Episode 11 - Colin Teubner Director, Customer Solutions at airSlate & signNow

Episode 11, we speak with Colin Teubner Director of Customer Solutions at airSlate & SignNow. Colin talks about airSlate and their mission to provide easy-to-use, no code, end-to-end automation to empower individuals and business teams to digitize business processes on their own by eliminating manual and expensive document and/or paper-based workflow processes. If your business is still utilizing traditional paper-based processes for signatures, contracts, or proposals you are going to want to listen to this podcast! 
 
  Learn more at www.airslate.com or www.signNow.com

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Play the King 0:00

This podcast is sponsored by OMI the company that makes CRM Work! Today, We're speaking with Colin Teubner Director of Customer Solutions at airSlate and signNow.

Colin Teubner 0:14

I'm Colin Teubner the Director of Customer Solutions at airSlate and signNow. And that's the team that helps our customers get up and running with the product after they sign on and also helps them evaluate it before they sign on. I started at airSlate about a year and a half ago. My experience is in the BPM and workflow software industry. For a number of years, I've been a product manager and also a sales engineer in that part of the software industry.

Play the King 0:42

So Colin airSlate has been around for, I want to say around 11 years now under a different name, then there was a rebrand in 2019, you came from within the industry, but you must have seen something with this company that made you think, okay, there's something going on here. Talk to me about the state of the market. Like just the landscape here. What is it that excites you about this product right now?

Colin Teubner 1:04

So one of the things that I always noticed when I was at other BPM and workflow software companies, customers constantly had to integrate e-signature among a number of other things that they have to integrate, but e-signature was one of them and it was expensive and painful and e-signature, it spans corporate boundaries. So people are having some elaborate processes internally, and then they need to send some documents up to get signed. And so I realized that that was a gap and airSlate was combining workflow and process management with e-signature capabilities. And that seems like a really winning combination. So I think that's what interested me initially,

Play the King 1:42

When you say expand corporate boundaries, when you say that can you give that example? Okay. So within an organization, people trust each other, they know who each other are. Are you describing a process by which you can sort of extend that, that boundary of trust, I guess, to other organizations where it might not have existed before? Like how would you describe that?

Colin Teubner 2:01

I would say you've got the boundary of trust inside a company. That's exactly right. And so approving decisions, workflows inside organizations, those can happen within an enterprise application, or I can just send somebody an email, you know, I can click a button to approve some of these expense reports . I don't need to sign anything because of that trust that you mentioned, when you talk about spanning company boundaries and let's use an example where they don't typically use e-signature when a retailer, a big retailer is ordering products from big manufacturers, they use something called EDI, which is electronic data interchange. So it automatically places orders when the stock is reaching a certain level, like car manufacturers do that with their suppliers to EDI is really common, but to support that, and you have to put a bunch of legal agreements in place beforehand and sign them because there is not that level of trust. The supplier can't necessarily trust that just because the manufacturer sends some data, a wire, they're also going to pay their invoice. And that's why you need paper contracts to support that digital process. So you can do that, right? You can have a system and you can have paper contracts that support it, or you can have e-signature where you are just signing the contracts involved that you need whenever there's not a trust relationship. So you sign those electronically as part of the flow. So we're not going to crush EDI, right? I mean, when people have these giant enterprise systems that need to be integrated, they're probably still going to do it that way. But the vast majority of decisions and approvals that are happening across company boundaries are much smaller. So being able to just get an e-signature as part of the flow , and a lot of times they're, one-time things too , you know, you're signing for a loan or approving the release of your medical records, to your doctor's office, you don't need a long paper contracting process. You just need to get the signature on a boilerplate document and move on.

Play the King 3:57

So when I think about the landscape where you guys are operating, you know, there are some long-term trends that have been pushing us in this direction for years, like, you know, over a decade, if not more. And then it seems to me that in the last year, you know, with everything that's going on with remote work, I imagine those trends have accelerated. Could you talk about some of the wider stuff going on that sort of makes this the right moment for a company like this?

