One of the most common and important business processes in the world is the signing of contracts. Companies spend alot of time coming up with great ideas; selling, marketing, and building those great ideas into products and services; and as a crucial last step, customers need to sign contracts. But getting a contract signed is far from easy – the process is often time consuming, cumbersome, complex, and error prone.
But now, there is a better way. And the better way is not just for contracts, it can be used for documents important to any sales process including proposals, quotes, invoices, customer letters, and more. We call it “Create-Send-Sign” and indeed its as easy as 1-2-3.
The idea is to have a simple online wizard which guides a user through the process of creating, sending, and signing a document, where the process is as follows:
- Create: Documents can be based on common templates such as contracts, proposals, etc. A user selects a template and customer data is automatically inserted to create an online document. A user can edit the document if needed or go straight to final output. Once the document is ready, it is saved as a PDF, and it can be previewed to check for accuracy and quality.
- Send: Once the document has been created, edited (if needed), previewed, and saved, it can be emailed to a prospect or customer. The email along with a link to the document is saved into an activity history so there is an audit trail for sending the document. Emailing a document would be appropriate for a sales proposal or an invoice as examples.
- Sign: If a signature is needed, a user can send a document for electronic signing or written signature. In the case of e-signing, the recipient and sender complete the e-signing process completely via email. For written signatures, the document is sent to a recipient who signs it and returns the document via a 1-800 fax number. The 1-800 fax number ensures the document is scanned and digitized with final signed copies emailed to all parties. At any time, it is possible to check the document signing status
A screen shot is available by clicking on the thumbnail below, which illustrates the Create-Send-Sign wizard with an online editor showing the online document.
From a business perspective, the Create-Send-Sign feature can be hugely valuable to any user that needs to quickly and easily create documents online for sending or signing. Time can be reduced in a sales process to complete a contract signing, revenues can be delivered more quickly, staff time can be reduced by having a quick way to generate these documents, and accuracy is increased through standardization of templates and automatic inclusion of customer data. Its a big, big win for everyone involved. If this sounds good to you, install ShareOffice right now from the salesforce.com AppExchange.
From a technical perspective, there is alot of complexity under the hood. This solution integrates ShareMethods, salesforce.com, EchoSign, and iNetWord into a seamless user experience and a special thanks to all of our partners who supported us in making this happen. The solution leverages the power of OpenSAM, an open standard for online app integration, as well as the Force.com and EchoSign web services APIs. Its a great example of the power of web architecture to make life simple and easy for a user, delivering many benefits, on-demand. We are very excited about the importance of this new capability and delivering it into the marketplace. We invite you to check it out and roll it out across your organization so that Create-Send-Sign can be as easy as 1-2-3.
