EchoBlog - The Latest From EchoSign

Groupon: "EchoSign Electronic Signatures Help Fuel Hyper-Hyper-Growth"

One market segment that has simply exploded (and this may be an understatement) is social commerce, and we're extremely pleased to play a small but important role in it. Leaders in this space -- Groupon, Living Social, Entertainment, and OpenTable among them -- need to close thousands of vendors, across the globe, to bring them on to their services. We're proud they all chose EchoSign and are truly honored to be part of their growth.

The answer, and there really is only one, is electronic signatures. As you can see below Groupon, in the midst of its hypergrowth (from $0 to $500m in less than 2 years - wow), Groupon was tripping all over paper signatures, losing hours and hours per deal. E-Signatures weren't just an option, or an improvement - they're requisite in this space, when thousands and thousands of new vendors are signing up for ever more new deals per month.

EchoSign Case Study: Groupon

EchoSign Exchanges Travel Time for Selling Time

Company Overview

Groupon grew out of a website called The Point, a website launched in November 2007 that lets you start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group — but only once a "tipping point" of people agree to participate. Launched in November 2008, Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in a variety of cities across the U.S., Canada, Europe South America China and Russia. Groupon is currently present in over 180 cities in 26 countries across the world and is the fast growing company ever.

Workflow Challenge

“Simply put, our sales reps were spending too much time getting our partner contracts negotiated and signed, says Ash Mahmud, Head of CRM UK/IRE, Groupon. “As our reps were getting the contracts signed in person, and this led to delays.” On a number of occasions the Groupon sales reps had to visit the client 2-3 times before the contract was signed. On average the reps were spending 20-25% of their time on the road and scanning the document into Salesforce.com. In addition, sometimes the contract was difficult to read and resulted in customer service issues.

EchoSign Solution

Ash found EchoSign on the salesforce.com AppExchange. “We also looked at [another solution] and found that EchoSign was easier to use and supported multiple languages. Groupon is a global company so this was important to us.” Groupon started a two week pilot with both solutions and picked EchoSign, and became an EchoSign customer in July 2010. “We are using EchoSign in conjunction with AppExtreme’s Conga Merge and Salesforce.com. We were also impressed with the support that we received from EchoSign and Conga.”

Results

Currently the sales reps using EchoSign are experiencing an average time to sign of just under three hours. “EchoSign has saved our reps a lot of travel time that can be used for selling. In addition, EchoSign gives us a lot of data for our management team,” says Ash.

An online business requires an online solution. EchoSign enables Groupon to streamline the sales process and remove the time lag between verbal agreement and contract execution.

— Ash Mahmud, Head of CRM, UK/IRE Groupon

Smart Selling Tools & Electronic Signatures: Helping to Cure the October Sales Blues

Smart Selling Tools recently put up a great piece about 'Reverse Sandbagging' and the October sales blues.  The October Blues are a semi-documented phenomenon where a successful sales team comes off a strong Q3, feels very bullish going into Q4 ... and then October falls a bit flat.  Why?  "Reverse Sandbagging" as Smart Selling Tools notes.  And EchoSign and e-signatures are its October recommendation to get your customers in this month, not next, and take some stress out of Q4:

"Sandbagging

is when a salesperson holds onto signed orders until the last minute. Then seemingly out of nowhere, the rep submits the orders all at once, usually at the end of the month or quarter.

When the salesperson has no orders to hold onto it's something else all together. It could be that they don't have enough proposals out. Or it could be that proposals just aren't getting signed and returned.

When proposals are being held-up by buyers, I call it "reverse" sandbagging. Of course, there are many possible reasons why a proposal isn't getting signed and returned. One possibility is simply that the prospect is busy, or too distracted by other things. Or it could be that they're waiting for the sales rep to offer a last minute discount before finally putting pen to paper and paper to fax.

No matter the reason, reverse sandbagging is one of the reasons why Q4 is so stressful. Who doesn't remember a year when they made their number after haranguing a prospect on December 24th?

Reverse sandbagging is especially common at the end of the year. How do you deal with it? Financial incentives and personal pleas are two options for changing a buyer's behavior. But there is a third option which doesn’t involve giving money away or groveling: an online electronic signature service.

I’ll use Echosign as an example. Echosign has over 1 million users. We selected it as one of the must-have tools in our recent “Smart Inside Sales Tools” ebook and it’s the one I use.

Here are a few examples of how Echosign and other e-signature software services can help change a buyer’s behavior and help your Reps book

More here ...

TechCrunch, Compliance Week, AllFacebook + More: "EchoSign Adds Social Identities To E-Signatures"

We're were incredibly pleased to see the media reaction to our Winter '11 release, in particular our novel and ground-breaking use of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google social identities and social graphs to help authenticate signers -- and to make e-signing even easier.

Now, if you know how to use Facebook -- you know how to sign a contract on the web (instead of with pen-and-paper).  

• TechCrunch covered us here.

• AllFacebook covered us here.

• PSFK covered us here.

• Bitelia, the leading tech blog in Spain (!), covered us here.

• 1000 Watt had a great summary here.

• Compliance Week covered us here.

And much more.  Look for some more in-depth coverage later this week.

EchoSign - The Way the Web Signs.

 

EchoSign Winter '11 Launches: E-Sign with Facebook and LinkedIn; Search Across 10,000,000+ Contracts; Sign in Chinese, Japanese; Much More

We've very pleased to announce our Winter '11 Release (Part 1) has launched (Part 2 comes in early 2011).

