As a sales professional, you probably know the basics about online signature products. They’re easier to use and less expensive than ever.

Unfortunately, knowing how to use an online signature tool is not going to give you a competitive advantage in today’s deals. But there’s a newer, related technology that will.

It’s called document analytics. It goes way deeper than signature analytics; it gives you “deal intelligence,” or data on why things are or are not happening in a sales or business development situation.

They answer questions like:

“Why is this deal suddenly stuck?”

“I feel like one of the prospect’s team members isn’t telling me something, and it’s holding up our deal. What is it?”

“Why is this particular decision-maker resisting change to the status quo?”

And there are quite a few use cases beyond the sales and marketing world. Just ask the accounting team members who resort to using document analytics to send invoices to clients who rarely pay on time.

Document analytics can tell you 4 things (that signature analytics won’t):

How long each viewer looked at each page of your sales proposal or quote.
Which members of your prospect’s team are not looking at the document.
Which members of your own company are not looking at documents that you’re sending.
Who’s looking — but not signing — and why.

Today, you can use document analytics for free, actually. Most document analytics companies usually have some kind of freemium plan. That’s perhaps why sales, business development, and marketing professionals have dramatically increased document analytics usage in the last year.

Who’s Using Document Analytics?

Sales professionals and business development team members use document analytics more than anyone else, though accounts receivable clock a close second. Anyone who sends out confidential documents to outside entities (partners, clients, leads) is a typical user.

Document analytics are most used for:

Confidential presentations
Very important invoices
Quotes
Proposals
Confidential deals

More Revenue, Faster (and…More No’s)

As they say in sales, “Yesses are great, and nos are good, but the maybe’s will kill you.”

Electronic dealrooms inside document analytics tools not only raise deal win rates by 18%, they also accelerate deal close times by allowing sales professionals to engage early with their prospects and walk away from deals that are deteriorating.

Using document analytics creates more transparent relationships between customers and partners, and that’s a kind of visibility that can increase trust.