echosign e-signature for salesforce case study pack: time warner, groupon, qualcomm, more

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EchoSign Helps Time Warner Cable Business Class Reduce “Sold to Revenue Cycle” and Implement Consistent Best Practices

Company Overview Time Warner Cable is the second-‐largest cable operator in the U.S., with technologically advanced, well-‐clustered systems located in five geographic areas: New York State (including New York City), the Carolinas, Ohio, southern California (including Los Angeles) and Texas. Time Warner Cable Business Class offers a suite of phone, Internet, Ethernet and cable television services to businesses of all sizes. Time Warner Cable Media Sales, the advertising arm of Time Warner Cable, offers national, regional and local companies innovative advertising solutions that are targeted and affordable.

Workflow Challenge The Business Operations Group began to research electronic signature solutions as a way to get commercial customer contracts signed faster. At the time, the main ways to get contracts signed were attaching a contract and emailing it to a customer, or printing a contract and faxing it to a customer — there were multiple methods used to deliver contracts to customers. The telecommunications business is very competitive and customers often require services on short notice. In addition, sometimes customers lost or changed agreements so Time Warner Cable Business Class was interested in reducing the cycle time to send and receive an executed contract. So in addition to closing customers faster, the Business Operations Group was looking for a way to standardize the contract process across divisions, and reduce or eliminate sales paperwork.

EchoSign Solution Time Warner Cable Business Class is implementing Salesforce.com across their regions and originally started working with EchoSign for Salesforce in early 2008. “The integration with Salesforce Merge was key for us,” says Dale Fox, VP, Commercial Operations. “The flexibility to attach a document to an opportunity (or any object) in Salesforce is an important factor in working with EchoSign.” The Carolinas region was the first region to start using EchoSign. Since the original adoption by the Carolinas region, Time Warner Cable Business Class is rolling out EchoSign to all regions.

Results In the first half of 2009, the Carolinas region sent out just over 1000 agreements per month with an average time to sign of 76 minutes. “Anecdotally, we have seen agreements signed by the customer in real time,” says Howard. The revenue benefit is that the “sold to revenue cycle” is much shorter, with billing and service provisioning happening much faster. However, the consistent process across divisions is just as important to Time Warner Cable. “The ability to standardize across our divisions, as well as with our customers, is also important.” reveals Dale. “Now we can quickly implement consistent best


practices, and the online central repository of contracts ensures easier and faster quality assurance and post sales review. In addition to contracts we are required to obtain multiple documents per transaction which can vary based upon the type of sale we make and we do this through Salesforce and Echosign. Most importantly, we interact with customers consistently.”

EchoSign Reduces Time Warner Cable Account Manager’s Travel Time by Half and Receives Kudos from Her Customers

Workflow Challenge Lisa Keene, Account Manager for Existing Customers, Time Warner Cable, manages over 100 contracts each month. Prior to Time Warner Cable implementing EchoSign she had hand-‐written contracts, driven to her customer and waited for the contracts to be signed in person. "In the past 4 years I have put 130,000 miles in my car on contract appointments, proposals and sales calls — that is 2,708 miles per month!", exclaims Lisa.

EchoSign Solution Along with other sales reps across Time Warner Cable, Lisa has been using EchoSign successfully for over a year.

Results "This year with EchoSign I have put far less miles on my vehicle and cut my travel time in half!" EchoSign enable Lisa to save sales time, travel time and has lowered gas bills tremendously. "Not only, do I save time and wear and tear on my vehicle; but I can automatically send reminders, daily if necessary, to close business deals. Not to mention the fact that I can do all of it without printing one piece of paper." In addition, Lisa's customers have commented on her "eco-‐friendliness" and have thanked her for being on the cutting edge and providing them with such a great signing experience. "Once customer stated, 'this is the best contract signing that I have ever had. I am so proud of your company for being efficient and eco-‐friendly. It is very nice to know that your company cares so much about our environment. And the luxury of being able to sign a contract without taking more than 2 minutes online, is amazing!"


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 UK 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 a competitor 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 and salesforce.com. We were also impressed with the support that we received from EchoSign.”

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. “We’re hoping to roll out EchoSign to all our account reps in the UK before the end of the year.”


Improved Contract Processes Result in Faster Sales Cycles, Faster Service Provisioning, and Happier Customers

Company Overview Qualcomm Incorporated is a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions. Since 1988, Qualcomm Enterprise Services (QES), formerly known as Qualcomm Wireless Business Solutions, has provided integrated wireless systems and services to businesses around the world. QES delivers the actionable information businesses seek in order to operate at peak performance and improve the quality of life for its customers, their employees and the entire value chain.

Workflow Challenge QES processes a large volume of contracts and amendments on an ongoing basis. “The contracts staff supports a large sales team that is located throughout the United States. It is critical to stay in close touch with the sales team and give them the confidence that our business processes are efficient, accurate and customer friendly to the fullest extent possible,” says Suzanne Reynolds, Senior Director of contracts for QES.

