We appreciate Salesforce.com recently highlighting how our customer ADTRAN and how EchoSign was one of the key components of boosting their sales team's productivity.
ADTRAN is a long-term marquee Salesforce customer.
The interesting part to us wasn't the spectacular results -- deployment in one day to a global salesforce, leading to send-to-sign time of within 24 hours. "ADTRAN reduced the contract approval process from weeks to less than 24 hours." These results are commonplace for our customers. You should expect a 10x improvement in close times, and ease-of-use, and customer signing experience, from using EchoSign. Otherwise ... why bother.
The interesting part for us rather was actually how ADTRAN describes their use of end-to-end web tools. This is the theme we are seeing in 2009, and which will accelerate in 2010. Sales teams, and really, any run-of-the mill business, are beginning to run their entire business on the web.
A few years ago, the average customer would pick and choose a few web tools. Salesforce probably. EchoSign for some. GoToMeeting or WebEx for some teams. A few others. But they were all point solutions -- even Salesforce. Lead generation, lead automation, lead tracking, collaboration, contract generation, signing and execution, storage, archiving ... rarely was the entire sales process web-based and web-automated, end-to-end.
Fast forward to 2009 and really 2010.
ADTRAN is:
* Generating customers on-line with Google Adwords
* Using a web-based call center to manage them
* Using Salesforce to track leads and customers
* Using Blackberries and Salesforce mobile to manage them from the field
* Using EchoSign-for-Salesforce to approve and sign contracts on the web.
This is the sales automation circa 2010. It's more than just "Sales 2.0". It's end-to-end web based processes. Nothing off-line, nothing local, and importantly, no point solutions. Everything just "works" together, 100% on the web.
It's not all there today for every customer, but it's getting closer. Further accelerating end-to-end 100% web-based sales processes is a key part of our 2010+ agenda and vision.
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