DocuSign Blog » Mike Machado

What’s News in The World of Electronic Signature

An Bui, DocuSign Social Media — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:23:10 +0000

Last week was filled with developments in the world of electronic signature and we’re excited to share them with you! We have news about electronic signature from real estate and Salesforce, the CRM and cloud computing platform.

DocuSign Electronic Signature and The National Association of REALTORS®

The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), America’s largest trade association, represents 1.2 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries. Last week, NAR selected DocuSign as the official and exclusive provider of electronic signature services under NAR’s REALTOR Benefits® program.

Second Century Ventures (SCV), is the strategic investment arm of NAR, made a strategic investment in DocuSign. As part of the investment, the president of Second Century Ventures and chief executive officer of NAR, Dale A. Stinton, will join the DocuSign Board of Directors.

DocuSign Electronic Signature and Real Estate

During last week’s REALTORS® (NAR) Annual Conference and Expo 2009, Shannon Williams King named DocuSign one of the must-have technologies and applications necessary for a real estate road warrior. Ms. King served on NAR’s Strategic Planning Committee for 2007 and 2008 and starting in 2008, is serving on the Young Professional’s Network – NAR Advisory Board. She was also named one of 30 Under 30 in REALTOR® Magazine in 2005.

Aaron Wheeler also named DocuSign as one of the technologies and applications necessary to take your real estate business to the next level in “Leveraging Technology for Luxury Home Marketing.” He also named Salesforce as a must-have CRM. Mr. Wheeler is the President and Managing Broker of Oakville Properties as well as the publisher of LUXRETECH, the blog about leveraging technology for luxury real estate marketing.

Of course, pairing DocuSign electronic signature and Salesforce CRM helps extend your business processes. We had some exciting announcements at Salesforce Dreamforce Global Gathering:

DocuSign Launches Two New Electronic Signature Products at Salesforce Dreamforce Global Gathering and Cloud Expo 2009

DocuSign for Salesforce 2.0 was showcased in a break-out session at Dreamforce, in which Mike Machado of Yamaha and Brian Frank of LinkedIn shared their successes with DocuSign for Salesforce with DocuSign founder and VP of Product Strategy, Tom Gonser. For more information, take a look at the case studies about Yamaha and LinkedIn.

DocuSign for Salesforce CRM Real-Time Quotes Salesforce.com chose DocuSign as the electronic signature solution partner to launch Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce.com customers. Ken Cavallon, DocuSign Business Development Manager, and Tyler Ziemann, Salesforce.com Senior Product Manager, presented a session about DocuSign for Salesforce CRM Real-Time Quotes.

DocuSign’s Electronic Signature Solution Named Best App for Salesforce at Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009

In addition to the launch of our two electronic signature products, DocuSign won the Best App for Salesforce Appy Award in a voting competition from among more than 3,000 companies who partner with Salesforce.com on the AppExchange. DocuSign CEO Matthew J. Schiltz accepted the award from Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Mark Benioff and Salesforce.com President Jim Steel.

Thank you to all of our customers who share your customer stories, provide us with valuable feedback that enables us to continually improve our electronic signature services.

From strategic investments and partnerships to new products and awards, excitement around electronic signature continues to build – we look forward to building electronic signature solutions to enable you to electronically send, sign and manage documents securely and with confidence.

Who is Really the Electronic Signature Market Leader?

Tom Gonser — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:23:00 +0000

Measuring Market Leaders in the SaaS Market

The other day, someone asked me “How do you know you are the Market Leader in the SaaS ESIGN Market?” Good question because in a new market nearly everyone claims they are the market leader.

What’s interesting is that with SaaS offers, it is actually fairly easy to come up with a proxy for market share by using the same tools that Web sites use. It’s a little more involved because we are not measuring your “.com” site. For example, DocuSign’s service is actually on a different server farm and is at DocuSign.net so it’s a bit more complicated, but attainable.

