EchoBlog - Electronic Signature Solutions

Salesforce.com Names EchoSign to "Best Apps of 2008"

We're very pleased to have just been named to the "Best Apps of 2008" by the more than 51,000 customers of Salesforce.com.

14 top-rated apps won the award out of more than 800+ applications on the Force.com AppExchange.

 We're especially pleased by the company.  Of the 14, three are our partners and another four are our customers.

Thank you to the Salesforce customer base and ecosystem for recognizing us.  We really appreciate it.

Press release after the jump.

InsideCRM: "EchoSign Thrives in the Era of Quick Time-to-ROI"

InsideCRM had a nice update on our latest Summer release (new features) that identified a lot of the key reasons it's picked up quite a bit of steam ... signing the way you want ...

"The new version allows users to sign – as in, draw their names on a screen in the same way they’d take a pen to paper – as well as digitally ink contracts. 'These are truly written signatures, only you can have them work on a BlackBerry or an iPhone.' The Palm Pre is also part of the mobile mix.

Contracts can also be signed and managed through Zoho and Salesforce.com, and through Google Apps, Google Docs and Adobe Acrobat. The new version also includes a new pdf.-to-html engine. “There’s a lot of value to .pdf forms, but they aren’t really meant to accept signatures,” Lemkin says. “We essentially rebuilt Acrobat to enable .pdfs to be approved and signed in html.”

EchoSign allows subscriptions to start earlier, to close customers who might otherwise be anxious about completing contracts, and feeds data about unsigned contracts to sales reps, who can then proactively work on the final step in the sales process.

EchoSign has had a good year, says Lemkin – sales increased by 30 percent from April to May, continuing a trend for the company, and many of the company’s new customers came about “virally” after they signed a document electronically. “Our goal is to acquire 70 percent of our customers virally,” Lemkin says.

Why is Echosign doing well? They’re one of an assortment of CRM “peripherals” that are doing well in the recession by providing very fast return on investment for relatively little expense. “It absolutely makes sense that there’s an acceleration of interest in tools that are instantly ROI-positive,” Lemkin says. The trick is making sure that the prospective users understand the value of the technology in question.

Upstate Cerebral Palsy: 60 Years, 70 Locations, and 89% Adoption

Two groups we tend to learn a lot from are non-profits, and well established organizations.  We learn a lot from non-profits because they have to do so much with so little.  And we learn a lot about business process change from organizations that have been around for decades (or longer). 

So it was great to hear just how much, and in what ways, 60-year old Upstate Cerebral Palsy had done with EchoSign to automate its signature process:

 “Each month we had 3-400 documents that needed internal signatures, and the manual process to collect signatures was not working.” Bruce implemented an online system using forms created by Acrobat and stored centrally online. However, users had to open a form, complete it offline, re-attach, and email it off for one or more signatures that repeated the process. “This was better than our volunteer courier system, but not by much because many of our users had old versions of Acrobat and not everyone in the organization had email.”

They went on to take a user-poll and share the results back with us:

Recently, Bruce sent out a satisfaction survey on EchoSign with the following results:

• 57% were very satisfied
• 32% were satisfied
• 30% have used EchoSign 6 or more times
• 80% had signed at least 2-3 documents with EchoSign
• 46% had learned EchoSign on their own
• 7% have signed their approvals on their home computers or with handheld devices

“For us these are very impressive statistics. We couldn’t be happier with EchoSign.”

Computerworld: "It Couldn't Be Easier" than with EchoSign

Computerworld published a great piece today on how high-end bike apparel maker Pearl Izumi has resurrected its $10m business with SaaS and EchoSign and our partner Box.net:

"Nearly eight years ago Pearl Izumi Inc., the high-end apparel maker for cyclists and runners in Louisville, Colo., shut down its custom clothing business because it was not hitting profit targets. Today, new services available online are making it possible for the company to revive a proven revenue-generating business, only this time with the expectation that the profit margins are in line with corporate strategy ...

According to Regan, to make the high-end customization business unit a success he needs online services that are "highly knucklehead resistant." He describes his market as comprised of users, largely bike shop owners, lacking deep computer technical skills and are short on patience.

"I wanted the lowest common denominator for customers," he says.

And he thinks he's found it for the sales process in two services, one Box.net Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. and EchoSign Inc., also in Palo Alto. With the former service, Pearl Izumi's customers can collaborate with apparel sales and design staff to create everything from the garment's fabric and features to quantities and prices. Then EchoSign attaches the output from Box.net in a drop-dead-simple signature-processing service."

"It couldn't be simpler," he says."

SaaS, web services, the Cloud, call it what you want.  It's for every business now.  Close in on the web with EchoSign.

BT Features the "Best of Breed" in Cloud Computing

BT has just put up a terrific web presentation on how it and its 1,000,000+ SMBs use best-of-breed SaaS/cloud computing applications.  Highlighted are Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Sugar, Genius, Ribbit and EchoSign/BT eSignature.

Why cloud computing for 1m+ SMBs?

• Visibility
• Better Sales Productivity
• Win Rates and Deal Sizes Go Up 
• Sales Cycles Go Down 

Click here to watch through it.  It's quite an excellent discussion of how to use Cloud Computing to expand the success of your sales and marketing efforts and teams.

Buy and sell shares in Facebook, Tesla, & Twitter with SharesPost + EchoSign

One of the neatest EchoSign integrations formally launched today: SharesPost + EchoSign.  You can see coverage today in the Wall Street Journal, Mercury News and New York Times, and more.

SharesPost has created a truly exciting secondary market where corporations and qualified individuals can buy and sell shares in many of the hottest pre-public companies, including Facebook, Tesla, Twitter, and hundreds more.

To automate the contracts for the transactions, we're pleased that SharesPost turned to EchoSign to make the process as simple and efficient -- and automated -- as possible.

