Founder of M&E shares his experience with Clicksign in signing commercial contracts in education
*Text written by: Raphael Santo
My experience with electronic signature tools and the efficiency gain I obtained in the commercial operations of Mercado&Educação
I started in the basic education market during an internship in the commercial area selling a student recruitment solution. Currently, about 5 years later, I remain in this vast and complex sector managing sales and partner success teams, always focused on private schools.
In terms of clarification, an explanation of the market is worth: We are talking about almost 40,000 private schools present in Brazil, these cover about 9 million students.
The basic education market still has low professionalization in management and there is an enormous amount of pulverization in the market. Brands tend to have regional appeal, in other words, a strong school in São Paulo does not necessarily have the same strength in other Brazilian states.
These characteristics make this a market marked by a lot of complexity and peculiarities for all those involved.
A solution aimed at attracting new students has a general scope, that is, a potential market that is close to the totality of almost 40 thousand institutions.
With a perfectly scalable solution, we went from 0 to 7 thousand partner schools, facing all the challenges related to signing and archiving contracts that, at first, took place in a completely manual and physical process.
Hiring an electronic signature service brought advantages in the agility of signatures, as well as a better organization of signed documents.
As with most sales processes, signing the contract, when necessary, is a critical step and can result in great pain when closing deals.
A simplified flow, with few steps and easy access can be critical to improving business results.
Below, I provide in more detail the operational efficiency gain we had from the incorporation of an electronic digital contract signature tool into our business process.
Digital contract tools make the signing process between the parties much faster
In a manual and physical process, it was necessary to attribute the school data to the contract, print the document and collect the signature of those responsible for the company, and then we had two ways, the first being scanned and sent to the partner school and the second taking the document physically to be signed.
As sales were mostly made by the team of Inside Sales, many of our files were sent by e-mail to interested parties who had to print the document, sign the signature and scan the contract again.
The bureaucracy of the process made the average return time of contracts much longer and, in general, required much more Follow-ups from our sales team to finalize subscriptions.
Having a digital tool made contracts signed much faster, and we gained speed in the operation and in the closing of deals.
The justification is very simple, with a simplified email subscription process, interested parties are able to complete the steps in less time with a few steps to completion.
A tip to make this process even more efficient, in our experience, is to take the necessary data that must be included in the document during the negotiation, leaving the contracting party with the minimum number of steps necessary to finalize the signatures.
File standardization and process simplification mitigates and, in many cases, avoids rework
Admittedly, most of our contracts, in our physical and manual contract signing model, would come scanned and emailed, but the quality and format were always uncertain.
If, on the one hand, we received scanned contracts with good scanning properties, on the other hand, the contract was sometimes received through photos of the most varied qualities. Sometimes it is necessary to request a new photo/scanner of the contract and this further adds to the commercial cycle.
We add to this the fact that eventually an error could have occurred in the data or information described in the contract and it was essential to repeat the entire manual and physical process mentioned above.
With Clicksign, standardization collaborates with a process in which rework is reduced. In cases where there is a need to change data, since it is quickly possible to do so in the digital files, as well as to avoid any type of qualitative problem of files sent by interested parties during the sending of the contract.
Digital signature tools collaborate with document archiving
I remember that the archiving process went through different organizational processes, initially this document was archived in a folder with the other business information, then a single folder was made for all the files and finally we standardized the file name so that it could be easily accessed.
Not only that, we had the physical contracts for the deals that we closed in person as well, so different filing formats were needed, physical and digital.
Have a system with the possibility of automatically archiving contracts after proper signatures with easy access, it collaborates in the management of these documents and makes it easier for us to review contracts whenever necessary, making the files more efficient.
Final considerations: Digital contracts are more efficient in the operation and management of files
I noticed that the gains we obtained from the contraction of the tool were:
- Speed of subscriptions
- Productivity of commercial teams
- Rework mitigation
- File organization
With a considerable volume of new partner schools, adopting ClickSign helped us to gain operational efficiency, since through the tool we were able to gain speed in subscriptions, which consequently led to a reduction in the sales cycle. With the tool, we were also able to avoid reworking with file standardization and reduce the steps for changing data and information and, finally, a substantial gain in the management and archiving of contracts, generating much more productivity for our operation for the processes within the commercial routine.
*Raphael Santo — Technologist and graduate in Management from UFSCar. Founded and manages Market & Education, an educational market blog. He is the manager of the Best School marketplace of Grupo Quero Educação, an enthusiast in the sales world and passionate about the educational theme.
Finally, if you also want to digitize your processes, as the leading companies in the market already do, Clicksign is the ideal solution to accelerate the growth of your business!
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