We're pleased to announce our partners at Bluewolf, and PricewaterHouseCoopers, have launched an exciting new integrated Channel Compliance Solution for Salesforce.com at Dreamforce '09, integrating EchoSign.com e-signature for Salesforce.

Demos, customer case studies, and more at the Dreamforce session on Compliance and Risk Management, Thursday at 11:30am:

"Finding Your Way to Full Compliance: Automating Channel Compliance" (Thurs., Nov. 19th at 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.) with Kenneth Edwards of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Jason Lemkin of EchoSign, and executives from Bluewolf who will share insights on compliance. Since the "Enron Era" of 2001, compliance has been a daunting, costly, time-intensive experience for organizations. At this panel, hear real-life stories from enterprises that are finding their way to compliance, providing a robust defense against fraud and illegal transactions, from deal registration to electronic signatures"

EchoSign has been the market leader in electronic signatures for Salesforce.com users for 4 years running - since 2006.

We're proud to have launched together with our partner Bluewolf Group in 2006, four years of #1 rankings and over 1,000 Salesforce customers later, we're launching the seventh version (v7) of EchoSign-for-Salesforce at Dreamforce tonight.

_____________

Simply put, we don't believe anyone can touch EchoSign-for-Salesforce after all this time, learnings, and installs.

V7 is available for existing customers to deploy to test sandboxes now and will have general availability in approximately 3 weeks.

Key innovations:

* Fully rebuilt in latest VisualForce for the state-of-the-art Salesforce experience

* Completely integrated INSIDE Salesforce.com - not an external web app bolted into Salesforce

* Full contract preview and drop-and-drag interface exposed to all sales reps (as desired)

* Dynamically set Alerts on a per-contract basis (know the second a contract has been viewed -- or not viewed -- by a prospect)

* Full integration with latest version of top-rated CongaCourier (launching at Dreamforce 2009 as well) and real-time integration with top-rated Apttus

and much more.

Please come by either of our booths for a demo.  We're at booth 210 on our own, and also being demo'd in Bluewolf Group's Platinum Booth (you won't miss that one).

We're always pleased when thought leaders reach out to us.  Dean Holmes, Social Media Strategist with over 14,000 followers on Twitter and 10,000 members on LinkedIn (and a 2 year EchoSign veteran), recently reached out to us to tell us how EchoSign had added value to his practice:

Workflow Challenge

“My challenge is all about speed and efficiency”, says Dean Holmes. “For me, time is money so I need to make the most of it.” As a leading online strategist, Dean Holmes is always looking for technologies that can help both his business and his clients. Dean was using eFax to get non-disclosure agreements and customer agreements signed and it wasn’t efficient enough. “I still had to go through a manual process and faxes are cumbersome and inefficient.” In addition, even with eFax it took 2-3 days to get contracts signed so Dean searched for a better way.

EchoSign Solution

Dean Holmes has been using EchoSign for about two years. He landed a client in Australia, used EchoSign to send the contract, and is now turning his client onto EchoSign.

Results

Dean has found that with EchoSign his contracts are returned within hours. “In addition to more efficiency, the ‘coolness’ factor of signing something online is key for me. It makes me look good to my clients and shows that I walk the walk.”

Faxes are a thing of the past. With EchoSign it’s won and done!

— Dean Holmes

Looking good to your customers.  It's critical.  If you are in technology -- which is now the single largest segment of the U.S. economy -- you need to be signing your customers and closing them on the web.  Practice what you preach.  As Dean notes, "walk the walk".  Fax just ... doesn't quite cut it anymore.

DestinationCRM had a very interesting article in its November issue on e-signatures.  It was one of the first we've seen that recognizes the change in the landscape that is happening to signatures and contracting, as signing evolves from a primarily fax and paper-based process into a primarily web-based process.

And it backed this trend up with analysis from three leading analysts:

"Consider for a moment how the Dark Ages finally gave way to the Renaissance: The capability for learning had been there all along, but a complete shift required evolution and expansion. The same could be said of the electronic signature. 

Bill Nagel, a Forrester Research analyst focusing on risk management, says the technological foundation for e-signatures—the combination of secure digital signing and paperless processing—has been in place for approximately 20 years, with some vendors in the space sporting a track record nearly that long. But demand for e-signatures is finally reaching critical mass, Nagel says ..."