"Available today in public beta, SharesPost is poised to become the largest community for private equity transactions and the central hub for private company research and valuation data. By offering independent third-party research from Next Up! Research and VC Experts; escrow services from U.S. Bank; and electronic signature from EchoSign, SharesPost is providing the transparency and low-cost execution required to drive market liquidity. The SharesPost community has already seen an increasing number of new posts to buy and sell shares of some of today’s most exciting private companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, SolarCity, Tesla Motors, eHarmony and more."

The first post-beta transaction was in green-chic Tesla Motors at $10 per share -- valuing Tesla at just over one billion dollars.

A few shares in EchoSign will be available shortly, valuation tbd.  Proceeds will be donated to the Arbor Day Foundation.  

Check them out here. 

Marketo: "We EchoSign’d the agmt to the CFO. He signed on his Blackberry. We Closed the Deal."

We had a great visit with EchoSign customer Marketo, Inc. when Bill Binch, VP of Sales and Customer Success, dropped by our offices a few weeks ago.   The full story is here, but some excerpts below:

• "We’ve seen the incidence of redlining on custom SLAs (service level agreements) reduced by 50-75% so we engage less in contract negotiations, and experience a smoother closing process”
• "Since using EchoSign, signed contracts are returned on average in 2 days, with the fastest turnaround in 5 minutes.

But our favorite piece was the end-of-the-month story:

Finally, EchoSign has helped Marketo close key end-of-the-month business. “It was Saturday, Jan 31, 5:30pm. The customer contact indicated that his CFO needed to counter sign the agreement and he said to me, “I’m not sure my CFO can get to a fax machine this late on Saturday”. We “EchoSign’d” the agreement to the CFO and he signed it on his Blackberry. We closed the deal and that’s what counts.” 

Sign How You Want.  Where You Want.  Even Saturday, January 31, at 5:30pm.  We love it.  Thanks Bill.

Salesforce + EchoSign on the Secrets of Partner Success

Thanks to the hundreds of you that joined Salesforce.com yesterday for their webinar featuring EchoSign and ServiceMax as Success Lessons for Force.com/ AppExchange Entrepeneurs.

Both EchoSign and ServiceMax were named by Salesforce last year to the "Best of 2008" Salesforce applications and Salesforce invited us to share our learnings.

We'll put the full video and slides up shortly and continue to answer all follow-up questions.

Summer 2009 Release is Here. Our Biggest Release. Ever.

We're extremely proud to announce the full roll-out of EchoSign's Summer 2009 Release.  The theme: Sign the Way You Want.  We're taken all the learnings from the past 3.5 years from you, our 10,000 customers and 800,000 users, and dramatically enhanced the ways you can create, get data from, sign and manage your contracts.

There's a two minute video tour if you click the above image, or go here for a tour of many of the key new features.  And highlights after the break.

A Record May

Green shoots. We'll take them these days where we can get them.

We wanted to update you and let you know May was a record month for EchoSign.  New paid customers were up over 35% from our previous record, and we added another 50,000 new active users for the first time.

Perhaps most importantly, for the first time, a majorty of our new revenue and users came from you, i.e. "virally".  

We'll continue to say thank you in every way we can -- principally by continuing to rapidly improve and evolve our product.  Our very big Spring 2009 release comes out in phases, starting this Wednesday night, with a full roll-out to our customer base early next week.  More details shortly (most users have already received an email update), and a quick preview is on the tips.echosign.com blog.

"After 25 Years, We've Gone to 99% E-Signatures"

A good friend of EchoSign often takes the position that many of the users of web-based electronic signatures are very tech-focused, relatively early adopters.

There's some truth to that - we're proud to count tech leaders like Facebook, Iron Mountain, Citrix, Dell, SAP, HP and others as our customers.

But the bulk of our customers are just seemingly ordinary businesses that one way or another, do business over the Internet.  This recent case study from Atlantic Realty caught our eye and represents perhaps the most typical EchoSign customer.

Atlantic Realty has been doing business for over 25 years, renting out vacation homes and doing business with good old pen, paper, paper ads, and the telephone:

"There’s a lot of paperwork associated with the vacation rentals. “We send out about 20 contracts per property,” says Nancy Beasley, Property Manager. “During our reservation high season, from January to June, we probably send close to 1000 documents per month.” During the balance of the year, Atlantic Realty sends out approximately 500 documents per month to home owners and guests."

They learned about EchoSign from a trusted advisor, and decided to take the plunge. 

"“EchoSign was very easy to implement”, says Nancy. “We had one training session ... and we were ready to go. Our agents still tell me how easy it is to use EchoSign.” Now, Atlantic Realty is sending out 99% of their documents for electronic signature and only 1% for fax signature. “Most of our customers are very comfortable with electronic signatures. However, EchoSign’s fax capability is great for those [1%] that want to sign the ‘traditional’ way.”

So what's changed for a 25 year old property rental business like Atlantic Realty?  Well the properties haven't.  Most of the vacation homes in Kitty Hawk, NC are likely the same ones that were there three decades ago.  The principals are the same. 

But what has changed is how they get their customers.  From the internet.  So what would have seemed odd just 5 years ago -- closing their customers over the internet -- now becomes natural.

We love Facebook.  But most of the business world is a lot closer to Atlantic Realty.  And they'll continue to accelerate the rate at which they use the internet to acquire, engage, track -- and close -- their customers.  And that's what we're all about.

It Takes a Village

One of the most common questions we get from financial analysts, Wall Street, VCs, and others who do not actually use EchoSign is, "So what else are you going to do?  Redlining?  Term extraction?  Collaboration?  Seems like you've sort of nailed that signing stuff." 