Colin Teubner 4:18

You're absolutely right, certainly in the last year, our business started growing more quickly. Everybody pretty much already knew about e-signature it's been around for awhile . And most of them kind of knew that they needed it. A lot of small businesses have been, oh yeah, I should get that e-signature thing, but hadn't gotten around to it. And the pandemic forced them to get around to it very quickly. So we obviously saw a big spike in interest right at the beginning of the pandemic, but that's interesting sticks around because once you've automated processes, you're not going to go back to the manual way of doing them. In fact, we find that people have 10 other things that they could automate once they have the software in their hands as well.

Play the King 5:00

Let's talk about those things. You mentioned how the software can compliment EDI. What are some ways that customers are using it first

Colin Teubner 5:08

Before I list these cases, I want to say that really every industry and every company has at least some use cases for this kind of software, certainly for just automating processes in general, and also for e-signature specifically, or the kind of document generation that we do. But I think there's certain industries that have adopted our way of automating processes more quickly than others, partly because of the organizational boundaries that we talked about before. And it's also partly because they may already have kind of a paper oriented mindset and we allow people to keep the concept of paper as they move those documents around and sign them during a workflow. So some of the main industries, I alluded to one already, which is healthcare. The example of releasing your medical records, new patient paperwork, and onboarding. There's a ton of processes and also healthcare as a whole has some very large players, but there's a lot of very small businesses in the healthcare industry, your doctor's office or dentist office. A lot of times, those are businesses with fewer than 20 employees. And so they hadn't previously had some big it department that was going around automating stuff. And again, with the pandemic, they needed to quickly get rid of those clipboards with paper that they hand off to people face-to-face and start getting documents filled out electronically another one's education. And so we have some big universities that are using airSlate to manage a lot of their processes that go to the students. And also some of the processes that go to faculty, particularly contract faculty. So again, things crossing organizational boundaries, you know, students are part of the university, but they don't have accounts on it , university, enterprise systems. So, I think it's just almost traditional for students to be signing documents that they send into the university. So e-signature is a great fit with students. then we also have in fact, two different universities who are generating contracts for adjunct faculty, which is a process that, you know, part of the reason that really needs to be automated is because they have to do 30 or 50 or a hundred of them all at once each semester. It's not something that's spread out over time because of their semester working. So automation is a huge win there. We can generate the contracts and route them for e-signature all on the same workflow. The third industry that I'll mention is construction. And I think this is a neat one. So again, a huge inter organizational workflows construction companies dealing with a homeowner or a building owner, multiple different suppliers and probably like an architect or an engineer and the permanent authority, the authority having jurisdiction, wherever they are. And so we have , um, some construction companies, multiple different ones in different areas of residential construction that are interacting with all of those different constituencies using documents. So if you imagine going out to somebody's house and getting the measurements for the roof and clicking a button and generating a quote for the homeowner, a material order for the roofing supplier and permanent applications for whatever city you happen to be in at the time where that house is . So again, generating a lot of paperwork. If you're interacting with a government, you're not allowed to say, Hey, we don't want to fill out that form, just take this data. You still have to send them the form. And so those people are, if they want to automate, they're forced to use a method that lets them keep that form in place and fill it out automatically.

Play the King 8:38

That's interesting. So can we, can we dial in, maybe to one of these organizations you use them as an example, I'll suggest the adjunct professor contracting set up , you know, we're talking about, you know, from the client side, from the vendor side, from the partners side, you know, just take me through it , like, how does this work and how it help, how does it help people save time, save money?

