tool. When marketing teams or sales enablement teams own the tool, then DocSend isn’t the right one. DocSend isn’t designed to give marketing or sales teams a bird’s eye view of reps being on brand/message, or determining which types of content should be placed at specific stages within the deal cycle.

DocSend is designed for sales reps who own the strategy and process of their deals. It gives reps the insight needed to make more informed decisions and uniquely manage each deal based on how that specific prospect is engaging.

Sales enablement tools are a better fit for large teams who are locked into somewhat of a ‘rinse and repeat’ deal cycle.

When the sales executive or team lead owns the tool, and is looking for levers to pull during the negotiation of deals, then DocSend is not only the right tool – it’s critical.

Sales enablement vs. deal negotiation: how to know which one you need

Here are a few questions to ask yourself based on your role, business goal, and other factors.

What business problem are you trying to solve?

• Train reps on how to sell & keep them on brand and on message → sales enablement tool.
• Provide competitive intel so that reps can better negotiate deals → deal negotiation tool.

Who will be owning and managing the tool (not using it)?

• Marketing and/or sales enablement teams → sales enablement tool.
• Sales teams → deal negotiation tool.

Are individual sales reps in the driver’s seat of their deals?

• Yes → deal negotiation tool.
• No → sales enablement tool.

Are reps ‘put on rails’ with pre-choreographed sales processes designed by sales enablement or marketing teams?

• Yes → sales enablement tool.
• No → deal negotiation tool.

Using DocSend as a high-impact deal negotiation tool 

DocSend is not intended to be a sales enablement tool. DocSend is critical for high-stake, complex deals. Strategic negotiations like this, when the individual sales rep is in the driver’s seat of their deals, call for a tool with robust analytic capabilities. Rather than having marketing or sales enablement teams running the show, feeding reps structured collateral, reps using DocSend are able to make data-driven decisions about their deals. 

Put simply, it’s a deal negotiation tool. With page-by-page analytics you are able to know ahead of any conversation, what questions your prospect might have based on how they’ve engaged with your sales collateral. 

Get x-ray vision into your deals with DocSend document analytics

DocSend gives you detailed insight into your deals and tighter control over your shared documents. It’s best when what you are aiming to accomplish follows our ESC model, meaning your document is being shared externally, it’s sensitive in nature, and critical to getting business done. 

With DocSend, you can dictate who is and isn’t able to open the document but more importantly,  you can set permission controls like block lists, passcodes, expiration dates, and download restrictions to ensure only the right people access your documents. Regardless of how the document was received, you can find out who each individual viewer is, what page(s) they view, how long they spend on each page, and whether or not the documents were shared with new stakeholders. 

This kind of insight is simply not possible with sales enablement tools. While many tools allow sales reps to see whether emails are opened or documents within their emails are viewed, they lack visibility into exactly how prospects engage with the emailed sales collateral (pitch deck, rate card, RFP response, proposal). Sales reps know that an opened email doesn’t accurately indicate prospect engagement level. Reps need insight beyond the email, directly into their lead’s business, so they can identify and prioritize the right prospects – without wasting time on dead end deals. 

The insight DocSend provides is a breath of fresh air for people in the high stakes, low volume, highly customized sales world. It saves reps a ton of time chasing down dead-end deals by seeing exactly how their prospect is engaging with their collateral.

Sales reps will tell you that ‘no’ is probably the worst answer they can receive. But most people don’t actually tell you ‘no’, they tell you ‘maybe’. DocSend eliminates the likelihood of reps getting ghosted – or worse, strung along – by prospects.

You can actually deploy strategies with DocSend that are hard to do without it, to actually figure out if your champions are championing you when they’re not talking directly to you. For example, a prospect flags that the CTO is a stakeholder in this decision. You then can flag this when sending over the proposal asking if it will be shared with them and then see if it’s indeed forwarded and viewed by the CTO. With DocSend, you get a much better understanding of whether the deal actually exists or whether you’re chasing somebody who’s just too nice to say no.

Increase your close-rate with DocSend

If you are managing complex or unique deals, DocSend is absolutely a force multiplier. The ability to prioritize and know which deals are real and which aren’t, actually allows you to hire fewer reps. People often scrutinize the cost of a new piece of software. Do we really want to spend the $30,000 on this? But in the meantime, they have inefficient sales reps and think they need to increase headcount. But, if there is software that helps reps close faster, the better question is, What does a 3% bump to your win rate do for you?. Is that worth the $20K you’d spend to equip your reps with a tool that makes them more efficient? And is there a world in which you should think about efficiency here, even with big slow deals?

You might not need to hire more reps. It’s more about enabling your sales reps to prioritize leads correctly and giving them powerful insight that they can use to tailor their conversations accordingly. 

Learn how DocSend can help sales reps build strong prospect relationships and close more deals.

The post A tool for better sales negotiation, not enablement appeared first on DocSend.

If you’ve found yourself nodding along, you’re not alone—far from it. In our recent webinar, we discussed current trends in hybrid and virtual selling environments and the challenges reps face when trying to close deals. Here, we take a closer look at the research and explain how you can keep late-stage deals from falling through the cracks.

Despite general sales enthusiasm, deal complications persist

On the surface, virtual and hybrid selling environments have largely been met with optimism from sales folks over the past couple of years. Our research, which surveyed more than 300 sales professionals across industries, found that over half of sales reps consider today’s virtual environments beneficial to them.

Providing access to anyone, anywhere, virtual selling gives sales reps a big opportunity to grow their networks. Complementing this widening customer base is an ever-expanding media landscape, and sales reps now have even more channels to engage with their prospects and leads.

Yet beneath this optimistic exterior linger less-than-ideal deal complications. At large, sales folks report feeling confident about their deals when sending out contracts and asking for signatures, with more than 75 percent of people believing a deal will close after the contract is sent.

However, despite this confidence, sales reps continue to see deals regularly fall through late in the sales cycle. Nearly half of respondents shared that their deals go dark post-contract nearly 25 percent of the time and more than 30 percent said their deals go under over half of the time—pretty stark differences when you consider their initial optimism.