We could, but it turns out just signing, tracking, and filing contracts the exact way over 9,500 customers want it signed is pretty much an endless job ticket for our engineers.  It turns out that while the majority of businesses use contracts to close their customers, they each do it slightly differently.  For example, we counted our workflows around inbound fax processing last week and it's over 247.  I.e., there are over 247 ways faxes come into EchoSign if your customer decides to fax sign instead of esign -- and that's just one little piece of our system.  Overall, we count almost 6,000 workflows in our system, or 1 for every 1.58 customers ;)

So we can't do it all.  That's where our friends and partners come in.  They leverage EchoSign in two ways -- via our API, and in the Salesforce ecosystem, via our Salesforce custom object (which eliminates the need to even use our API).

Today our friends at Box.net for example introduced a terrific workflow for their 2,000,000 users that we just don't do (but that those analysts, Wall Street types, and VCs always ask about): approve, update, review, and sign.  And it's quite powerful.

Have a contract you need internally reviewed, commented on, changed, and then signed?  There's plenty of sophisticated enterprise software that can do this elegantly, but Box.net expands this to businesses of every size.  Now, you can upload a contract to Box.net; have all your internal parties comment; they can propose edits; the master contract can be updated internally with comments; and then it can be sent off to be signed and filed via EchoSign -- all on the web, all with no software or anything to learn.

Does this happen with every contract, evey day?  No ... the vast majority of contracts do not go through deep review, but merely a rules-based sign-off.  But by leveraging the Box.net-EchoSign integration, approve/update/finalize/send/track/sign can now all be automated whenever you want.  Pretty cool.

It indeed takes a village to do everything.  We'll keep you posted as our partners add high value workflow extensions like these to EchoSign.

EchoSign Named 2009 WhizKid for Front Office Innovation: "Deceptively Simple and Disruptive"

We're very pleased to have just been named one of the seven "WhizKids" of 2009 by Beagle Research, the leading CRM analyst firm (you can find Beagle and its research all over Salesforce.com's website, among many others).

We won this award together with our customer Onvia for excellence in this year's theme "Making Your Company Easy to Do Business With".  Amen - that's what gets us up in the morning.

"Why we like them [EchoSign]
The contract management process has not changed much since the broad dissemination of the fax machine and the introduction of overnight package delivery in the 1980’s. Regardless of the size of a deal, parties tend to go back and forth with negotiations and while this was manageable in the 1980’s today many more products and services are available and require some form of contracting—about 50% by our estimates. 
In an on-demand world where we can utilize software over the Internet in minutes, it makes little sense to take days to finalize contracts. EchoSign has a deceptively simple solution that accelerates the contracting process to something close to Internet speed. The product can’t do anything about the human input in negotiations but it takes the latency out of sending documents, capturing signatures and managing those documents for quick retrieval over the life of the agreement.
EchoSign takes the pain out of paperwork involved in contracting, and makes closing a deal on the Web as simple as it is to work on WebEx or track in SalesForce. Ultimately, it fixes a process for managing a high volume of contracts that has been broken for too long. For all of that, they deserve a 2009 WizKids award.
Customer example
Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) a company that tracks all government purchasing activity in addition to commercial and residential projects in development for markets such as architecture and engineering, construction, IT/telecom, business consulting services, operations and maintenance, and transportation. The company has more than 8,400 subscribers across the United States that rely on them as a comprehensive resource for industry-specific information needed to make intelligent sales decisions. 
Onvia needed an efficient way to close service agreements. With a volume of 300-500 sales contracts per month, they needed an application that allowed their sales reps to close customer sales while they were on the phone. A key requirement was that the tool needed to be easy to use for both the sales reps and their customers ..."

The full report is here, and congratulations to EchoSign customers Zuora and Right90, also winners!

Dennis goes on to predict that companies that dramatically improve operational excellence will be the winners coming out of this recession, much like Salesforce and WebEx were the winners out of the last one:

"Coming out of the last recession we saw new dependence on web based meetings and on-demand software delivery.  I think every recession generates some winners like that.  From this recession, it is becoming clear that social networking is becoming absorbed into the business software suite.  I also think solutions that enable higher levels of operational excellence within each vendor will be natural outgrowths of this downturn. 
These solutions cut fat without damaging muscle — often a tall order — and they prepare us for an upturn that will be tepid.  There will be growth but it won’t be as robust as we had come to expect in the last few years and we will all need operational solutions that help us cope.  Fortunately the wheels of innovation continue to turn and we get what we need, just in time."

"How I hired 9 people in 7 cities in 21 days using EchoSign"

This was simply a great and rather humorous post on how web services can dramatically accelerate your business:

"Here’s what I faced: I had about 3 weeks to hire 6 to 9 people to work as City Editors for the CultureMob blog. They were going to be located in 7 different metro areas and we could only pay them a small monthly stipend. Like many start-ups, we had no money and even less time to waste.

Given enough time, I’m certain I could have found people one by one, but there was simply no time to do so. Instead of Dinner Impossible, this was Hiring Impossible.

I turned to [six] low-cost and free tools online to find people, interview them, and get them signed to a contract. I started on April 23 and got the last contract signed on May 13. Here’s how I did it: ..."

More here with his nod to EchoSign:

"6. Echosign.com. ... This application is so good, and so bullet proof that it was worth the extra $15 to easily get e-signatures on the contracts. It’s clear that this application could handle everything from a small business to a massive one."

More here on making 9 hires in 7 cities in 21 days with Craigslist, Gmail, Excel, Genbook, Comcast VOIP, and EchoSign.

Net results: 9 hires for $165.  Disruptive technology indeed.

We're not all quite like Mike yet.  But we're all getting there, on one path or another.

JMP Securities Names EchoSign to "Hot 100" Best Privately Held Software Companies of 2009

EchoSign is extremely proud to announce that for a second year in a row, we've been named by JMP Securities to the "Hot 100".

JMP is one of the leading technology investment banks and each year researches its list of the best privately held software companies.