A Proxy for Market Share – Visits to a SaaS Application

At least in terms of overall activity, ‘visits’ to a SaaS Application online is a good proxy for market share. People do not visit a login page for an online ESIGN tool for fun. They go to log in and sign or send.

Companies like Quantcast, Alexa and Compete.com provide measurement estimates of traffic to sites. Most dismiss Alexa because they use a Web browser toolbar to count visits and this only works with certain browsers, only for users using the toolbar, only focuses on rankings of 100,000 and above (our competition doesn’t show up), and can be easily gamed. Quantcast does not have sufficient data yet. So, for today, Compete.com is the best source having the best data.

Using Compete.com to compare the total visits to the top 9 SaaS ESIGN applications is a fair proxy for measuring market share of these ESIGN vendors. The data is pretty amazing, and shows what we in the industry suspect. The overall market is growing and not surprisingly, more offerings are coming into the market.

The graph below shows the relative size of the top 9 SaaS ESIGN vendors for October 2009:

Here are the same 9 SaaS ESIGN vendors from September 2008:

First, my disclaimer! This is only a PROXY for market share information. There are variables that are likely not taken into account such as API calls, etc. But as a group, the data applies the same to all of these companies.

So what does this data say? Actually, it tells us some very interesting things:

From 9/08 through 9/09, the market has expanded.

Overall application visits have increased 286%.
More companies have entered the market.

This data is consistent with what we’re seeing at DocuSign. Our business is up over 350% over this same period.

DocuSign’s market share grew over the past 12 months from 57% to 70% —yes, we’ve had a great year!

This data shows that 2009 has been a big year in ESIGN, and we believe 2010 is gearing up to be even bigger. Want to check out the ESIGN market yourself? Visit www.compete.com and compare different company’s SaaS application sites total visits. This will show you the ‘activity’ level on a comparable basis.

It’s clear e-signing is quickly becoming the preferred method of conducting business. At DocuSign, we strive to give you the best electronic signature services possible with the most rich array of functionality so you can quickly get the signatures you need to close the deal. We make it fast and easy to DocuSign from anywhere, anytime.

Whether it’s sending a simple Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) or a complex multi-page, multi-signer sales contract, we work very hard to give you the best e-sign services available. We’re listening. And here’s what we’ve heard so far:

The introduction of DocuSign into our collections process significantly improved DSO contributing to access to over $1M in additional working capital on an annualized basis. – Brian Frank, Director of Global Enterprise Operations, LinkedIn

DocuSign allows us to quickly generate documents and distribute them to the customer for execution and then get them moved on to the supplier to book the energy. It immediately goes from the customer’s office to the supplier so there is a very little gap in time for the market to move. DocuSign helps the customer lock in a rate at a low price and ensures that it gets preserved even if the market is moving quickly. – Scott Chilton, President & Managing Partner, Community Energy, LP

Just by the very nature of how much easier DocuSign is to get a document signed, get it completed and get it archived, DocuSign allows us to go from a couple of days or even a week, down to literally hours to get a contract executed. – Jim Roberson, President & Co-Founder, Drawloop Technologies

DocuSign significantly improved the company’s workflow cycle. With DocuSign, you can always look at the status in real-time and know if the contract is still out there. It makes your job a lot easier, keeping track of what contracts you sent out and what hasn’t come back yet. – Tressa Morgan, Sales Operations Database and Client Support Manager, EDGAR Online

The best part is documents could be signed in literally minutes versus months. I now have complete visibility. With a few clicks, I know who hasn’t signed. – Mike Machado, CRM Manager, Yamaha Commercial Audio

It seems the word is out! Using the Internet, not the Interstate, to get your documents signed is faster, less expensive and becoming the norm in many business segments. It really is inevitable! It will be interesting to see what the data is at this time NEXT YEAR. Stay tuned!

