Digitize and Automate your entire sales process from start to finish

Accordium supercharges business performance wherever paperwork is involved. With digital contract management, workflow automation and electronic signatures, customers can agree faster, get better insights, and sell more.

Kevin William David interviewed Daniel Richardson, Co-Founder at Accordium to know more.

Can you tell us about what you are working on? What is Accordium?

Accordium is a cloud-based sales solution. It’s a visual tool, built around automating sales processes, digital contract management, and legally binding electronic signatures. Our platform simplifies sales contract processes and improves the customer experience wherever documents are involved. We help businesses close more deals and produce results faster.

Tell me more aboute why you are building this?

Time kills all deals. Complex processes, price negotiations and the onus on the customer to print, sign, scan and return contracts prevents sales team from reaching their targets.

We know that manual document management is a leading cause of errors, data loss, poor customer experience and missed revenue. Companies are losing up to a quarter of their revenue by wasting time in multiple systems, and dealing with outdated methods of handling paperwork.

This impacted all the founders at the company both personally and professionally., and so Accordium was born of the frustration we experienced dealing with paperwork, and the desire to fix something very broken with our sales process.

A question we often asked our own sales team was “How much time do you waste on manual processes and admin to close a contract?” Usually the answer is too much. Considering the average salesperson uses seven different tools to close a single deal, it’s no wonder that sales reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling.

Since we founded Accordium, the goal has been to help companies who want to optimise and modernize their sales teams.

So we like to think that our customers are future-proofing their business by taking the next step in sales digitization with us.

How is Accordium different from what already exists in the market?

We’re competing more with antiquated processes rather than other competitors in the market. Sure there’s companies like DocuSign that offer e-signature solutions, but this is not where our customers get the most value from Accordium. When first conceptualizing the idea, we knew e-signatures would be an important feature, but not our defining product.

If you’re in sales, you know it’s a constant negotiation even after you’ve sent out a contract. It’s not just about collecting a signature; there are terms and prices that may still need to be negotiated, edited, changed and discussed again.

If you’re just sending contracts through email and PDF, or even through tools like DocuSign, it’s still a manual process. This takes up a lot of time, distracts salespeople, hinders the sales process and is incredibly inefficient.

We think it’s an area of business that hasn’t been fully developed or optimised yet, and our mission is to change that.

Who uses Accordium? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

We have people using us across the world from different departments and industries. We’ve come from a sales background ourselves, so we’ve built Accordium to specifically help sales leaders, their teams and their customers come to an agreement faster.

Accordium really is the tool we always wanted (and needed) on the sales floor earlier in our careers.

The cool thing is: everyone benefits when using us. Sales leaders get better visibility and more control over the contract pipeline — that means better forecasting and quick remediation of contract bottlenecks. Sales teams get precious time back and increased productivity, as they can now spend more time closing deals instead of ancillary tasks like data entry or chasing signatures and paperwork. For our customers’ clients, they no longer have to print, scan and email contracts back and forth.

This is the core of what Accordium does: using digitization to manage paperwork better and get signatures faster.

How are your customers using Accordium? Could you share a few different use cases?

Right now we find our customers using our platform in a few distinct ways.

• Digital Contract Management
No one enjoys complicated and slow sales processes especially when it comes to closing contracts. With digital contract management, our customers simplify communication between parties, internally and externally. This in turn makes the entire process transparent and efficient. Everything moves faster and becomes easier to understand.

• Sales workflow automation
  Many businesses are still heavily dependent on manual workflow processes that are super time-consuming, inefficient and costly. So our customers use us to ensure their processes are streamlined, efficient, and less time-consuming. This helps them to shorten its sales cycles, and accelerate revenues.

• Collecting Electronic signatures
With Accordium, our customers can send and receive legally binding electronic signatures safely and securely worldwide. Sales teams and customers alike love it as you no longer have to go through the hassle of printing and signing.

Have there been unique use cases for Accordium that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

So far the biggest surprise is the amount of people who don’t work in sales who get a lot of value out of tool and really like what we are doing. Most of our users are in sales roles, but there is a significant amount of our users that work in other departments. It’s one of the better unexpected things to happen.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We are still a young company and have a lot more to accomplish before we consider ourselves successful.

There was no magic “growth hack” for us. Like most SaaS companies, Inbound Marketing and Outbound Sales continue to play an integral part of our customer acquisition and revenue generation initiatives.

We hustle every day to make our product better, improve our messaging, and understand how to solve our customers’ pain.

By experimenting a lot we can discover quickly what works for us, while ditching things that didn’t work so well — and of course there have been a few! We focus a lot on lowering CACs and long-term sustainable growth, instead of just short-term gains. So in that way, we’re always optimizing every part of the product, sales and marketing funnels.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Building a product and business is one big challenge after another (usually multiple challenges need to be solved at the same time). Whether that’s getting funding, finding the right people you can trust, customer acquisition etc. One of the biggest challenges for us was overcoming the time difference between our HQ in Copenhagen and our development team based in Kuala Lumpur.

Communication and time delays between the two offices can be a real problem if not managed effectively. Work windows do overlap but it is not always optimal.

We made a conscious decision to ensure our dev team is very much a part of Accordium. We don’t outsource. They’re full time employees who just happen to be based in Malaysia. It’s a highly collaborative environment where we value people working together, transparent plans and constant communication.

The founding team are generally based in Copenhagen, so it helps a lot that our team in KL are incredibly competent, responsive and all round awesome. The high level of trust, and routine “office health checks” between our locations solve a lot of problems before they can start.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Our core focus right now is working on the stability of our product. Accordium helps sales teams in the last mile of deal closing, so it is a natural progression for us to have a integration with CRMs like Salesforce. We will have the first integrations on a few CRM platforms available in the coming months.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Slack — With Accordium offices on different sides of the world Slack is the backbone of our internal communications. We have a few integrations that allow us to respond to almost anything in real time. The team never misses a beat with customer signups, social media mentions and support queries; all feeding into our Slack channels.

Intercom — We use intercom for our customer interactions on-site and in-app. From responding to questions about product/pricing, to increasing engagement with users inside our platform.

Confluence — Is the tool we use for collaboration on management projects and the Accordium internal knowledge base. We centralise all of our business documentation here.

HubSpot — Hubspot is expensive, but if used properly is a very potent tool to drive and nurture the inbound marketing funnel. We run our content marketing and blog from Hubspot as well as utilizing their Sales CRM. This allows us to centralise our Sales and Marketing efforts as much as possible.

Upodi — Upodi offers us an enterprise grade subscription management platform. Upodi helps us manage our recurring billing cycles. They’ve helped us to eliminate the cost and complexity required to manage subscription billing operations.

Google Apps — I don’t think there is a Google App that we don’t use heavily. From Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slide, Hangouts — every tool does exactly what we need, we can’t live without them.

Originally published at siftery.com.