Gartner Research went on to highlight a key reason why web/SaaS e-signatures are accelerating:

"Gregg Kreizman, a research director at Gartner, says that e-signature users not only gain efficiency but also lose fewer business opportunities. “The number-one benefit is basically speeding up processes versus the time it took to handle signatures manually, or [to overnight] documents…and [wait] for the response,” he says. “There’s also the ability to get a customer signed and not lose the opportunity because of the mail or courier time involved, loss of interest, or [the emergence of] a better deal.”

DestinationCRM also noted EchoSign's leadership in the space and placed us on its Vendor Shortlist.

 

We'd missed this great video BT made a little while back on their top 4 sales tools for their sales teams.  EchoSign (known as BT eSignature at BT) is prominently featured at BT's offices around 5:00 in the video.

There are some great benefits and ROI examples, including that BT saves about 5 hours per week per sales rep using EchoSign due to lack of any need to do follow-up with their customers after they hit "Send for Signature".

That's pretty outstanding.

Click on the image to watch the full video.

There's a traditional $100m segment of enterprise software known as CLM, or Contract LifeCycle Management, which for most of the past 10-15 years has been pretty staid (and grown pretty slowly).  CLM has focused on on-premise software for managing complex contracts, generally buy-side contracts (e.g., procurement), and with a strong focus on selling to legal as a vertical (the folks with all the liability when complex contracts go wrong, or are lost).

Like much of enterprise software, CLM has traditionally been expensive, with long-sale cycles and complex implementation cycles, often measured in years.  A few vendors, like our partners Apptus and Upside, have shaken up the market and changed a number of these assumptions around by moving to a SaaS / on-demand model.

CLM though has traditionally only focused on two pieces of contracting -- archiving and then managing complex, high dollar contracts, and more recently, authoring and creating contracts.  We've always believed since founding that electronic signatures are the key "glue" to make CLM truly end-to-end digital.

We were thus gratified and pleased to see AMR Research's most recent report on CLM which positioned Contract Signature as a key evolution of a truly digital CLM Business Process (with ourselves highlighted in the report) -- along with cloud-based Authoring systems like Google Docs (which EchoSign has integrated natively).

CLM software can be overkill for high volume, routing contracts like a standard, formulaic sales agreement. In those cases, often (x) a simpler-to-deploy combination of a tool to create form contracts (Google Docs or Box.net, or the EchoSign form library, or a Conga Merge in the Salesforce ecosystem) combined (y) with a service like EchoSign for signing, tracking, storing, and managing, can completely automate the contracting processes.

However, for more complex, lower volume, higher-dollar contracts with many participants, reviewers, and stakeholders, with complex post-contracting compliance, CLM software can provide huge value.  And there, connecting CLM software with automated contract execution closes the loop.

For our more tech-focused customers -- EchoSign is proud to be a part of Defrag 2009:

Please root for us, and if you are attending, we'll see you there.

This week, EchoSign presented at the 5th Annual Houlihan Lokey Technology Conference and part of the discussion was on the tipping point for web / electronic signatures.  I.e., when will the majority of routine contracts and documents be signed on the web?

The reality is there probably will be no single tipping point, but rather a confluence of smaller events that help, each on their own, to accelerate a trend already in place.

One we're seeing right now in the U.K. in the postal strike.  As The Times notes, there is essentially no point in putting anything in the post in the U.K. right now.  Since the "last mile" postal workers are on strike, nothing will be delivered (though it will be picked up).

The Times, eWeek Europe, and a number of others have noted that we are seeing a dramatic uptick in interest and sign-ups for BT eSignature (our brand in the U.K.).

The postal strike won't tip web signature penetration from it's current 2-3% (up from essentially 0% a few years ago) of contracts to 50% overnight.  But it's a small piece of what will, in a few years, look like a tipping point.

Today our partner and friends at Box.net, the web's #1 cloud storage and collaboration platform, launched a very powerful integration inside of Salesforce.

