How Electronic Signatures Can Boost the Growth of Your Business

A small business wants nothing more than to achieve financial growth and stability—everything else pales by comparison.

One of the less obvious ways to boost the growth of a startup and close in on that coveted stability is electronic signatures. A small detail, perhaps, but one that packs the potential of major impact.

E-signatures aren’t brand new but their uses are wide: imagine quicker real estate transactions, paperless healthcare, and effortless dealing with previously pesky insurance documents, among myriad other possibilities. Throw in the cloud for anywhere-access and you have a tool that benefits everyone involved in all sorts of situations.

So how does a startup fit in? Well, smaller companies often don’t have the resources that bigger businesses do, which means implementing technology such as e-signatures can be a game changer. Their bottom line will feel the effects immediately and company size is not a barrier to adoption.

For example, e-signatures can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to deliver documentation, which results in enhanced customer experience—something that translates into customer satisfaction and retention. This is hugely beneficial to startups seeking early traction. It’s also a way to differentiate themselves from competitors and larger firms who may be slow to adopt these kind of technologies.

As well, e-signatures can help beginner businesses get things done more quickly behind the scenes, further increasing their agility, which is already an advantage of a lean and nimble startup. And it’s a solution that can scale seamlessly with the growth of a company.

Some of the better known companies that provide e-signature services are EchoSign, which Adobe now owns, DocuSign, and Silanis, a Canadian company based in Montreal who sums up the benefits of e-signatures brilliantly.

“Replacing manual, paper-based processing with automated, electronic signing processes can enable any organization to reduce the cycle times, errors and costs associated with getting customers, partners, supplier and employees to review and sign documents needed to close new business, authorize decisions, and move operations forward,” says Silanis in their Beginner’s Guide to E-Signature.

Furthermore, many of these providers also provide developers with APIs to fully integrate e-signature into your branded applications adding an additional way to streamlining customer signatures. In fact, both Silanis and DocuSign allow developers to test their API for free which makes it that much easier to see if e-signatures are right for your startup.