Nothing beats an application that actually makes your day better.  An application that you use because you want to use it, and not because your company management has dictated its use.

One app that I keep hearing about at the grass roots of businesses I visit is Echosign, the online contract signing app.  Other apps exist in the same space – Docusign being another leader, but it’s Echosign that I keep hearing in my network.

In my sales career I’ve wasted a huge amount of time creating contracts, emailing them as PDF’s to customers, requiring them to print them, sign them, fax all the pages back, for me to print them, get them counter-signed, scan them and file them in the right place.

The friction in this process is immense, and the amount of effort required from your customer can slow a deal down by days or weeks – especially if you just receive back a selection of the contract’s pages and you have to ask for them to re-send.  Not a great atmosphere!

Echosign links into your CRM system enabling easy creation of your contracts and then allows your customer to click to the right sections and type in their signature.  A link to the signed contract is then forwarded to any counter-signatories before the finalised contract is emailed to all parties with the lovely message telling you your agreement is “Signed and Filed!”

The average time to signature across Echosign is 42 minutes – which is a dramatic shift from the days or weeks in paper-world.

As a sales person, once you have Echosigned (or Docusigned) then you would never send a contract another way.

This has to be the goal for any tech vendor – to get your app to a point where the actual users become addicted to using it after a single touch, and that no-one needs to mandate the use of the app, it’s use is driven from the grass roots of the business.

What other apps have you used that have the Echosign Effect?  Do you focus on user adoption as a key measure of implementation success?

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