Keeping your deals from going dark without warning

While virtual selling provides plenty of opportunities, it can also lead to deals that go dark without warning. Identifying warm leads and building meaningful relationships with prospects is a lot more challenging in virtual environments than in-person settings, and these obstacles coexist with the optimism we see today. More than 70% of sales folks cited these two concerns—identifying leads and relationship-building—as top anxieties of virtual selling.

Sure, we might be connected to more people in more places but being able to interact with them in meaningful ways has become much more difficult. Knowing which leads are actually warm and which prospects are genuinely interested is little more than a guessing game when you’re relying on emails and 15-minute Zoom calls.

But it’s not all bad news. On the contrary, with the right tools and a few strategic selling tweaks, you can remove common communication blockers and keep your deals progressing. Consider the following four tips to keep your momentum in the deal cycle from stalling.

• If your prospects have to work to consume your content, they won’t. Eliminating content and communication hiccups is one of the easiest ways to boost engagement and keep deal cycles humming along. Are you sending prospects large files to download? Do your emails frequently get lost in spam filters? How much time is your prospect spending searching through your email thread for that proposal you sent last week?
  
  These are common bottlenecks that can keep your prospect from understanding the value of your offering. Using a prospect-friendly sales tool will make sharing and updating content fast and easy for you and your audience. Using a single link to share all your sales and marketing material makes content consumption fast and frictionless. (And easy for you to manage!)

• Leave the cookie-cutter sales decks to your competition. Don’t overlook the power of personalizing your content as conversations with prospects progress. Just wrapped up a stellar customer conversation and product demo? Take it a step further by customizing your materials based on what you learned from the conversation.Marketing teams can become a consultative partner to sales by nailing down which slides are effective as templates and don’t need to be custom. For example, if a rep spent time customizing each page in a deck but only one or two slides were actually important, marketing can create a template and sales can customize the two important slides. The ability to see how the custom materials are being consumed help save time and create a scalable process between marketing and sales.

• Skip those dreaded check-ins with unengaged prospects. Focus your follow-up activity on the right people and stop wasting time with unengaged and uninterested prospects. Real-time document insights are key here. When you send documents in DocSend, you can see when they look at your content, who they share it with, and how much time they spend on every page.This not only arms you with valuable intel on who to follow up with and when, but it also lets you tailor data-driven messaging based on the content your accounts are spending the most time on.

• Avoid the element of surprise. Nothing curbs deal momentum like an unexpected stakeholder entering at stage right. Virtual environments can make visibility into company stakeholders more complicated, and it’s not always clear which decision-makers need to be involved or who the champion reading the ROI deck you poured so much time into is.DocSend pulls back this curtain of surprise, letting you see which deals are being actively reviewed and what new stakeholders are being introduced to your pitch. When you know all the players, you can follow up more strategically and close the deal faster.

“Salespeople have always been at an unfair advantage because we don’t always know what’s going on. DocSend levels the playing field.” — Mark Parkinson, Vice President of Sales Enablement at Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness (CMOE)

Sometimes it’s not goodbye. Sometimes it really is “See you later.”

Every sales rep knows that life happens, prospects get busy, and projects get re-prioritized. Sometimes, your most interested, highly engaged customers just inexplicably fade away with no rhyme or reason. 

These circumstances are another sweet spot you can stay connected with using the right tools. DocSend notifies you whenever a months-old prospect or unengaged customer returns to look at pricing proposals or content you’ve previously shared with them. This gives you the perfect opportunity to call them back and pick things up right where you left off. 

How can you use insights from DocSend to close more deals faster and efficiently? Watch the replay of our webinar, “Closing more deals with DocSend,” to learn how Mark Parkinson, VP of Sales Enablement at CMOE, and his team use the platform to personalize, accelerate, and close deal cycles.

The post Ghosted at the end of the deal cycle? Keep late-stage deals from going dark with these four tips appeared first on DocSend.

Salespeople agree that this new model has its benefits: an expanding customer base not bound by geography and new channels for maintaining prospect contact. However, despite the benefits, salespeople realize that yesterday’s processes need to shift in order to be successful within virtual or hybrid environments. ‘How will I identify warm leads?’ and ‘How can I build meaningful relationships with prospects?’ are often questions that Salespeople ask themselves.

“Oftentimes, Salespeople operating in virtual settings don’t have cameras on. This means the typical modes of assessing the prospect, like body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, are lacking. DocSend helps to fill in these gaps.”
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These concerns highlight that sales teams are missing key insights when making deals. As our research shows, better insights drive deeper relationships. Knowing which prospects are genuinely interested and being able to strategically follow-up based on where they spend the most time in your documents are invaluable tools in virtual sales environments. DocSend analytics gives teams the power to do both, so they can proactively prioritize which companies to go after.

Here’s how.

1. Identify engaged prospects beyond the email open notification

While meeting face-to-face is still not an option for all sales teams, salespeople are turning to other resources to boost their understanding of who’s engaged (and who isn’t). How teams currently leverage prospect activity to prioritize who to follow-up with is critical to increasing win rates.

While many tools allow sales reps to see how prospects engage with their emails, they lose visibility into how prospects engage with sales collateral (pitch deck, rate card, RFP response, proposal) once it’s emailed over and most importantly, if those documents were shared with new stakeholders (more on that later).

Salespeople know that an opened email doesn’t accurately indicate prospect engagement level. We need to have visibility beyond the email, directly into our lead’s business. DocSend’s document analytics reveals the level of engagement and interest a prospect has with sales documents through link tracking, document completion rate, page-by-page analytics, and more. This provides the insight necessary to prioritize the right companies to go after, without wasting time chasing down dead-end deals.

You’re probably familiar with prioritizing prospects into A, B, and C lists. Here’s how we do this using DocSend:

• A-List (high priority): Prospects who repeatedly engage with and read your collateral, and who share it with other stakeholders.
• B-List (medium priority): Prospects who did engage with and read your documents, but don’t engage repeatedly and/or don’t share it.
• C-List (low priority): Prospects who open and respond to your email, but haven’t yet engaged with your sales documents.

Prioritizing your prospects this way gives you a much better view into their decision-making process.

2. Discover new decision makers before it’s too late

We’ve all experienced a lead telling us that they’re the main decision-maker involved in the deal, only to discover way too late that that’s far from true. Had you sent the document using DocSend, things could’ve gone a lot differently. You would’ve been notified when your documents were forwarded and opened by your prospect’s boss, who is likely the real decision-maker. Having insight into who is actually a stakeholder makes strategic follow-up that much easier.

