Ryan Dohrn answers Travis from Boise about getting his boss to accept electronic signatures instead of handwritten ones. E-signatures are legally binding with proper encryption and audit trails. DocuSign and similar platforms can close deals 50% faster by cutting out printing and faxing.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn, your sales coach here, answering your questions sent to me at ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, next question. Travis from Boise, I assume Boise, Idaho. Been there, great town. All right, Travis's question: my boss insists on actual signatures on a contract. Can you help me? I'm wanting to use an electronic signature tool and my boss hates that idea. Um, Travis, so I'm going to make some big broad assumptions here. I'm going to probably assume that maybe your boss actually likes a fax machine as well. So your boss is going to watch this video and send me some hate mail. All right, so I had an opportunity to reach out to my attorney to ask him, hey, what about electronic signatures? Are they binding? And his answer was actually surprising to me. It depends. You have to use an electronic signature tool that actually offers a certain level of encryption as well as a certain level of documenting with an ID number what it is that's signed so they can actually track it back. So the tool that he recommended that I'll recommend to you is DocuSign. Now there's, there's a bunch of them out there— Adobe EchoSign, a bunch of them. I personally use DocuSign. It's worked out well for me. So one of the things you might have to do is perhaps get some advice from an attorney that makes them feel comfortable, or recommend that I actually talk to my attorney about it. Now, I'm not a lawyer, Travis. I don't even try to play one on TV. I actually went to college to be an attorney and ended up in sales. Imagine that. So double-check with your attorney, but you might also look at maybe a competitor. If your competition is allowing advertisers or clients to sign with an e-signature tool, I think that's something you want to potentially bring up to your boss. In the end, a lot of times, friends, you just have to do what your boss says, but I have found that electronic signature tools have helped me close deals 50% faster than if I just ask for a signature. The other thing is a lot of you make it hard for people to buy from you. Don't send them things that they have to print out and then they have to fax back to you or scan or, or whatever. Electronic signature tools are great. They're legally binding. And for me, friends, it's the way that business is being transacted. So Travis, I hope that that helps out there in Idaho. So stay safe, friends. If I can do something for you, reach out to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com. Love to answer your listener questions. And remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. We'll see you next time.
