Case Study: Qualcomm

Improved Contract Processes Result in Faster Sales Cycles, Faster Service Provisioning, and Happier Customers

Company Overview

Qualcomm Incorporated is a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions. Since 1988, Qualcomm Enterprise Services (QES), formerly known as Qualcomm Wireless Business Solutions, has provided integrated wireless systems and services to businesses around the world. QES delivers the actionable information businesses seek in order to operate at peak performance and improve the quality of life for its customers, their employees and the entire value chain.

Qualcomm on Using EchoSign to Deliver Faster Sales Processes

Workflow Challenge

QES processes a large volume of contracts and amendments on an ongoing basis. “The contracts staff supports a large sales team that is located throughout the United States. It is critical to stay in close touch with the sales team and give them the confidence that our business processes are efficient, accurate and customer friendly to the fullest extent possible,” says Suzanne Reynolds, Senior Director of contracts for QES.

The business process to get a customer’s signature on a contract has historically been a lengthy and very manual process for QES. Often, it took up to two weeks to get a customer to sign a contract, counter-sign and then distribute the contract to all interested parties. This significantly delayed the sales cycle, which meant that service provisioning and shipments could be delayed, which in turn resulted in delayed billing and revenue. Additionally, the QES sales team had no visibility into the status of a contract, resulting in additional phone calls and emails to the contracts group.

The contracts and sales teams needed a new tool to support an efficient signature process. The key requirements included ease of use, integration with Salesforce.com, and complete visibility for the sales team.

EchoSign Solution

In late 2007, the Qualcomm Salesforce IT group found EchoSign on the Force.com AppExchange and deployed the application to a pilot group in less than 2 weeks followed by a complete roll-out in March.

“Deploying EchoSign for Salesforce was an outstanding experience and shows the power of the Force.com AppExchange. By allowing Salesforce customers to easily click and install fully integrated add-on applications like EchoSign, the Force.com AppExchange ensures that key functionality to solve real-world business problems is only a few mouse clicks away,” says Mark Silber, IT Systems Architect at Qualcomm.

EchoSign is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce and delivers increased value to Qualcomm’s investment in Salesforce. Every contract is instantly viewable in Salesforce, providing everyone with real-time visibility into the contract status. Qualcomm also deployed extensive dashboards to further collect and report metrics around the contract process and additional custom workflow and notifications in Salesforce.

Results

All EchoSign users are seeing impressive results. “EchoSign delivers improved product delivery cycles and our users love the functionality and ease of use. Our objective was to eliminate the manual, cumbersome process of getting a customer contract signed. EchoSign does that beautifully. Customer contracts sent through EchoSign are signed in less than 2 days, on average, with the fastest signature cycle clocking in at 14 minutes,” says Silber.

The QES sales and contracts groups use the EchoSign audit trail (visible in Salesforce) to determine the current state of the contract, including when the contract is viewed by the customer. This visibility significantly reduces the time spent on email or phone call follow-ups, enabling the sales team to focus on the sale and not associated paperwork.

“Training individuals to use Echosign is quick and painless. In fact, the contracts department has found that EchoSign is quickly becoming the preferred signature method for both the sales team and for customers as they are exposed to it,” says Brandon McCulley, Senior Contracts Administrator at QES. “Both the sales team and our customers love EchoSign. From our customers perspective, we are definitely ‘easier to do business with’ and we’re yielding tangible results — everybody wins!”

As a standalone service, EchoSign is an extremely powerful and effective tool. When combined and integrated seamlessly with Salesforce, it’s a solution that can’t be beat

— Mark Silber, IT Systems Architect, Qualcomm