DocSend lets you know when prospects engage with your collateral, and with whom they share it. You’ll know exactly when your documents are forwarded to and viewed by other stakeholders within the company.

Not only does this provide x-ray vision into who exactly is involved in the buying process, but this also gives reps critical information regarding each stakeholder’s interest level based on their engagement with the shared collateral. Being able to see not only how many times a prospect engaged with your sales documents, but also who your content was shared with has the potential to speed deals up and uncover who the real decision-makers are.

Armed with this knowledge, sales reps can focus their pitch to encompass each stakeholder’s concern and better align with the organization’s needs and interests to close the deal. Get a razor sharp edge to closing deals faster by knowing exactly who from an organization is a part of the decision-making process, and what each person is interested in to tailor your pitch appropriately.

DocSend gives you insight into all stakeholders involved early on in the deal process. If your prospect tells you they’re the only decision maker, but you keep seeing their boss in your shared documents, then you know your contact likely has little leverage and you should probably get in front of their boss as quickly as possible. When this happens to me, I make a note of who the new stakeholders are and immediately go to their LinkedIn to learn more about them and follow-up accordingly.

I remember wanting a prospect to pass along sales documents I had shared with them. When I saw that the information had been shared and opened by someone new, I was able to reach out and see if there was an opportunity to connect and learn more about this new stakeholder. This insight is what makes DocSend a rep’s secret weapon.

3. Tailor the conversation every step of the way

Our research found that over 75% of salespeople believe a deal will close once they send out a contract for signatures. But despite this confidence, deals are still falling through. More than half of potential deals going dark for a third of salespeople means one thing: having more insight into prospect engagement with your deals won’t hurt. This added layer of reassurance with insight you wouldn’t otherwise have is key.

As tempting as it can be to craft your sales proposal around what you know about your product, the purpose is to tailor your narrative to your prospect’s unique understanding and needs. (Trust me, we learned this the hard way at DocSend. Learn how we figured out that prospects were disengaging from our sales content early and often – and what we did to fix it.)

A clear example is how Matt Hammond, VP of Sales and Marketing at Campus.app, closed a 7-figure sales deal by using DocSend’s analytics to better understand how his prospect was interacting with the sales proposal.

The moment I realized DocSend was mission-critical was when we sent out a 7-figure sales proposal. DocSend coached us to put 3 pricing options on 3 page and utilize analytics like time spent per page to our advantage. Because of this insight, DocSend helped us negotiate much more effectively.

Having full visibility into prospect engagement metrics throughout the sales cycle gives you much needed insight to tailor your conversations accordingly. Most of the time, measuring engagement ends at opens and clicks. But to really understand how prospects are progressing through your proposal (for example), you need to dig deeper. You need to look at engagement within the deck. DocSend’s document analytics lets you measure things like drop off rate, page views, and time spent per page so you can tell exactly what content captured and held a prospect’s attention, and what didn’t. Being able to identify which parts of your sales documents your prospect focuses on gives you an extra edge when it comes time for that proposal call. And access to insight into where they don’t spend time can be just as powerful.

Tools like Outreach can be helpful, but they come with a few limitations, especially when it comes to measuring prospect engagement. Not a lot of reps know that you can track email opens with Outreach, so if you’re not familiar with the tool, then you’re not even going to know that you can track that. Also, this feature isn’t always automatically turned on, so you’ll either have to remember to enable it or risk forgetting about it. There’s a margin of error.

Additionally, Outreach provides tracking on the email, but a lot of times the content that’s important for a prospect to view isn’t always in an email. An email tracking option either built into Outreach (or another tool) isn’t really fruitful for any attachment that you may be sending, whether it’s protecting it or just tracking it. Just using a tool like Outreach doesn’t give you that much helpful information.

For example, let’s say I were to send an email to a prospect, Kevin. They click to open the email, and since tracking is based on the email recipient it shows that Kevin opens it. If Kevin were to forward that email to anybody else, it’s going to look like Kevin opened it a lot, because one of the limitations of tools like Outreach is to only track whether an email has been opened, not whether it’s been shared with or opened by someone new. In a typical sales scenario it ends up looking like Kevin opened that email 40 times. Is Kevin really interested? Or did he just pass it around to people? The thing is, sometimes we pass around terrible sales emails as a hilarious, really bad example of how not to engage a prospect. That’s a sales person’s worst nightmare, and definitely a scenario that could be happening. You just have no idea.

Pairing Outreach with a tool like MixMax can give you a little bit more insight, but mainly those tools are built for communication automation. If you want to reach out to 20 different prospects in an hour, you probably don’t want to have to write 20 personalized emails. These solutions are great for scalable outreach, but their main goal isn’t really to be able to track engagement beyond the email open. One of my favorite hacks to get the best of both worlds is to include a DocSend link within the emails I send out to a long list of prospects using a tool like Outreach. I get the benefit of scalability along with the x-ray vision that DocSend’s document analytics provides. If I consistently see that a prospect isn’t looking at any of the collateral I’ve shared with them, I know they’re probably not engaged. I can disqualify them pretty quickly, which really helps me save time. DocSend’s document analytics really tells me how much time I should spend on this deal.

Being able to see how long a prospect spent on a proposal, what product or feature is most important, or where a prospect’s focus is is really the magic of DocSend. It’s great for sales reps to take advantage of, especially to time and…
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4. Create controllable, customized client portals with data rooms

In my past sales roles, all of my prospect conversations would result in multiple email threads with various stakeholders. And it would be impossible to track who had been sent what, when, or by whom. With DocSend’s data rooms, there’s no need for confusion of email chains or multiple links for your prospect to keep track of – it’s all housed and tracked under a single link. You can see when, where, and how your prospects engage, and follow up with timely and personalized outreach. Update your documents once, and all your shared links of that file will be updated as well.

When a stakeholder needs a new document or to download a case study for their boss, I can easily make changes to their access level without having to give a new point of access.