Colin Teubner 8:57

Yeah . I mean, I think it's interesting. And the adjunct professor one is a great example. I already kind of alluded to the fact that, you know, because they have to do so many of these in such a short amount of time, it's really painful for the people who are participating in the manual merchant of that process. So you've got staff preparing a bunch of contracts and you've got a person of authority at the university who has to sign them and then send them off to the adjunct professors or the contract instructors, you know, a lot of times in software and we have to do big ROI studies and try to prove out the benefits. But I would say, you know , this kind of automation plus e-signature project, most of the time, the benefits are pretty obvious to the people who are experiencing that painful manual process today, they have serious issues. There's things falling between the cracks. And then sometimes it's not just about time-savings or sort of stress savings at that crunch time. It can also be error rates or compliance concerns. And if you accidentally send one adjunct , contract with a much larger salary than you meant to offer them, you may get stuck paying them a larger salary. And so those kinds of errors can be very costly. And then likewise, I mean, with compliance concerns, you're more worried about like, if you're a small doctor's office and you're worried about HIPAA violations, you're worried about huge fines or even getting sent to jail. And in the case of those small doctor's offices, we do offer HIPAA compliant processes. And so you can use air slate in a HIPAA compliant manner to manage that patient data that's coming in. And that's big peace of mind for people as well.

Play the King 10:30

That's Interesting. I imagine maybe you don't wantthe attorney writing out 50 different contracts, they can do it once and then, and then somebody else can, can put in information that , then feeds out into those 50 different contracts.

Colin Teubner 10:44

You're right. Anytime you can save attorney time is , usually a pretty big dollar savings as well. The attorney can just kind of manage a template of a contract and we can fill in the data for all the different times that gets sent out. We also have a contract negotiation capability. So you can use that contract as a starting point and the counterparty can make suggestion changes and you can go back and forth and review it. And then again, as with our other use cases, once you're done with that, it's just immediately sent for e-signature. So even for a little bit more flexible processes that aren't so automated, you can, you can handle them.

Play the King 11:15

It seems like you guys, as a company have really leaned into that because, you added signNow, then , this library of legal templates, tens of thousands, it seems like, that use case is pretty popular among your clientele.

Colin Teubner 11:29

Yeah, that's right. Well, you had legal, which was our , another one of our portfolio companies that offers, as you said, tens of thousands of legal templates, and maybe you don't need the attorney in the first place and that's an even bigger savings, but , um, you know, a lot of people of course still work with them, but us legal is a big time saver and a starting point for contracting. And then, you know, you might review or tweak those templates and then put them into automation .

Play the King 11:53

Totally. So let's say you are speaking to somebody who is working to bring their company out of the paper age and implement the solutions you guys offer. What are some things they need to sort of think through before they implement that change? Like what , what are they, what are you, what do you hear from people and need to sort of get them thinking about before this happens?

Colin Teubner 12:13

I think the biggest thing is just figuring out the scope of the first project that you do with airSlate. Sometimes people are thinking of it very narrow-minded, they're thinking just about e-signature and they're missing some opportunities for automation looking at where is the data or the information on this document coming from, or the document itself, is it in one of your systems, you don't need somebody to drag and drop an upload it into our tool. And then on the backend , likewise, is there some place where you need this data to go, even if it's just put it line by line into a spreadsheet that gives you the ability to do reporting on it later on and that kind of thing, or if you upgrade one of your enterprise systems or change them, then you can upload that spreadsheet into the new database and have a good head start on having your data. So that's on the small side. Sometimes people also think too big. They're trying to imagine completely automating some entire piece of their business, and you can do that over time, but you need to bite it off into small chunks primarily so that, you can just, after a month or two, you start seeing some value from the automation and then go from there. The great thing about software and any kind of software is it's easy to change. And so that's why people do agile development and it's better to just even throw away some work you did, as long as it's in the pursuit of having a better automation. And so we encourage people to bite off a reasonable chunk at the beginning and then plan on expanding it as they go.

Play the King 13:41

Got it, got it. So airSlate started 2009, as I mentioned as a PDF editor. And so clearly in the last 11 years, like some really serious additions to that, those capabilities it's now like you wouldn't recognize that that, that first, that first iteration I would imagine, but talk to me about the scope of this and where you see it going in the next, say five to 10 years. What are the next stages for, for airSlate and signNow?