The integration is clever for a couple of reasons.  First, it gets around storage and costs issues on the Salesforce platform (which are expensive).  Second, it allows a more robust way to work with content inside of Salesforce, especially for folks who do not pay for or have the Salesforce Content module.  

And when you use Box.net inside of Salesforce, you can full access to the applications natively integrated into Box.net -- including EchoSign.

Click on the image below to see a demo including sending a contract for e-signature on EchoSign from Box.net inside of Salesforce.com:

EchoSign offers its own top-rated Salesforce integration on the AppExchange.  

But now, if your content is stored in the cloud on Box.net, you can also access right inside of Salesforce.com as well.

The fax is on a slow, but accelerating, decline to irrelevance as a vehicle for signatures.

There are a number of reasons why.  Signing on the web is becoming more and more intuitive.  Customers are beginning to simply expect a web-based contracting process from their suppliers and vendors.  And of course, there are large efficiency gains.

But when our customer Microbilt reached out to us, they highlighted a simpler way to describe why the transition from fax-based signatures to web-based ones is accelerating.

Web signatures take stress out of the sale.  A lot of stress.  And by removing stress -- more deals close.

They're right.  It's that simple.  

MicroBilt's Workflow Challenge

We're looking forward to meeting many of you at Dreamforce 2009, our fourth Dreamforce.  EchoSign will be represented on several panels, including our CEO speaking on Executive Insights for "Finding Your Way to Full Compliance - Automating Channel Compliance".

Last year, several of our customers, including an in-depth presentation from Time Warner Cable, spoke about the impact of EchoSign in accelerating and improving their sales processes.  This year we anticipate over a half dozen of our customers speaking about EchoSign.  More details to follow closer to the event November 17-20.

Please let us know ahead of time if you'll be there, or if you can't, please come by our booth to say hi and see EchoSign-for-Salesforce Version 7, launching at Dreamforce.  It will change the face of e-signatures for sales teams.

Much has been made over the past several days on the seeming total data loss at Microsoft of T-Mobile Sidekick data.  How could Microsoft lose all of this data in the cloud?  It seems impossible.  

The true story may never be know.  But it highlights one key point on cloud / SaaS vendors: they all claim wonderful uptime and operational data.  Just like every salesperson somehow was in the "President's Circle" or top 10% of earners.  Or how almost everyone that graduates from Harvard somehow does so with "honors".

The real question to ask is - what sort of downtime incidents has your vendor had over the past 3 years?  How were they handled?  And what was the real world impact?

If you hear from a vendor "we're never had any downtime", run, do not walk, to the exit.  

No on-line SaaS/web vendor, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Salesforce.com, has ever experienced zero downtime.  It's not possible nor is it credible.  Servers are not 100% reliable -- including the ones that provide redundancy and horizontal scaleability.  

The real learning is how vendors handle it.  

At EchoSign, we've learned a lot over the past 4 years.  First, we provide 2.5 years of 100% fully transparent up-time data 24x7x265 at trust.echosign.com.  It includes scheduled downtime - i.e., we don't hide or ignore maintenance schedules.  Why?  Because it's too easy to blame real problems on 'scheduled maintenance'.  And hide them.  

We also discuss and highlight the downtime incidents we've had, in real-time, at trust.echosign.com.  

At EchoSign we've had two material downtime incidents in our history, and zero data loss.  The downtime incidents, one in 2007, and one in 2008, luckily both occurred after standard business hours and had minimal impact on our users.  One was due to a total power loss at both the primary and back-up power centers at our primary data center - a once-in-a-decade event as there are multiple redundant power sources in our SAS 70 data center.  But, the longer you are around, the more likely a perfect storm can and will hit. The other was a DNS (routing) issue that impacted a relatively small subset of our users at the end of the business day -- but for over an hour.  

Evaluating the true reliability of an online services vendor starts with the product, its status in the ecosystem, its reputation and customer base, its scale.  

But when the quality-of-service truly matters -- as it does with electronic signatures, when you're closing deals with your end customers -- ask for the real data, and the real stories.  

As those of us who remember Clippy will attest, one man's idea about how to make something simple is another's nightmare.

As of our October release (coming out Monday - more to follow), EchoSign will include approximately 11,600 workflow permutations.