A lot of evaluators who either don’t have power or aren’t the decision maker will ask for a ton of sales material that may or may not be necessary. They may ask for a Salesforce specific document or a vendor comparison or something like that, and if they’re not reading or opening it that tells me that either they’re not interested, or I can call them out on it during our next call and ask why they haven’t reviewed the information they’ve requested I send. One time, I sent over a vendor comparison and they didn’t even look at it. On the next call, I called it out, which gave me the opportunity to show it and talk through it, rather than relying on them to review asynchronously.

For teams that aren’t using DocSend, reps are just assuming that they’re prospects are looking at the collateral they’ve sent over. Whereas I have tangible data that shows me that they didn’t look at it, so I’ve got to review it during our next meeting, if it’s really important.

Another way I’ve been using DocSend’s data rooms is to create a personalized client portal for each prospect. I’ll put their logo in it and add any relevant pieces of content, like specific case studies for that particular industry. The benefit is two-fold: I’m able to track engagement across all documents and it feels custom and personal for the prospect. Having that shared space is a great way to build a relationship with a potential client. And, depending on how late it is and how slow my brain is working, it only takes me about five minutes to make a fully customized data room. It’s so easy to drag and drop in relevant content pieces, and then, when they get to the MSA or the order form of the quote, I just add that to the data room. When I tell potential clients that I’ve created a custom portal for them, it makes them feel really special and valued, when it took me all of five minutes to do it.

Updating documents that have been added to data rooms is so easy with DocSend. I’ve used the update document feature to replace old proposals so many times. Normally, when you’re updating collateral without DocSend you would have to send an attachment, meaning you lose control over the previous one(s) you’ve sent. Your prospect may be comparing the old proposal with the new one, but with DocSend I can disable document downloading, meaning prospects will only have access to the most recent, up to date proposal.

For additional control, you can grant access to documents within your data room to only those with an email from a certain domain. I use this to make sure that prospects can’t share documents with anyone outside of their organization, and I always disable downloading. If there’s a unique situation where a prospect does need to download a specific document, I can easily enable it. And having that open, flexible conversation really helps with prospect engagement.

5. Deploy detailed insights to your sales team at scale

You may be wondering what else you can do with all of the unique insight DocSend provides. Well, what if it could all be synced directly back to your CRM? If you’re thinking that would be too good to be true, think again.

At DocSend, we leverage our Salesforce integration to track our content across every stage in the buyer’s journey. We can see how specific pieces of content, like our old vs new sales decks, impact how prospects progress through the funnel.

DocSend’s Salesforce integration allows us to identify the content that drives the sales process forward, and finally understand which pieces of content actually drive conversion.

If we want to know the overall performance and engagement with a specific piece of content, we can run a quick report in Salesforce and see which contacts and accounts have viewed it, and for how long.

In the past, we would have no way of knowing the ROI on the sales content we were sending out. Now we’re able to track content throughout the entire sales process, all the way to deal size, win rate, and revenue attainment. We’re able to easily map all individual prospect activity in DocSend at the account-level back to our Salesforce accounts. It couldn’t be simpler.

There’s so much you can do with the DocSend and Salesforce integration to optimize the sales process. We recommend paying attention to two key metrics – ’average percent viewed’ and ‘average visit duration’ – to identify the following:

• Low-performing content. With DocSend and Salesforce working together, sales teams can finally see which content isn’t cutting it.
• High-performing content. Highlight the content that best moves prospects through the funnel.
• Content performance trends. See how different types of content can influence different account types. For example, your comprehensive buyer’s guide might crush it when you’re selling to big companies, but fall flat when you’re trying to close a deal with a medium-sized business. With the DocSend Salesforce integration, you’ll finally be able to pull insight like this from your reports and improve how you use content in your sales process.

6. Drive deal execution with an intuitive eSignature experience

You’re close to the finish line. You’ve crafted a compelling, data-driven pitch deck, uncovered new stakeholders, and monitored prospect engagement within your documents.

Now is the moment you’ve been waiting for. They’re ready to sign. A signature is your last hurdle before your deal closes, and eliminating any points of friction is key. That’s why using the same tool to get your contract signed is critical to keeping deals moving. Seamless and simple, DocSend gives you the insight you need to get your prospects through the funnel, and the speed you need to get them to sign. You don’t have to sacrifice file control or security.

Within seconds, you can convert any document in DocSend into a signable document. And because we know an audit trail is important, you’ll also receive all the pertinent signer events. It’s that easy.

Our research found that 75% of salespeople believe a deal will close once they send out a contract for signatures. Deals are closing faster than ever – sales contracts get signed about a day after they’re sent out for signature, with average time spent staying somewhat steady whether they intend to sign the document or not. That means that the decision to sign the contract (or not) has been made long before your prospect is given the contract to sign. Focus on building relationships along the entire sales cycle, and use eSignature analytics to inform future prospect follow-up strategies.

DocSend’s eSignature makes the signing process as flexible as it is convenient. I can use it to send a contract or proposal out for signature, but I can also use it to send an NDA. It’s very customizable.

To learn more about how you can gain a competitive edge while selling remotely, check out our recent research.

The post Selling virtually? Here’s 6 ways DocSend helps Sales teams identify and nurture leads appeared first on DocSend.

The problem with chasing email opens is that so much of the internal decision-making process happens after that point. Your sales collateral may be forwarded and viewed by multiple stakeholders and decision-makers, and there may be discussions about your shared slide deck that you don’t have any insight into. An opened email doesn’t necessarily signal an engaged lead — you need more information to be able to prioritize them and ensure you are spending time where it matters most.

How to go beyond email opens to measure prospect engagement

Tracking email opens is an important first step. Obviously, buyers who interact with your emails are likely more interested than those who don’t. But email engagement tools only give you insights into buyer behavior within that email. Your goal is to see past the email into the business you’re selling to. DocSend’s document analytics allow you to do just that — and develop a strategic, confident sales cadence from intro to closing call.

Imagine sending a one-pager via email attachment to a prospect, who then forwards it to their manager. Since you don’t know that that prospect forwarded your email, you follow-up with them. Then you follow-up again, and again, but you’re not getting anywhere. Had you sent the document using DocSend, things would’ve gone differently. You would’ve been notified when your collateral was forwarded and opened by the manager, who is likely the real decision-maker. When you understand who the real decision-makers are, the potential of speeding up that sales process and following up in a strategic way becomes much higher. Below, you can see how your decision making can be informed by the metrics provided by DocSend’s document analytics functionality. This real-time business intelligence can improve your sales workflows and business processes by allowing you to better understand how your prospects are actually interacting with your sales collateral.

