One of the most common questions we get from financial analysts, Wall Street, VCs, and others who do not actually use EchoSign is, "So what else are you going to do? Redlining? Term extraction? Collaboration? Seems like you've sort of nailed that signing stuff."
We could, but it turns out just signing, tracking, and filing contracts the exact way over 9,500 customers want it signed is pretty much an endless job ticket for our engineers. It turns out that while the majority of businesses use contracts to close their customers, they each do it slightly differently. For example, we counted our workflows around inbound fax processing last week and it's over 247. I.e., there are over 247 ways faxes come into EchoSign if your customer decides to fax sign instead of esign -- and that's just one little piece of our system. Overall, we count almost 6,000 workflows in our system, or 1 for every 1.58 customers ;)
So we can't do it all. That's where our friends and partners come in. They leverage EchoSign in two ways -- via our API, and in the Salesforce ecosystem, via our Salesforce custom object (which eliminates the need to even use our API).
Today our friends at Box.net for example introduced a terrific workflow for their 2,000,000 users that we just don't do (but that those analysts, Wall Street types, and VCs always ask about): approve, update, review, and sign. And it's quite powerful.
Have a contract you need internally reviewed, commented on, changed, and then signed? There's plenty of sophisticated enterprise software that can do this elegantly, but Box.net expands this to businesses of every size. Now, you can upload a contract to Box.net; have all your internal parties comment; they can propose edits; the master contract can be updated internally with comments; and then it can be sent off to be signed and filed via EchoSign -- all on the web, all with no software or anything to learn.
Does this happen with every contract, evey day? No ... the vast majority of contracts do not go through deep review, but merely a rules-based sign-off. But by leveraging the Box.net-EchoSign integration, approve/update/finalize/send/track/sign can now all be automated whenever you want. Pretty cool.
It indeed takes a village to do everything. We'll keep you posted as our partners add high value workflow extensions like these to EchoSign.
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