DocuSign®, the leading provider of on-demand electronic signature solutions! We were honored with an Appy Award at Dreamforce ‘09, salesforce.com’s user and developer conference. We received this recognition for transforming our business with the power of cloud computing.

Appy Award recipients are nominated based on their innovative usage of Salesforce CRM or the Force.com platform in bringing new levels of customer success to their sales, marketing, partner, service, support or IT organizations.

Jim Steele, President, Worldwide Sales and Chief Customer Officer, salesforce.com, shared his thoughts about DocuSign and the honor in the salesforce.com ecosystem:

We were honored to present DocuSign with an Appy Award as testimony to its success. With nearly 68,000 customers, more than 200,000 developers and hundreds of partners, we are continually amazed by the innovation in the cloud computing community.

A special “Thank You” to all of our customers who make us successful by sharing your customer stories and providing us with valuable feedback that enables us to continually improve our electronic signature services. Matthew J. Schiltz, CEO and president of DocuSign shares his thoughts:

It is a tremendous honor for DocuSign to be voted Best Partner App by Dreamforce attendees. We have worked diligently to ensure salesforce.com customers can close deals in the cloud using DocuSign’s electronic signature service straight from their Salesforce CRM deployment.

DocuSign received its award for Best Partner App as voted by the attendees of Dreamforce ’09, from more than 3,000 companies. The seamless eSignature solution, DocuSign allows Salesforce CRM users to quickly manage and send contracts for e-signing from a single workspace. Contracts can be conveniently signed in the cloud and returned within minutes.

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

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.

Yamaha Corporation of America distributes and sells musical instruments via its nationwide network of 7,000 retail stores. For years, Yamaha’s contract process included courier costs, human errors and missing pages. Yamaha’s systems specialist, Mike Machado shares: “We depended on a lengthy signature process… Sometimes the forms weren’t signed in the right places and folks would strike things out. We often received incomplete agreements.”

So what’s an enterprise company to do when it comes time to update its master agreement with 7,000 retail stores?

Could it ask its sales reps to stuff over 5,000 envelopes and spend nearly $15,000 in courier charges? Of course, this course of action doesn’t account for time spent waiting for the documents to be returned as well as time spent following up and following up on the follow up.

Instead, Yamaha’s Machado spent three months researching various Web-based products that would preserve “the look and feel of a paper-based experience,” while cutting costs and expediting the process.

Yamaha chose DocuSign for its user-friendly interface and low cost. The DocuSign electronic signature service and workflow solution was implemented in a 30-day deployment across three of Yamaha’s sales divisions.

Before Yamaha signed the electronic signature line with DocuSign, Yamaha’s in-house legal counsel spent 30-days extensively researching the processes involved with e-signature capture, data storage as well as the electronic signatures themselves to ensure that electronic signatures captured via DocuSign would be legally binding.

Now, Yamaha’s dealers log on to a secure site and review a contract. The program automatically generates an e-signature that can be modified with different fonts or including a middle initial. Each electronic signature that is generated is also unique to each signer. Yellow “Sign Here” tabs instruct dealers where to eSign by clicking to place their signatures. Because only properly signed contracts can be routed further, this process ensures no more missing signatures or initials. For record keeping, completed documents can be downloaded and saved as a PDF.

Because Yamaha was both a DocuSign and Salesforce customer, they were able to use DocuSign Connect for Salesforce. This gave Yamaha the ability to track the status of the documents in Salesforce so they know when each document was delivered, opened and signed.

With Salesforce integration, they can also collect the data from the electronic contracts and automatically update Salesforce when contracts are completed.

So where did the $10,000 monthly savings come from? Yamaha did not have to send multiple contracts via courier. DocuSign’s software-as-a-service, or SaaS, electronic signature technology meant that no additional IT infrastructure investment was necessary to implement this solution.

So how long does it take to complete a formerly month-long, labor intensive contract signing process that includes approximately half-dozen approvals? “[It] can now be completed in minutes” according to Machado.

With visibility into where a contract is in the process, Yamaha’s sales representatives can address bottlenecks, so they can move deals forward.

So what are the primary benefits of electronic signature technology?

…turn-around time, cost savings and an improved regulatory posture – all of which benefit from economies of scale.” – Bill Nagel, Forrester Research

To learn more about how DocuSign electronic signature can benefit your company, take a look at the DocuSign web site and try DocuSign Lite for free. DocuSign will also be at Salesforce Dreamforce, November 17-20, 2009, in San Francisco – connect with us there!