Taking it to the Next Level With Electronic Signature

An Bui, DocuSign Social Media — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:17:22 +0000

Our time in San Diego for REALTORS® (NAR) Annual Conference and Expo 2009 has come to a close, but we aren’t missing a beat – we’ve headed north to be EVERYWHERE at the Cloud Computing Event of the year – salesforce.com Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco November 17-20, 2009.

Before we left NAR, we were pleased to be named as one of the technologies and applications necessary to take your business to the next level in the “Leveraging Technology for Luxury Home Marketing” session. Aaron Wheeler, the speaker, also named Salesforce as a must-have CRM. – Thank you Aaron!

Leveraging Technology for Luxury Home Marketing: Grow your luxury real estate practice by implementing an internet and technology strategy and using cost-effective solutions. Increase your service level and client loyalty using customer relationship management technologies. Determine how to track advertising campaign effectiveness and provide the results to your client. A real estate professional shares tips on what does and does not work when you leverage syndication technologies, email marketing, social media, and other technologies to increase exposure for your luxury listings.

From Southern California to Northern California… we’re so hot, we can’t stop!

Today marks the opening day at Dreamforce and the first day of Cloud Expo!

During the Cloud Expo in booth #1118, we will have experts available to demonstrate the new solution suite, analyze customer business workflows, recommend best practices and help attendees get started with a 30-day free trial. Attendees participating in a brief demonstration are entered in a drawing to win a Dell Netbook at the close of the show.

Stop by our booth to say hi to Tom Barnes, Robert Sanchez, Adam Hernandez, Brad Epker and Mike Tasca. You can also catch Tom Gonser, Bob DeSantis, Loren Alhadeff, Ken Cavallon, Eric Wong, Tanya Frerichs, Doug Rybacki, Mike Borozdin, and Steve Woodworth at various sessions. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone!

Don’t forget to mark your schedules for three don’t-miss sessions: Close it in the Cloud!™ with DocuSign Smart Electronic Signatures, Electronic Contract Execution with Apttus, and DocuSign for Salesforce and in collaboration with Salesforce CRM product group in their session Introducing Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce CRM.

Introducing Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce CRM

Thursday, November 19th, 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m., PT. Room North 133.

In this Salesforce CRM product group session, DocuSign will demonstrate for the first time its rich integration with this new capability. In collaboration with the Salesforce CRM Real-Time Quotes product group, DocuSign will show attendees how to close it in the cloud in real-time. Attendees will see the future of Real-Time Quotes in the Spring 10 release, learn how to manage quotes with workflow, quote with product bundles using BigMachines and leverage integrated electronic signature technology with Smart eSignatures from DocuSign. We’re excited to be an integrated part of the solution and the only ESIGN provider in the session.

Speakers: Tyler Ziemann, Salesforce.com; Tim Handorf, BigMachines; Ken Cavallon, DocuSign.

Sales Track: Close It In The Cloud! with DocuSign Electronic Signatures

Thursday, November 19th, 2:45 p.m. – 3:45 p.m., PT. Room North 130.

Learn how Yahama, Expedia, and LinkedIn have transformed their business by using DocuSign for Salesforce CRM. Companies have eliminated paper and are sending contracts for electronic signatures, transforming slow, manual, expensive, paper-based contract processes into efficient 100% cloud-based processes. With integrated data management, your people will never need to rekey data again! Close more deals faster, eliminate errors, and increase efficiency by closing it in the cloud with DocuSign for Salesforce CRM.

Speakers: Gene Harden, Expedia, Inc.; Tom Gonser, DocuSign; Mike Machado, Yamaha Corporation of America; Brian Frank, LinkedIn.

Large Enterprises Track: Electronic Contract Execution with Apttus and DocuSign for Salesforce

Friday, November 20th, 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m., PT Room North 120.

