With approximately three weeks left in 2009, do you have enough time to accomplish everything you would like to before the start of 2010? Perhaps you’re thinking about new initiatives for next year – with electronic signature, you can start saving time NOW while implementing an environmentally friendly, “Green” business process.

How many pages are the real estate contracts you prepare for your clients? If you’re writing an offer with all of the associated addendums, you could easily create nearly 30 pages of paper.

If you’re faxing the offer, that’s another 30 pages created by the fax machine. This transaction has created 60 pages of paper – and no signatures at this point! Your client then has to sign each page where you’ve indicated and if he or she faxes it back, this process has now created 90 pages of paper.

Of course, if you have to get your client’s spouse to sign, you’re looking at more faxes and more paper. If you’re using a scanner, you can minimize, but not eliminate, the amount of paper you generate.

In a multiple offer situation, say five, the number of pages multiplies and could become 450 pages for the fax-back-and-forth process of collecting signatures, just for this one client. If you’re working with multiple clients… the number of pieces of paper multiplies as well.

With seller addendums… you get the picture.

The Solution: Electronic Signature from DocuSign

With this much paper, you need a solution that enables you to implement a paperless and green business process. DocuSign is the leader in electronic signature services that securely enable you to electronically send, sign and manage your documents with confidence.

You can create your documents with your current forms creation software – Adobe, Microsoft Word, zipForms, WINForms, TrueForms, Flexmls Forms, IRES, Realfast2Go, TransactionPoint, or DocCentral.

Once you’ve created your documents and saved them to your computer, you can log into DocuSign. You upload your documents, enter your client’s information, tab the documents for signature and click to send. See the video below:

Your client receives an email from DocuSign with a message that you’ve requested their signature on documents. Once your client clicks the link included in the email and authenticates him or herself into the DocuSign system, DocuSign takes them through the electronic signature process, step-by-step. See the video below:

Once your client has signed or initialed the document in each location you’ve tabbed, accepted or declined each tab for optional signature or initial, and completed the signing process, you will receive an email notifying you that your documents have been signed.

If you choose to “CC” the other agent in the transaction, he or she will receive a clean, legible copy of the documents with all of the associated signatures.

No faxes. No paper. DocuSign electronic signature provides clean, clear electronic signatures on documents without software to download or equipment to buy.

As the official and exclusive provider of ESIGN services for the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) and its 1.2 million members under the REALTOR Benefits® Program, and is designed to provide unique offers to NAR members through its new “ESIGN Advantage Promotion for Realtors®.”

With the “ESIGN Advantage Promotion for Realtors®,” we’re currently offering a special promotion to Realtors® through December 31:

• All the capabilities of DocuSign for Real Estate Standard Edition,
• Custom branding that will enable you to tailor your account for a more personalized client experience,
• And special pricing: the cost for the promotion will be as low as $13.95 per user/month (annual commitment) or $17.95 per user/month (month-to-month). You can save as much as 21 percent on the best available monthly subscription rates with a risk-free 30-day money back guarantee.

You can implement paperless processes and go green at the same time with electronic signature from DocuSign!

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.

Sessions evolve based on whatever topics attendees want to share with whoever wants to learn. The sessions and tracks will be set the morning of the event, so show up early (8:30am to be exact!) to get your session on the calendar and provide input on the sessions you want to see. As a sponsor of this event, we want you to have the best experience possible, so without further ado…

Tips to Get the Most Out of RE BarCamp San Diego:

1. Participate! RE BarCamp San Diego is about participation – everyone has something valuable or interesting to share as well as opportunities to learn
2. Learn! You might be curious about a new technology or tactic. You might have questions like “How does a signature get into an electronic signature system?” There will be many interesting, knowledgeable people at RE BarCamp San Diego – ask someone!
3. Facilitate! If you’re running a session or having a hallway conversation, you can always draw in other attendees to offer up what THEY know to keep the conversation productive and interactive.
4. Share! Everyone knows something – share with others what you know. If you know about search marketing, blogging, blog copy writing, working with lenders, using various technology tools like electronic signature, SHARE IT! RE BarCamp San Diego will be a valuable learning experience for all if we share what we know.
5. Walk! The two feet rule applies to RE Bar Camp San Diego – if you aren’t getting value in the session you are in, go find another one, so you can learn what you want to learn.