To use DocuSign Lite:

1. Go to the DocuSign home page



2. Enter your email and name as well as the person you are sending to
3. Upload your document for signature by clicking on the “Browse” Button
4. Click “Send Now”



5. Signers open their email from DocuSign to click to esign

DocuSign Everywhere

Today, thousands of companies utilize the DocuSign on-demand electronic signature service as a standalone web application or as an integrated part of business critical applications such as zipLogix, Salesforce.com and Ariba. In addition, DocuSign is the only electronic signature service that enables access to the sending and esigning experience via options that include a DocuSign Desktop Client, a broad range of Blackberrys and the iPhone, in addition to the web browser experience.

More Choices!

Most recently, DocuSign with partner Smart Mobile Solutions announced the availability of the ESignControl iPhone App in the iTunes App Store. Another example of a business partner integration resulted in DocuSign Express For Drawloop.

DocuSign and Drawloop Technologies, Inc. offers a free esign experience as part of Drawloop’s free PDF conversion tool. You can access DocuSign for Drawloop via web, as a Mozilla Firefox add-on, or as an iGoogle Gadget. Take a look at these instructions for using DocuSign Express for Drawloop via web. You can download the Mozilla Firefox add-on or embed the DocuSign Express / LOOP to PDF iGoogle Gadget.

Ken learned a number of things on the tour… not the least of which is that Marc Benioff, salesforce.com’s CEO at approximately 6′7”, is a giant of a man with a giant idea. His idea is to do for business computing what LinkedIn has done for professional networking. LinkedIn has taken professional networking from in person, phone and email direct connections up to the Cloud. People can learn from each other and share their expertise, connect with each other and discover opportunities within their networks. The paradigm shift powered by salesforce.com with its force.com Cloud Computing platform expands a sales management tool via a Cloud Computing business process platform that eliminates companies’ need for data centers and IT staffs to run them. Force.com is far more than CRM, it’s truly a Business Computing Platform in the sky… 
 
Flashback to 2004: What was the Timing of Convergence between Social Networks and systems in the Enterprise?   

 
The big question was: “Were social networks a time sink, or were they helping employees be productive?”   Flash forward to 2009 and it’s now clear that Mashups provide an example of social networks having a place in the enterprise. For example, combining Customer Service Portals on Force.com and Facebook has resulted in a mashup that allows its users to track relevant conversations, adds to the corporate knowledge base and then shares that information with the relevant community. The ability to sift social networks for highly actionable enterprise content and leverage the wisdom of the crowds for the enterprise is now seen in actual implementation…the convergence between social networking and enterprise computing is real. 
 
Back in the day, customers used to call if they had questions. With the advent of the Internet and as search engines such as Google indexed the web, customers googled for the answers they sought. Now, customers turn to social networks to ask ‘similar others’ for help and get answers their questions and deal with problems. The social network works out the problems and as conversations hit a critical mass, the convergence of IT and knowledge base enables customer service operations to be aware of these conversations. Cloud Computing Mashups have enabled businesses to glean real world actionable knowledge and leverage the wisdom of the crowds.  
 Social networking came out of the dot com bust. These next 12 to 18 months we’ll see people searching for better ways of doing and not just doing. This means many innovative ideas and lots of innovation. As the economic grip tightens, people are thinking of new ways to do old things better, using technology. One of the big questions on everyone’s lips is how to find better, faster and cheaper ways of doing things we do everyday? Force.com is a tool that can be used to answer that question.  

Launched at Dreamforce 08, the annual salesforce.com user conference each November in San Francisco, DocuSign’s fully integrated Salesforce solution, available on the force.com AppExchange, is called DocuSign Connect for Salesforce: QuickStart.  These regional Cloudforce city tours gave DocuSign an opportunity to engage business communities that may not have had the opportunity to come to Dreamforce… and the reception was fantastic.  DocuSign is the leader in electronic signature and contract execution services and combined with the power of Salesforce offer significant value to companies that use both solutions.  With DocuSign, the electronic signature we collect confirms the data in contracts, HR documents, or anything people sign. The value of DocuSign is in the electronic signature and contract execution process, or the collection and management of data. If we can wrap our heads around the fact that we no longer need paper, we realize that we can collect and correct data throughout the process, shortening the round-trip of the data, driving shorter cycles, gaining greater visibility and achieving all the efficiencies of not producing, printing, shipping, receiving managing and storing of paper!  

How does taking paper out of the process affect YOU?  