Colin Teubner 14:07

Is just kind of expanding what we have. You know, airSlate's already got a huge library of bots. One of the things that we want to do is make it so that you don't need a separate software package to go do the integration. So we're trying to have bots for the systems our customers are using. So a big part of our work is always just the steady expansion of that library of bots. Another thing I just alluded to previously is the idea of change. Of course, it's easy to change software now, but there's some more features that we can add to airSlate. That'll make it even easier for our flow creators to handle change as it comes, to be able to evolve a process and change how it works as you go. And then the last one, you know, of course talking about AI capabilities and there's a number of services that are relevant to documents, some of which are already available in the market, you know, OCR or intelligently recognizing the contents of a document. Even if that document is an image, instead of text detecting, what type of document something is. And then applying a setup we've used on a previous document, that's similar, even if the new document is not quite the same, AI can detect the fact that it's of the same type or matching the same template with slightly different content and apply that set up . Certainly translation is a big one and we all have seen Google translate and other online translators . So being able to tie those kinds of services into document automation can be very powerful and also , analysis of the meaning of the documents. And also the structure of the documents can let you further automate things. B ut one thing that comes into which we haven't really been doing as much but could get into is somebody sends you an email. Are they, are they happy? A re t hey angry with you? And you might want that to go to a different person or follow a different process depending on their a ttitude. So those are just some of the things off the top of t he head!

Play the King 16:03

Been relatively modest in terms of , uh, telling us who you work with and things like that. I want to give you an opportunity to sort of talk about some of the partnerships that you guys have are just to give people a sense of the breadth of companies that are using your product. And I'll , I'll mention OMI, of course, having a partnership with you guys and, you know, that's , that's why we're talking today, but could you possibly take me through some of those ?

Colin Teubner 16:21

Yeah. So am I as great, and I think that's a good one to talk about part of our goal, or I think what we kind of want to see for our customers is for them to feel comfortable using the airSlate software themselves, however, you know, frankly, there's a lot of them that don't for various reasons, it might be that they just feel like they're not technical and don't want to learn. It might also be that they just feel they don't have time. So maybe they understand the airSlate just fine, but they're saying, yeah, this, this tool is great. And please build this for me. And so that's where OMI comes in as a, they offer a service to come in and set up and configure your automation flows inside of air slate without you having to invest a ton of time. And that's both as a project service, which is great for getting people up and running as well as an ongoing managed service, where you have a certain number of hours from them each month for them to come help evolve your flows like we were talking about with change. So that's really a important partnership across the partnership spectrum. We also have a number of tech partnerships with companies like Salesforce, where we're in their app store. And a lot of Salesforce users are pushing Salesforce data into airSlate to get documents generated and signed. So there's a lot of those. And then we also have some software vendors that are building capabilities around airSlate. There's one product called NewLaw, which is a law firm practice management software. And that it's not totally on airSlate, but it uses airSlate again for document generation and e-signature capabilities. So that's just a couple of examples, but again , there's a broad spectrum of partners filling different needs.

Play the King 18:01

Excellent. And I just want to mention as well that , to learn more people can go to signnow.com or airslate.com or both. Colin, I really appreciate your time today. Any closing thoughts for us?

Colin Teubner 18:13

Yeah. One closing thought is all of these workflow automation tools. They're all about creating custom software. So people have various packaged software that works fine, whether that's Gmail or Microsoft word or Salesforce, and they're finding some shortcoming in that. That's why they look for an automation tool that does exactly what they need. It's custom software. Now, up until recently, you had to write custom software by paying developers to write code that was pretty rigid. And if you didn't have those developers within your own company, you know, that it was really expensive to go hire them every time the change needed to be made. So every software like air slate, you know, there's, there's tons of other workflow tools out there. They all make kind of the same trade-off, which is that you narrow the universe of what you can build with it compared to custom code and an exchange. If you get a much faster build and a build that can be done by less technical people. So those two things are the things to look at when you're evaluating this kind of software. What can I build with the software? What , how is the universe of what you can build in trunk compared to custom code and who is going to be doing the building? Some tools that call themselves workflow or low code, are still for developers. They're just like developer productivity tools. airSlate is meant for the business analyst . Somebody who's good with spreadsheets, but not a coder. And so, you know, I think we really hit a sweet spot of being able to do a lot of very powerful processes with document automation and also having, you know, relatively non-technical skill skillset that can be used to go build these things. And so that's, that's really our sweet spot.