A summary of the features that launch tonight is in the slide show below, but in a nutshell, the Top 6 new features are:

• E-Sign with Facebook and LinkedIn, and Add Your Web Identity to Your Contracts.
• Real-Time, Google-esque Search Across Accounts Up to 10,000,000+ Contracts (Manage Page 2.0)
• Reusable Message Templates.  No more typing out custom messages again and again
• "Husband and Wife" Signatures much improved.  2-10 signers, one email address, now it's super simple.  
• "De-Chromed" Signatures that look, act and feel exactly like pen-and-paper.
• Full native e-signing in Japanese and Chinese for our Global customers.

And much more.

 

Please let us know your thoughts and questions -- and if you have time, take a 2-minute video tour of EchoSign's Facebook/LinkedIn integration by clicking on the video below.

 

A Fortune 100 File Room After 3 Years and 1,000,000 Contracts E-Signed on EchoSign

Recently, we had the distinct pleasure of being able to tour the facilities of one of our Fortune 100 customers, who has been an EchoSign customer for over 3 years.

We learned a lot about process, about the web in business, and re: EchoSign.com, about the value of having an application that does not require on-boarding, training, or professional services.   They have thousands of EchoSign senders, none of whom have ever required training.

But where our jaws dropped was when they took us to their contracts file room, which you can see a section of below.   The contracts file room, simply put, was almost empty.

After three years and 1,000,000 e-signed contracts, not only has their sales contracting process gone 100% web-based and digital -- but EchoSign has enabled them to automatically PDF, digitally archive, tag and manage these 1,000,000+ contracts with zero work by the sales team.

We're expanding this further in our Winter 2010 release, going live on Monday night, which enables real-time, Google-esque search on our Manage tab across accounts with up to 10,000,000 contracts.  So your file cabinets can look like these too.

With EchoSign E-Signature, SourceQ Signs Up "Breaking Bad", "House", "Saving Grace", "Prison Break", and More

In four years, the majority of contracts will be signed on the web.  One way we see that is in our growth statistics (500k new users in Q3 alone).  Another is when we see web leaders like Groupon, Pandora, Living Social, Edmunds.com, OpenTable, and others move their contracts to the web with EchoSign.

But to us the most interesting sign on the paradigm shift to web-based signatures and contracts is when we see e-signatures in use in the mainstream that touches everyones lives.

So it was great when Les Scott reached out to us with a terrific story of how EchoSign electronic signature put an end to the "fire drill" around music publishing agreements for some of the world's top TV shows.

 

Case Study: Source Q Boutique

EchoSign gets 240 Contracts Signed Over the Course of 5 Weeks

Company Overview

Source Q Boutique (SQB) is a music publishing company that specializes in placing music in Film & Television Shows. SQB currently represents well over 500 composers and artists nationally. A short list of SQB's latest placements include: Breaking Bad (AMC), Cold Case (CBS), Theme song to "Life Unexpected" (CW), Saving Grace (TNT), Prison Break (FOX), Ugly Betty (ABC), Friday Night Lights (NBC) , House (FOX), Californication (Showtime), Forensic Files (TruTV) and many more.

Workflow Challenge

In 2009, SQB and one of their co-publishing companies created a new promotional product. The DVD contained not only audio files of 450 songs, but also 9 months worth of metadata entries -- information on each song's title, artist, composer, composer's performing rights affiliation, splits between the composers, lyrics to each song, etc. The DVD had been sent off to manufacturing when they learned of a major network policy shift within the industry, which resulted in making some of the key meta data on the DVD less effective and inaccurate.

The policy change required the music publishing company to review and investigate all 450 publishing agreements to ensure they had the rights required to alter the metadata. Further investigation revealed that 240 of the 450 agreements did not include the legal permissions needed. Needless to say they were in search of a solution that would deliver the most expedient way to have 240 music composers execute an updated agreement.

"I was desperate for a solution," recalls Les Scott, Director of Catalog Licensing, Source Q Boutique. "Our past experience with (snail mail) correspondence with our writers/artists has been, let us say, less than expeditious and we were mostly concerned with being able to deliver this product to our clients in time for the upcoming television season."

EchoSign Solution

Les contacted other publishing companies and they suggested working with signatory companies. He trialed a few vendors and decided that EchoSign was the vendor of choice. "In the publishing world, we are already dealing with skepticism and leeriness on a mass level, so any application that would require the recipient to create an account prior to signing the contract was not going to work. EchoSign was simple to use, and non-threatening. The signer's experience was the best with EchoSign."

Results

Using EchoSign, Les got all 240 contracts signed in a 5 week period. "I'm sure if we had approached this last minute problem through printed documents and regular mail, we would still be waiting for half of the documents to get signed and returned (6 months later), and would have completely missed the television season." After this "fire drill" Les researched the legalities of esignatures and learned that electronic signatures are legally binding and effective in a court of law. "I feel like I'm giving my friends and colleagues a great gift by telling them about EchoSign!"

I wish I had found out about EchoSign years ago!

— Les Scott, Director of Catalog Licensing, Source Q Boutique

EchoSign Electronic Signature Adds 500,000 New Users in Q3, 1.1 Million New Users in 2010 ytd

Q3 was a record quarter for EchoSign, by far, with over 500,000 new EchoSigners added in Q3, and over 1.1m in 2010 year-to-date.

More here to follow.

Thank you for your support, and look for dozens of new features in just a few weeks in our Winter 2010 release.

EchoSign - The Way the Web Signs.