Contracting In The Cloud
Electronic signatures have been gaining momentum for years, but until the past few years they were slow to take hold as a common business practice. Vendors tended to deliver e-signature technology in complex, complicated and expensive forms, rather than deliver offerings that incorporate e-signatures into the overall contract process. As a result, e-signatures did not realize their potential to improve the customer experience and organizations continued the way they always have: with inefficient, paper-based contract processes.
Today, the rise of electronic signatures and Web contracting is changing the industry landscape.
Web contracting is more than just collecting signatures electronically; it entails the automation of the entire contract process, from creation, collaboration and execution to archiving and management. It replaces the traditional manual steps of getting contracts signed, and combines the security of a paper-based process with the advantages of working on the Web: speed, efficiency, flexibility, compliance and instant global access. Leading organizations are embracing Web contracting as a way to do business, both locally and globally.
The driving force behind Web contracting and e-signatures has also changed. Whereas adoption once was pushed by businesses wanting to eliminate inefficiency, now consumers—including customers, partners and internal users—are the main drivers. Customers are increasingly comfortable conducting business via the Web and mobile devices, and they are demanding that companies move more of their customer-facing processes online. And now that vendors are offering full-featured Web contracting solutions, the customer experience has caught up with the vision: Web contracting is intuitive, fast, flexible, secure and compliant.
Web Contracting and E-signatures Benefit Organizations
Leading competitive companies already use Web contracting for external, customer-facing workflows—primarily for sales or partner agreements. Now, companies also are seeing the value that Web contracting adds to internal processes across the organization: in legal, HR, sales, customer service, finance and IT. In all cases, Web contracting and e-signatures can shorten the contracting process from days or weeks to hours, from start to finish. It benefits organizations in multiple ways:
- Improved sales performance and reduced revenue cycles. Customers can sign deals with sales reps at any time and from anywhere, increasing close rates dramatically. Streamlined visibility across sales and finance departments also improves operational efficiency;
- Improved compliance and governance. Thousands of employees can sign on-boarding documents, performance plans, benefits and T&E requests in minutes; laggards are easily spotted and receive automated reminders, reducing the risk of non-compliance;
- Vendor and channel efficiency. Organizations can reduce the operational overhead to manage hundreds or thousands of partners or vendors with secure e-signatures for certification and training documents, partner program agreements, requests for market development funds (MDF) documents, non-disclosure agreements and procurement documents;
- Transparency and reporting. Web contracting enables a transparent workflow with enterprisewide contract status visibility; and
- Ease of deployment and rollout. Cloud-based Web contracting offers organizations a hosted solution that requires virtually no IT resources to deploy or maintain.
Web Contracting Benefits Customers
In the past, one goal of e-signature technology was to make it easier for customers to sign documents. Today, however, Web contracting and e-signatures encompass the entire contracting process to improve the customer experience in several ways:
- Ease of use. Web contracting can be as simple and intuitive to use as email;
- Convenience. Customers can sign contracts at their convenience, and even via their mobile devices without printing documents, installing software, creating new logins or physically signing anything. They automatically receive a digital record; and
- Faster results. Whether customers are waiting for a mortgage approval, opening a new bank account, or signing a waiver, speed is always desirable. Web contracting enables a signature with a click of the mouse, and can compress the entire contract process to minutes or hours.
Adobe EchoSign and the Web Contracting Market
Adobe has been a trusted name in documents for over 20 years. Now Adobe enjoys the same trusted status in Web contracting and e-signatures. Companies worldwide already use Adobe EchoSign to sign hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts every month and manage the entire Web-based contracting process quickly, easily, securely and legally. EchoSign has helped these organizations eliminate lengthy sales close cycles and reduce post-sale internal contract processing costs by 50%-75%.
Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat XI users can send PDF files to be signed from within the application as well as sign documents electronically themselves. EchoSign offers pre-packaged integrations with popular CRM applications such as salesforce.com, MS CRM and SharePoint, Netsuite, SugarCRM as well as contract lifecycle management applications. In addition, the EchoSign API is used by companies all over the globe to integrate EchoSign signature events with commonly used finance, database and CRM applications, further automating the contract workflow and other downstream processes.
To learn more about web contracting and how Adobe EchoSign can benefit your organization visit www.echosign.com or call 877-324-6744 in the US or 44 (0) 1628 590 307 in the UK.