DocuSign will be on hand with Jay Thompson, Dean Ouellette and others for a panel discussion on various technology tools to take your office mobile or virtual. Curious about mobile broadband? Want to know how electronic signatures can save you time and get your clients to rave about your service? What about video cameras, laptops or other hardware tools? Tablet, Mac, or Windows laptop – which one would work best for you?

Come say hi to me at RE BarCamp San Diego and we can talk about electronic signatures, going paperless, working remotely or anything else you want to discuss. I’ll be the really petite one who looks taller in her Twitter avatar (@DocuSign).

What do you need to know to go paperless?

1. Back Up All of Your Documents!

In the traditional paper process, you photocopy documents, put them in a labeled folder and filed them in a filing cabinet so you can retrieve the document as needed.

In the paperless process, you need to back up your documents. You may decide to copy all of your files on a regular basis to an external drive. You may choose to store your documents using a hosting service. DocuSign provides its customers with document storage when they upload documents for electronic signature. Additionally, both senders and signers can download copies of completed documents for their own records.

2. Going Paperless is a Process

Going paperless takes time – you might start with using DocuSign Electronic Signature Service for your sales process and implement for your vendor purchase orders a week later. You may choose to digitize your old records as well and scanning your old documents will take time.

3. Over Time, You’ll Save Space

Given the amount of paper you currently have filed in filing cabinets and whether you choose to digitize your older paper documents, you may find that you can get rid of some of your filing cabinets. DocuSign has customers like Jay Thompson:

Thanks to DocuSign, I can keep an entire filing cabinet’s worth of stuff on a thumb drive.

Fewer cabinets mean more office space. A thumb drive means you can easily keep and access the documents you need, without having to return to the office before reviewing some papers.

4. More Benefits Than Less Paper

While going paperless often means less paper, not no paper, you’ll be able to see other benefits as well. Not only will you see a cost savings because you’ll stop printing, mailing, shipping and storing paper, you’ll also start to see time savings.

With DocuSign’s Electronic Signature:

• No more driving across town to a client for a signature
• No more following up because a line wasn’t signed or initialed
• No more difficult to read faxes
• Automatic reminder capabilities enabling you to set DocuSign to remind your clients to sign, so you don’t have to
• Workflow capabilities that mean you get the signatures you need in the order you need them, so you can set it and know DocuSign is taking care of the process for you

What else do you need to know to go paperless, especially in real estate? Let me know in the comments or write a post on your blog and leave me a pingback – I’ll take a look and leave a comment!

Why? 

Customer Service:  Clients like knowing that you will be where they want or need you to be. As busy people, you know your clients don’t want to have to drive across town to meet you at a fixed location. It’s easier for them to pop into a coffee shop to have a cup of coffee and talk business. It also gives you the flexibility you need if you’re in the service based-business.

Operational Costs: Having a physical office can be expensive and is a sunk operational cost. Some industries and business processes DO see benefits from having a physical office that everyone goes to. However, in a relationship-based business like real estate, why have a brick and mortar presence if it will be rarely used?

Jim Paulson, Broker / Owner of Progressive Realty in Boise, Idaho states:

Why build an office with only a 25% occupancy rate and shrinking!

 
Time Savings: As you travel from location to location, you ARE your office. Your car or briefcase should hold everything you need to make business happen. Having to travel between a client and an office takes precious time. Eliminate the physical office to eliminate the time consuming task of commuting to the office.

Interestingly enough, DocuSign Electronic Signature Services also provides these same benefits to its subscribers.

