Paperwork, monetary costs and most of all – wasted time. Signing a contract has long been an unnecessarily cumbersome process, but it really doesn’t have to be.
Thanks in part to the E-Sign Act and the EU’s directive on electronic signatures, electronic signatures were allowed as legally binding alternatives to handwritten signatures as early as twenty years ago. Today, more companies are taking advantage of the opportunity to offer electronic signatures, making it easy for their customers to sign agreements directly from their mobile phone or computer. E-signatures do not only increase your competitiveness by saving you money, time and energy, but also because they offer an environmentally friendly alternative to paper documentation. In other words, e-signatures simply mean benefits, and we delve into some of those below.
1. Anywhere, anytime and (almost) anyway
Signing an agreement electronically is easy. Arrange a meeting in order to sign a document, or wait for a contract to arrive in the post just to sign it and send it back? These are now just memories! Instead, you can sign your contract directly from your computer or mobile phone. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting on the beach in the Bahamas or waiting for the bus, you can still sign. If more than one person needs to sign, well, there are no problems there either, because everyone can do it from different places.
2. Save time, money and energy
Time is money, as they say. With e-signatures, you don’t have to bother the process of posting, scanning and saving contracts into different archives. Instead, it is possible to sign an agreement in a flash, and when it’s done, it’s done. Companies no longer need to spend hours handling physical documents, but can instead handle the entire contract process in just a few minutes. A study from Forrester Consulting shows that e-signatures speed up the signing process up to 21 times compared to traditional signing. What would that mean for your business? Applied to all sales processes throughout an entire year, it quickly becomes quite a lot of time saved. Costs for printing, postage and, above all, administration are all avoided. Our Lime eSign tool was specially developed to be as simple as possible and to integrate itself with Lime CRM, where the entire sales process, from document upload to communication and signing, is all managed directly and in one place.
3. E-signatures, synonymous with security
Electronic signatures are more secure than traditional alternatives and make it much more difficult for counterfeits to slip through the net. Signing is often combined with an e-identification process that ensures that the right person signs the contract and the agreement isn’t at risk of being corrupted. Also, having all your paperwork gathered in just one system prevents important documents from getting lost.
4. Everyone likes satisfied customers
Customers like when processes are simple, professional and fast. As a company, it’s important to reflect on your customers’ experience of dealing with you. Using e-signatures makes everything easier for both parties, and when companies can provide a friction-free experience as early as during the signing process, it sends an important signal to the customer. The environmental benefits of a digital solution can’t be overemphasised either, as they might just give you that little edge over competitors in the eyes of today’s enlightened decision-makers. It’s no wonder more and more businesses are realising the benefits of electronic signatures.
Lime eSign is exactly what it sounds like – a digital way to seal your deals. Once you have integrated a signing feature in your CRM you can forget about documents going missing.