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Stop Standing Around the Fax Machine: Close With E-Signatures
April 16, 2008
By Jason Lemkin
It happens at every company: It's the last day of the quarter and the sales reps are hanging around the fax machine waiting for signed contracts to come through. It's like watching a pot boil. Upstairs CFOs and Sales VPs try to estimate how the quarter will end and exactly which revenue they can recognize and when. Sound familiar?
No matter what size your company or sales team, reps need solutions that help them focus on selling rather than tracking down contracts. At the same time, Sales VPs and finance need accurate visibility into revenues, every day of the quarter, not two days after it closes. But with developing technology there emerges a new trend: e-Signature services that can help an enterprise close more deals and close them fast.
The Value of e-Signatures
Think about the entire sales lifecycle. Companies have made major investments in SFA from lead generation and management to content creation and contract generation. While we give reps tools to make them more effective during the sale, organizations fail to close the loop on the sales contract lifecycle. By automating the delivery, signing and reporting of contracts, sales reps can close the loop and move on to the next sale knowing that the process is being completed without them having to waste valuable selling time managing a paper trail.
e-Signature services provide a hosted infrastructure for the delivery and signing of any contract. When a contract is delivered through an e-Signature service, reps can receive both online or offline signatures. Once a contract is signed, alerts go out not only to the sales rep, they can also be sent to the SVP and finance in order to recognize that revenue immediately. In addition, many services offer a dashboard so that sales management can measure metrics such as the number of contracts that are out for signature, what contracts have been sent, average time to sign contract and the highest performing rep with the most outstanding contracts. Companies like British Telecom (BT) have reduced the time to sign from 8 days to 30 minutes using e-Signature services.
Many e-Signature services integrate with the SAAS applications your reps use today like salesforce.com, Webex and even Enterprise 2.0 applications like Zoho and Box.net. A strong e-Signature service should be flexible enough to deliver the customized workflow and reporting you need in order to integrate with you legacy systems. Workflow capabilities enable easy, on-demand access to revenue generation. Now, you have insight into exactly what has closed and what hasn't right at the tip of your fingertips. Search capabilities allow you to call up any contract, know exactly when it was signed and leverage the contract for invoicing and renewals.
Trend Triumphs
So who is using e-Signatures? According to Celent Consulting 42% of the insurance industry is now using e-signatures. Even the White House submitted the 2008 budget with the President's e-Signature. And the Real Estate industry has increasingly used e-Signature services for home sales. The Association of Corporate Counsel also encourages the use of e-signatures as the last step in the contracting process. Because e-Signature services are easy to use, economically priced and require no IT, companies of any size can leverage them. BT has thousands of sales reps using e-Signatures to close business everyday. At the same time, SOHO businesses use e-signatures to manage their painting contracts, bail applications, limousine reservations, requests for custom kennels, services for custom illustration, and a multitude of other services.
To close the loop on your sales lifecycle, you need to arm your reps with tools to close the deal. E-signature services are quickly becoming the most effective way to close more, close faster and take a little bit of the stress out of the end of the quarter.
Jason Lemkin is CEO and co-founder of EchoSign. His operational experience spans the business development, sales, legal, human resource and finance fields. He holds a B.A., Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University; a J.D., Order of the Coif, from U.C. Berkeley; and completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business' Executive Management Program.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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