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.

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!

You can apply your signature with your mouse, text, image or even a digital certificate by opening your PDF document in both Acrobat and Adobe Reader XI and clicking on the I Need to Sign pane. Sign by clicking Place Signature, then click Send Signed Document to send your document to others securely via EchoSign.

But what if you need others to sign and approve your document, and track the results?  Simply click the Get Others to Sign pane in Acrobat XI, then the Send for Signature.  This will securely upload your document to EchoSign and prompt you to enter the addresses for the additional signers.  If needed, you can drag and drop fields on the document for e-signatures, initials, contact information, company, title, or any other customized form field.  Click Send and your document is on its way.

The document recipient will receive an email from you (via the EchoSign service) with a link to the document and simple instructions on signing. Recipients don’t need anything but their browser to sign the document then send it back to you. They can review the document and sign instantly with a mouse, stylus, or by typing their name, even from their mobile device. Talk about easy!

Acrobat XI and EchoSign used together also makes it easy to route, complete and eSign forms. When creating a form in Acrobat XI, you can use the Convert to EchoSign Form option in the Form Editing panel to convert all of your fields to EchoSign aware fields. This means the form recipients will be able to fill your form and electronically sign it using EchoSign in their browser, saving additional steps and time.

Additionally, making these fields EchoSign-aware allows recipients to pre-fill saved information automatically from EchoSign, like their name and title. The EchoSign form fields in Acrobat have special field properties to determine the signers information that should be prefilled. Simply upload your form for distribution through EchoSign and recipients can easily and securely fill and sign forms, all electronically. Adobe Acrobat XI not only gives you a full array of signing capabilities, it now helps you get signatures and approvals much faster with full exposure into the signing process using EchoSign. Watch this video to see how you can sign documents in Acrobat and then upload to EchoSign for signing by others.

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

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

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

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

Our iOS application continues to make it easy and legally binding to get documents signed digitally in minutes, rather than the days or weeks it might otherwise take via paper document delivery. Users have reported the value of getting documents signed in person via their iPads and of sending documents from their EchoSign libraries, photo albums, email attachments and other applications. As of today, iOS users will also be able to:

1. Integrate with cloud-based document storage systems such as Box and Dropbox;
2. Save frequently used documents locally to the device and send these saved documents for signature;
3. Integrate with Box OneCloud’s mobile application to allow the Box iOS app to send documents directly to the EchoSign app;
4. Open documents in outside applications;
5. Print documents straight from the mobile device; and
6. Preview documents before sending them out for signature.

Business today is a more mobile pursuit than ever before, and teams are eager to leverage cloud-based, mobile-enabled tools to increase efficiency and close more deals – faster. Adobe EchoSign for iOS devices makes it easier for mobile workforces to incorporate Web contracting into their business activities, increasing productivity.

The latest Adobe EchoSign for iOS is available now. Download the app here.

Mangesh Bhandarkar, group product manager, Adobe EchoSign

Large health services companies like CIGNA constantly add new physicians and small practices to their network, which is a long process. CIGNA expands its network by more than 20,000 customers a year – resulting in more than one million pieces of paper that require signatures. In order to reduce the time needed to complete the paperwork associated with these additions, the company switched to Adobe EchoSign’s eSignature solution. As a result, CIGNA decreased the time it takes to add new physicians and practices into its network by more than half.

After seeing success with Adobe EchoSign, CIGNA adopted the service enterprise-wide. With more than 65 million customers worldwide, it is important that the company has enough physicians and offices to meet its customers’ needs.

With Adobe EchoSign, CIGNA can expand its network faster, giving patients access to more resources and providing faster treatment. Switching to an e-contracting process improved CIGNA’s internal operations and customer relationships. By giving customers faster access to healthcare, CIGNA sees notably greater levels of customer satisfaction. Plus, CIGNA experienced significant savings by eliminating paper and postage, all while expanding its green initiative.

This scenario is not only true for CIGNA, but for many health providers. Paperwork is a necessary part of the healthcare industry; however, it should not prevent patients from receiving the care they need, when they need it.

See how Adobe EchoSign helps other healthcare companies improve the contracting process and provide their patients with more resources in less time here.

Loretta Jones, senior marketing manager, Adobe EchoSign

We are excited to share some news hot off the press from the show floor at NetSuite World.

This week NetSuite recognized Adobe EchoSign as a Netsuite SuiteApp Partner of the Year. Adobe EchoSign for NetSuite brings all of EchoSign’s functionality to NetSuite users and is the only eSignature system with complete integration to NetSuite. For the full scoop on the news, check out the EchoSign blog, here.

Learn more about EchoSign for NetSuite.

The Atlanta Hawks ticket and suite sales teams always aim to sell face-to-face, but due to the nature of the business, it’s not always possible. The sales teams had to resort to closing deals over the phone, which presented delays. Often, getting a deal signed required several back-and-forth steps through email, fax and printing. Now, with the entire suite and ticket sales team using Adobe EchoSign, salespeople can email contracts to prospects while on the phone with them and have signatures returned in as few as two minutes. Plus, the available tracking mechanisms make it simple to analyze and improve on the sales process by analyzing which contracts are opened or signed, how many contracts were sent out, how many contracts were declined versus how many were signed, and who is sending contracts and when.

With a sales team drowning in paperwork, the Carolina Hurricanes eagerly made the switch to a Web contracting solution to manage its ticket sales process. Sales reps send out contracts via the EchoSign Web applications, and buyers can respond online or via smartphones or tablets, making the process much easier and quicker for customers.  The team saw fast success when it first adopted Adobe EchoSign to renew season tickets, and customers gave positive feedback about the platform’s easy-to-use features.

eSignatures streamline the entire ticket sales process, benefitting both the sales teams and the customers. So far in the 2012 season, the Atlanta Hawks have more than doubled the number of contracts signed as compared to the same time a year ago. Both teams have seen such great results that they’re planning to extend their use of the service.

The new age of Web contracting forever changes the sales process. Watch this video to see how.

Loretta Jones, senior marketing manager, Adobe EchoSign