This is one of the great insiders' awards, with the list including most of the up-and-coming leaders in SaaS.  Congratulations to our customers who also made the Hot 100 -- over 20% of the Hot 100 are our customers. 

Criteria for inclusion include momentum, customer success, and path to successful IPO.  Seven of the 100 are already in registration for an initial public offering, even in these challenging times.

Key themes JMP found gaining momentum this year were:

• Sales and Marketing Automation - which they call "smarketing".  Leaders highlighted here include Eloqua, Genius, Jigsaw, InsideView and Marketo -- all of whom are our customers - congratulations!

• Cloud Computing.  OK, we get it ;)  EchoSign customer RightScale is highlighted, along with BlueArc and Parallels.

• Analytics and Data Integration. 

And thanks to you, our users and customers, for creating the traction and goodwill to propel EchoSign to a second straight win here.

Accelerating Sales with Key Sales 2.0 Solutions (or what EchoSign and Twitter have in common)

Network Solutions, one of the web's early big success stories and its largest provider of domain names (among other key SMB web services), recently gave a presentation at the Sales Leadership Conference in Las Vegas on "Accelerating Sales with Sales 2.0 Solutions".

Network Solutions' toolkit was interesting and reflective of where sales is today and is rapidly going:

* Lead Generation: Enhanced with SalesGenie to search prospects and leads dynamically

* Salesforce.com to manage prospecting, proposal generation, closing and account management

* Social Media tools such as Twitter and blogs to create communities that strengthen your sales force

and ..

* EchoSign to automate and ensure "quick and easy closes" (see their demo above/left)

Finally, Network Solutions noted that "Going Mobile" is the future of sales.  Indeed.  We're proud to support mobile signatures across almost any browser-based device - Blackberry, iPhone, Android, etc. and offer a unique mobile interface.

What's "Sales 2.0" today is rapidly simply becoming "Sales" as more and more businesses find, track, manage and close their customers on the web.  We're proud to be the leading sales tool in closing contracts and business on the 'net.

EchoSign Named Tie50 Finalist

EchoSign is pleased to have been selected by TieCon, the world's largest conference for entrepeneurs, out of 1,200 nominees as one of the finalists for the Top 50 startups of 2009.

EchoSign is a finalist in Internet Infrastructure (hmmm) ... please give us a vote here if you haven't already: www.tie50.net/polling.

We're proud to have won some terrific awards in our history, including Best App of 2008 from Salesforce.com for Contract Management; Hot 100 by JMP Securities; Three-time AppExchange Essential; Red Herring 100; and more. 

TiE has become perhaps the most influential global entrepeneur society and speakers this year will include Hans Morris, president of Visa; Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit; Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn; and Paul Maritz, CEO of VMWare, and many more.

Again, votes are much appreciated for the final round: www.tie50.net/polling

Simplicity + Value = No Brainer

At EchoSign, we've been doing this for quite a while.  As our space continues to heat up, we're staying true to our vision from 2005: to be the easiest way to get contracts signed, tracked and filed.

What's changed over the years is what it takes to make something "simple".  With thousands of workflows and dozens of ways to sign, we have to keep on our toes to allow our users access to that power without diluting the core -- the ability for any two parties, of companies of any size, to get a contract signed in just minutes, or even seconds, on the web.

What that means is whether you are a Fortune 500/Global 2000 customer like BT, GE, Dell, Qualcomm, Pulte Holmes, First American, etc. etc.; a small business just closing your first customers; or somewhere in-between like Mr. Klugman's company  -- and to be clear, the needs are often rather different -- the product is still "easy, simple and a no-brainer". 

Look for us taking this to the next level in our Spring '09 release, out shortly.

BT @ CloudForce London: "Last Month, We Did 25,000 Contracts Using EchoSign E-Signature"

EchoSign was proudly represented by BT at this month's Salesforce.com Cloudforce in London.

Bill Murphy, Managing Director of BT's entire SME business, gave part of the keynote together with Mark Benioff.  You can see it here.  Bill describes why BT has made such a big investment in SaaS:  "Speed.  Velocity. Agility. and Utility, all wrapped together in a very agile fashion".

He then goes on to talk about eSignature and EchoSign at about 2:00:

"Last month, we did 25,000 contracts, all using [EchoSign] eSignature  ... 2 years ago, all of that would have been post ... Our velocity is signing contracts went from days and weeks to literally on average 40 minutes   .  That's a huge productivity burst ... And those are the things we're looking at to transform ourselves, and deploy back out to our customers so they can use them."

See it below and more after the jump from BT and EchoSign at Cloudforce.  And don't miss the Marc Benioff bear hug at the end of the video.  Not sure our British colleagues knew what to make of it ;)

Using Sales 2.0 Tools to 10x the Productivity of Your Sales Team

The Sales 2.0 Advocate has a great piece entitled "The Emergence of the Hybrid (Telesales/Field) Sales Rep" here.

Bill Lohr is interviewed on his experience growing a leading web content management company's revenues 35x over 2.5 years, and the key sales tools (including EchoSign) that fueled that growth.

The interview is an interesting one, in terms of best practices in cold calling, prospecting, enterprise vs inside sales, upselling, and much more.

"AS: What sales tools and technologies did you use?
BL: Among others, we used salesforce.com, Jigsaw, Hoovers, GoToMeeting, LinkedIn, Eloqua, and EchoSign.

AS: How did the Sales 2.0 technologies help you sell?
BL: Lots of ways.  Jigsaw and Hoovers helped alert us to who the players are in a given account.  LinkedIn got us to the right people faster and increases their response rate because an individual reaching out to another individual makes the outreach more personal. EchoSign accelerated the contracts cycle.

AS: What have your sales results been?
BL: When I started, we were producing $20,000/MRR.  Two and a half years later, with the same sales team, the productivity increased to $700,000/MRR."

