by An Bui, DocuSign Social Media on Wednesday October 28th, 2009
LinkedIn Uses DocuSign For Salesforce to Accelerate Time to Revenue

In six years, LinkedIn has become the world’s largest professional network with 50 million members in over 200 countries on 7 continents. How does electronic signature from DocuSign provide value to a company like LinkedIn?
LinkedIn helps over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies sift through the content-rich profiles of passive job candidates to find the right people for their organization.
Brian Frank, LinkedIn Director of Global Operations and a panelist at our Executive Customer Council (ECC) in September, stated:
If you’re looking for that hard to find person, that salesperson who’s a superstar, the person who’s already employed as the top performer at his or her company, LinkedIn helps you find better talent faster.
LinkedIn’s Business Challenge
LinkedIn, a leader in Enterprise Web 2.0 technology, was also an early adopter of electronic signature technology but encountered significant challenges surrounding the collection of customer information key to invoicing and collections.
Without the correct information – purchase order number, billing and shipping information, user information, and so on – contracts that ended up on the desktops of accounts receivable staff meant days of follow up and hunting down the proper information before they could ask for the money.
How much time did tracking down this information take? On average, this cost LinkedIn an extra 25 days to the billing cycle.
The Solution? Logical Workflow with DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents Powered by Drawloop
Designed to integrate directly into Salesforce, DocuSign works together with software created by its partner, Drawloop, to offer LinkedIn’s salespeople what Frank calls a logical workflow:
- The LinkedIn Salesperson: selects specific clauses or words necessary to a specific Opportunity and the system automatically creates a contract
- Drawloop: takes the data from the Opportunity in Salesforce: customer name and data from the product section in the Opportunity. Drawloop then merges this information into a DocuSign template to create an assembled PDF document
- DocuSign: adds flexibility to capture data on the customer side during the electronic signing process
With DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents conveniently creates a contract to send to a customer – salespeople do not need to sign into another system. The system also provides an enhanced layer of security into the process, by creating a non-modifiable, locked PDF that prevents anyone from creating their own documents and adding it into the system.
“DocuSign is fast, easy and seamless. It removed the hassle of getting a copy back to the customer, tracking data and knowing who approves what. The thing that’s really special is that it captures those terms in the contract cycle that no one ever thinks about. Those terms are very important to a variety of different internal stakeholders at the company.” – Brian Frank, Director Global Enterprise Operations, LinkedIn
What was the result for LinkedIn? Considerably reducing DSO, or days sales outstanding, from an average of 25 days to FIVE days, an 80% decrease, and improving cash flow:
The introduction of DocuSign into our collections process significantly improved DSO contributing to access to over $1,000,000 in additional working capital on an annualized basis.
While eSignatures helps LinkedIn get documents signed faster, only DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents allows LinkedIn to get documents signed faster, correctly. Click for the complete LinkedIn case study.