DocSend’s page-by-page document analytics are a powerful tool for understanding how stakeholders engage with your collateral. You can see who views which pages and how long they spend on each one. Being able to identify which parts in your sales deck or whitepaper that your prospects focus on gives you an extra edge when it comes time for that proposal call. If you know someone hasn’t spent any time on a certain part of your collateral, you can leverage that information in your follow-up. There’s no more hoping your prospect will move forward — say hello to confident, data-driven closing calls.

On the end user side, the prospect you’re selling to, they can simply view the documents you’ve uploaded to DocSend via the link in a mobile device or desktop browser. There’s no need for them to download any software or workflow optimization needed. Whether your use cases are sending them complex documents or a simple PDF, you will see how they consume your content with our document analytics.

How to prioritize prospects with data using document analytics

The information you get by sending collateral with DocSend lets you intelligently prioritize your prospects so you don’t waste time chasing down leads with no intention to buy. Using DocSend’s built in document analytics, you now have actionable insights to inform your decision making. I’m sure you’ve heard of prioritizing your accounts into A,B, and C lists. Here is how we think about prioritizing prospects the DocSend way:

• A-List: People who actively engage with and read your collateral, and who share it with other people in their organization.
• B-List: People who did engage with and read your collateral, but don’t do so repeatedly and/or don’t share it.
• C-List: People who open and respond to your email, but have not yet engaged with your shared collateral.

Prioritizing your prospects this way gives you a much better view into their decision-making process. It also helps make sense of verbal signals that can actually throw you off track.

Taking action based on your document analytics

If you get a verbal signal that a prospect is interested, it doesn’t mean much in and of itself. For example, if a buyer tells you that they’re interested, but they are squarely in your C bucket, they may not be as interested as they say. Alternately, you may not hear much from another buyer, but they have forwarded your materials to four people in their company. If all of those people view it as well, you can be more confident that they are vetting your proposal internally. This prospect still fits very much in the A bucket, and they are worth following up with.

Increased prospect visibility not only improves your prioritization process, but it can also improve sales forecasting. This has the potential to impact the revenue accuracy of a whole company. Being able to see data points indicating internal interest will help you make the best decisions when it comes to pricing. You’ll never get that level of confidence just with an email open. A clear example is how Matt Hammond, VP of Sales and Marketing at Campus.app, closed a 7-figure sales deal by using document analytics to understand how his prospect was interacting with the sales proposal.

Getting insights into what goes on internally with prospects ups your game when it comes to prioritization, follow-up, price setting, and forecasting. The way to do this is with DocSend. Click here to sign up for a free trial.

The post Email opens aren’t enough to measure prospect engagement appeared first on DocSend.

Identifying at-risk accounts is no small task. Quarterly reviews with a client can be misleading as it’s easy for the decision-maker to not know the full story if they aren’t the end-user. It’s possible those using the product may be discouraged and these frustrations may only reveal themselves at the time of renewal. And while product usage can be a leading indicator, sometimes this can be wrong as well. At DocSend, we found that product usage increases with at-risk accounts because they are spending time disabling links and transferring their files to a different storage provider.

There is an indicator that stays fairly constant throughout the lifespan of an engaged client – collateral engagement. A client who leverages your supporting resources to enable their users and onboard new employees is likely in good standing. An at-risk client will show low engagement with your supporting resources, likely due to frustration with the product. This early-warning sign allows you to step in to provide more support and offer more training. But how can Account and Customer Success Managers access the necessary types of analytics to help them prevent churn?

DocSend Spaces & Document Analytics

DocSend Spaces is a tool to keep all supporting resources in an easy to access portal for clients. This is not only handy during onboarding but can be used for future enablement for new product releases. Spaces give the client everything they need right at their fingertips and increases the likelihood that they fully adopt the product.

Spaces paired with our document analytics provides a way to track how each client is engaging with shared resources. Access high-level data like how many times a document has been opened and downloaded. Or get granular and see how much time is being spent per page and where readers tend to drop-off. Not only are you able to track the increase or decrease of engagement with your Space but you can also identify ways to improve your content and provide even more value.

Analytics like these also better prepare you for client calls with the decision-maker. It may be daunting to tell your client that you have a hunch that there is some frustration from the team using the product. But this transparency has an opportunity to strengthen your relationship. Your client wants a positive ROI from their investment as much as you do so coming up with a plan to turn things around can make a lasting impact.

While indicators of churn can come in many forms, receiving insights into what’s going on with your clients can be a game-changer. Acting fast and being transparent can turn a frustrated client into a long-lasting partnership. If you’re interested in seeing how DocSend can help your team, click here to sign up for a free trial.

The post Get in front of churn by effectively identifying at-risk clients appeared first on DocSend.

Q&A with Sam Levan, co-founder and CEO of MadKudu

Sam is passionate about using data to help companies understand their customers better and create better experiences. MadKudu is an actionable lead scoring platform for the entire B2B funnel that uses predictive analytics to help SaaS marketing teams accelerate revenue.

With your product being so data-driven, what are some marketing and sales trends you saw in Q2 that founders should be aware of as we get into Q3?

Conversion rates in the sales and marketing funnel have become more volatile than ever. Some customer segments are positively impacted by COVID while others negatively. The change in the mix of industries and geographies in the funnel creates very different conversion rates and sales velocity. More than ever, it’s important to closely monitor these changes in the funnel to avoid building a “vanity pipeline” that won’t actually generate revenue and instead over-inflates the sales pipeline you’re reporting on.

We’ve seen an acceleration of the adoption of an all-bound model by our customers. The marketing and sales motion usually relied primarily on one model (eg. inbound model, PLG, outbound). After years of fierce debate about which model is best, we’ve seen more and more teams build the capabilities to run all those models at once. I believe this was driven by the current global situation and the fact that teams can no longer rely on just one model to fuel continued growth.

What are some unforeseen marketing and sales challenges your team has had to overcome this year that other B2B teams can learn from?