Using the power of end-to-end electronic contract management from Apttus and electronic signatures from DocuSign, successful companies can now speed up time to revenue, automate business process, eliminate paper, and ensure compliance with this amazing cloud computing solution that delivers on the promise of the paperless enterprise! Join us to find out how your enterprise can Close it in the Cloud! with electronic contract execution from these two top AppExchange partners.

Speakers: Kirk Krappe, Apttus Inc.; Tom Gonser, DocuSign

What’s That Sweet Sound You Hear?

An Bui, DocuSign Social Media — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:46:09 +0000

Yamaha’s praise of electronic signature from DocuSign for Salesforce! Why? Dramatic increases in agreement compliance rates after implementing DocuSign for Salesforce to automate the signing process of agreements with Yamaha Corporation of America’s network of dealers.

With DocuSign for Salesforce:

Yamaha can:

Sign-up new dealers
Renew existing dealer agreements
Realize greater operational efficiencies with seamless integration with DocuSign electronic signature and Salesforce CRM

Yamaha has:

Automated sales agreement processes
Slashed cost, time and error rates from previous paper-based process
Increased visibility into the status of every contract at any given moment
Eliminated a myriad of costly manual processes

Yamaha dealers worldwide have used DocuSign’s on-demand electronic signature service to digitally sign their annual agreements. Once signed, the contracts are securely stored online for easy retrieval and recordkeeping. Using DocuSign from a Web browser or mobile device, the dealers access and sign their Yamaha agreements online in minutes from any location at any time. Dealers no longer have to wait to receive a contract via snail mail, hassle with mailing it back or filing a paper copy. Since deploying DocuSign, Yamaha’s agreements are typically completed within minutes or hours, NOT weeks or months, as was the case before.

The DocuSign Electronic Signature Advantage
Why did Yamaha select DocuSign for Salesforce electronic signature solution after reviewing several competing solutions?

Ease of Use—DocuSign’s intuitive service closely replicates the traditional signing experience, easily meeting Yamaha’s top priority that the new solution be readily accepted by their dealers.
Compliance—With DocuSign, Yamaha created one uniform contract that dealers cannot revise ad hoc, ensuring 100 percent compliance for all signed contracts. All DocuSigned agreements are legally binding and backed by a full audit trail.
Real-time Insight—DocuSign reveals the signing status of every agreement: when it was opened, when it was signed, how long the dealer has had it, and which agreements remain to be signed, enabling Yamaha to manage its channel effectively.
CRM Integration—By connecting DocuSign to Salesforce, Yamaha can now Close it in the Cloud!TM without leaving its CRM system, accelerating close times to minutes. DocuSign automatically populates Salesforce data sets into its service which eliminates the need to re-key data. Using the tools in Salesforce, Yamaha can create reports about contract status.
Workflow Management—DocuSign automated many backend processes for Yamaha, liberating employees from using a spreadsheet to manually track each agreement that required about 50 touch points across the company.

Want more information about the business benefits DocuSign provides Yamaha? Read the detailed case study.

To learn more about DocuSign for Salesforce, connect with the DocuSign team at salesforce.com Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco November 17-20, 2009. Stop by the DocuSign booth, #1118, to participate in a brief demonstration and enter a drawing to win a Dell Netbook at the close of the show.

Close It In The Cloud! DocuSign Demonstrating New Integrated ESIGN Solutions for Salesforce CRM

An Bui, DocuSign Social Media — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:11:20 +0000

DocuSign will be EVERYWHERE at the Cloud Computing Event of the year – salesforce.com Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco November 17-20, 2009.

As a Gold Sponsor, we’ll have a private room for us to meet with you and discuss electronic signature or eSign services that will enable you to electronically send, sign and manage your documents from within your Salesforce CRM environment.

We’ll also present three sessions: Close it in the Cloud!™ with DocuSign Smart Electronic Signatures, Electronic Contract Execution with Apttus, and DocuSign for Salesforce and in collaboration with Salesforce CRM product group in their session Introducing Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce CRM.

Don’t Miss Introducing Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce CRM