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Building a Sales Process from Data.

April 6, 2021 6 min read

Our CEO, Matt Hollis recently interviewed Qwilr’s Sales Executive, Steve Findley about what it takes to review a sales process and tap into data that helps sales teams to increase their conversions overnight.

As a little bit of background, Steve has 18 years experience in sales and relationship management. Formerly a commercial banker with Royal Bank of Scotland, Steve has lived and worked in the UK, Australia, and the United States. Steve has a passion for the sales process and remote work, having consulted to companies in sales process improvements and sales operations around the world.

Add to that, Qwilr is one of Australia's most exciting tech companies having secured Series A funding, circa 10 million Australian dollars amidst the early challenges of COVID pandemic.

Today, we’d like to share some of the highlights from their discussion. If you’d like to watch the whole conversation press play below.

Matt: I just want to kick off by giving you the opportunity to give a two-minute overview of your background. So people can understand your experience and where you come from.

Steve: I cut my teeth in the UK in banking with Royal Bank of Scotland back before the credit crunch. Then got the chance to move out to Australia and worked, actually executing marketing events for Citibank around Australia, which was good fun. Spent a couple of years living in the US and off the back of that got involved with Qwilr. Been with them for just over two years now. I work remotely with Qwilr, helping clients in Australia, the US, North America, and recently getting back to London, as well.

Matt: What is top of mind at Qwilr at the moment? What is the hottest topic for your customers?

Steve: I think the sales proposal itself is the key pain point that their experience leads them to reach out to Qwilr. So then, we really work with them across their entire sales cycle with all their customer-facing documents.

Matt: I thought to kick-off today we’d share a few horror stories. Is there anything on your side that you have seen that concerns you over the years?

Steve: I think that my example is a little bit more situational. I’d travelled to London to visit family and I got an opportunity to present with a couple of tech leads to Commonwealth Bank's Innovation Lab.

So I went in with two tech leads and managed to really mess up this meeting completely. If there was a book on everything you should do wrong in a sales meeting, we did it:

• I let my tech leads go into too much detail on tech rather than keeping it to overview.
• Lost control about the process.
• Came away from the meeting not having a clue if they even understood what we were trying to pitch to them.

It taught me a lot about meeting control and owning those processes, even when you are collaborating and doing work with colleagues as well.

Matt: Let us get into styles of process. ‘Sales process’ is a broad term - what do you do when the lead comes in? How do you get a quote? How do you qualify and engage? How do you quote all the way through to getting a signed order form? So Steve, let us talk a little bit about Qwilr and where it fits into the sales process.

Steve: Qwilr can actually fit in any number of places. I mentioned that the sales proposals are the classic use case that we see as a pain that would bring customers to us. But Qwilr is a smart document tool. It really allows you to create any document as a web page which means you get mobile responsiveness, analytics and collaboration. You can also pull in the superpowers of the web (such as videos, dynamic pricing and calendars) into your documents. All of these things empower sales teams and remove friction.

One client I worked with recently has the following workflow for their customers:

• Top of funnel they inquire about the company.
• They receive an industry fit case study sent to them which has the sales team's calendar built into it.
• They book a meeting and that meeting goes into a demo using a morphed Qwilr document from that original document.
• From there it’s on to a sales proposal which is another version of that original Qwilr document.

Matt: What are your thoughts around eSign and where it fits in and how Qwilr fits into that mix?

Steve: I can go on a tangent on this one, that is for sure. I think that you make an interesting point around DocuSign and it is that sort of brand name that has become synonymous with an eSign function. But there are plenty of tools out there, Qwilr included, that allow documents to be eSigned. Actually, provided you are meeting functionality for the regulation around eSign, it actually then falls back on the customer creating that document to let their client know what they are signing up to by putting their signature on it. So the onus is around that by signing this document you are agreeing to pay us this or do this or that we will do this.