Much more here.

100% Wind Powered E-Signatures

In honor of upcoming Earth Day, we wanted to highlight how we are working to go Green 2.0.

Making your contracting process paperless with EchoSign is obviously one of the simplest things you can do to go green with web services.  The amount of waste from contracts is particularly alarming, with, according to CitiGroup, the average 8-10 page contract being photocopied, printed, or reprinted, almost 10 times by all the various parties and departments.

Going to EchoSign can cut that waste 90-100% overnight.  And we appreciate the nods from companies like BT, HiDef Web Solutions, Qualcomm, The American Lung Association, and many others on how e-contracting has materially contributed to their Going Green efforts.

Having said that, there is still more that can be done.  Going paperless by using e-signatures is the low hanging fruit.   But there are stil those pesky servers.  So we've gone Green 2.0 and 100% wind-powered.

What Contracts and the Internet Have in Common

The San Jose Business Journal did a full-page profile of EchoSign today (online now here) with some good insights on the market.

The part that was of particular interest to us was the focus on the connection between contracts and doing business on the web.  As the Biz Jornal noted, "What do contracts and the Internet have in common? It’s virtually impossible today to do business without them."

Electronic signatures are somewhat interesting on their own.  But frankly, they are nothing new, especially IT-based solutions.  The majority of tax returns will be e-signed this year, for example.

Electronic signatures as a way to sign on the web, when more and more business is being done on the web -- that's something much more game changing.  When we started EchoSign in 2005, we did so because we saw the Internet connecting every business at least via email.  And we believed the contract was the missing piece to automate transactions.

Fast forward to 2009, and it's not about email of course ... the web has taken over all businesses, small, medium and large, tech focused or not.  Whether it's tracking customers in Salesforce, doing demos in WebEx or GoToMeeting, or closing them with EchoSign ... the point is, the web has become the hub and focus of millions and millions of businesses worldwide.

Connect the Internet and contracts together ... as elegantly and simply as your other web apps ... that's not just interesting.  That's the present for many, and the future for all.

EchoSign on "24"

The role of collaboration in contracts is an interesting one.  There are those who see it as a key business enabler and one that further unlocks the power in contracting and signing on the web.  There are others who see "collaboration" as a bit of a Web 2.0 distraction, with the vast majority of contracts being relatively formulaic, with no need to chat, interact, review or even redline.

We think they both views are right -- and so we work the way you work.  On that note, two interesting developments over the past week.  First, our friends and partner at Zoho launched Zoho Chat inside of Zoho Writer.  What does this mean for you?  Well, EchoSign has been natively integrated inside of Zoho Writer, the web's leading standalone word processor, since early 2007.  With EchoSign-for-Zoho Writer, you can collaborate on a contract together with your internal team (edits, revisions, etc) or with a customer, and then get it signed in seconds with the "DigiSign" link which directly links to your EchoSign account.  Last week, they added Zoho Chat to the mix, so you can now do instant-messaging with your collaborators as well as you draft, iterate, and e-sign a contract.  Very cool.

Even slicker -- at least visually -- is our integration inside of Cisco WebEx Connect, enhanced via some Hollywood special effects.  EchoSign is the only electronic signature solution integrated by Cisco WebEx and a visualization of it was dramatically featured in the last episode of Fox's hit show "24".  The President discussed an "Executive Pardon Order" with several members of her team over a WebEx video chat, and then digitally signed it in seconds.

Whether you work it in WebEx, or create it in Zoho Writer, you can close it with EchoSign. Thanks to our friends at WebEx for the tip-off. 

Cutting Your Costs by 66% With EchoSign and Best-of-Breed SaaS Apps

At EchoSign we didn't attend SaaSCon this year -- with limited time, we went to Web 2.0 Expo instead, and it looks like maybe we made the wrong call.

It looks like there were several interesting dialogues on why SaaS and web services adoption is really accelerating (beyond the hype), with real ROI stories.

Here was a neat one than Jnah Dash picked up:

"One CIO [on the panel] explained how he reduced his IT spend from $607K in 2007 to $259K in 2008 by switching to SaaS (Google Apps for gmail, videochat, documents, spreadsheets, charts, etc.). He adopted Netsuite as the core ERP/CRM application and picked other packages like WorkOasis (facility management), Halogen (performance management), ADP (payroll. HRIS), and admin tools like Webex, Echosign, eFax, Zoomerang, and VisualCV. His staff cost was reduced from $166K in 2007 to zero in 2008. Hardware cost was reduced from $52K to $8K. His is a small size company selling exercise equipments. No wonder the first adopters of Saas are the small to medium size companies."

This is the heart of what's happening.  A combination of best-of-breed web services -- including EchoSign -- cut this CIO's IT spend in half, and his staff cost to, ahem, zero.  Total savings: $514,000 a year, or a 66% cost reduction in his budget -- with a positive impact on revenue.  Where else can you cut costs in 2009, and also make more money by doing so?

Q1'09 for the 750,000+ EchoSigners: A Return to Normalcy

With the release of anonymous opt-in benchmarking last fall, our users have had access to unprecedented data as to what is happening in sales across their peer groups.

So what did we see in Q1'09?  A return to normalcy. 

Q3'08 saw a huge huge push, but with an abnormal amount of contracting at the very end of the month as the economy began to fall off a cliff.  Q4'08 was the opposite: ennui, with usage dropping off toward the end of the year, when for the sake of our economy, we'd all hoped for a big end of the year push. 

Q1'09: back to business as usual, at least in terms of how we work and sell.  Yesterday (3/31), the last day of the quarter, was a record day for EchoSign usage -- but with the same general patterns we saw back in 2007 and Q1 and Q2 of 2008 ... relatively slow at the beginning of the month, more contracts toward the end of the month, peaking toward the very end of the quarter.  In other words, what you'd expect in normal sales, with folks trying to make quotas, cut deals, etc.