Divide that across over 13,000 customers, and you get to ... well .. a lot of different ways people get contracts signed.

A lot more than the 4 workflows we started with.

We've been at this for almost 4 years, and we're only a small part of the way to building every use case and workflow we want.  But we've built quite a few.  Thousands in fact.

Our goal is to Work the Way You Work. 

If you don't see an option, a workflow, a way to close your customers -- let us know.  We've probably got an answer.

Google proudly (and geekily) noted today as the 57th anniversary of the barcode.  Apparently, the first product purchased using a barcode was a ten-pack of Juicy Fruit gum.

Since then the barcode has gone on to many unimagined uses, including routing of EchoSign faxed documents.

While e-signatures are our primary function, EchoSign has sent and received almost 400,000 faxes since launching in 2006.  We have a mature, proven global fax network with over 40 points of presence to receive faxes across the world -- from India to Ireland, to South Africa to Sweden -- and a multiply redundant fax processing system that guarantees your fax signatures are not only received, but processed in real-time.  We also monitor our fax network by the minute to ensure 99.95% uptime and throughput.

The barcode is an unsung hero at EchoSign, but we're joining Google to raise a pint to honor its contributions to signature and contract automation.

Information Week's Fritz Nelson just did a terrific piece and video ReviewCam of EchoSign, taking notice after we crossed 1,000,000 users. 

Our favorite part: Fritz thinks e-signatures are both fun and "very cool".  Our kind of guy.

OK, this is fun: Electronic signature in the cloud. I know, it sounds small, but how many documents do you sign? What about your employees (HR forms)? Your sales team (contracts)? EchoSign lets you create a workflow to do this, from delivery to the actual signature to the storage and management. And all in the cloud.

Click below for the full piece and video.

Q3 was a strong quarter, with a strong finish in September, for EchoSign.

We celebrated crossing 1,000,000 users -- and added another 78,000 in September.  At that rate, we'll add another 1,000,000 users in less than a year - 1/3 of the time it took us to get to the first million ;)

What's happening?  Well it's not that the entire world is deciding overnight to move to e-signatures.

Rather, it's something you might call The Facebook Effect.  The Facebook Effect (a term we're coining here -- attn Richard Lewis) is where an application that you started to hear about a few years ago begins, seemingly years later, to become more relevant, more common, more mainstream -- and then shortly thereafter, dramatically expands its footprint.

Where were you when you first heard of Facebook?  For us, it was in late 2004 from college students.  However, it wasn't clear how relevant it would be to us in the business world (Facebook wasn't even open to alumni, let alone the general public then).  Around early 2007 we started to receive more and more invites from tech-centric business partners as Facebook opened up, but we mostly ignored them.  By 2008, our aunts, uncles, grandparents, bosses, partners and customers were all connecting with us on Facebook.

And all the time.   

The Facebook Effect is similar in business apps, but it takes longer.  Viral exposure is measured in months, not minutes.  Small businesses in particular are often laggards, too busy to investigate new web services.

But then it hits.  Years after you first heard of it, you start to hear a lot more.  And then, a little later, it's all around you.

Signing contracts, closing customers, on the web.  It's happening.  The FaceBook Effect will be here in 2010 for web signatures.

We've very pleased to note that leading technology investment bank Houlihan Lokey has selected EchoSign as one of the top 20 Technology Companies to present at its 5th Annual Technology Conference in San Francisco on October 21.

One topic we've been thinking on, and working on, with some frequency is the future of contracts.

EchoSign has seen explosive growth in Q3 -- we've almost doubled our growth rate over Q2 (our previous record), and crossed 1,000,000 users.

Which begs two questions.  One, how to keep it going.  But two, once the world starts to adopt e-signatures en masse, what next?

The 1.0 concept here is so-called "signature automation" or "straight through processing".  Once your contracts are digital, and the data in them is digital, they can be processed automatically.  For example, several of the world's largest leasing companies use EchoSign to automatically process equipment leases, direct debit the first month's payment, and record all the paperwork, automatically, in one click.

But Contracts 2.0 may be something even more radical.  If the contract is created, reviewed, approved, signed, tracked, stored, and extracted all on the web ... does it even need to mimic paper at all?  And the business processes that have evolved, originally around paper -- are they ripe for radical de- and re-construction?