Even in a bottom-up model, you need to build support at the exec level. We used to have a bottom-up sales motion: our end-users would request demos and drive the buying process quite independently. In Q2, we’ve seen executives (CMOs, CEOs, CFOs) become a lot more involved in the buying journey. They’re looking at how the team spends its budget with a lot more attention. Because of this learning, we’ve had to help our champions sell the value of MadKudu internally and focus on building relationships with executives so we can have that conversation ourselves. To that end, we quickly adapted to add value to executives in the buyer’s journey.

What channels are working in B2B marketing and sales in this current economic environment?

TL;DR; Value-add content and tools. Online events. The crisis has increased the need for advice, benchmarks, and peer feedback. While it takes a while to generate revenue, we’ve seen a few companies get great results by creating value-add content and organizing local online events where their prospects and customers meet and help each other.

For early-stage startups looking to raise funding, what should they be thinking about when planning their marketing and sales strategy now?

Explicitly pick an attractive beachhead market. Investors want to see a large total available market. But don’t confuse this market with the initial target market for your early-stage startup. Be bold, and explicitly decide to focus on a small beachhead market that is neutrally or positively impacted by the current conditions. When you’re early in your growth, you can’t afford to be everything to everyone, so narrowing your focus is exactly what investors want to see. It is actually very hard to do. Investors will feel confident you’ll be able to build traction for the next 18 months with this initial market. You will then expand out of this initial market when you reach your next milestone.

Is there anything you think marketing and sales teams should be thinking about right now or anything you want to add?

Use leading indicators of marketing pipeline to quickly see what’s working and what is not. In the past few months, there has been a tectonic shift in the marketing spend of many companies. Marketing has always been a constantly changing space. This is even more true right now. Quick experimentation is the best way to make change a positive force. But in B2B, without a tool like MadKudu, it takes months to see if the latest marketing campaign will actually generate revenue. Make sure to use a valid leading indicator of pipeline value to quickly learn if what you are trying now is working or if you need to iterate.

Pitch Deck Interest Metrics Update

Key insights on investor and founder fundraising activity since last week.

Early Stage Positioning for B2B Startups
In the current climate, burning through your runway while pursuing the wrong customers with the wrong approach could prove fatal, and fast. Here’s how to avoid wasting time and money pursuing the wrong approaches to marketing and product development.

Read the full post by Justin Warren on HeavyBit’s blog.

How We Built a Startup Fundraising Network that Aims to Remove Bias
The DFN has been in the making for almost a year now and it consisted of three separate MVPs that we iterated on to get to the offering that we just launched. Here’s the story of how we did it.

Read the full post by Alex Poulos on DocSend’s blog.

The post How challenging conventional sales and marketing in a downturn can lead to increased growth appeared first on DocSend.

What big names and cool features can’t do is answer the question of why. If you can’t tell prospects why your product matters, then you haven’t convinced them to pick you.

The secret to a winning sales pitch deck design that closes more deals is a powerful story. That’s a lesson we learned first-hand when we decided to overhaul our own sales pitch deck presentation. This is also why we launched advanced video analytics software, so you can weave in powerful pitch videos into your sales deck presentation and access detailed insights into how prospects engage with them.

Do an audit of your sales decks and other sales collateral

We decided to take stock of our sales presentations and sales collateral by doing a quarterly sales deck content audit. After evaluating the content we’ve created, we noticed something interesting: We had over eight different sales decks.

Like many sales teams, ours had spent a lot of time creating different versions of our core sales deck. With each new variation, our goal had been to sell more effectively to specific target markets and personas.

Instead, we ended up with feature-heavy sales decks that were only superficially different.

During the crucial discovery call, the last thing you want to do is take prospects through an in-depth examination of your product, yet that’s exactly what we did.

We were throwing our prospects into decks with 16-20 slides and asking them to study our product’s features.

The evidence of our mistake was in the data:

Less than 40% of people that opened our most frequently shared deck, DocSend for Sellers, made it halfway. And only 17.5% stuck around to see what was on the last page.

The purpose of any sales pitch deck is to educate prospects about why your product matters, and our data told us that our prospects were disengaging early and often.

That meant only one thing: It was time for us to rethink our approach.

How do you make an effective pitch deck for sales presentations?

Storytelling. People love stories. Stories seize and hold our attention and even change how we behave.

When it came time to revisit our sales deck, we focused on developing a strong narrative in which our product could live.

We turned to Andy Raskin’s now-famous Medium post, “The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen,” and we asked ourselves: What’s our product’s story?

Using Raskin’s framework as a guide, we ditched our pitch for a sales story worth sharing.

Here’s how we did it:

Step 1: Highlight your big, relevant change in your sales pitch deck

All powerful stories begin with context, and the same goes for the stories we tell as B2B marketers and sellers.

We started building our new sales deck by thinking broadly about the rise of sales enablement as a function. Then we dedicated the first half of our new deck to defining the shift in the world that makes DocSend so relevant for modern sales teams.

We focused our attention on a “big, relevant change,” as Raskin advises, rather than on one specific problem. While addressing “the problem” certainly has its place, putting it at the very beginning can shut down the conversation prematurely.

The first slide of our new sales deck template teases the shift in the world we’re about to unpack:

Then, we introduce the key variable that fundamentally altered the way we sell:

Buyers now have access to more information than ever in the form of websites, blogs, case studies, ebooks, white papers, and more lead generation assets.

We connect this explosion in content to an even bigger change in buyer behavior:

Today, buyers define their own journey to buying a product, and it’s up to marketers and sellers to figure out what matters most to them.

We point out that one of the ways businesses influence this new sales process is by creating their own content. Businesses use content to attract, convert, and nurture prospects:

By telling this story about how sales has changed, we set ourselves up to have meaningful conversations with our prospects. Sharing stories about change creates a common perspective between you and your prospects and invites prospects to imagine how that big, relevant change impacts them.

But here’s the thing: Simply identifying the shift isn’t enough. You still have to establish the business problem brought on by this shift, as well as the potential outcomes it has for your prospect.

Step 2: Your sales deck should define how prospects win or lose

B2B prospects, like all buyers, calculate potential losses and gains before purchasing. As marketers and sellers, we can tip the scales in our favor by defining what it means to win or lose in this new world.

