How DocuSign Grew Average Deal Size by 20%

Often at the core of any successful enablement function is the ability to help sellers spend more time with their customers and less time on non-revenue generating activity. Especially during economic uncertainty, getting the content, training, and resources sellers need at just the right time can make or break deals. Driving sales productivity is an area that DocuSign, a cloud-based electronic signature technology company, has been laser-focused on to help their sellers succeed. 

With a large field team and growing account base, DocuSign needed a single source of truth for sellers to not only access the right content at the right time but also track their activity and buyer engagement. Beyond content management, DocuSign began reevaluating its current tech stack to seek ways to consolidate and ensure that its sellers were maximising the value of the tools at their disposal. This led DocuSign to realise the value of having sellers work within a unified platform in order to streamline the sales process, save sellers the time and complexity of navigating disparate systems, and accelerate productivity with clear insights into what works. 

Standardising a Single Source of Truth

Before implementing Highspot, DocuSign faced a familiar challenge plaguing many organisations — establishing a single source of truth for marketing material, training and enablement resources, and internal policies to help go-to-market teams be successful. “Marketing is working hard to create really compelling materials, and enablement is working really hard to build the training and the information that they need, but without a tool like Highspot, the ability to measure that is limiting,” said Jesse Potter, director of field enablement at DocuSign. “That’s really been the big thing for us, is trying to standardise that single source of truth.”

Without a unified platform, sellers had to navigate multiple disjointed systems, consuming time and complicating reporting. “There were too many places to look, and it was difficult to keep track of what was up-to-date and what was going to be the most relevant and impactful for the customer,” shared Potter.

The DocuSign team wanted to make it easier for salespeople to understand what was resonating with customers from directly within its CRM, Salesforce, in order to streamline the sales process and improve the effectiveness of buyer engagements. In doing so, they also knew that they would be able to better prioritise and optimise enablement efforts to enhance productivity. “We always say, if it doesn’t happen in Salesforce, it didn’t happen,” said Potter. “What is most critical for me is that level of data. Being able to surface the right materials to the sellers at the right time is really powerful. It means that my team can be more efficient and effective and not have to build everything at all times. The menu of options can be a bit more tailored because we know exactly what sellers need based on what’s coming to us from Salesforce.”

One Platform to Drive Productivity

DocuSign enables salespeople to be efficient and effective at every point in the sales process through a unified, integrated approach to enablement. Creating a single source of truth for go-to-market teams to get the collateral, learning resources, and insights needed to be successful has significantly improved efficiency by saving sellers time and encouraging engagement with enablement materials. “Even just that simple piece of not having to click out and go to a different experience in a different place is huge for us,” explained Potter. “It means that we’re more likely to get engagement with that material.” 

This approach has helped DocuSign enable salespeople with agility in order to keep up with changes in the business and the market. “From an enablement perspective, we have started to really use Highspot as an enablement delivery tool,” shared Potter. With synergy between the content, guidance, training, and coaching available to sellers, the enablement team was able to create cohesive and consistent experiences for salespeople to unlock productivity. “When we rolled out a sales methodology, we were able to take these very robust and complex sales playbooks and consolidate them into much more interactive learning through Highspot. It was an interactive tool that sellers can reference back to at every stage of the sales process,” said Potter. 

By simplifying and streamlining the sales process for sellers from end to end, DocuSign helped reduce workflow disruption and enhance access to reliable data. Having seamless integration between Highspot and Salesforce has played an integral role in improving this efficiency. “The Salesforce integration is huge because it allows me to really tie some of the activities that the salespeople are completing within Highspot with results,” explained Potter. “I can actually look and see the hundreds or thousands of opportunities that were positively influenced by some of the content or training that we surface to them through the Highspot and Salesforce integration. That data component – being able to tie back Pitch activity, training completion, or content utilisation to closed revenue or activity in Salesforce – is really huge.” 

Accelerating Sales Cycles and Growing Deal Sizes With Unified Enablement

The results that DocuSign has achieved since implementing a unified platform for enablement have been significant. For example, being able to upskill sellers through interactive learning material and guide them through selling scenarios with dynamic Sales Plays has helped the DocuSign team cut learning time in half for salespeople. “Highspot allowed us to move very quickly and instil that confidence because we could build a Play, build some content, get it out there, and get people speaking more comfortably about these new scenarios,” said Potter.

Giving sellers time back, streamlining their workflows, and enhancing access to actionable insights also helped DocuSign significantly improve productivity, achieving a 10% decrease in sales cycle time and 20% increase in average deal size. “We had a great testimonial from a seller who closed the deal right at the end of the year, a real-time crunch scenario,” shared Potter. “[Highspot] enabled the salesperson to know exactly which way the customer was leaning and accelerate the deal cycle by having the quotes approved, the order form generated, and ready to go before they even got on the call with the customer. That acceleration and efficiency have been a huge win for us.” 

For the enablement team, having critical data at their fingertips through Analytics and seamless integration with Salesforce has helped them prove the impact of their efforts on the business. “For most enablement teams right now, we are trying to do a better job of quantifying the impact and the return from our efforts and the training we provide,” explained Potter. “Doing that in Highspot has a lot of benefits because we’ve integrated it with our core systems, which is huge. A lot of automation is happening just by using a single platform rather than multiple.”