Case Study: Marketo

EchoSign helps deliver a consistent sales process

Company Overview

“We needed a tool to help make our sales process consistent across the company.” said Bill Binch, Vice President Sales and Customer Success, “We had reps emailing their quotes out to customers and using multiple fax machines and efax numbers to receive the executed agreements. Tracking which proposals were sent and when they were signed was a challenge. Plus it was a manual process for integrating executed contracts to Salesforce. We searched for a streamlined process to track proposals and have a single location for storing executed orders.” With this manual process, many contracts were not executed immediately, but were returned as “redlined” drafts. In many cases, it took — on average — a week to get a contract signed.

Workflow Challenge

In August 2008, Marketo found EchoSign for Salesforce on the AppExchange and implemented the application in less than a day. The sales staff required no formal training. “We gave our sales reps a 10 min tutorial on EchoSign, and away we went,” says Bill. Now, EchoSign is the de facto signature standard for Marketo.

EchoSign Solution

Marketo has seen a number of business benefits from EchoSign. “From a business standpoint, we’ve seen the incidence of redlining on custom SLAs (service level agreements) reduced by 50-75% so we engage less in contract negotiations, and experience a smoother closing process”. Since using EchoSign, signed contracts are returned on average in 2 days, with the fastest turnaround in 5 minutes.

Results

With EchoSign, sales reps can now see the status of the contract at any time – all from within Salesforce. Less time is spent on post-sale paper work and contacting the customer to request the contract status. “From a management perspective, I really appreciate the reporting capabilities. Towards the last half of each month, I look at the reports to check the status of all outstanding contracts.”

Once the contract is signed, it is a smoother process to move the new customer through the enablement, customer success and renewal phases. “EchoSign is a tool that makes both our sales process and operations more effective.” Marketo has not experienced any resistance from the customers. “EchoSign makes us look advanced and cutting edge, and since many of our customers are in the technology sector it works out well.”

Finally, EchoSign has helped Marketo close key end-of-the-month business. “It was Saturday, Jan 31, 5:30pm. The customer contact indicated that his CFO needed to counter sign the agreement and he said to me, “I’m not sure my CFO can get to a fax machine this late on Saturday”. We “EchoSign’d” the agreement to the CFO and he signed it on his Blackberry. We closed the deal and that’s what counts.”

With EchoSign we get it done.

— Bill Binch, VP, Sales and Customer Success, Marketo