Integrated sales:
unlocking speed andproductivity for growing
businesses
Why you need sales integrations and how eSignatures can help
automate your sales cycle

Manual sales tasks arekilling your growth
For salespeople, any time not spent on business development is time
wasted. 

Yet, many small businesses accept isolated tools and manual steps
in the sales process, like copying and pasting contact details
between applications or downloading contracts and uploading theminto other systems.

These manual steps are a big reason why salespeople spend 10.5
hours per week on administrative tasks and only 27% of their time on
the job actually selling.

So how can growing businesses unburden themselves from sales
admin traps and stay focused on the needle-moving aspects ofsales?

We’ve learned in our recent Dropbox-commissioned research ofbusinesses with 2-999 employees that the answer is rather counterintuitive: sales teams are winning by integrating their sales tools. 

Winning companies are 1.4 times more likely to deploy sales
technology tools and 1.9 times more likely to fully integrate them. 

That is, by putting in place integrated workflows that minimize
manual grunt work in the sales process, salespeople are doing moreof what they do best—prospecting, pitching, and closing.

But knowing where to start, what to integrate, and how to make it
happen trips many growing businesses up. It’s why we’ve distilled
our research to identify:
How sales processes become disconnected in the first plac
How businesses at each stage of growth tackle workflow
bottleneck
How to build a robust integrated sales cycle that will grow withyour business

Hours per week27%

of salespeoples

1.41.9Salespeople spend  
10.5 hours per week onadministrative tasks.

Only 27% of salespeoples’  time on the job actually  selling

Winning companies are 1.4
times more likely to deploy
sales technology tools

Winning companies are 1.9
times more likely to fully
integrate them

10.5

times

times

Why don’t growing businesses integrate
their sales tech?
An integrated sales cycle sounds great, right? So why don’t more companies do it? From our research, two clear reasons emerged:“I’m too busy to think beyond right now”

“Integration? That sounds difficult”

Trying to innovate while keeping a business running can feel like an
impossible task. By the time you’ve put out all the fires and takencare of the day-to-day, there’s little time to think about how things
might be better. 

Most people don’t start businesses or pursue a sales career because
they love tech. 

However, when you can get the right balance of immediate and longterm decision-making, it often takes some of the immediateproblems off your plate. 

Perhaps that makes the thought of dropping money on technology
you don’t fully understand and don’t have the time to learn about
extra daunting.

While addressing immediate problems is natural, taking a longer
view can result in addressing the root cause of a problem andeliminating those tasks entirely.

Take the immediate task of following up on a contract you sent to aprospect last week. Yes, sending a follow-up email is an immediate
fix, but implementing a tool that tracks the status of documents andautomatically sends follow-up emails will take the task off your plateforever.

So while any job today requires a certain level of on-the-tools techproficiency, it’s probably not what spins your wheels.

Or maybe you already have the technology but connecting it allsounds complicated—so it’s easier to keep using your email,eSignature tool, or CRM, in isolation.

The best way to get a good result out of any technology investment
is to have a concrete understanding of the end result—what problem
is this technology fixing or what process is it improving?

How your businessWith such a level playing field and customers with an appetite forchange, small businesses have a unique opportunity to challenge

peers think about

bigger competitors and take a larger market share. But to do that,your digital buying experience needs to match your consumers’

sales integrations

digital expectations.

As sales teams grow, so do the complexities and challenges thatcome with selling. By digging into how other businesses are

shifting their people, processes, and technology at different

stages of growth, you can better understand the actions to take84%

40%

in your business that will make a difference now and set you up

to avoid future complexity. It’s why we launched our Dropbox-

commissioned research of businesses between 2–999 employees

to find out how growing businesses are approaching their sales

workflows.

use digital channels

buy more online

more often

than they used to2–24 employees

TechnologyPeople

relying on email to track your address book and conversation threads,

You’re a business owner or one-person sales team that’s highly
hands-on in deals and contract creation.

Process
As a business owner, you review and often prepare sales contracts
yourself.

You’re often focused on the short-term with more than one job on
your plate and lack the time to establish new processes. Thatmeans you’re repurposing older documents and working off ofmore informal templating.

If you are using a CRM, it's probably a free one. Otherwise, you’renegotiate deals, and send sales contracts to close deals.

When it comes to storage, you’re using more informal storage systems
or saving files on one computer, as fewer people need access.

How to think about integrations at thisgrowth stage
As a small or one-person sales team, sales is rarely the only job on yourplate. Time and technology are your immediate barriers to more andfaster sales. To help, you should be looking to productivity integrations
that can help you get sales tasks off your plate faster. These might
include integrations between your eSignature tools and email orThroughout your workflows, you’re repetitiously completing

document. But, if you intend to scale, you should also be taking themultiple manual steps every time there’s a new prospect.

long view by asking, “Will these integrations still be useful when I have2, 5, or 10 salespeople, or will I need a new process or technology?”