In our new sales deck, we outline the business problem created by the shift in the sales process. We spell out the consequences of this “glut information economy” for high-performing sales teams.

The challenge, according to Raskin, is one of scale. In order to incentivize prospects to buck the status quo, you need to show how the change you described earlier will result in big winners and big losers.

We introduce our business problem as one systemic to marketing and sales teams. While the volume of content has increased exponentially, neither marketers nor sellers have insight into what’s working and what’s not:

Those who don’t adapt face what Raskin calls an “unacceptably negative future.” That is, they risk having an unpredictable sales process that’ll cost them both time and money:

By connecting our story of change to specific outcomes, we create the opportunity we plan on seizing. We establish a business problem tied to key objectives that requires prospects to respond in one of two ways: Action or inaction.

While some prospects walk in the door ready to purchase, the rest will need you to grab their attention and tell them exactly what’s at stake.

Step 3: Identify the “Promised Land” that awaits your prospects

Now that your prospects understand the business problem, they’re likely wondering, what does “winning” actually entail?

We use this opportunity to describe what our product enables prospects to achieve. Rather than describing our product outright, we outline our vision for high-performing sales teams equipped with our product.

Our “Promised Land,” as coined by Raskin, is a future state in which sales content is actionable, measurable, and outcome-driven. And our product is the vehicle for reaching that future state.

We present our Promised Land as the two steps required to win in this new world:

Your Promised Land should solve the business problem you defined earlier. In order for prospects to want the solution you’re going to offer, you need to connect the dots between the shift in the world, the business problem it creates, and the criteria for winning.

Step 4: Share the “magic gifts” your product offers in your sales deck

The arc of our sales deck has so far mirrored the classic dramatic arc. We’ve used tension, conflict, and the prospect of resolution to capture our prospects’ attention.

We’ve intentionally positioned our prospects as the hero of this particular journey.

As with our initial story of change, we invite prospects to imagine how they might reach the Promised Land now that they know what it means to win.

While Raskin uses the analogy of epic films and fairy tales, we prefer to think of storytelling as a set of techniques that can be applied to any sales presentation. Framing your product and its features as “magic gifts,” to use Raskin’s terminology, is just one way of spurring prospects to purchase.

In our last slide presentation, we highlight how DocSend enables sales teams to win. Rather than examining any particular “magic gift,” we provide a holistic overview of our product:

The purpose of using a dramatic arc in your sales deck is to give your product meaning and value it wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s more important that prospects remember the story you’ve told and how your product fits into that story than they recall the details of any specific features.

Step 5: Include supporting data in your sales presentation

All prospects want proof that you can actually help them win in this new world — and the best evidence is customer testimonials. After all, your existing customers have already won.

It’s important to note that, contrary to Raskin’s advice, we’ve chosen not to include customer testimonials in our new sales deck. Instead, we’ve made our customer testimonials available as separate resources for our team to send to prospects.

During the discovery call, we want prospects to focus on our product’s story. That means we’ve only included the information necessary for prospects to understand why our product matters.

One of the resources we share after the discovery call is a summary of customer testimonials:

We’ve curated customer testimonials that align with the story we tell in our sales deck. The testimonials reflect how customers have used DocSend to turn the Promised Land into reality.

Just as you need to elevate the stakes for winner and losers early on in your deck, you need to illustrate the tremendous success achieved by your customers. Doing so helps prospects understand how you will help them.

The evidence is always in the data

Once we started sending out our new sales deck, the first question our sales leaders and reps asked was, how is the new deck performing relative to the old deck?

We started with the very metric that led us to revisit our sales deck: The dropoff rate.

The results surprised even us. You can see the dropoff report from our old sales deck on the left, the same one we shared earlier, and the dropoff report from our new deck on the right:

With our old sales deck, only 17.5% of all viewers made it to the last slide, and you can see the steep dropoff after viewers open the deck.

Now, 65.4% of all prospects who open our deck click through to the last slide, and, what’s more, our new deck is actually two slides longer.

Great news, right? Yes and no. While we were certainly excited to see such dramatic results, we still needed to dig deeper into the performance of our new sales collateral.

The question we really wanted to answer was, what’s the ROI of our new sales deck? Need help with your sales deck? Email me or join the DocSend community.

To better understand how to interpret how viewers engage with your DocSend content, check out our blog dissecting the analytics dashboard.

To be continued…

In part 2 of this series, we share the additional metrics we used to measure the performance of our sales deck. For example, how did our new deck impact our opportunity creation rate? Short answer: We saw a pretty significant lift.

In part 3 of this series, we share our top five tips for telling your product story. We include examples from companies we admire and explain how to build a sales narrative that converts.

The post Using storytelling in your sales pitch deck will close more deals appeared first on DocSend.

According to Forrester, it costs SaaS businesses 5x more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones. Marketing Metrics reports that the average probability of closing an upsell deal for businesses today is more than 3.5x times larger than the average probability of closing a new business deal.

What does all of this mean? Customer success teams are always on the hunt for silver bullets to reduce churn—but you can’t wipe it out overnight. You have to make improvements to your business’s customer journey to see incremental reductions in churn rate. The below churn reduction model from Zoho shows that reducing churn from 2.5% to 1% leads to double the customers in eight years.

With these findings in mind, it’s not a surprise that the best customer success teams are laser-focused on reducing customer churn. Here are five proven churn reduction tactics that customer churn experts swear by for customer success in 2019.

1. Prioritize onboarding

If you’re not seeing churn at trial signup, your new customer onboarding flow is likely contributing to your churn rate.

Onboarding is helping your users advance from sign-up to the point where they achieve their first success with your product. The process includes the completion of an in-app welcome flow, but it also generally includes a series of emails or in-app messages that communicate key functionality.

ConversionXL reports that 40-60% of trial signups in the SaaS space are abandoned before onboarding is even completed. Your onboarding flow needs to educate your new users on your product’s value and how to get started. If it doesn’t, they may churn before they even get a chance to know your product. Even increasing onboarding completion by 10% can help you capture a lot of incremental revenue.

Your new users’ first impression may be lasting, but it’s not final. Segmenting users by use case upon signup allows you to tailor onboarding messaging to their specific needs. (Here’s a good guide on setting that up.)