Customer Service: DocuSign’s flexible electronic signature service means that you can provide your clients with the signing experience you both desire. If both you and your clients enjoy the face-to-face interaction during the signing process, DocuSign provides in-person signing functionality. If you need to get signatures fast, DocuSign’s remote signing capabilities mean your signer only needs email access, a browser and internet connectivity. There’s no need to download software and it’s so easy to use, it passes the “Can My Mom Use It” test.

Operational Savings: By reducing, if not eliminating, the cost of paper, printing, ink, fax, and overnight or same day courier services, DocuSign electronic signature provides its subscribers with operational savings. With the DocuSign document dashboard, you can also manage your paperwork via DocuSign. This means you won’t need to pay someone to print, copy, scan and file hard copies anymore!

Time Savings: I hear so many stories of time savings from our customers, that I’ve written several blog posts about it. With DocuSign electronic signature, you no longer have to go through the process of creating the forms, printing them, marking them up for signature, finding a fax machine or overnight envelope, filling out the recipient information, sending, and then waiting for the other party to return the documents… only to see a missed signature or initial, restarting the entire process! Integration with major forms software and DocuSign’s template and Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) features have helped DocuSign power users create documents for electronic signature in as few as two minutes!

DocuSign electronic signature – it’s a must for the mobile professional. You can try electronic signature for free, with DocuSign Express for Drawloop, to get a taste of what life with electronic signature might look like. However, if you want access to the DocuSign dashboard and other features we’ve mentioned, sign up for DocuSign. With a risk free, 30-day guarantee, you have nothing to lose and savings to gain.

He uses two DocuSign features: Templates and Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) to reduce the time for document creation from 20 minutes to TWO. Two minutes is about how long you should spend brushing your teeth!

Templates: You can take frequently used documents, like purchase agreements, and pre-define all of the locations on the agreement where recipients need to sign or initial. You specify a “role” for each signer (Buyer 1, Buyer 2, Buyer’s Agent, Seller 1…) and drag and drop the stick-e-tabs on the agreement. Once you’ve created a template, you can use it again, when you have a similar transaction. Take a look at our how-to for template creation.

IDR: You can use IDR to automatically recognize a certain document by looking for document attributes. For example, if you wanted DocuSign to recognize a document as a “real estate purchase contract” you can use the IDR tool to draw a box around section(s) of the document, such as a title or other unique identifier.

Once you’ve created your templates and used the IDR tool to help DocuSign identify your documents, you can prepare offers by uploading the individual documents for the offer. IDR will ask if you want to apply various templates as it detects the documents. All you have to do is specify the names and emails for each party of the transaction and press “send.”

If you “cc” the other party’s agent, their agent will receive a secure link to the completed documents after your clients have signed. These documents will be clear and easy to read because they haven’t been faxed back and forth!

Click to read Aaron’s original post and view his slideshow of the entire process, from template creation to signing.

To try DocuSign with a risk-free 30 day money back guarantee, click here and pretty soon, the amount of time you’ll take to create documents will be about the amount of time it takes you to brush your teeth!

*Note the DocuSign plan, DocuSign Professional for Individual Users Advanced Plan, that supports templates and IDR start at $34.95/month. However, that is less expensive than a mobile broadband plan (~$70.00/month with Verizon)

Several businesses, such as BuyATimeshare.com, have decided to go paperless. This decision has resulted in more environmentally sustainable, cost effective business practices that also streamline business processes. BuyATimeshare.com’s paperless office has also resulted in:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Faster sales cycles
• Effective customer service
• Greater scale, with thousands more properties reaching the resale market than ever

What other businesses have “gone green”? Other real estate professionals have recognized the benefits of adopting paperless processes, including electronic signature and online contract execution.With more than 18,000 real estate professionals who have used DocuSign for electronic signature services, we’ve heard many testimonials of significant time savings as well.