We're working on innovations here for 2011 and beyond.  But some early observations:

• The C> Drive is dead (long live the C> Drive).  Getting a contract saved locally to your hard drive is certainly far easier than the '90s paradigm of going to a file cabinet.  But local content can be lost, corrupted, changed and mismanaged -- and is lost to the enterprise.  The contract will be entirely, and dynamically, generated in the cloud.

• But Fax will survive far longer than people think -- just not for signatures.  Approximately 40% of documents that are FedEx'ed are documents "out for signature".  It's reasonable to assume a similar percentage for fax.  This will no longer be done, ever, for Contracts 2.0.  But fax also is a way to transport documents from one office to another, without the need for scanners or a stateful PC.  Fax of documents not for signature will last for decades and only slowly decline. Fax for signatures, however, will be dead and extinct in 6-8 years, much like analog film is now dead.

• More documents will be signed, not fewer.  In the digital age, one might wonder if signatures might become an anachronism.  In fact, the opposite is occurring.  As commerce becomes more global, and more remote, "handshake" deals become less and less practical.  Virtual relationships need to be physically consummated.  The signature is that moment in time, and its value only grows as commerce ever-accelerates and ever-expands its footprint.

There's more coming.  One thing we can guarantee you.  In five years time, EchoSign will look a lot like it does today -- only it will be more powerful, more feature-packed, and more integated with more and more web solutions.  But EchoSign will also being doing some things that today seem pretty out there. 

We're extremely pleased to note and announce that EchoSign has now crossed 1,000,000 users worldwide.

While it's revenue and profits that keep EchoSign running, it is the breadth of our entire userbase that allows us to continue to learn, innovate, and expand our product and platform.

We thank you for your support.

We're very interested in getting your stories and thoughts as we pass this key milestone.  

For the next 30 days, for every EchoSign story you tell us, or piece of product feedback you give us, we'll plant a tree.  Feel free to post your EchoSign story on the EchoSign 1,000,000 users Facebook wall here, or on Twitter using the hashtag #es1mill, or just in the comments below this post if you want.

Either way, we'll plant a tree to say 'thanks'.

For coverage on TechCrunch, click here.

T-Mobile recently announced a monthly charge of $1.50 to receive a basic (1 page) paper bill and $3.50 to receive a detailed paper bill.  That, on top of their average $75 per month service charge.  After a net-based backlash, T-Mobile has temporarily reversed the charge for the basic paper bill -- though it's kept the $3.50 charge for a detailed paper bill.

There is, of course, no charge for paperless bills.

These fees, and the costs they represent, tie directly to the data and feedback we've heard from our almost 1,000,000 users.  Generally, our customers measure EchoSign in terms of revenue ROI, i.e. the value in (x) closing deals and contracts more quickly, and (y) how much more revenue that generates in terms of addition days of revenue and additional deals closing which otherwise would have been lost (deals which die while waiting for a fax or FedEx that never comes).

But especially with our non-sales focused customers, the ROI can often turn to the costs saved by going paperless.  The indirect cost savings are actually the largest cost savings category by far, in particular, never losing track of a contract ever again.  The cost to an enterprise of trying to find lost contracts can be vast.

However, the direct cost savings are simpler to measure.  Some customers measure the costs of e-signatures vs. overnight or fax, and e-signatures almost always win.  Others use a subtler measure of the basic cost of processing a contract.  Those numbers typically pencial out to about $3-$6 per contract (before fax and FedEx charges).  

Which seems to be exactly what T-Mobile is charging for a detailed paper-based bill.

T-Mobile has relented, in part, for now.  But in the coming 12-24 months, you'll find yourself charged more and more for not going paperless.  

It's just too darn cost effective to be 100% digital and electronic.  So the luddites are going to have to pay.

We honor and remember those who fell in 9-11, and those who have fallen since.

This may sound strange coming from an electronic signature vendor, but one thing is clear: no one needs to use e-signatures.

So why change?  A simple reason.  To make signing (and closing your customers) 10x better.  10x easier.  10x faster.  10x simpler. 10x more elegent.