There's no question times are challenging.  An insta-cure would be nice.  But what most of us simply want in business right now is a return to normalcy.  Understanding what the rules are, and how to play by them.  Understanding that the economy is working as expected, even in a recession.

EchoSign leading indicators suggest we're back on the path to normalcy.  That's a good thing.

Come See British Telecom and EchoSign at CloudForce 2009 in London

For our customers, users and friends across the pond, please come see us at Cloudforce 2009 in London on 7th April.

We'll be hosted by our customer and partner BT (British Telecom), which has over 5,000 sales reps using EchoSign.  In the U.K., BT also resells a U.K.-localized version of EchoSign as "BT eSignature".  BT eSignature will be prominently featured in their center pavilion at Cloudforce 2009.

Cloudforce is free in 2009, which is quite a deal.

"We are moving to a position where ‘cloud computing’ is a widely adopted norm for the way in which businesses think about and consume software and applications.  Its a seismic shift which will create significant opportunities in changing cost and capital structures in business’ and allow more and more business’ to benefit from applications that are too complex to administer or expensive to adopt now.

BT are proud sponsors of Cloudforce London 2009, the world's premier software on demand event.  Join us and our partners on the 7th April where we can demonstrate how BT can bring it all together for your business.  Register for free now."

New York Times: Web 2.0 Works to Solve Real-World 1.0 Problems

At EchoSign we like to think of ourselves as a Web 2.0 leader.  But what is Web 2.0?  Is it all about social, tweets, and Facebook?  (Yes, we do love Facebook, one of our 9,000+ customers).  Or is about something a bit broader, what we like to think, web applications that leverage the ubiquity of the internet?

Well, luckily The New York Times agrees with our broader view and highlighted EchoSign as one of the three killer apps for using Web 2.0 to Solve Problems.  Subtitled, "Surprise!  Web 2.0 does more than social networking", the piece has a great interview with one of our customers:

"I spoke with an EchoSign customer, Angela O'Grady, the COO of Preferred Offices, a “hotel for businesses” in the Washington D.C. area that rents offices, meeting rooms, and other business location services. “We started with EchoSign after a client sent our contract back to us with the service,” said O'Grady.

In two years, O'Grady said they've used EchoSign for 441 documents, plus another 100 or so their customers printed, signed on paper, and returned. Clients don't have to pay anything to receive a document, just like YouSendIt doesn't charge the recipients of files.

“We're selling the latest and greatest technology and bandwidth,” said O'Grady, “and this is another nuance of how we provide state of the art service for our clients.” Being high-tech, and using EchoSign's management tools, they now know their average document signing time is 114 minutes. That certainly beats the days it used to take to get contract paperwork modified and signed."

Going from days to close a customer -- down to 114 minutes.  We can do the same for you.

Andrew Flusche, Esq.: "E-Signatures Are Quick, Legal and Easy"

Almost everyone approaching e-signatures for the first time has the same basic question: "are they legal?"

The simple answer, as most of the small but dedicated cadre of readers of EchoBlog well know, is "absolutely".  Electronic contracting broadly speaking has been done since the 19th century and the days of the telegraph.  Fast forward to today, where the majority of taxpayers file with an e-signature.  And for businesses, things got more interesting when the U.S. passed the Federal E-Sign Act of 2000 (along with similar laws in many other countries), which gave e-signatures for business transactions the exact same legal force as written signatures.  Gartner wrote in a recent comment that the legal status of e-signatures is a "non-issue".

And EchoSign is the only leading e-signature service actually founded by corporate attorneys!

But sometimes, it still feels better to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.  Attorney Andrew Flusche had a great piece we recently noticed:

"Aside from personal liability, another popular contract topic is e-signing. It’s a quick, legal way to execute your business and personal contracts.

E-signature law

The basic law of contracts is that a contract is binding if the parties agree to its terms. Signatures signal that the parties agreed. But you don’t have to sign your full name in ink on paper.

The federal Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Acts solidified the validity of e-signing your contracts. This Act basically says that electronic signatures are valid in the form that the contracting parties agree to. But the Act also allows you to opt out of electronic signatures.

Notably, some states have also passed laws regarding e-signing. But electronic signatures are essentially valid in all 50 states.

Echo-Sign

For my contracts, I love using Echo-Sign. With Echo-Sign’s software, I can send out a contract and have it fully signed by all parties in 5 minutes. It’s a great way to get e-signatures fast.

To use Echo-Sign, you just upload a document that you want signed. Then you input the email addresses for the people that need to sign it. When you’re ready, you simply click “send.”

Echo-Sign will email each person, asking for his/her signature on the document. Once each party has e-signed, Echo-Sign automatically emails a final copy to everyone.

If this isn’t cool enough, you can even review and sign contracts from a mobile device, like an iPhone, Palm, or Windows Mobile phone. If a client signs a contract while I am on-the-go, I get a message from Echo-Sign on my Motorola Q. I can quickly sign the contract myself without needing access to a regular computer.

Speeding up business

As you can see, electronic signatures are just one way to speed up routine business. They facilitate quicker contracts, which means you can get more agreements done in less time.

For a busy attorney like myself, e-signatures save crucial time which lets me focus on serving clients even better. Whatever your occupation, I highly recommend trying the free version of Echo-Sign. You’ll be glad you did."

SharedSpaces Integrates EchoSign

We're pleased to note that EchoSign partner Sharemethods launched today SharedSpaces -- private, interactive workspaces for creating, managing and sharing content and files with individuals and partners throughout an organization's ecosystem in a controlled and secure environment. Sharemethods' customers include BusinessWeek, C|Net/CBS, and many other leaders in technology.