According to BuyATimeshare.com:

DocuSign, which eliminates paper-based contracts, has tripled the speed of transactions, bringing properties to the resale market faster than ever.

BuyATimeshare.com now uses fewer than 20,000 sheets of paper each month since implementing their paperless business process. That’s one-fifth of the environmental impact that results in a positive impact on productivity.

Why bother with a scanner and data entry? With an electronic signature and online contract execution service like DocuSign, paper documents for signature never have to enter your office again.

You no longer need to type up a contract or disclosure, fill out the signer information, mark ‘x’s next to spaces for the necessary signatures and initials, fax the documents and wait. You can keep waiting while your signer gets the fax from the fax machine, reads the documents, signs and return faxes it back to you. Alternatively, your signer might set it aside on his or her desk, intending to get to it later and finally signing after you followed up half a dozen times.

Wouldn’t you prefer to just upload a document, fill out information about your signer(s), and have the DocuSign system send them an email with a secure link? Once your recipients click the link and the system authenticates them, they simply need to click to acknowledge that they are using electronic signature and adopt their own unique electronic signatures. Then, they read the documents and click to ESIGN where you’ve placed yellow stick-e-tabs. This process can take minutes instead of days. You’re now free to pursue more business.

Electronic signature and online contract execution saves DocuSign’s real estate customers significant time and money. Other organizations that have realized time and operational cost savings with the use of electronic signature and online contract execution include Yamaha, Great Lakes, RE / MAX, and Bellco Credit Union.

What technologies are you using to improve your productivity?

Can you put together an integrated workflow to have a business process that is automated, paperless and saves you time?

While there is no single “best” way for every real estate professional, there are a variety of tools that work well together.

Automated forms software: You may already be using ZipLogix (zipForms/WINForms), RealFast, IRES, LPS Real Estate Group (Transaction Point or DocCentral) and Reveal Systems. All of these real estate software form providers integrate with DocuSign.

Contact management: Your contact management may be your Outlook email or CRM system that enables you to connect contacts to tasks and companies.

Electronic signature and online contract execution: DocuSign’s real estate specific features, like signing order, correct on the fly, import of handwritten signatures and contract templates explains why DocuSign’s real estate subscribers and their clients LOVE DocuSign. You can ensure that you’ll get every signature and initial you need. You’ll get the completed ‘DocuSigned’ documents which will be more “clean” than any scan-copy-fax-sign transaction. Needless to say, DocuSign transactions shorten sales cycles, thus saving you time. Our subscribers use these time savings to close more transactions. 

Using compatible technology tools enables you to enjoy a smooth workflow and makes your life easier while saving you time and money. Couple that with increased customer satisfaction and a paperless office just makes sense!

Brown paper packages, tied up with strings, these are a few of our favorite things… – Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music

When Julie Andrews sang about her favorite things in “The Sound of Music,” electronic signature and online contract execution technology did not exist. Now that it does, we love reading stories about how our subscribers (and our subscribers’ customers) love it. Recently, one of our DocuSign for real estate customers wrote about sending documents back and forth as part of a paperless, green strategy.

With all of the paperwork involved in real estate transactions, real estate professionals have had to send, fax or drive documents back and forth. This meant significant use of paper, ink, gas and time.

With DocuSign electronic signature  service, our subscribers have realized that going paperless can help them save significant time and operational costs. Because senders and signers only need email access and a web browser to move ahead with the transaction, it doesn’t matter where people are. They don’t need to be next to a fax machine, waiting for the fax to come through. They don’t need to spend their valuable time driving from one place to another to get the necessary signatures and initials. By minimizing driving, they’re using less gas, which is good for their wallets and the environment. Electronic signature on digital documents also preserves the quality of the information, so you don’t have to struggle to read a grainy fax.

ESignatures leading to time savings, NOW that is one of my favorite things!*

*bonus points for singing this line to the tune of “My Favorite Things”. Of course, electronic signature leads to time AND money savings, but the tune doesn’t match.