We see that process happening a lot in Qwilr with our eSign function. I think what is interesting with DocuSign is that what we have typically found is that if you go through a very complex legal process or redlining and back and forth, I see DocuSign as being a great fit for that type of setup. But what is interesting with DocuSign is if you put a DocuSign in front of a customer, they have an immediate reaction to take the document to their legal team.

What we have done differently with Qwilr with a lot of customers is say, “if you deliver the document as a beautiful web page to your customer and it does not come out of DocuSign, the customer will see that and read that and they might not even ask to redline or commence negotiations”. It removes some of the friction that a tool like DocuSign creates.

Matt: One of the things that I get really passionate about is a lot of customers will say, "Okay, sounds good but where do we start?". So when someone approaches you, Steve, and says, "Hey, we want to do things better. We have got some old school sort of ways". How do you help them figure out what it is they need and will they get a return on investment?

Steve: As far as the sales process goes, I think you can dive into a really deep conversation with a customer out of this because normally you are talking to sales leaders and people in sales enablement that are passionate about this process (like us).

With Qwilr, I think that we have the opportunity to permeate that process in a lot of ways and allow salespeople to deliver documents that they are proud of and have put their best foot forward and have the best shot at closing the deal.

Matt: One of the things that I have found to be really, really valuable as we go in to talk to prospects is to say to them, “create a training document about your sales process for a brand new employee”. Document what each stage looks like from lead into opportunity through to quoting through to order form. Regularly we see that the sales process was designed in the past and has evolved to become more complex. And second, when reviewing your sales process and working out where to start, consider how much time is spent in each area. For example, we saw a customer take five days to get a contract out after the customer said, "Yes, please. I would like to go ahead." Wow, with my sales hat-on, I find that terrifying. If I do not have an order form in front of them immediately, I am worried someone is going to steal the deal from me. To me, that delay is a real risk.

Steve: Absolutely. You have deal stages in those different identification points. But I think if you can simplify those and remove steps for a salesperson, it always frees them up to be more creative and better in that process with their customer because they do not have to worry about anything like, what discount can I give here? What term can I do here? What paperwork if I am going to get set to do this? You free up some of those restrictions and they can get creative around how they sell and how they look after that client, which I think is where I have seen some of that really good stuff happen.

Matt: When you are thinking about this process and you get engaged by customers, are there any really specific things that you just see regularly? Are there really obvious things that you are looking to hone in on?

Steve: Occasionally getting into calls with existing clients where we will review their analytics and look at a selection of documents they have created over a certain period to understand trends and see how we can influence sales cycles and help them convert more of their deals or remove friction.

Since COVID, we have done a lot of work with our customers to embed videos within sales proposals. So those key places where we know our customers will go to, we will add video in at that stage because that is helping that team to be able to sell and influence a deal when they are not in the room because they can add dynamic content in that way. That has been tremendously helpful for a lot of customers in this forced remote work environment.

Matt: Great, right, and in terms of we sort of set up front that the key part of this is selling more, do you have any sort of anecdotes or stats from the Qwilr side about how effectively implementing really great tools that speed it up and do a better job? Is there evidence to show that it does sell more?

Steve: The customers that come to us, on average we see a twenty percent increase in quite close conversions from switching to Qwilr from PowerPoint to PDF or a Word to PDF. Personally, I have had customers where that actual conversion rate is increased three-four hundred percent from switching across to Qwilr.

Sometimes we have customers where they might already be converting a lot of their deals into business. So what Qwilr does is provide an increase in the association with their brand that allows them to increase their pricing.

The ROI conversation is obviously a huge one for companies making decisions on these tools. Qwilr will save them a lot of time in that process and we will increase document conversions.

Summary

1. Check out Qwilr for dynamic documents
2. Learn and review your sales process by creating a training document for new employees
3. Decrease the time it takes from a verbal agreement to contracts going out
4. Consider what ROI you want from your sales process

Nicole Stirling
Marketing Coordinator at Opvia