25–249 employees
PeopleTechnology

You’re on your way to building a sales team with 2-10 reps orYou’ve implemented a structured CRM that centralizes contact

account people. This is where you begin to focus on sales workflows

info and records customer interactions. 

that scale without adding more employees.

Process
As you grow, you have more layers of reviews, approvals, and signers—both internal and external—which adds greater changes andediting demands.

CEO and founder input in the signer process becomes inefficientand often reps are given more autonomy to make deals. 

You’ll have a few standard document templates saved with formal orinformal fields to fill in to speed up the sales process.

Though you’re often still seeking a higher degree of tracking onprospect and customer statuses and experience a need for sharedaccess to signed contracts.

Along with more customer data comes a demand for increased
security and fraud-prevention measures, like audit trails.

How to think about integrations at
this growth stage
Once you build a team of salespeople, technology becomes much
more important to your sales success—how can you maintainvisibility over salespeoples’ actions while giving them theautonomy to act fast on deals? With a CRM in already in place,
you can speed up processes like approvals, contract tracking,revisions, and deal info by integrating all of your sales tools into
your CRM—that way, you have a centralized hub of deal visibility
and your salespeople have all their tools and information in one
place. Think email communications, document storage,
document templates, and eSignature tools all integrated withyour CRM.

250–999 employees

How to think about integrations at
this growth stagePeople

At this stage and size, integrated sales tools are table stakes. With soYou’ve established a sales team, and more than likely a head of sales

becomes critical to keeping the sales cycle from stalling—which

who manages regional sales reps or has teams reporting to them.

ProcessYour sales process includes multiple revisions back-and-forth frominternal stakeholders, lawyers, prospects, and third parties.

For efficiency, you’ve created formalized processes and contract
templates that remove admin and speed the sales cycle up.

You might have a sales process, but it involves manual inefficiencies.

TechnologyYou have a broader tech stack that includes CRM, project
management tools, shared storage drives, eSignatures, and more, andare actively looking for integrations to improve the efficiency andtransparency of your sales cycle.

As you expand, you want your CRM to manage multiple teams in
different geographies, which requires tighter controls for different
contract types, seeing different information, and disallowing individualusers from making template changes.

many salespeople entering the equation, visibility and collaboration
demands more powerful and integrated technology. Your focus
becomes weeding out the inefficiencies in your sales process toensure reps can spend the maximum time selling, not on approval
and admin. That means investing in tools and integrations like sales
contract templates that are auto-filled with customer information via
CRM integration.

The multiplying value of an
integrated sales cycle
Integrations are productivity multipliers for the sales process. When you caneliminate the time solo sellers or sales teams spend on unnecessary manualtasks in a way that applies to every current and future salesperson, you’ve
created a process that scales with your business and sets every one of yoursalespeople up for success.

Here are some of the common integrations boosting sales teams’
productivity.

Help desk integrations Business intelligence integrations 

These integrations can feed contextual customer information back into
your CRM, like interaction or purchase history, segmentation details,
customer value, complaints, and tickets when you’re handling support
tickets.

These integrations can help you to visualize your sales data,build forecasts, track CRM activity, spot macro sales
behaviors, and even predict chances of churn. While CRMs
come with built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards,
business intelligence integrations give you a more powerful,dedicated intelligence platform.

eSignature integrations 
eSignature integrations let salespeople create, template, and send
agreements for signature directly from their CRM or word processor
without switching windows or tools.

Deep dive: The
productivity benefits ofeSignature integrationin the sales cycle
Signing is a massive part of sales, with 71% of sales contracts, 53%of proposals, 50% of quotes, and 40% of NDAs signed electronicallyby growing businesses. 

But just because you’re using eSignatures doesn’t mean you’ve got a
streamlined signing process. Even in the typical eSignature workflow,
there are still several friction points that can grind sales to a halt.

Creating a new document or finding an existing doc to work from
Creating a new document orfinding an existing doc to workfrom

Whether it’s because you don’t have formalized templates and are working off
similar past projects or because you want to ensure all team members use thesame approved templates and forms.

Time: 5 minutes per contract

Adding contact details
Adding contract details

Manually adding prospect info to contracts—often copying and pasting—is
not only a waste of time but can introduce errors.

Time: 5 minutes per contract

Editing contracts and terms
Editing contracts and terms

If you’re going back and forth on revisions, constantly uploading and downloading
agreements into your eSignature can add a lot of manual effort, especially if you
have to convert docs between file types (from word processor to PDF, etc.).