"Create your own electronic signature [Using Flex and Cold Fusion]
In an enhanced example of a technique that works well - combining an AS 3 PNG encoder, an open-source utility, the Apache Batik project, and of course, ColdFusion 8, you can create your very own electronic signature.
The electronic signature you create, by dragging your mouse across the signature canvas to, in effect, sign your 'John Hancock', works like this:

With an irregular frequency, we survey our customers to get a statistically significant representation of how much commerce flows through EchoSign.  Our latest survey comfortably confirmed more than $200,000,000 of contracts a month are signed on EchoSign.

The direct ROI from switching to e-signatures is usually immediately measurable -- at least qualitatively.

EchoSign provides performance dashboards to all its 960,000 users that show both how quickly your organization closes deals, and also what % of contracts are signed.

Typically our users and customers immediately see an improvement in the % of deals signed vs. paper-based processes, which equals immediate additional revenue (beyond the cost savings from going paperless and skipping FedEx fees, etc.).

But precisely quantifying the exact average revenue "bump" from moving to electronic signatures and contracting can still be challenging, due to the different sizes of deals and other variables. 

To answer the question of the the precise ROI of going paperless, FiServ just commissioned a fascinating study of the revenue and customer retention benefits of Qwest moving to e-billing.  The study represented a 50% representative sample of almost 8 million households.

The bottom line: the ROI from going 100% paperless with your customers is so high that "customers should be strategically guided" toward a combination of e-billing and e-payments.  Combining paperless billing and paperless recurring electronic payments led to a stunning 15% higher customer retention rate.

Paper processes = higher churn and less customer satisfaction.  And the lowest costs.  The full report is here.

One of the most common use cases people imagine for contracts is one where the customer and the vendor/seller (for us, the Sender) work together on a contract in real-time, review it, and then sign it and seal the deal, all in real time, all together, all on the web.

There are a number of ways to do this with EchoSign today.  Our integration with Google Apps and Google Docs allows both real-time and asynchronous editing and redlining of contracts in the cloud. 

But perhaps the most common theoretical use case is simply talking a prospect or customer through a proposal or contract over the web, in real-time.  One new way to do that is leveraging Box.net's existing integration with EchoSign and its new integration with Fuze web-meetings.

As the example in this post shows, now you can grab a contract or other document on Box.net; review it in real-time with a prospect using the Box.net-Fuze integration, together on the screen; and then sign the contract and close the deal using the Box.net-EchoSign integration.

We were extremely pleased to see that the debut episode of The Tomorrow Show on CBS was entirely about the Future of Paper including the paperless office.

Interviews included Jim Juzack, pictured left, who lives in a house made entirely of paper byproducts.

As well as Doug Fink, President of the Pennsylvania Paper & Supply Company of Scranton, PA (the geographical inspiration for The Office).

Mr. Fink makes a strong point around the Paperless Office.  He argues (as head of a paper supply company) that "we won't be completely paperless for the next few generations".  But, interestingly, he notes and admits his company is almost entirely paperless for its backend processes -- and its accounting department "retains no paper".

When The Pennsylvania Paper & Supply Company is "paperless", you know it's probably time for the rest of us ...

Radio America's Business Owner's Toolkit, broadcast on over 400 radio stations across the country, featured an in-depth interview with EchoSign last week.  The archived interview can be found on iTunes here (skip to 27:00 or so), or on the Radio America website.

The themes range from why EchoSign is thriving in today's economy, to how small businesses can take advantage of the current climate to accelerate ahead of the competition.

We were very pleased to have been profiled in depth by Intuit's AppGap. 

They focused particularly on the "Echo" part of EchoSign -- the ability to use electronic signatures to for the very first time, bring real-time visibility and status to the contracting process:

        "This is where I got the major “aha” over the benefit. Records handling and archiving has become largely electronic which provides significant benefits and cost reductions to firms. The signature has been the last remaining vestige of the analog world as I mention up front. Now that vestige goes away opening the complete life cycle of transaction to electronic storage, either on premise or in the cloud. You can now get RSS alerts of all aspects of a contract, email alerts as I did on the status, reports can be generated real time on contract status. It allows for the transparency of enterprise 2.0 into the contracting process.