EchoSign is natively integrated into SharedSpaces, so any collaborative document a SharedSpace can be instantly sent for electronic review, signature, and archive.

67.4% of the Fortune 500 Use EchoSign

There's nothing like a spurious yet still accurate statistic to stir some thinking.

Based on a quick analysis across our userbase, 67.4% of the Fortune 500 (or at least the Fortune 500 as of 1/31 - some change there of late) have used EchoSign.

What does this mean?  Given how easy it is to use web services like EchoSign, it does not -- of course -- mean we've completely conquered corporate America.  While we're extremely proud of our Fortune 500 customers like Dell, GE, Time Warner, SAP, HP, etc. etc., the reality is e-signatures are just beginning to enter the mainstream of corporate contracting processes.

But what it does speak to is the trend, which is really just beginning to take off in 2009, of making your contracting and signature processes just as simple, just as easy and, most importantly, just as web-based, as your other business processes.

It's starting.  2009 will be the year web-based signatures begin to go mainstream.  2010 will be the year the momentum really grows.  And by 2016, people will wonder, and even laugh at, the notion that in the old days, people used to have to use fax, snail mail, or a fedex to sign things.  Not tomorrow.  But it's coming, and happening, and accelerating, now.

Fix the Paper Hole

One of the most gratifying things about being in our fourth year of taking the pain out of paperwork is that our customers can pretty much explain everything about our vision, mission, value proposition and goals better than we can.

We missed this recent post on Chris Brogan's widely-followed blog, but it really nailed what we are about.  Interestingly, 7 of the commenters on the post turned out to be our customers and recommended us as the solution to the Paper Hole:

"I’ve got a problem. As a professional speaker and someone running an online marketing agency, I am often in a situation where someone sends me a contract to sign. Makes sense. LOTS of businesses run on contracts. Here’s the thing: I’m a digital nomad. I rarely visit the office. I don’t have printers and fax machines. Think about it.

The Process

1. Someone sends me something to sign in email.
2. I look at the email for days.
3. I plead to just send an email signature.
4. Seven reminder emails later, I find my way to Staples (or *.placewithprintersandfaxes)
5. I print the form/contract.
6. I sign the form/contract.
7. I dig into my iPhone email to find the fax number, can’t.
8. I email the person to remind me of their fax number.
9. I listen to bad in-store music and make small talk with the Copy Center person, who hates everyone.
10. I get the email.
11. I dial the fax number.
12. It takes four tries.
13. The fax goes through.
14. Weeks later, the process is complete.

It’s 2009

Can we please stop the paper thing? Isn’t there another way?

I know there’s not, but if nothing else, I feel better for explaining why you’re still waiting for me to sign whatever it is"

LOL.  This is about 10x better than our "ugh with the fax" video from early 2006 - thank you Chris.

It also shows we have to continue to get the word out as he'd never heard of us.  But fortunately, 7 of our customers reached out in the comments and singled EchoSign out as the solution to this mess.  To Chris -- thank you for the great 2009 update of our value prop.  To our customers -- thank you for the support.

Reflections on the Pacific Crest On-Demand Conference

Our CEO (second from the right) was part of a spirited panel last week on "SaaS in Difficult Times" together with SaaS leaders NetSuite, Opsource, Cornerstone OnDemand, Xactly and Eloqua.

It was a candid session where leading CEOs were very frank about the impact of the economy on their companies.  The challenges in the global economy -- and thus with our customers -- were contrasted with Salesforce.com having officially crossed $1,000,000,000 in annualized revenue that day.

A few themes emerged:

• SaaS leaders were not seeing much of an impact on "net adds", or the rate at which they added new customers, generally speaking.  Customers are still flocking to SaaS over more expensive and complicated on-premise solutions.
• Larger, enterprise deals were seen as a sweet spot, with many leaders buying more and taking advantage of the downturn to lock in longer-term, discounted deals with SaaS vendors
• The mid-market was seen as the tough spot at least for seat-based business models, where customers may be happy, but downsizing simply leads to buying less seats
• Sales cycles are much longer
• Every SaaS company was planning for slower growth in 2009+, which interestingly, is leading to greater profitability.  Without so much expense for sales and marketing front-loaded to fuel maximum growth, it's much easier for recurring-revenue models to grow their cash bases by growing more moderately. 

It was a terrific discussion.  As a highly related reminder, if you are an EchoSign Enterprise customer -- try our anonymous, opt-in benchmarking.  You'll be able to track in real-time, and over time, just how the sales cycles and close rates are of your peer group.  Our SaaS group's sales cycles have grown 64% since November 2008, for example.  Interested to track this type of data over time?  Just join a peer group on the Admin tab of your account.

Two Years of 100% 24x7x365 Transparent Uptime Data

We just noticed that March 2009 marks our 2 year anniversary of providing an industry-first 100% transparent uptime system at http://trust.echosign.com

In those 2 years, we've learned a lot.  Our initial inspiration was Salesforce.com, which launched trust.salesforce.com to show uptime about 2 years ago.  Though in fact, the tracking there is actually somewhat limited, with outages less than 15 minutes, and scheduled downtime, not tracked.  Google for example only just followed with Gmail and Apps uptime status in the past few weeks.

We've gone to the extreme since early 2007, with 2 years of full data, including scheduled downtime.

Why?  The simple answer is because we had to be.  Closing deals, signing contracts, is a mission-critical business process. 

You have the right, and should demand, full transparency from all SaaS and web services vendors for the applications you depend on.  Almost no web-based application can truly deliver 100% uptime, 24x7x365.  But you deserve to know in real-time if there are issues, and historically, what the issues have been, why they occurred, and how they were addressed.

"Success is built on trust. And trust starts with transparency."