DocuSign Connect for Salesforce is where No Paper meets No Software. For Enterprises, we take paper out of the sales and HR process, which means that an organization (your organization) no longer needs to produce, ship and store documents. Before DocuSign, data would be locked up in physical documents and once agreement was reached, would need to be rekeyed and entered into a database. With DocuSign’s Enterprise Class electronic signature and electronic contract execution process all transactions occur online with robust workflow processes and automatic real time updates… that means that the data captured in the electronic contract execution process is already online, secure, easy to find and easy to use!  
 
Because of Cloud Computing, we’ve seen a Facebook and Salesforce mashup create value resulting in customer delight. The mashup with Salesforce and DocuSign Connect for Salesforce provides:  
 

• End-to-end cloud-based contract execution built directly into the Salesforce workspace
• Real-time contract status updates – know where your deals are at any given moment
• Full DocuSign document sending capabilities embedded into Salesforce – so your salespeople can stay in a single workspace
• Direct data mapping which eliminates the need to re-key information driving massive efficiencies and speeding up your pipeline

 
The clear message from the Cloudforce Tour is that new and innovative ways of doing business in a fast paced world with a compressed economy are emerging every day. DocuSign Connect for Salesforce is a world class Mashup that speeds up the sales process, provides real time visibility into your pipeline of business and drives a wide array of efficiencies that organizations realize from day one.  Over and over again attendees who saw DocuSign in action at Cloudforce said “I gotta have that!” 
Ken’s favorite quote from the event was from a large Enterprise customer who said “Wow, with what we’re already doing in Salesforce your solution really will help my teams ‘Close it in the Cloud!’… with (DocuSign Connect for Salesforce) we can get rid of all of our filing cabinets and really build a paperless Enterprise!”

An’s personal perspective regarding social media means that she sees these technology tools as a way to interact with and make connections with our customers and participate in conversations that are already happening. By sharing ideas and blog posts, we’re contributing to the creation a stronger information network about electronic signature and online contract execution.

She’s written about us before, when she discussed a social media principle, “Immediacy in all things”:

Acting on new, validated information when appropriate moves things forward more quickly than before.

She has an interesting point – accelerating business processes makes sense in this economic climate. Reducing the cost of sales/sales cycles are especially important in a time low economic growth, such as the one we’re in now. For example, one of our tools, DocuSign Connect for Salesforce, enables users to:

• Send documents to any Salesforce contact from within Salesforce
• Capture contract and envelope data in real-time with automatic updates to your Salesforce account
• See all contract status and data within the dashboard tab, thus enabling visibility into all contract activity across the entire organization
• Eliminate the need to rekey data, by automatically injecting data into Salesforce Objects

Our customers use DocuSign to quickly create and manage ‘transaction networks’ where people come together to authenticate and close deals online faster and more reliably that is possible with paper.

This extends Enterprise 2.0 technology and thinking to include Enterprise 2.0 PROCESS adoption. The connections that DocuSign enables help build trust relationships and require businesses to think about collaborating with their customers with control and security.

An wrote about changing patterns of interactions one tweet at a time. We’re changing business processes one envelope at a time. How are YOU using social media or Enterprise 2.0 tools?

If you are a developer or an ISV who is looking for a platform for business critical applications, you will like the DocuSign Developer Program. DocuSign has developed an extensive API that allows some very powerful extensions to be built that extend the DocuSign Electronic Contract Execution (ECE) service into a great number of business critical applications.

For example, the DocuSign Connect service allows real-time delivery of status and form data to any application in real time. We’ve built a Connector for Salesforce on this technology that allows deep integration of data status into Salesforce. There are more opportunities out there for Connect that many businesses would find very valuable.

Off the top of my head, I’d expect to see developers create tools for Sharepoint, RSS, SAP, or even DocuSign connect that automated credit card transactions… Any business process that could automate downstream delivery of data and/or status is a target! Through our API, the entire sending or signing process can be literally EMBEDDED inside other applications. If you are an expert in a business critical application that works with documents, forms or workflow, you can turbocharge it with DocuSign.

Why would you do that if you can do the above with a digital process?
We created the DocuSign Developer Center to provide developers access to DocuSign electronic signature and electronic contract execution (ECE) resources to foster solutions that streamline business processes like the ones above. DocuSign Connect, the cornerstone of this dev center, is a suite of integration services designed to extend DocuSign Service capabilities into existing systems or new applications. DocuSign Connect comprises of DocuSign Connect API and DocuSign Connect Service.

By joining the DocuSign Developer Community, you’ll get access to all the tools, tips and resources you’ll need to develop and deliver your own integrated electronic signature solutions. With your free DocuSign developer account, you can develop your own DocuSign solution and help your organization realize the cost savings, transaction control, and green benefits of electronic signature and online contract execution processes.

