Since 1998, Acteva, a San Francisco-based company, specializes in on-demand online event registration, ticketing and payment management services for both virtual and real-world events such as lectures, webinars, conferences and more. The company has helped large corporations, universities, non-profits and other clients manage events online and processes between 600 and 700 large custom event contracts annually.

Business Challenge 

With a healthy flow of large event contracts running through multiple departments each month, Ed Lemire, executive vice president for Acteva, was looking for a way to streamline contract management practices. Acteva salespeople juggled multiple contracts, created in Word, with numerous addendums. This consumed upwards of a half hour to generate and create contracts, not to mention the time necessary to get those documents in the hands of the right signers. Plus, management had no way to track individual changes salespeople made. “We wanted a contract process that limited areas that could be edited and modified, bottom line,” Lemire says. Additionally, Acteva was seeking to consolidate contract activity through its customer relationship management system, Salesforce.com. Acteva considered Salesforce a critical IT asset and wanted to create a sane workflow that put contracts quickly in the right hands of the appropriate signers— even if these people were different from the salesperson’s point-of- contact within a given organization. “We were trying to create a workflow,” Lemire explains. “Some of our customers are universities, large associations, chambers of commerce, government organizations—all customers where our sales associate typically deals with x person but the people who actually ratify the contract are board members and other people.” With so many people outside the process getting involved at the very end of negotiations, the challenge Acteva faced was that at least 20% of the signers would mark up the physical documents for changes. This was an aggravation the company was trying to avoid in the future as well.

DocuSign Solution 

Together with a partnership with a document automation provider, DocuSign made it possible for Acteva to run its contract management workflow directly from the Salesforce.com console. DocuSign offered Acteva a complete solution— from document generation through signing to storage and retrieval.

Results 

Acteva is now able to generate a contract based on elements from a customer’s Salesforce data and the type of contract needed. According to Lemire, sales staff can quickly utilize drop-down options that auto-populate a contract and any necessary addendums. Once the contract is generated, DocuSign allows Acteva to easily route contracts for signatures to numerous parties within a customer organization simultaneously. This helps Acteva avoid the long wait times necessary for a physical document to play hopscotch across various decision-makers’ desk piles. Once that contract is signed, DocuSign also enables Acteva to route the document to internal sales managers for review and ratification, then to the necessary stakeholders who might also need copies to get the actual fulfillment work executed. Acteva has managed to create a mean-lean contract management lifecycle with DocuSign. The previously laborious process taking 30 minutes to generate and create contracts, now takes Acteva salespeople less than 10 minutes. As for the signing process, Acteva customers used to take an average of two days to sign on the dotted line. Now the company sees signed copies delivered within 15 minutes. “If the contract is sent to the right person, it is very quick and easy for them to ratify the contract with a few simple clicks,” says Lemire. “The turnaround time is much faster.” Once the contract is signed, salespeople can access and review contract information with the click of a button within Salesforce.“Basically we have one centralized repository of contract data,” Lemire says. Finally, the other advantage is that Acteva is able to rein in the customer urge to mark up documents that are ready to be finalized. “This eliminates that need to revise,” says Lemire. “For us, that’s a good thing.”