Case Study: LinkedIn
Salesforce.com Application: Delivering Automated Controls for Contract Processing
Company Overview
LinkedIn is an online network of more than 18 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing more than 150 industries. LinkedIn takes your professional network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful professional network. Currently, the professional network on LinkedIn represents all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and numerous other industries.
Workflow Challenge
Last summer, Brooke Watts, Sr. Manager, Customer Advocacy, was helping to implement a sales process and controls for the LinkedIn corporate sales group — a group of 8-10 reps processing 50-75 corporate contracts per month. “We are a decentralized sales team and needed to implement automated controls around processing our contracts.” To solve this problem, LinkedIn created corporate order forms directly in their Salesforce application. However, this only automated part of the problem as the corporate sales reps still had to get the contracts signed outside of the Salesforce environment using a traditional fax machine. This signature process typically took a few days and in extreme cases could take up to a week. In addition, the executed paper contracts were filed in hardcopy and not easily accessed by the sales team, sales management, or finance.
EchoSign Solution
A consultant working with Brooke recommended EchoSign for Salesforce as the missing piece of the solution — EchoSign turns Salesforce into a sales-based contract management application and automated the planned manual process of scanning and uploading executed contracts to Salesforce. LinkedIn implemented EchoSign in a couple days and the training for the sales team was minimal. Originally, Brooke created a short 2 page training document for the entire “quote to close” process and it is still in use today to train new reps. With EchoSign for Salesforce, LinkedIn has a completely automated contract processing system — all corporate order forms originate in Salesforce, the signature status automatically managed and updated in Salesforce, and all executed contracts are automatically filed and stored with the opportunity in Salesforce. In addition, EchoSign flexibly supports both written signatures and e-signatures, allowing LinkedIn to offer either option to their customers.
Results
“We definitely got the best advice from our consultant,” says Brooke, “with EchoSign contracts come back signed in minutes.” LinkedIn corporate customers frequently comment on how easy it is to sign contracts, and due to the ease of use, LinkedIn is in the process of transitioning from written signatures to e-signatures. The “signed and filed” email ensures that all parties receive a copy of the executed contract and can access it at any time via email or in Salesforce. Brooke also uses EchoSign to manage vendor contracts — “prior to EchoSign, it wasn’t easy to manage my contracts with vendors because there was always a lag between the time I signed the contract and the time I received the counter signed copy. Now, EchoSign takes care of everything and I’m notified immediately when the agreement is executed.” LinkedIn is also investigating the use of EchoSign for additional external applications such as user change forms, as well as internal applications such as PTO approvals.
With EchoSign, contracts are signed in minutes!
— Brooke Watts, Sr. Manager, Customer Advocacy