We had an excellent event with presentations from DocuSign on product training, product directions, informative customer case studies, breakout sessions and a lively customer panel discussion.

As a service to all of our customers, we will be offering a one hour webinar that will summarize key issues in eSignature and the new DocuSign 10.1 release discussed at the conference.

Please register by clicking on the appropriate link below and mark your calendars – we hope you can attend one of these sessions:

SMB / Enterprise Customers: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 from 11AM – 12PM PDT
Real Estate Professionals: Thursday, April 1, 2010 from 11:00AM – 12:00PM PDT

Thank you for your consideration and we look forward to your attendance at this webinar!

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.

The ECC kicked off with a welcome reception and group dinner at the Arctic Hotel. The reception and dinner gave everyone a chance to get acquainted and provided a great atmosphere for information exchange between DocuSign customers, account teams, executive management and board members. By the way, there was a billiard table at the reception and it turns out that we have customers who are not only great visionaries on how to use electronic signatures, but must also be moonlighting on the WPA tournament circuit!

The following day was a complete agenda filled with:

Business Operations: Matthew J. Schiltz, our Chief Executive Officer and President, opened the conference and provided a business update on the tremendous growth that our customers were driving, highlighted key company milestones achieved, and closed with our strategy looking into 2010.

Product Directions: Tom Gonser, our Founder and Vice President of Product Strategy, presented our latest product innovations and then led an extended session where he facilitated direct input to our strategic product and technology roadmap. This is always the most popular working session of the conference.

Best Practices: Throughout the conference we focused on sharing customer Best Practices, which offered valuable ways to better drive operating profitability improvements for ECC members. We had two very informative case study presentations from our special guest speakers: Mike Machado of Yamaha Corporation and Rei-Na Jensen and Philip Yuhico of the Automobile Club of Southern California. Both customers shared their outstanding business achievements including dramatic cost savings, accelerating contract cycles from weeks to days (or in some cases, minutes) and how they had successfully deployed DocuSign to their company and customers.

We also had a customer panel which took questions from the audience and drove great discussions on ‘how-to’ for new DocuSign customers.

Post event surveys gave very high marks for this executive-level meeting. ECC attendees commented that all the presentations positively impacted critical business decisions, plans, and future profitability.

At the end of the meeting, we announced the next ECC for Spring, March 8-9, 2010 in New York, NY. Continue to check back here on our blog, and we’ll keep you updated on the events and locations where you can interact directly with the DocuSign team.

Also, poke around in the electronic signature resources DocuSign offers!

If you have questions or would like to see a topic addressed on the blog, please don’t hesitate to leave me a question in the comments or follow

DocuSign just concluded our September 2009 Executive Customer Council (ECC) conference. The ECC conference is an opportunity for DocuSign to meet our customers and have an information exchange on the progress of our company and products, as well as an open forum for customers to share their experiences and provide input on future releases.

We had an excellent session with presentations from DocuSign on product directions, informative customer case studies and a lively customer panel discussion.

Guest speakers included Mike Machado of Yamaha Corporation as well as Rei-Na Jensen and Philip Yuhico of AAA of Southern California.

As a service to all of our customers, we’re offering one hour webinars, led by Tom Gonser, Founder and VP of Product Strategy. He will summarize key issues and the new DocuSign 9.2 release discussed at the ECC.

Mark your calendars – we hope you can attend one of these sessions:

Tuesday, September 29 at 10 am (PT) 
Register here

Thursday, October 1 at 2 pm (PT) 
Register here

The first one is Tomorrow. If Tuesday’s webinar doesn’t work with your schedule, mark your calendars for Thursday! We look forward to your attendance in one of the webinar sessions.

The demand for on-demand electronic signature and online contract execution continues to grow in 2009. DocuSign has hit some tremendous milestones as we help our customers completely replace the expensive and inefficient processes of printing, transporting, signing, tracking, storing paper contracts and capturing business data.

Our customers report:

• Immediately lowering operating costs up to 80%,
• Eliminating Not-In-Good-Order (NIGO) rates,
• Reducing contract cycle times from 24 days to 24 hours or fewer.

DocuSign has:

• Over 25 million signature events
• 56% increase in use of our electronic signature and electronic contract execution (ECE) services from Q4′08
• 300% growth over Q1′08

DocuSign version 9.1 offers significant new and unique features, and continues to simplify the user experience in order to further accelerate the widespread adoption of electronic signatures and ECE. New features include:

• Electronic Signature Personalization—DocuSign delivers the only online electronic signature experience that offers signers the ability to create and save their own unique electronic signature.  With this new release, DocuSign now offers signers the ability to load an exact image of their handwritten signature for use as part of their DocuSign e-signature, creating an even more personalized process.
• Simple and Powerful Sending—The new experience of sending documents for electronic signature is even more familiar, easier and more powerful. Using the familiar paradigm of drafting an email, a single screen guides the user through the simple process of sending documents for signature.
• Intelligent Document Recognition™ (IDR)—The proprietary new feature analyzes documents loaded into the DocuSign system and automatically applies all ‘sign-here’ and other data tabs based on pre-defined customer workflows. This innovation is a dramatic time savings for power users that often send the same contract or agreement for signature multiple times a day, or for complex contracts.
• Support for Additional Document Formats—The new service now automatically provides real-time conversion of a broad range of document formats to secure PDFs on the fly.  Customers no longer need to convert documents to PDF, saving a step in the process.
• Improved In-person Signing Experience—Electronic contract execution is becoming more common during in-person signings with multiple signers—especially for real estate, insurance and financial services customers. Using the new in-person signing process, DocuSign introduces a ‘Signing Host’ who acts much like a notary, authenticating the signers and administering the process.

We recently unveiled the new electronic signature and contract execution capabilities available in DocuSign Version 9.1 at our Executive Customer Council (ECC) in Washington D.C. DocuSign’s ECC represents many of the world’s largest and most successful companies, including Fortune 500 customers and partners from financial services, insurance, telecommunications, supply chain, procurement, technology, manufacturing, travel and real estate.

Ariba, the world’s largest supplier of automated supply chain software and services, and one of the key strategic partners for DocuSign, was introduced to Version 9.1 at DocuSign’s ECC. Last month, we announced a strategic partnership with Ariba, the world’s largest supplier of automated supply chain software and services, to revolutionize the entire contract execution process by integrating DocuSign Version 9.1 within Ariba’s platform.

“With the volume and complexity of enterprise contracts on the rise, no company can afford delays in contract execution or unauditable offline procedures. Adding DocuSign’s electronic signature capabilities to Ariba Contract Management enables completely paperless contract execution and a fully automated contract lifecycle,” said Tim Minahan, chief marketing officer at Ariba. “The combination of Ariba and DocuSign Version 9.1 raises the standard for security and visibility into arguably the most critical step in closing your business agreements–the final signature.”

Tom Gonser, our founder and VP, Product Strategy, shares these words:

We have a customer-oriented culture which guides our development and new product delivery.  DocuSign’s latest release is a mature SaaS product that reinforces DocuSign’s position as the market leader and is a complete solution for eliminating the manual processing of paper contracts and forms. By focusing on cutting operational costs, accelerating revenue, and immediately impacting efficiency and profitability, our customers are driving tremendous business results for DocuSign.