I had the good fortune of co-hosting a webcast with Peter Ostrow, Research Director, Sales Effectiveness at Aberdeen Group at the end of September to discuss what impact replacing one’s pen and paper contracting process with an all-electronic process has on an organization’s bottom line. (You can access the recording here.)

Peter reviewed some of the impressive findings from Aberdeen’s recent research report during the webcast, including how e-signatures have enabled some companies to increase year-over-year sales cycle by 12%, and are now:

• 50% more likely to get customers to renew
• 41% more likely to reduce proposal error rates
• 18% more likely to shorten their sales cycles

Peter explained the reason behind the recent surge in the use of e-signatures for the contracting and sales process:

“As sales organizations struggle to mitigate the effects of the economic downturn, one of the biggest challenges is bringing their sales cycle under control. Electronic signatures represent an opportunity for sales organizations to reduce the lead-to-win timeframe, remove friction points from the contracting process and increase close ratios.”

SaaS Solutions Make it Easy for Agents and Brokers to Adopt E-Signatures

The good news is that SaaS e-signature offerings, like Silanis e-SignLive with IBM LotusLive, make it extremely easy for independent agents and brokerage firms to move to paperless processing of on-boarding and licensing agreements, customer claims, new business applications, and more.

Because e-signing capabilities are delivered as a service over the cloud, there is no software or hardware to purchase, install or maintain. For a low monthly subscription fee, agents can sign up for an online service and start e-signing right away using nothing more than a web browser and their mouse.

What’s more, increasingly more services are now supporting the ability to e-sign documents using mobile devices, like the Apple iPad, making them viable solutions for “E-Signing on the Go” and customer-facing processes!

Sign Up for a Free 30-Day Trial of e-SignLive and You Can Win a Free iPad