    The full benefit of electronic records management was not possible as long as a physical object was involved. You could scan faxes but that is time consuming and it not likely to happen for high volume, low revenue transactions, but now this manual step is removed. A light blub went off for me when Jason, said you could have your boss counter sign and order his iPhone. See sample below."

More here.

B/OSS (Billing & OSS World) recently profiled EchoSign's success in the telecom space, highlighting customers including BT, Comcast, Alltel, Qualcomm, Abica Telecom, Time Warner, and others.

"One company finding value in the EchoSign solution is BT. In his role as general manager for broadband, VoIP and software services at BT Retail, Chris Lindsay is responsible for 1.2 million SME relationships. He says his sales organization is, well, complicated. It has more than 3,000 direct sales personnel across seven different channels, including a franchise channel with 512 franchisees, field-based account management and internal indirect sales. The organization sends out 25,000 contracts per month.

BT was already well under average in the time it took to get contracts signed — around 48 hours — but has taken that down to 42 minutes using EchoSign. “We have knocked two days of briefcase time off the process of faxing back and forth,” Lindsay said. “When you are doing 25,000 contracts a month that really adds up and affects your cash flow. The quicker the contract is signed, the quicker we can rate the bill and the quicker we can collect the cash.”

He said he went with EchoSign because of two qualities: Speed and simplicity. “It was the speed in getting started using it and the simplicity of actually doing what it said.“

More here.

With the $1 billion set aside for cash-for-clunkers have been burnt through in less than a week, and even another potential $2b likely to be gone by the end of the month, we thought we'd try to do our part.

We've pleased to announce that in August, EchoSign-for-Clunkers will provide full credit for the value of your old analog fax machine against annual EchoSign Enterprise subscriptons.

Like cash-for-clunkers, the analog fax machine will need to be destroyed, to avoid forcing the same fate on a subsequent owner.

We're not against fax per se at EchoSign -- we view fax as an important and integral part of the signature and document process, and one used by millions every day.  In fact, we natively integrate several electronic fax services -- and offer our own option for fax signatures.

But what's clearly as big a clunker as that 22', 8 mpg Ford Excursion clogging up 2 parking spaces is having a sales team waiting around an analog fax machine at the end of the quarter or month, waiting for the contract to come through.  And you know -- it often doesn't.

Business is lost.  No visibility or status.  It's just plain sad.

In fact at EchoSign, we've just had our best month ever, and 10% of our new revenue in July came through contracts e-signed after 6pm on the last day of the month.  And a number of our customers emailed us today to tell us about deals they'd closed on EchoSign that just wouldn't have closed otherwise.

So trade in that analog fax machine fast.  (Hopefully, we'll make it more than 5 days with this offer.)

Picture, "Stressed Executive by Fax Machine", from samples in David Fawcett gallery @ http://www.davidfawcett.co.uk/newpictures.htm

We're pleased that Google chose to highlight and feature EchoSign and EchoSign customer Patients Know Best, Ltd. as a customer success story in its solutions marketplace.

"Patients Know Best (PKB) is the first company to integrate with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) network to offer a secure service that allows patients and physicians to communicate on medical issues, and work together online. The patients outside the network control access to their data – they decide where to send their information and who to share it with. The result is an extremely successful online partnership between patients and their clinicians, allowing patients to send and receive online messages, send data to their clinicians and access medical notes from their doctors.

Challenge
PKB is using Google Docs, part of the Google Apps suite, to revolutionize the patient-clinician relationship in the UK. Since so much of their service deals with contracts and sensitive private information, it was important for PKB to instill a strong sense of trust in users – for that, they turned to EchoSign. “We need to have operational excellence and we need to be able to move fast,” says Dr Mohammed Al-Ubaydli, CEO, Patients Know Best. “We have a lot of documents, a lot of moving pieces, and employees spread across 4 different time zones so we need operational solutions that help keep us organized, let us move fast, and are inexpensive.” ....

With the air starting to get a bit crisp at EchoSign headquarters, we've kicked off our 2010 planning process a bit early.

There's still a lot in store for 2009 (including a host of new features next week) but one thing is clear: we're going to stay committed to being the fastest, simplest, most powerful way to sign contracts on the web.