Time: 20 minutes per contract

Manually monitoring responses,
following up, and updating theCRM with contract statuses

Manually monitoring responses, following up, and updating theCRM with contract statuses
Playing the waiting game with prospects and following up with emails chews up
more sales time than you’d think.

Time: 10 minutes per contract

Storing documents
Storing documents

If contracts are sent back and forth within your eSignature tool, filing them—incloud storage or physically—requires manual uploads and downloads or printing.

Time: 4 minutes per contract

All of these manual interventions in the sales process take up around 44 minutes per sales contract! 

It might not seem like a lot for a one-off, but even if salespeople are only sending one
document for signature daily, that’s still 267 hours (6.7 working weeks) of non-selling time
per year. What more productive sales tasks could get done in 44 minutes every day?

But here’s the kicker. Every single manual interaction listed above can be eliminated witheSignature integrations.

The power of HelloSign eSignature integrations
With a simple integration, like eSignatures, you can start seeing real benefits from sales automation and productivity in a snap.
Here’s what eSignature can do.

Avoid going into your eSignature platform at all

Auto-fill data from your CRM into your contracts

Automatically follow up on unsigned contracts

Automatically save signed documents into yourpreferred storageeSignature integrations like HelloSign let you template andsend documents for signature directly from the tools you
already use—whether that’s a word processor like Google Docsor Microsoft Word or a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot.

HelloSign tracks the status—opened, signed, rejected—for every
sent contract. And if a contract goes unsigned, HelloSign sends
automatic reminders, so you can focus on selling.

HelloSign integrates with most major CRMs so you canautomatically fill in contract templates with your CRM data,saving you time and reducing the chances of errors in yourcontracts.

Storing important documents always takes longer than youthink. To help, HelloSign integrates with major storage tools—
Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint—to automaticallysave contracts in your preferred location once they’re signed.

Customer story

Amenify closes sales 33% faster using HelloSign
for Salesforce
Amenify needed eSignature software that could integrate into
Salesforce CPQ and allow them to create, edit, and delete contract
templates without having to leave Salesforce or toggle between
multiple software solutions. 

The HelloSign for Salesforce CPQ integration added reporting
capability that allowed Amenify to see closed-won status much
more clearly, as they have visibility into the number of documentsthat are awaiting signature.

“It used to take about four weeks to get revenue-generating
documents signed and completed. Using HelloSign for Salesforce
CPQ, we get signed documents back 33% faster," says Everett Lynn,
CEO at Amenify.

Where sales teams
are integrating
eSignatures
For any integration to be truly effective, it needs tointegrate into the trusted tools you already use.
From our research, we’ve identified the common
tools businesses of different sizes use—all of which
can be integrated to speed up sales workflows.

The most common apps businesses use

Customer story

Vivial integrates eSignature 2X faster with HelloSignfor Salesforce
Vivial was looking for a way to send agreements for signature withoutleaving Salesforce and that created minimal disruption to its current
eSignature users. HelloSign quickly emerged as the top contender toprovide Vivial and their sales reps with a smarter, faster solution.

“What was refreshing about the implementation with HelloSign is that
it was all intuitive from a Salesforce perspective, which is what I
know,” says Eric Pohlabel, Vivial’s Sr. Salesforce Certified Advanced
Administrator. “Implementation was 2X faster than our previous

application. It was night and day in terms of how quickly we were upand running.”

And the efficiencies speak for themselves. By integrating HelloSign
into its Salesforce instance, Vivial is now serving 1000+ markets with
its suite of marketing tools.

Get the full details of Vivial’s integratzion

Integrations aren’t as hard

Maintain sales agility

or as disruptive as you

as you growthink (promise)

Agility is vital for solo sales and growing sales teams
alike. As businesses grow and scale, though,One of the biggest reasons businesses don’t integrate more of

integrating time-saving tools and taking a holistic

their sales stack is that they think it’s too technical or too

workflow approach to your sales cycle is imperative

disruptive to already workable processes.

to maintaining that agility. HelloSign is one of those

The truth is, in most instances, integrating eSignatures into
your sales cycle is fast and easy. If you’re already using tools liketools that’s helping businesses make an impact asthey continue to expand.

Microsoft Word, Google Docs, MailChimp, or Dropbox, it’s as

Try the HelloSign integration today and see howeasy as a quick installation. Check out all of the HelloSign

easy it can be to integrate into your sales cycle.

integrations. 

And for larger-scale integrations into CRM and other businesssystems, the HelloSign team has made integration a breeze.

DIY integration isn’t your onlyoption
If you think integrating eSignatures all sounds a bit too
technical, there are third parties that can do the integration foryou—that’s how 59% of sales leaders in small businesses do it.
Check out some HelloSign partners.