The fax is on a slow, but accelerating, decline to irrelevance as a vehicle for signatures.
There are a number of reasons why. Signing on the web is becoming more and more intuitive. Customers are beginning to simply expect a web-based contracting process from their suppliers and vendors. And of course, there are large efficiency gains.
But when our customer Microbilt reached out to us, they highlighted a simpler way to describe why the transition from fax-based signatures to web-based ones is accelerating.
Web signatures take stress out of the sale. A lot of stress. And by removing stress -- more deals close.
They're right. It's that simple.
MicroBilt's Workflow Challenge
Heavy Federal and state regulation is a significant challenge for companies in the consumer data industry. Due to these regulations, MicroBilt customers are forced to complete lengthy contracts that are typically 30-35 pages long. “The Identity Theft Crisis in our country has compelled federal regulators to impose the highest standards of due diligence on those businesses granting access to personal identifying information”, says Juliet Arthur, Contracts Specialist, MicroBilt. MicroBilt has been looking for a solution to speed up both the contract delivery process and the post-signature contract review process.
Historically, faxing contracts of that length has not been reliable and in many cases has proved to be detrimental to the sales process. Several years ago MicroBilt simplified the contract delivery process by using email to send contracts rather than faxing them, however the contract still had to be completed, signed and faxed back. When a customer returned the signed contract via fax, some pages would be missing and often times account managers had to contact the customer numerous times to gather the missing pages and resend. Most of our customers are small and medium sized businesses and typically the owner is required to complete most of the paperwork. Once they fax in the completed paperwork, they’ve moved onto the next task in their busy schedules. Contacting them to track down missing pages is a nuisance that MicroBilt has been looking to eliminate. “We can’t process our contracts unless we have every page, and often it would take days to get the entire contract from the customer. It was a manual process that just wasn’t efficient.”
EchoSign Solution
In August 2009, Juliet was assigned to manage the initiative to improve the efficiency of MicroBilt’s contract process using EchoSign. EchoSign was chosen because the setup and implementation was a smooth process and it was very easy for the account reps to use. “We use EchoSign every day, and since August we’ve sent out over 300 contracts and addendums using the tool.” Each contract is sent via email as a complete digital package so pages don’t get lost.. “Even though our contracts are lengthy, our customers only have to sign it once so electronic signatures are ideal,” comments Juliet.
Results
“EchoSign has reduced our sales close cycle tremendously – we’ve seen contracts come back in as fast as 15 minutes!” says Juliet. Another benefit is that the sales reps are removed from the contract process so they can focus on selling – once they make the sale, they do not have to contact the customer multiple times to track down missing information. “EchoSign has relieved a lot of stress for our account managers. We use it every day. Our contract process is a lot smoother, and our account reps sell more.”
EchoSign has reduced our sales close cycle tremendously!
— Juliet Arthur, Contracts Specialist, Microbilt
Comments