For every company.

A question we often get is why we serve large, medium and small enterprises.  It is indeed a challenge. We need multiple levels of support, different sales teams and channels, and a host of different features and business models to serve enterprises of all sizes.

What we've learned though is that for signing on the web, there's a symbiotic relationship between the enterprise and the SMB, and we suspect it exists for somewhat similar, adjacent web services as well.

The largest enterprises have the power of not just the purse, but the power of people.  What that means is that it's much easier to get their structured feedback, their product needs, their input on tactical directions for EchoSign.  For example, with BT, we regularly have feedback sessions from dozens of managers on improvements to the system.  Furthermore, larger enterprises have dedicated personnel assigned to work through and review SaaS and other IT solutions.  They are able to provide a longer-term perspective on ways for us to improve. 

All told, all of our improvements driven by our large enterprise customers also enure to our 9,000+ small business customers as well.  This is what one would expect of SaaS.

That the small businesses also help the enterprise customers even more may be less obvious, but in fact the large enterprises are the bigger winner in this symbiosis.  Because the reality is that while it's easier for us to get a rich level of long-term feedback from our enterprise customers, the small businesses simply dwarf them in number.  And because they don't have an IT desk, or a support team, or an apps group -- we hear the feedback directly, immediately, and loud and clearly, every day.

And while many of our workflows and nuanced features are only used by our largest customers, our trademark ease of use -- for the sender, the signer, the manager, and his or her boss -- is disproporrtionately influenced by the sheer volume of our small customers.  And that inures to the benefit of users and customers of every size.

EchoSign is now regularly used in over 100 nations across the world.

Our top countries by users, in order, are pretty much what you would expect: the U.S, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Sweden.

In the short-term, the biggest questions around global e-signatures and e-contracting are around legislation.  A basic overview of e-signature law in North America and Europe is here (note: PDF), and please contact support or your EchoSign rep for a more detailed primer and best practices guide to deploying electronic signatures globally.

Beyond legislation though, looking forward a few years, the bigger issue for global electronic signatures is likely going to be how billions of people worldwide interact with and use the internet.  The current paradigm is based around email (for notification) to a PC-based web browser (for signing) with a secondary mobile signature option. This works well for the above countries.

However, in much of the developing world, the paradigm is radically different, with mobile devices and mobile connectivity the primary way of accessing the internet.  Email in many cases is irrelevant, and SMS dominant.  Coupled with that are interesting developments like India's announcement it plans to spend over $5 billion in USD to issue biometric identity cards to its 1.2 billion citizens to enable, among other functions, digital signatures for many of its citizens who in many cases lack the stable broadband connections and ubiquitous PCs we have here in the U.S. and in Europe.

We're laying the groundwork now not only for the way people sign on the web today, but also how they'll be signing in 2013 across the world.  Look for more here, with initial steps beginning in our next release in mid-Q3 2009.

Three months ago we looked at the aggregate, anonymous opt-in EchoSign benchmarking data and declared, a bit ahead of the market, a "return to normalcy".

We made no claims about the underlying health of the economy in Q1, but made strong data-driven claims from our benchmarking data that sales teams across the country were seeing a return to normal business processes after the post-Lehman paralysis in Q4 and early Q1.

Our insights for Q2 aren't quite so prophetic, but are confirmational.  Customers who have opted into our technology-vertical benchmarking groups (e.g., SaaS) saw material upswings in contracting rates for each month in Q2 over the corresponding month in Q1.  (see the chart at the left/top) - Apr over Jan, May over Feb, June over Mar.  It's important to look at individual months in the quarter as activity historically is strongest on the last month of the quarter (as companies seek to "make their quarter"), and weakest during the month in the middle of the quarter where there's typically not as dramatic a push to close (the mid-point between quarterly goals).

However, other categories in benchmarking did not see an improvement.  HR, Telecom, Media and other categories were essentially flat over Q1. 

So Q1 saw a return to normalcy.  Q2 saw tech lead the way in pulling out of the recession.  But the rest of the economy seems to not yet have followed tech's lead. 

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.

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). 

 “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.”

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

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