10 ways small businesses can win using eSignatures

Are you considering using electronic signatures in your SMB? Electronic signatures are becoming the first port of call for removing the friction and time from contracts and agreements. Electronic signatures are used in many organisations and are legal in the UK. 

If you are wondering where you can apply electronic signatures for fast efficiency gains, here are are 10 ways for small businesses to use DocuSign eSignature. It’s the most popular tool in the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

Top 10 uses for eSignature for SMB’s

1. Sales contracts

Sales are essential to business and the sales team is often the primary source of growth. Streamlining sales agreement workflows can have many benefits. Routing sales agreements electronically allows users to track the progress of each approval and speeds up sales contracts. Up to 82% of agreements are signed in less than a day with electronic signatures.

2. Vendor and supplier agreements

The process of negotiating with vendors can be slow, manual and frustrating. Using DocuSign eSignature can help if you secure a favourable outcome to lock in prices and terms faster and help you finalise agreements.

3. New customer forms

Using an electronic signature makes onboarding new customers easier. There are many examples in business where customer forms are needed such as registering for healthcare, opening a new bank account, or other services. Using an electronic signature can make the whole process easier for customers and employees. Organisations can eliminate duplicate data entry along with saving printing and postage costs. 

4. Change orders

Scope creep often happens on large projects like digital product builds or construction projects. If you allow change requests and orders to be managed using electronic signatures it helps you to avoid additional delays mid-project and ensures a complete, documented paper trail for review in the cloud.

5. Customer approvals

If your customer needs to approve the product or service your organisation is supplying before final designs or manufacture, collecting an electronic signature can really help. It’s easy to capture and store approvals. Electronic signatures can also speed up the approval process. 

6. Employee onboarding

Welcoming a new employee is crucial and an easy onboarding process can create a great first impression of your company. Usually a new employee has a whole realm of forms to complete including contact details, benefit enrolment, payroll forms and more. The whole employee onboarding experience can be improved with DocuSign eSignature which helps to make the process seamless. Discover more about creatthe employee experience paperless.  https://www.docusign.co.uk/blog/how-to-create-paperless-hr-department

7. Intellectual property licensing & other legal agreements

DocuSign electronic signatures are legally binding with a court-admissible audit trail. Electronic signatures are suitable for most legal documents such as intellectual property licensing and using eSignature can help organisations turnaround documents faster. 

8. Non-disclosure agreements

Non-disclosure agreements are common and provide the security that neither party will disclose confidential information. Obtaining a wet signature can cause delays to the non-disclosure signing process but with an eSignature you can sign within minutes from anywhere so that discussions can be entered with confidence. 

9. Distributor/channel agreements

If as part of you business you have a partnership with dealers, distributors or other sales channels that are core to the success of your business, electronic signatures can make it easier and more attractive to do business with you.

10. Parental consent & age verification

Electronic signatures can integrate with ID verification solutions to make it easy to give permission from parents or check ID. 

If this has inspired you to switch to electronic signatures, sign up for a free trial and see what you think. Or, if you’re already a customer, discover more about the complete DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

 

Author
Mangesh Bhandarkar
GVP, Product Management
Published