But it’s still important to know whether (and how) new users engage with the onboarding materials you send. Then you can tailor your follow-up messages based on whether they have engaged with your previous materials. You can even assess whether the collateral users do access is working by tracking page-by-page bounce rate, time spent on page, and more. (One key piece of content for onboarding can be case studies.

DocSend provides an affordable way for customer success professionals to do this. With instant read notifications and page-by-page analytics, you’ll know when your onboarding materials are opened and passed around. You can also find out where users are (and aren’t) spending their browsing time.

2. Incentivize annual plans

Incentivizing annual plans depends on renewal rate, so it may take a while to see results. But data from ProfitWell suggests it’s a no-brainer when it comes to reducing customer churn rate. As part of its churn study, ProfitWell reports that businesses with a larger percentage of annual contracts (rather than monthly contracts) see vastly reduced churn rates.

Ultimately, what this finding suggests is that larger, less frequent renewals are more churn-resistant than smaller, more frequent renewals. If you’re not currently offering annual plans as the default on your pricing page, consider doing so. There are calculations to compare the long-term gain in ARR from a higher renewal rate to the short-term loss in ARR from the discount applied to annual plans.

Try making annual plans the default and tracking renewal and customer lifetime value (CLV) by plan. If your sales and customer success teams aren’t actively incentivizing annual plans over monthly plans, it’s time for them to start.

3. Collect feedback from churned customers

According to Groove, 68% of customers churn because they believe you don’t care about their needs. Forum Corporation reports that 70% of customer churn can be attributed to subpar customer service experiences. Groove suggests that any given angry customer tells an average of 16 people about their experience.

One great way to reduce churn is to open a strategic channel for soliciting and receiving customer feedback. Your approach can vary based on your business and your targets. Soliciting enterprise client feedback is a different beast than collecting longtail user feedback, for example. What’s most critical to remember at this stage is to solicit feedback at pivotal moments in the user journey.

Perhaps the most overlooked point in the user journey for feedback collection is following churn itself. Feedback around customer churn decision-making offers insight to product and messaging strategy and to product and marketing prioritization.

Harvard Business Review suggests that even just asking for feedback can in some cases be enough to reduce churn. (Typeform has a useful guide for designing a customer churn survey.) Outside of churn-triggered feedback solicitation, it’s good to collect feedback throughout the customer journey. Deepen your relationships with those who provide positive feedback to turn them into brand advocates and evangelists.

You can also consult engagement metrics of assets sent to customers before they churned. This can help identify common engagement trends that may be resting beneath the surface. Listening to engagement data collected by a provider like DocSend helps you identify your key churn prevention levers.

4. Put your actionable feedback into action

Once you’ve analyzed your engagement data and determined the overarching causes for your business’s customer churn, it’s time to put that feedback into action.

Your churn prevention levers will be indicators of churn for your specific business. They’re indications that you can internally flag with marketing, product, or support for treatment. For instance, a key indicator of customer churn might be decreasing frequency of visits to your app or dashboard. The work of reducing customer churn rate would then become increasing the stickiness of your business. Alternatively, if a key indicator of churn is not utilizing a specific product feature, the work becomes boosting awareness and engagement accordingly.

Once you’ve executed the marketing, product, and/or support changes, set yourself up for some quantitative results. Strategic and tactical developments from churn feedback should be treated like any other marketing or product testing. When possible, A/B test and establish cohorts to assess the short-term and long-term changes in churn. Customer churn is a lagging metric, so consider leading and lagging churn factors when outlining your iteration plan and measurement model. Cohort analysis can be a particularly effective way to measure the results of churn reduction measures.

It can be really beneficial to experiment with a tight feedback loop among early or beta adopters of changes intended to reduce customer churn. This way, you can gain quick learnings to translate into strategy and execution refinements that produce big wins.

If changes are made to business materials or the way they’re sent, use DocSend to collect data. Stats like open rate, time spent in document, pages viewed, and forwarding activity can provide compelling evidence that you’ve moved the needle.

Whatever the churn levers you’ve discovered, collecting insightful customer feedback isn’t enough. It’s important to loop marketing, product, support, and—of course—customer success in, so that there’s unanimous investment in the initiative, but more importantly so that you can look to your full team for help. At the end of the day, reducing customer churn rate is very much a team effort.

5. Align sales and customer success

Ensuring that the goals of sales and customer success are aligned will ensure that teammates on both sides of the deal are working to eliminate customer churn. The last thing you want is highly-skilled sales reps who close deals with customers who ultimately aren’t optimal fits for your product.

To get sales and customer success truly aligned you should start by examining your messaging from the tail to the tip of the customer journey. From email copy to assets employed to seal the deal and inspire implementation, all members of your sales and customer success teams should be on the same page. It’s critical that sales and customer success are on the same page—a page that can be centrally and seamlessly updated by marketing, product, and other stakeholders. (Not to mention the simple fact that keeping materials consistent from one side of a deal to another can go a long way in building the trust you need to reduce customer churn.

In 2019, the importance of internally managing all versions of all sales and customer success assets and maintaining easily-accessible repositories of updated documents for reference and distribution can’t be overstated. This is incredibly easy with DocSend, as version control is as simple as clicking “Update” and uploading the new version of a case study, pitch deck, or other sales asset. No more sending out corrected versions or new links!

Takeaways

To close, here are five critical takeaways to bring to your next meeting about customer churn:

• Optimization of new user onboarding flows can go a long way. Most self-serve customer churn happens early on in the customer journey. Sometimes it’s just a matter of better educating your new users and introducing them to your product.
• Incentivize users to make fewer (but larger) purchase decisions. Larger, less frequent purchase decisions are less susceptible to churn than smaller, more frequent product decisions are.
• The most useful feedback can come from customers who have just churned. Oftentimes, this feedback can be crucial in plugging the holes in a customer success team’s leaky bucket.
• When it comes to iterating in response to feedback, tracking is everything. Without quantifiable, observable testing metrics, attributing a reduction in churn can be surprisingly challenging and convoluted.
• Reducing customer churn is a full-team effort and a full-team success. From product & engineering to marketing to sales to customer success & support, every team plays a role in the most successful customer churn reduction strategies.

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