How DocuSign Helps Salesforce Attract Talent And Win Customers

Salesforce.com is a public software company with more than $3bn in annual revenue, 100,000 customers and 12,000 employees around the world.

A classic disruptor, salesforce.com’s agility and digital business processes have helped the company achieve 37 percent year-over-year revenue growth while competing alongside Microsoft and Oracle. Salesforce.com needed a solution to shorten the time to services while reducing overhead costs. Additionally, growing at such a large rate required improved speed to talent acquisition. Salesforce.com worked with DocuSign to streamline customer and talent onboarding with a digital end-to-end workflow.

The Challenge

Salesforce.com was struggling against lengthy delays to onboarding new customers and talent – unacceptable hindrances to the rapid growth and profitability crucial for success in the high-tech industry.

Employee overhead should not increase with revenue growth. Previously, however, manual customer onboarding processes created challenges to scaling contract services and managing data for salesforce.com’s customers – more than 100,000 accounts.

Due to a manual customer onboarding process, time between initiating new client contracts and provisioning services averaged two days. As Salesforce can be provisioned immediately upon contract execution, that delay was two days too long. Further, it was unacceptable for a disconnected manual customer onboarding process to hinder salesforce.com, whose solutions help other businesses establish strong connections with their customers.

Salesforce.com’s service contracts, the largest of which is valued at nine figures, needed to be digitised to enable streamlined customer onboarding in less time. In addition, the company needed a solution to onboard new talent.

Previously, offer letters were generated within Salesforce for automatic completion of 17 mandatory fields and eight optional paragraphs. As the next step, however, offer letters were printed and sent via FedEx between salesforce.com recruiter and candidate. The associated manual tasks caused significant time delays to new talent onboarding. Minimum turnaround time per offer letter was one week and each cost $63 to send. Incomplete packages further delayed onboarding and increased shipping costs. Salesforce.com needed a scalable solution that was flexible, reliable, secure and easy to use for multiple workflows.

Solution

Initially looking for a solution to sign service contracts, salesforce.com embedded DocuSign with existing systems to automate the customer onboarding process and streamline internal processes.

In addition, DocuSign integrated directly with Salesforce to automatically extract candidate data for electronic offer letters. The new process is still initiated in the platform, and the recruiter does not have to leave the originating system. DocuSign creates seamless end-to-end digital workflows in multiple departments. Salesforce.com has found streamlining customer and talent onboarding with DocuSign to be a viable replacement of manual processes, increasing revenue and growing a skilled team without escalating overhead expenses.

Benefit

Benefits for Customer Onboarding: Now, account executives are saving 10 minutes per quote with DocuSign. As soon as a customer completes the contract, it is automatically assessed for launch. If specified criteria have been met, services are immediately initiated. Despite an increase in volume, fewer orders are processed manually than ever before.

As a result of this automation, customer onboarding has essentially become self-service. 90 percent of services are now provisioned within one day, and 60 percent are enabled within 15 minutes. More importantly, salesforce.com is also saving an average of $19.35 and, in some cases, as high as $50 per sales contract.

Salesforce.com is growing its revenue upwards of 30 percent without adding any head count to their contract service organisation. Not having to leverage resources for personnel growth for contract services, the company is leveraging DocuSign to expand other areas.

Benefits for New Talent Onboarding: Now, offer letters are delivered almost instantaneously. In the first six months of use, the 1,000 offer letters salesforce.com extended were returned in an average of 21 hours with zero incomplete fields. Further, the company has eliminated shipping costs from the onboarding process, saving $63,000 in that first six months. A low expense-to-revenue ratio is pivotal to scaling business for the long haul. Salesforce.com now closes more deals in less time and acquires new talent faster, allowing for consistent resources with 37 percent year-over-year revenue growth.

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