SalesTechStar Interview with Sunil Patro, Founder & CEO at Signeasy

The optimized use of eSignature platforms can help sales teams save a lot of time while enabling quicker deal closures, Sunil Patro, Founder & CEO at Signeasy weighs in with a few thoughts:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Sunil, tell us more about your journey through the tech-B2B market and more on what inspired Signeasy?

Hi Paroma! Thanks for inviting me to this series!

Signeasy’s origin can be traced back to a remote beach in Mexico, when I needed to sign a job offer letter during my vacation. After half a day of running around to get this done, I was convinced of the need for an easier solution.

That’s how Signeasy was born. With my background in engineering and product development in the tech start-up space, I wanted to address the inconveniences faced by individuals and businesses stuck in the print-fax-scan paperwork processing routine.

When it went live on the App Store in 2010, Signeasy was the first-ever document signing app built for mobile. Today, we have a fully fledged SaaS solution that is laser-focused on making document transactions fully digital and ‘easy’ for small and mid-sized businesses.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Alexey Aylarov, Co-founder and CEO at Voximplant

As a bootstrapped company, what were some of the challenges you faced that you’d like to share key learnings from now?

 When Signeasy launched in 2010, building a mobile app for eSignatures at the time was extremely innovative. Of course, that came with challenges and opportunities: working evenings and weekends, balancing a full-time job, and managing a lean team of contractors to help bring my vision to life with limited financial resources. However, our revenue figures rapidly progressed in 2013 when we joined Microsoft’s accelerator program. We broke even after three years in business, and from then on, Signeasy has had an upward trajectory.

Key learnings from this time include:

• Leaning into partner relationships – Leverage strategic partnerships with Apple, Google and Microsoft can get your platform visibility and credibility.
• Having a user-first (not buyer-first) mindset – Build consistent user delight at every touchpoint, and let happy users organically grow into satisfied business customers.
• Creating culture – Nurture a culture of innovation and customer obsession. Find passionate people who like solving problems and creating impact.

While the early years were challenging, our grit and tenacity pushed us through. After years of bootstrapping our way to success, Signeasy took outside funding from a group of strategic advisors in late 2020, achieving more profitability in a short period of time, and using that revenue to scale the company and continue to innovate with new products and features.

Today, Signeasy’s brand loyalty speaks volumes: Tens of millions of eSignatures signed across the globe, SignEasy’s app for iOS and Android has been downloaded more than 9 million times, and regularly ranks among Apple’s App Store 100 highest-grossing business apps. Our integrations with Google and Microsoft ecosystem have gotten world-wide recognition and our solution has gathered innovator mentions in many independent software review sites and analyst research reports.

When it comes to improving digitized workflows for sales teams, why are document management tools and esignature tools (those that integrate with existing platforms easily) now the need of the hour? What best practices would you share with sales teams still implementing all of this?

In today’s world of distributed work, there is a significant adoption of CRM especially among SMBs. Salesforce is positioning itself to become every company’s new home base. However, some of the key workflows such as contract negotiations and signing happens outside of the CRM system, which is not ideal for governance and auditability. A modern eSignature workflow that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce can help sales professionals save hours of manual work and reduce document turn around times to minutes—ultimately resulting in shorter sales cycles, with complete visibility into the audit trail within Salesforce.

Some best practices to keep an eye out for: 1)  Seamless integration that takes a few minutes to set up, 2) Product vision and steady roadmap with continued investment, 3) Transparent pricing and packaging to simplify decision making.

At Signeasy, the Salesforce integration’s product team works closely with our own sales leadership to define the product roadmap.

We’d love to hear more about some of your recent features/capabilities like Signeasy for Salesforce?

Signeasy for Salesforce is a native eSignature solution purpose-built for Salesforce users and admins. As with anything we do, we have focused on making it easy for our customer at every step. It can be set up in three simple steps, it is highly intuitive, offers powerful capabilities within Salesforce, and the pricing is transparent with no hidden charges. Salesforce users can send documents out for signature and track their progress within the opportunities, accounts and contacts sections. We aim to help sales teams accelerate their sales cycle by eliminating tedious, manual processes via automated contract and document workflows.

We also became SOC2 Type II and HIPAA compliant, opening up new opportunities for our solution to be used by industries like healthcare. This was a top request from our customers and prospects and something we had wanted to do for a long time. We believe strongly in data privacy and security and building trust with our customers.

A few thoughts on how you feel sales tech as a segment will move in 2022?

Sales tech has seen tremendous growth in the last five years. What has traditionally been highly manual is now seeing new tools like auto-prospecting sequences, call recording with feedback, in-app training, interacting with trial users, etc. helping automate a lot of the unknowns and providing real feedback throughout the buyer journey.

Take eSignatures for example. Integrating one within your CRM not only gives you the power to achieve operational excellence and improve forecasting but also helps you understand buyer personas and their behaviors. One example is if the prospect has opened the quote or contract, you have sent them for signature, you can instantly see a “Viewed” notification inside your Salesforce contact dashboard. This information can give you that immense benefit of calling or emailing your prospect to clarify any questions or doubts right on time. As they say, “Strike while the iron is hot”, to close the deal.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital sales/customer communication tips and best practices before we wrap up!

The next decade will position sales at the forefront of innovation, with key learnings from selling, servicing, and collaborating remotely. Leaders should leverage tech tools to empower their sales teams as customers today have come to expect sophisticated and personalized experiences that are contextual and non-intrusive in nature.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Aaron Seyler, Senior Vice President of Sales at TeleSign