4 ways eSignature
APIs are unlocking
business growthYour guide to greater revenue
and performance througheSignature API integration.

Introduction

APIs unlock a new,faster digital world“For companies such as Expedia, the majority of the revenue is driven
by APIs, because they've made it so easy for other companies toembed their services in someone else's portal or website. It’s

If you feel like the world is speeding up, you’re not wrong. There’s
important to look outside and see what other companies have been
more information than ever and a new ‘world-changing’ software
able to do,” says Akshay Sheth, Senior Engineering Manager, FactSet

release seemingly every day.

But APIs aren’t just for forward-thinking big tech players. With little
And one of the driving forces behind this rapid acceleration is the rise
effort, any business can reap the benefits of APIs by processing andof APIs—or as McKinsey describes them, “the connective tissue
distributing data at massive scale, allowing businesses to spin up
between technologies and organizations.” It’s these connections
new features with quick integrations, and open up entirely new
helping businesses monetize data, make smarter decisions, and open
business models.

new routes to innovation and growth.
An easy entry point into the world of APIs—with big growth benefits—is eSignature APIs, which help businesses to:Operate at greater scale and efficiency through intuitive customer
experiences
Accelerate the sales cycles to boost revenu
Simplify hiring processes and lock down top talent faster
Save developer hours on peripheral business functionality

Interested? Here are 4 ways eSignature APIs transform yourbusiness growth.

Contents
1. Deliver the ultimate customer experience

2. Accelerate your sales cycle 3. Hire with scale and precision 4. Take a load off your developers

1
Deliver the ultimate
customer experience
Today’s economy is one of convenience. Every product and service isdesigned for user simplicity and speed. And it’s working. The world’s
largest companies compete primarily on convenience
Amazon is easier than going to the stor
Netflix is easier than going to the movie

And while, for the most part, businesses have kept up with flashy

Salesforce is easier than using a spreadsheet

websites, smooth apps, and sleek user interfaces, the document

As Matt McLarty, Global Leader of API Strategy at MuleSoft says,“Business models are totally related to customer experience.

signing process has lagged—acting as a thorn in the side of so many
user experiences. 

Because ultimately, customers are the driver of revenue, so

Whether you’re converting customers or hiring new employees,

everything that you focus on should help them. And I think it's pretty

signing still…

clear that the companies that differentiate themselves in the digital
economy are differentiating based on customer experience.”

The thing is, these trail-blazing user experiences have also set thestandard for every other online consumer interaction.

…slows progress and kills momentum.

…drags customers away from your app or website.

…forces users to juggle clunky third-party tools and log-ins.

But embedded eSignatures are changing all that by helping
businesses deliver a smooth, fast signing experience.

Embedded signing for afast, distraction-freeexperience

The power of brandBy embedding eSignature tools using APIs, customers can sign

trustworthy brands. Why? Because it pays off: presenting a branddocuments and contracts directly within the workflows you’ve set
out for them on your website or app—keeping them away from
distractions and getting them to their desired destination faster.

In today’s on-the-go world, reducing the number of steps in anexperience is standard practice. Consumers also expect to sign on
any device with ease. Embedding eSignatures into your signingworkflows using an API helps here too, by making signing on any
device, from anywhere, a reality.

The other part of delivering an exceptional customer experience isbrand. 

Companies spend extreme amounts building memorable andconsistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to23%. 

Because brand is such a huge part of any business’ continued
growth, keeping your brand consistently front and center across any
customer interaction—including the signing process—is critical.

White-labeling your signing experience with advanced eSignature
tools can make all the difference to a customer experience.
Because, instead of forcing customers to interact with other brands
and websites, they only see your brand consistently throughout
their experience—keeping you front of mind and first in line for
repeat business.

Customer story

DealMaker reduces the capital-raising process from 72
hours to 30 minutes
Raising capital used to be full of costly and error-prone manual
workflows that led to headaches and slow progress. And DealMaker
saw this as an opportunity to eliminate the friction of manual
processes in the capital-raising process through digital documents
and eSignatures. 

But to make it happen, they needed an eSignature solution that could
seamlessly embed into their platform for a faster, more transparent
signing experience. That’s when they turned to the Dropbox Sign API. 

“HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign] embedded beautifully into ourplatform and unlike other vendors, it didn’t require users to leave ourplatform, open new accounts, or separately log in. HelloSign’s [nowDropbox Sign] API helped us deliver on our mission of speed,efficiency, and ease of use," says Mat Goldstein, CRO and Co-Founderat DealMaker.

And it’s completely transformed DealMaker’s capital-raising processby slicing a 72-hour process down to 30 minutes.

2Accelerate yoursales cycle
Businesses don’t grow without sales. But to close moredeals, reps need to get in front of more prospects. So, any
way you can shave seconds or minutes off the sales cycle ismore time teams can spend bringing in new business. Andthat means taking a hard look at your sales processes andsmoothing out inefficiencies that suck your reps’ time.aFocus salespeople on
selling
Speed is the name of the game in sales. The faster you can reachout to prospects and convert them into customers, the faster you
can start working on new deals. 

But one thing that stops sales reps dead in their tracks is admin,like preparing, sending, and chasing down contracts. 

That’s why many high-performing sales teams are deploying simple
automation that takes admin off their plate. 

eSignature APIs are a sales automation tool that keeps your sales
teams operating in top gear. With eSignature APIs, sales reps cancreate re-usable document and contract templates and pre-loadthem with data from your systems (like your CRM) to automate thesignature process. That saves reps hours in non-revenue generatingactivity.

Group sign for a fasterpath to revenue

Track deal statuses withgreater accuracy

Getting contracts noticed and signed by C-suite decision-makers

Waiting for a prospect to sign on the dotted line is a frustrating

can often hold up deals and send reps chasing after signatures.

experience for sales reps. Did they get the contract? Is everything

But in instances where contracts only need to be signed by one ofok? Have they ghosted me?

many decision-makers, sending bulk signature requests to thateSignature APIs take the guesswork out of the contract-signinggroup can greatly increase your chances of a fast turn-around time. 

process by giving sales teams visibility over contract progress—

And that’s what makes the Dropbox Sign Group Sign feature sosent, opened, signed, completed, or returned. 

valuable. Group Sign lets reps send documents to a group of

Even better, eSignature APIs will send salespeople notifications

recipients (with one click). That way, whoever gets to it first canwith contract status updates so they don’t even have to log in to seesign for the group.

the progress.

That way, when a contract does go cold, sales reps know when tofollow up and when to give a prospect some space.

3
Hire with scale andprecision
Business growth isn’t just about making more money, right? It’s also
about hiring the right people so you can grow your capabilities. So
any way you can make your business more attractive to top talent isa huge win. 

But hiring is a lengthy hit-and-miss process that chews up HR
teams’ time with paperwork and, if done poorly, turns candidates off
your business. 

Fortunately, using eSignature APIs, many of these pains can beminimised, if not completely automated away.

Recruit more top talent
with faster hiring processes
Here’s a simple HR truth: top candidates are attracted to top

That’s why any way you can automate hiring processes and deliver agreat experience is a huge win. And there are big opportunities toautomate the hiring process. As Enrique Rubio, Founder of Hacking
HR explains, “recruitment is one of the quintessential processes thatbusinesses.

organisations are trying to automate. It's a low hanging fruit.

So the easier, faster, and more impressive you can make the hiring

tasks. Things like programming interviews and helping people

experience, the better your first impression, and the greater yourchances of hiring top candidates before the competition. 

On the flip side, word of mouth is a powerful thing. If youronboarding process is bad, customers won’t hesitate to tell their
network about it—a big knock to your brand and chances of
attracting better talent.

Automation can help recruiters with meaningless yet significant
navigate the process of hiring.”

That’s exactly why top recruitment teams are turning to solutions
with built-in eSignature tools to simplify the hiring process.

With eSignatures, rather than emailing PDF attachments andexpecting candidates to grapple with confusing third-party tools
and log-ins, candidates can immediately sign documents that areembedded right into the onboarding platform.

Plus, by delivering employment contracts and offer letters tocandidates digitally, candidates receive a simple and streamlined
experience, and hiring managers increase their chances of locking
down top-tier talent before the competition.

What’s more, by automating repetitive requests for signatures foridentity documentation, tax details, and employment contracts, youreduce the time gap between request and response, furtherincreasing your chances.