You can:

• Download the DocuSign Connect API 3.0 Developer Guide
• See live samples
• Download the DocuSign Connect API 3.0 SDK

This is just the beginning – we have more innovations to come in the near future. I’ll keep you posted on developments and you can also check out our forums and follow us on Twitter (@DocuSign).

Image courtesy of flickr user bfick under Creative Commons.

Net Caucus, the largest information technology policy conference in the US, attracted over 550 attendees in 2008. This year, the conference frames the policy debates that will challenge the Obama administration and the new Congress. Tech exhibition attendees will view over 30 hands-on demonstrations from major companies and innovators, allowing them to test-drive the latest technology and learn more about how the Internet is changing our lives. This event serves as a great opportunity for policymakers, industry executives and public interest advocates to come together and to network with their peers. The goal of this annual tech exhibition is to bring cutting-edge technology demonstrations to Capitol Hill that illustrate the power and flexibility of the Internet as medium for communications, commerce, and democracy.

Demoing DocuSign to senators and other members of Congress alongside other demonstrators including Google, Verizon, Microsoft, Comcast, Salesforce and many others was an amazing opportunity to share what we’ve done to help our customers streamline their online contract execution workflow. Last fall, we teamed up with one of the other demonstrators at Net Caucus, Salesforce, to release DocuSign Connect for Salesforce at the Dreamforce ‘08 Conference. DocuSign Connect is a suite of on-demand services that integrates our enterprise-class electronic signature and online contract execution product and the Salesforce platform. This tool can help organizations shorten their sales cycles. One of our DocuSign Connect customers, Comcast, also presented at Net Caucus.

Ted Girdner, Senior Director of Sales Operations at Comcast Business Services, shared why they chose DocuSign Connect:

We selected DocuSign because of their proven success in the e-Signature and contract execution market, superior enterprise service, and flexible integration with Salesforce.com. Deep integration between these two business-critical platforms is exactly what Comcast needed to significantly improve its contract management processes.

I love hearing stories of happy customers and conferences provide a great opportunity to see what cool things they’re doing. While I enjoyed Washington D.C., I’m looking forward to the sales meeting back in Seattle later this week.

Image courtesy of Flickr user i’m george. Used under creative commons

Psst…

Smart Envelopes – Enterprise customers with more complicated workflows can now control ‘who sees what’ in an envelope. This means that a single DocuSign envelope can contain multiple documents that are only viewable by certain recipients. For example, the customer signs the contract, but also in the envelope workflow is a ‘for office use only’ form that the sales manager fills out. This way, compound transactions can be managed in a single envelope. I’d like to see FedEx do that!

Custom Branding Controls – DocuSign account admins will now be able to setup their own logo, colors, and email message formats. This has been possible in the past, but required some custom work. Until January, this new capability will be available for ALL accounts to try out free of charge. So grab your color wheel and take it for a test drive.. I think you’ll like it!

New SecureFields form filling tools – My favorite advancement this year has got to be the incredible power of the DocuSign SecureFields technology – this allows any document to become a form, collect information, mask it, and then deliver it back to the sender. And I am talking data field, multi-line, checkbox, radio button groups, & drop down lists.. And, no – we won’t make you use Acrobat Professional to build the forms! With this release, we are enhancing SecureFields with some really cool new stuff -
*Regular Expression support – now you can mask just about any input. Need it to be a valid Visa #? No problem. Need to suppress spaces? Easy. See what you can do with ‘regex’ here.
* Auto-navigation control – now you can custom design the recipient experience when the tab around your forms. Want them to tab to ALL fields required or not? Easy. Want them to tab only to required fields? Simple. You design the experience, we’ll walk them through it.
* International Date/Time support – yes, finally we allow you to choose the date format you want – not just the old 5/5/2008. Pick from 8 different formats to suit your part of the world!
* Secure Hyperlink Fields – Create a hyperlink custom field and drag/drop it into any document. Now you can add a link to external web content right into your envelopes – a video, instruction manual, or anything else!

Salesforce Integration – I talked about this earlier, but this Salesforce integration really rocks! Nothing out there even comes close. DocuSign is now available integrated into Salesforce with some of the most powerful data-mapping tools available. Send any document status and/or even document form data directly into any object in Salesforce. Wow. The DocuSign address book is now integrated directly into the Salesforce contacts, accounts, and opportunities. Very powerrful.

The Engineering team has been busy – thanks folks, this is great stuff.
TG