American Lung Association: "We Love EchoSign Electronic Signature"

BT eSignature Gets an Update

Across the pond, we're known as "BT eSignature".  British Telecom, or BT, one of the world's largest communications companies, provides a BT-customized version of EchoSign to its 4,000,000 customers (and other users) in the U.K. and Europe.

They've recently updated their pages with not only a snazzy new look-and-feel, but some great testimonials from R.J. Hutcheon Solicitors (a UK law firm), Rawnet (a UK communications agency) ... and BT itself, which processes over 20,000 contracts a month on EchoSign.

We're also a key part of their Broadband & Internet application suite.

This has been a terrific partnership for us with BT and our joint customers and it's great to see the joint offering continue to evolve and improve.

Thank You For the Support!

Digitalbucket Integrates EchoSign

We just saw that Digitalbucket implemented a very nice EchoSign integration.  Digitalbucket is a SaaS on-line digital content collaboration platform launched in 2007.

There are a number of ways to integrate EchoSign into your application.  One option, as implemented by Digitalbucket, Zoho, Box.net and other web leaders is to securely request EchoSign credentials (i.e., EchoSign account information) to send, sign, track and store documents.  This has the advantage of not requiring the integrating application to provision or manage or, in the case of paid accounts, bill end users.  In just a few hours, your application can integrate electronic and fax-based signatures and full workflow and routing around signed contracts.

For our Salesforce.com partners and customers, another option is to integrate with our Salesforce.com custom object and "push" the contract into their object for signature.  Again, no account provisioning, billing or tracking is required and there is no cost.

We'll also look at single sign-on and similar integrations (such as the EchoSign integration with WebEx Connect or HR Block Rocketlawyer) in another post.

EchoSign Chosen for 2009 Montgomery Technology Conference

 We were very pleased to learn that Montgomery & Co. has chosen EchoSign to present as its 2009 Technology Conference, which fortunately for us is right on the beach in Santa Monica March 10 and 11.

Please let us know if you are attending.

Even better, a number of our customers will be presenting as well: RightScale, Intacct, Jigsaw, Drivecam, among others.  We'll see you there and thank you to Montgomery & Co. for the recognition.

Fax and eSignatures -- Like the Telegraph and the Telephone

Seth Godin's blog had a short piece entitled "Solving a Different Problem" that really resonated with us.

His piece noted that when the telephone came along, it had a challenge.  Telegraph technology was well established and held four distinct advantages: "It was universal, inexpensive, asynchronous and it left a paper trail."

"If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition."

While we've talked about how the transition from written to e-signatures is like the transition from analog to digital photography, on further reflection, the transition from the telegraph to telephone is an even better metaphor (if a less recent one).

Let's see the similarities between Fax and Telegraph:

• universal: yes (more or less) for both fax and telegraph
• inexpensive: yes for both
• asynchornous: yes (your fax # just sits patiently waiting for a fax)
• paper trail: yes

That would sure seem to stack the deck against e-signatures.  So why then is EchoSign up 250% in January?  Why do 97% of our customers tell us they'll never go back? 

Because electronic signatures solve a slightly different program in an overwhelmingly useful way ...

[Continued after the jump]

EchoSign Chosen for Pacific Crest Securities' 4th Annual On-Demand Conference

We're extremely pleased to have been selected for a second year in a row to present at Pacific Crest Securities' Annual On-Demand Conference.

This is a true "who's who" event in the SaaS world, an insiders' event where the top leaders in SaaS convene.  Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, will kick off the event.

We'll be speaking on "Running a SaaS Business in Difficult Economic Times", the topic du jour, on a panel hosted by Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource Inc, together with Jim McGreever, CFO of Netsuite, Perry Wallack, CFO of Cornerstone OnDemand, and Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly.

On that note, a small aside that EchoSign sales were up 250% in January.  Thank you to those of you who came onboard in these challenging times -- we really appreciate your business and will strive to keep and earn it.

EchoSign, Weddings, and Sealing the Deal: "There's Just Something About The Ease of a Simple Two-Step Process"

We were pleased to notice a number of posts recently on dpreview.com about photographers using EchoSign, the web's leading photography site and one of our favorites (and now a subsidiary of Amazon.com).

Professional photographers make up a significant chunk of EchoSign users.  The use cases are many, but two that stand out are using EchoSign for model releases, and using EchoSign for wedding contracts.

We appreciated Eager Eye Photography of Maine's thoughts on how EchoSign has helped turbocharge his business.

First,

"Two days ago, I sent out a contract to a wedding client, through Echosign, and the deal was concluded -- the contract signed -- in less than half an hour.

Yesterday, I sent out an another contract to two clients (a groom and his mother -- the mother is paying) and that worked like a charm too; I have a PDF copy signed consecutively by both people, that's sitting in my in-box right now.

My 'old' contract turnaround time has sometimes been several weeks (some clients need repeated prodding, the mail is slow, fax machines can be a hassle, etc.). No more. There's just something about the ease of a simple two-step web-based process that makes it harder to postpone/ignore than the prospect of dealing with paper, postage, post offices, certified mail, and what have you. And it's an environmentally sound thing, too (might be a selling point for your business)."

In a later post, he goes out to note how he's now gone even further, storing his EchoSigned contracts on his iPod Touch and he and his customer can view his signed contracts together in the field:

"I had a folder auto-copied from my main Mac's desktop that contains PDFs of all my 2009 contracts. This wasn't primarily for purposes of the trade show, but it came in handy regardless when two or three potential clients inquired about contractual details. I just gave them the iPod, flicked to the clauses in question, and let the clients read the relevant passages then and there.

Now, when I'm on a job, I have a certified (by Echosign) e-copy of the contract in my pocket, on my pod (PDF), plus all kinds of other pertinent information. Even if I forget to bring a file that's on my Mac and I need it, I can log in remotely and view/download it."

Thank you to Eager Eye Photography for the postings.  This is what it's all about for us.