The business process to get a customer’s signature on a contract has historically been a lengthy and very manual process for QES. Often, it took up to two weeks to get a customer to sign a contract, counter-‐sign and then distribute the contract to all interested parties. This significantly delayed the sales cycle, which meant that service provisioning and shipments could be delayed, which in turn resulted in delayed billing and revenue. Additionally, the QES sales team had no visibility into the status of a contract, resulting in additional phone calls and emails to the contracts group.

The contracts and sales teams needed a new tool to support an efficient signature process. The key requirements included ease of use, integration with Salesforce.com, and complete visibility for the sales team.

EchoSign Solution In late 2007, the Qualcomm Salesforce IT group found EchoSign on the Force.com AppExchange and deployed the application to a pilot group in less than 2 weeks followed by a complete roll-‐out in March.

“Deploying EchoSign for Salesforce was an outstanding experience and shows the power of the Force.com AppExchange. By allowing Salesforce customers to easily click and install fully integrated add-‐on applications like EchoSign, the Force.com AppExchange ensures that key functionality to solve real-‐world business problems is only a few mouse clicks away,” says Mark Silber, IT Systems Architect at Qualcomm.


EchoSign is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce and delivers increased value to Qualcomm’s investment in Salesforce. Every contract is instantly viewable in Salesforce, providing everyone with real-‐time visibility into the contract status. Qualcomm also deployed extensive dashboards to further collect and report metrics around the contract process and additional custom workflow and notifications in Salesforce.

Results All EchoSign users are seeing impressive results. “EchoSign delivers improved product delivery cycles and our users love the functionality and ease of use. Our objective was to eliminate the manual, cumbersome process of getting a customer contract signed. EchoSign does that beautifully. Customer contracts sent through EchoSign are signed in less than 2 days, on average, with the fastest signature cycle clocking in at 14 minutes,” says Silber.

The QES sales and contracts groups use the EchoSign audit trail (visible in Salesforce) to determine the current state of the contract, including when the contract is viewed by the customer. This visibility significantly reduces the time spent on email or phone call follow-‐ups, enabling the sales team to focus on the sale and not associated paperwork.

“Training individuals to use Echosign is quick and painless. In fact, the contracts department has found that EchoSign is quickly becoming the preferred signature method for both the sales team and for customers as they are exposed to it,” says Brandon McCulley, Senior Contracts Administrator at QES. “Both the sales team and our customers love EchoSign. From our customers perspective, we are definitely ‘easier to do business with’ and we’re yielding tangible results — everybody wins!”


EchoSign Brings the Signature Process into the 21st Century

Company Overview Infowelders is a full-‐service certified Salesforce.com consulting partner serving clients across the globe. Since 2004, Infowelders has been 100% focused on helping clients define and automate their business processes on the Salesforce.com platform. Engagements range from initial implementation of the standard Salesforce.com CRM product to complete custom application development to manage complex workflows and processes. Infowelders also assists other Salesforce.com partners with AppExchange enablement of their proprietary solutions.

Workflow Challenge Being a Salesforce.com consulting partner, Infowelders also uses the application to manage every aspect of their business processes from Leads to Projects. Historically, all project contracts were maintained outside of the system through a series of email communications and faxes. This not only took more time to get things done, it also created a disconnect between the sales team and the delivery team and didn’t give the delivery team any insight into the status of the contract or the detailed deliverables contained within in a real-‐time fashion. Several issues arose:

• After approving the contract the client is ready to start the project immediately, but sales still had to receive the faxed contract, countersign, and then send back, which could take days if the countersigner was out of the office.

• When it came to prepare the project for hand-‐off from sales to delivery, the sales rep had to scan the countersigned documents and upload them into Salesforce.com, which was a challenge if the rep was travelling and not near a scanner. Most times, it did not happen until after it was needed, or it didn’t happen at all.

EchoSign Solution Infowelders turned to EchoSign to help manage the contract signing process because of the inefficiencies of shuffling paper and faxes between parties. Now all parties have real-‐time insight into where the contract is in the signature process and the exact language contained in the contract. There are no more ad-‐hoc phone calls to sales reps asking them where the contract is or prodding them to countersign so that the project can get underway. In addition, the fact that a sales rep can see when a customer has viewed the contract has been an unforeseen benefit.


Results “Printing, signing, faxing, and scanning are 1980’s technology,” says Nick Hamm, Infowelders’ Director of Technology. “We are consulting around cutting edge technologies, and EchoSign allows us to bring the signature process into the 21st century both for our company and our clients. Prior to using EchoSign, the fastest a contract could be faxed, signed, faxed back, countersigned, faxed back again, scanned and uploaded into Salesforce.com was at least a day. Today we can complete all of those processes in just minutes and with only a few clicks. EchoSign is a no-‐brainer, and we recommend it to all of our clients.” Infowelders’ use of EchoSign has expanded from sales contracts to cover formal sign-‐offs on project documentation as well, making the delivery team more efficient and easier to work with. In fact, when Infowelders moved into new office space, they did not even hook up a fax line. “There is no reason for us to fax anything anymore, and our printer usage is almost next to nothing.”

echosign e-signature for salesforce case study pack: time warner, groupon, qualcomm, more

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