Scale your HR team’soutput
But hiring isn’t just about the candidate’s experience. eSignatures
can also help HR teams become significantly more productive.

Templating generic contracts means HR teams format a document
once and then reuse it again and again, which is perfect for highvolume document requests like employment contracts, tax forms,investment agreements, HR paperwork, and more.

Additional features like Bulk Send make sending repetitive
documents like NDAs out for signatures a breeze. Rather thanmanually preparing each document for a group of new hires, witheSignature APIs, HR teams can mail-merge contacts with templated
documents to automatically fill in specific fields. That way, they cansend out personalized contracts to 100s or 1000s of signees with asingle click.

Customer story

How Fountain helps businesses
process and hire over 96,000
applicants a month

The hourly workforce is highly mobile and eager to start working as“At Fountain, we strive to provide a seamless branded experiencesoon as possible. So for Fountain—an hourly workforce platform—

across corporate sites and customized job directories,” says Sean

it’s critical applicants move to the final contract-signing stage fast. 

Behr, CEO of Fountain. “Automated document signing supports

That’s when they turned to the Dropbox Sign API to deliver a
streamlined customer experience and simplify their hiring team’s
administrative duties.

this, allowing candidates to apply for jobs on the go and moveswiftly to be hired.”

Dropbox Sign API functionality helped Fountain’s customers hire atscale, with an average of 96,000 candidates hired each month.

4Take a load off yourdevelopers
Building every piece of software from scratch is a costly and timeintensive task. Not only does it take a lot of developer-hours to build
your software, but you’re also burdened with supporting andmaintaining the system.

This is especially true when it comes to building additional
eSignature capability into your business workflows. Compliance,audit trails, and constant new threats are important processes tomanage and can all pose a big risk to your company if things fowrong. 

That’s what makes eSignature APIs such a game-changer forbusinesses. Because rather than hiring expert eSignature developers(or expecting your development team to become experts), eSignature
tools can be fully customized and integrate directly into your website
and application workflows. It’s a fast, plug-and-play integration thattakes just days to implement—rather than months to build. 

What’s more, your developers don’t have to think about updating andmaintaining your eSignature tools either. Instead, there’s an entire
business dedicated to keeping your eSignatures up with the latest
compliance obligations, innovating for better results, and supporting
you if things go wrong.

Customer story

A 4-day eSignature integration saves
SimplyInsured months ofdevelopment

SimplyInsured offers a no-hassle, 100% online way for small

Deciding an eSignature provider was the best use of theirbusinesses to sign up for health insurance that saves companies anresources, the SimplyInsured team looked for a clean, modern, andaverage of $500-$1000 per year, per employee. But turning

well-maintained API that would be easy to integrate with theirtraditional offline paperwork into a digital process was key to theirproduct. That’s when they found Dropbox Sign.

service. And that sent SimplyInsured searching for a solution. 

“We did our integration in just four days. It was really quick. And“We did research and talked to people who had built their own

the core library we built in those four days continues to drive ourhome-grown eSignature platform in house. They told us it would

business today. When compared to the seven months it would havetake three months to build something functional, or seven months

taken to build our own solution, it became obvious HelloSign [nowfor something robust. That’s an eternity in developer time,

Dropbox Sign] was the right choice,” says Vivek.

especially during the early stages of a startup. Then you haveongoing operational overhead to consider. Time was the biggest
factor in the decision to purchase a solution,” says Vivek Shah,
SimplyInsured’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Conclusion

Transform yourbusiness growth withAPIs
As the world increasingly becomes more digital, APIs are at thecenter of this sea change. 

Whether it’s to improve the sales cycle, attract and hire better
candidates, or save on development effort, businesses are faced witha choice: start using APIs to engage with customers and employees
in their preferred ways or risk being left behind.

Make Dropbox Sign

eSignatures are an easy and rewarding first step on your API journey. 

your signature move
Ready to integrate eSignatures into your app or website? 

Dropbox Sign simplifies work for millions of individuals. Companies
Try the Dropbox Sign API for free.

all over the world rely on the Dropbox Sign API to power their
Or book a demo with our expert API team to see how eSignatures

applications, making it easier to close deals faster, onboard new

can work for your business.

hires, save developers time, complete documents without error, andmuch more. For more information visit the Dropbox Sign website.