YAMAHA Corporation of America Success Story
BACKGROUND Yamaha Corporation of America is the leading supplier of musical instruments in the United States. It offers an array of instruments, including pianos, digital keyboards, synthesizers, woodwind and brass instruments, guitars, drums as well as professional audio gear. In 2007 Yamaha needed to update its contracts with every one of its dealers in an efficient and timely manner.
CHALLENGE Yamaha needed a way to manage its distribution channels and partners more effectively, and it recognized that DocuSign was a strategic business tool that could improve the company’s existing processes. With such a vast network of authorized dealers, Yamaha sales representatives needed a better way to manage signing contracts with their accounts. Because of a change in its Internet sales policy, Yamaha had to work with its entire dealer network, essentially at once, to update its master dealer agreements. Yamaha explored options for easing its contract-signing process that would benefit the internal sales team as well as dealers. But the company felt that there was more to simply getting contracts signed; it wanted to strengthen its relationships with its dealers and position Yamaha as a progressive company that adopts new technologies to become more efficient. In addition, it wanted to find a way to incorporate contract signing into its existing CRM system from Salesforce.com. By tracking all of the interactions that the sales team had with customers, including contracts, Yamaha management could get a global, 360-degree view of its customers. And, most importantly, Yamaha wanted to make sure that its dealers would have a positive experience working with the company.
SOLUTION Yamaha realized that the team needed to find a new way to work closely with its dealers to ease the current signing issues and be prepared to more efficiently sign up new dealers. The team was able to quickly and easily implement DocuSign and integrate it with its existing Salesforce.com solution. Just as important was the need to implement a solution that its internal sales team would adopt, since the effort would be wasted without its support. “At first the sales team was resistant, but once it saw how easy DocuSign was to use and how quickly the team could close deals, everyone jumped on board,” said Mike Machado, systems specialist for the Music Marketing Group.
RESULTS Machado couldn’t have asked for better results. “Not only did we find a technology that made our internal processes more efficient, but more importantly we found a way to connect with our customers and renew our accounts without the hassles that we’d encountered in the past,” he said. Previously, Yamaha would have sent contracts via overnight courier to each of its customers. In many cases, a dealer would have received multiple envelopes from each of Yamaha’s selling divisions. That amounts to more than 5,000 envelopes that included lengthy contracts. Besides the time and cost involved in these types of mass mailings, frequently documents would be returned with pages or signatures missing, meaning the process would have to start over. In the contract project’s two-month period, Yamaha received thousands of electronically signed contracts — a tremendous improvement over past projects. “We’re so happy with the results that we’re going to use DocuSign eSignatures when signing up new dealers,” said Machado.
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