3 Steps To Empower Your Sales Staff
2. Liberate Access to Your Contract Templates
At another company, I was required to attend several client meetings throughout the day. By a chance of fate, one of my clients lived in the northernmost point in the city, another one in the southernmost point and the last one in the easternmost point. By now you should be able to guess where the offices of my company where. Located. You likely guessed the westernmost point your were right.
The end result was three to four hours just driving around the city. To make matters worse, I had to drive back to the office to begin drafting the new contracts, because of a strict policy in place. Simply stated no on access to contract documents from any remote location.
Valuable time could have been saved, if I had “anywhere” access to the contracts through a cloud-based solution. Even if the company was highly concerned about security and privacy, it could have implemented a virtual private network (VPN) solution.
A perfect example of the benefits of anywhere access is the time we lost a sale because we had to wait a day to update the contract. Not surprisingly the client couldnt quite understand why it would take a whole day to update a single clause. After the pain of three clause changes, the client decided to go with another vendor. Time is money and we were truly wasting his.
An alternative solution worth considering is the implementation an enterprise-level contract management system. Ask your IT manager to evaluate whether an on-premise, cloud-based or hybrid model would be the right solution for you. It is a good idea to go beyond just Word and Excel to keep track of your contract management processes. These programs will enforce better accountability from your salespeople.
Takeaway: Empower your traveling sales staff to always have the latest, pre-approved contract templates available from anywhere. Evaluate whether you need a cloud-based, on-premise or hybrid software solution.
