We're very pleased to have just been named one of the seven "WhizKids" of 2009 by Beagle Research, the leading CRM analyst firm (you can find Beagle and its research all over Salesforce.com's website, among many others).
We won this award together with our customer Onvia for excellence in this year's theme "Making Your Company Easy to Do Business With". Amen - that's what gets us up in the morning.
"Why we like them [EchoSign]
The contract management process has not changed much since the broad dissemination of the fax machine and the introduction of overnight package delivery in the 1980’s. Regardless of the size of a deal, parties tend to go back and forth with negotiations and while this was manageable in the 1980’s today many more products and services are available and require some form of contracting—about 50% by our estimates.
In an on-demand world where we can utilize software over the Internet in minutes, it makes little sense to take days to finalize contracts. EchoSign has a deceptively simple solution that accelerates the contracting process to something close to Internet speed. The product can’t do anything about the human input in negotiations but it takes the latency out of sending documents, capturing signatures and managing those documents for quick retrieval over the life of the agreement.
EchoSign takes the pain out of paperwork involved in contracting, and makes closing a deal on the Web as simple as it is to work on WebEx or track in SalesForce. Ultimately, it fixes a process for managing a high volume of contracts that has been broken for too long. For all of that, they deserve a 2009 WizKids award.
Customer example
Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) a company that tracks all government purchasing activity in addition to commercial and residential projects in development for markets such as architecture and engineering, construction, IT/telecom, business consulting services, operations and maintenance, and transportation. The company has more than 8,400 subscribers across the United States that rely on them as a comprehensive resource for industry-specific information needed to make intelligent sales decisions.
Onvia needed an efficient way to close service agreements. With a volume of 300-500 sales contracts per month, they needed an application that allowed their sales reps to close customer sales while they were on the phone. A key requirement was that the tool needed to be easy to use for both the sales reps and their customers ..."
The full report is here, and congratulations to EchoSign customers Zuora and Right90, also winners!
Dennis goes on to predict that companies that dramatically improve operational excellence will be the winners coming out of this recession, much like Salesforce and WebEx were the winners out of the last one:
"Coming out of the last recession we saw new dependence on web based meetings and on-demand software delivery. I think every recession generates some winners like that. From this recession, it is becoming clear that social networking is becoming absorbed into the business software suite. I also think solutions that enable higher levels of operational excellence within each vendor will be natural outgrowths of this downturn.
These solutions cut fat without damaging muscle — often a tall order — and they prepare us for an upturn that will be tepid. There will be growth but it won’t be as robust as we had come to expect in the last few years and we will all need operational solutions that help us cope. Fortunately the wheels of innovation continue to turn and we get what we need, just in time."
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