PropertyGuru modernizes B2B contract signing process with Adobe Acrobat Sign

Singapore’s surging economy and limited housing inventory makes it one of the world’s fastest moving, most competitive property markets. For prospective buyers and renters, getting the right housing intelligence at the right time is often the difference between securing a dream home or continuing to wait on the sidelines.

Singaporean and foreign nationals alike have made PropertyGuru the region’s number one property marketplace. Across Southeast Asia’s five growing economies — Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia — the company serves 40 million property seekers and hosts more than 3.5 million real estate listings per month.

Assessing the contract needs of a growing business

In addition to its expansion across Southeast Asia, PropertyGuru’s success also led to its entry into the B2B sector. PropertyGuru for Business provides solutions ranging from market analytics and valuation management software to property software-as-a-service and marketing-as-a-service platforms for developers, agencies, banks, valuers, city planners, and policy makers. The goal? To help stakeholders in the property value chain maximize growth opportunities while reducing risk and uncertainty.

The final step in PropertyGuru’s B2B sales process is a signed contract. Historically, the company’s sales team would customize and attach a draft contract to a customer email along with a request for approval, which the customer could grant by clicking a button in the message. This would alert the sales team that the contract was approved. A copy of the fully executed contract was then printed and mailed to the customer at a later date.

“Our contractual process was largely manual, making every customer interaction more cumbersome and time intensive than it needed to be,” explains Allen Godfrey, engineering manager of the platform automation team at PropertyGuru. “We decided to search for a cloud-based eSignature capability to improve the customer experience and reflect the innovative nature of our brand.”

Meeting sustainability and business objectives with eSignatures

Adobe Acrobat Sign attracted Allen’s attention after PropertyGuru acquired another company. He saw that the solution, which the company used extensively, offered all the capabilities that the sales team required plus potential for application across the rest of the business.

Allen liked the alignment of Acrobat Sign with PropertyGuru’s sustainability goals, since it eliminated the requirement for paper in contract workflows. He was also pleased with its Salesforce integration capabilities. Previously, PropertyGuru used another approval automation solution that didn’t offer a good experience to its enterprise customers.

“Our sales team used Salesforce to manage the end-to-end sales process, from note taking to generating quotes and raising orders,” says Allen. “We quickly saw how transformative it would be if Acrobat Sign could be embedded as just another workflow.”

With the decision made to adopt Acrobat Sign, the team got to work integrating the solution with Salesforce and then rolled out training to onboard users.

Elevating the brand with end-to-end eSignature workflows

Allen says that PropertyGuru’s sales team now generates 2,000 Acrobat Sign contracts per month within Salesforce. Sales representatives can modify content such as terms and conditions and access a variety of templates in a few keystrokes.

Contracts are sent to customers via electronic workflows together with an eSignature request. Once completed, a notification is sent to the relevant sales representative, the contact is countersigned, a copy is sent to the customer, and the contract is stored in Salesforce — all within the same workflow. Moreover, the sales team can retrieve and review contracts in Salesforce at any time.

In addition to being used by the sales team, Acrobat Sign has been adopted by PropertyGuru’s corporate legal team in Singapore and Malaysia for the electronic signing of contracts and other documents.

“For customers and employees alike, Adobe Acrobat Sign is intuitive, easy to use, and fast,” says Allen. “Wherever we implement it, it increases satisfaction.”

The Platform Automation team now plans to roll Acrobat Sign out to the teams managing PropertyGuru marketplaces in other Southeast Asia markets.

“Adobe Acrobat Sign is a prime example of how technology can enhance a brand,” Allen says. “It’s a great fit for what our customers expect and for what PropertyGuru stands for.”