Printers, overnight mail, scanners, and fax machines are killing business productivity. More and more organizations are moving away from paper-based approaches to their critical business processes to reduce costs, improve security, and limit environmental impact.  According to a recent Adobe study, “Paper: An Endangered Species?” the majority of managers surveyed had overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward paper-based processes and cited productivity, security, attracting talent and going green as the benefits of a completely digital workflow. The research is based on interviews with 1,051 U.S. managers in small, medium and large businesses that are responsible for creating or working with contracts.

Below are a few stats from the report, but to view the full report Click Here: Paper: An Endangered Species?

• 51% of respondents said that a digital workflow makes filing and managing documents easier

• More than two-thirds believe that paper-based contracts are prone to defacing

• 76% of respondents said they are impressed by companies that have a strong digital presence

• 98% of respondents noted they still use paper in their transactions involving contracts

Organizations that use eSignatures are seeing a dramatic decrease in the time needed to close deals, reduced contract negotiation times, faster “quote-to-cash”, and a safer, more secure way to track and store some of their most critical business documents.   And all eSignatures are backed by the federal ESIGN Act, ensuring the legality of the contract, which should put the customer at ease.

Remember floppy disks? What about cassette tapes? These two types of technology seem almost ancient, and something you might find in an antique store. Well move over floppy disks and cassette tapes and make some room for the fax machine! A large percentage of faxes are used to send a document with multiple signatures. What if these documents could be signed and exchanged electronically by each person?

Adobe Acrobat XI has full support for signing documents. Adobe EchoSign is an easy to use online service that allows you to instantly send, eSign, track and file documents securely. Recipients can sign right in their browser on virtually any connected device without downloading a plug-in or having to create an EchoSign account. Using these two products together gives you the ability to complete the entire process of signing documents electronically, and the final signed document can be viewed reliably by anyone with the free Adobe Reader.

It’s simple too!

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It’s always a great feeling when you win an award. It’s especially great when that award comes from a partner like SalesForce.com and you win the award because customers voted and chose your product as the best.

For the seventh straight year, Adobe EchoSign was named the number one e-signature application and overall winner for sales for the Salesforce.com’s 2012 AppExchange Customer Choice award! EchoSign collected the most glowing customer reviews in its category for the past year. Thank you to all our customers for your enthusiastic responses to our product and voting us number one again!

“Companies of all sizes turn to the AppExchange as the world’s leading business apps marketplace to extend the benefits of the cloud throughout their organizations,” said Ron Huddleston, senior vice president ISV and Channel, salesforce.com. “Adobe EchoSign taps into the power of social and mobile cloud technologies to transform the way companies connect with customers, partners and employees. We congratulate Adobe on being selected by customers as a leader in the Customer Choice Award category and applaud their ongoing commitment to delivering customer success.”

Adobe EchoSign is used by more than 35,000 companies of all sizes to sign 1.5 million contracts each month. EchoSign has helped these organizations cut sales close cycles by 50 percent to as much as 500 percent and reduce post-sale internal contract processing costs by 50 percent to 75 percent.

The New York Stock Exchange uses EchoSign to sign and manage renewal agreements with the companies listed on the exchange. “We saw an immediate improvement in the process. We reduce the time it took to get agreements signed from several days to about one hour,” said Brandon Baker, vice president at NYSE Technologies.

Those are just a few examples satisfied EchoSign customers. Why not find out what all the hoopla is about by taking a test drive here.

Eitan Saban, vice president, Customer Success, Adobe EchoSign  

Twitter: @EitanSaban

In my talks with Adobe EchoSign customers, I hear first hand how our web contracting and eSignature solution is changing the game. Just like video conferencing’s infiltration into business years ago, signing and managing contracts online is becoming second nature to business processes and companies are realizing the benefits.

I’ll be moderating a panel at Salesforce Dreamforce this year titled “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?” Experts from Groupon, Electronic Arts, SolarCity and Time Warner Cable will share lessons learned and best practices around web contracting, how their companies have increased ROI in Salesforce and turned their businesses into competitive sales machines using Adobe EchoSign.  Here are the details:

Session: “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?”

Date/Time: September 18 from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.

Venue: San Francisco Marriott Marquis

Room: Golden Gate A

Panelists: Groupon, Electronic Arts, Solar City and Time Warner Cable

For more updates on EchoSign at Dreamforce 2012, keep an eye on our blog and the Acrobat, EchoSign and Chatter Twitter handles (#df12).

We’ve entered into a new age of doing business in the cloud and web contracting is playing an important role in accelerating this transformation.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM, Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Twitter: @LynchKevinM

Since marketing and sales departments exist to make life easier for customers, I’m surprised to see so many teams drop this customer-centric philosophy at the most critical moment of the business-client relationship – the contract process. Adopting eSignatures helps sales and marketing teams save a lot of time and resources, while closing more deals with customers.

My recent article in Marketing Tech highlights several ways eSignatures benefit both the business and the customer.

For the business, eSignatures remove the contract process from the multiple steps needed to secure signatures offering a digital option that automates the many back-and-forth conversations between a sales rep and a client. Digital contracts also offer a way to collaboratively work on documents and provide an easy way to track, store and access contracts.

For the customer, eSignatures offer convenience as prospects can access contracts on the Web from their laptop, desktop and even mobile device essentially giving them 24/7 access. Most eSignature solutions don’t require software downloads, making it even more attractive for customers to sign this way. All eSignatures are backed by the federal ESIGN Act, ensuring the legality of the contract, which should put the customer at ease.

Read the full post in Marketing Tech to see how eSignatures can help increase ROI and customer loyalty.

Loretta Jones, head of marketing, Adobe EchoSign

More and more companies of all sizes are turning to electronic signatures to conduct business. They know eSignatures cut the time and costs associated with traditional paper-based processes. This means closing a deal faster, which means money in the bank!

That’s why we’re committed to making Adobe EchoSign the premier eSignature solution for today’s smart businesses. So today, we’re announcing several new features aimed at giving you greater control, greater flexibility and a peace of mind, so to speak.

First, with today’s announcement, all PDF files delivered from Adobe EchoSign will be certified with the Adobe CDS certificate. Adobe Reader and Acrobat will display your document with the Blue Certified Bar. The Adobe stamp certifies that a document delivered via Adobe EchoSign has not been altered or tampered with in any way. It is the genuine article. This is the kind of peace of mind that adds trust and confidence to your deals.

Next, we’ve added the ability to collect supporting documents from signers and attach them to the contract, creating a complete package of the deal. Signers simply upload files during e-signing. The uploaded documents become part of the record for the signed document and they also can be downloaded independently as needed.

In this release, we’ve also added the ability to get documents approved, in addition to the existing functionality of getting documents signed. Approvals can be a very powerful tool for organizational business processes, which require one or more people to approve an agreement before it is sent for signature. Approvers can also be required to fill in data, add initials, or even sign the document.

Finally, Adobe EchoSign is introducing conditional rules that let you define rules in your document for specific form fields to either show or hide based on the data entered during signing. Applying the appropriate conditional rules to form fields within an agreement ensures that the data collected from signers during the signing process matches the organization’s business requirements. Conditions can be defined through the authoring interface or via text-tags. Finally, new radio button fields make it easier for signers and approvers to complete forms.

We want eSignatures to be the standard way people conduct business. And we’ll continue to add features like these to get you there. You can get a more complete description of these new features and how they can enhance your businesses workflow on the Adobe EchoSign website.

Mangesh Bhandarkar, group product manager, Adobe EchoSign