Mercury ISS

Mercury Information Security Services (ISS) is a leading provider of information security services, advice and consulting. Located in Sydney, Australia and led by CEO, Edward Farrell, Mercury ISS was recognized by Deloitte as a Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific company in 2019, the pre-eminent technology awards program that evaluates technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and rapid growth patterns of companies that transform the way business is done today.

The problem

Mercury ISS is a lean, mean information security services machine. They’ve recently celebrated their 5 year anniversary and fall into the category of 2-10 employees, or “Swiss Army Knives” as CEO Edward Farrell calls them. As with any small business, job descriptions are evolving daily. If there’s a problem, any one of the employees is equal parts equipped and expected to solve it, no matter their pay grade.

The fatal flaw of the “Swiss Army” start-up approach is that if what little staff you have are all multipurpose and already stretched thin, there’s little room for innovation.

Proposal creation was eating up nearly 3 hours of the Mercury ISS employees’ time per document.

“I would tediously create Microsoft Word docs and then manually transfer customer data from Capsule CRM into the document.” Edward Farrell, CEO at Mercury ISS

The result? Hours of wasted time and an increased risk of human error.

Farrell knew that his business wouldn’t be able to scale unless he found a way to deliver proposals faster and eliminate the bottleneck.

The solution

After chatting with another Australia-based company, Farrell learned about PandaDoc. It sounded like the ideal solution to the problems his team was experiencing with their existing proposal creation process.

He began the onboarding process shortly after. It took roughly 6 weeks to implement at Mercury ISS in May of 2018, a timeline that Farrell agreed would have been expedited with the help of today’s PandaDoc Onboarding Team.

“PandaDoc not only sounded like the ideal solution to my company’s proposal creation problems, it was the ideal solution.” Edward Farrell, CEO at Mercury ISS

The variety of proposal, quote, and contract templates available with PandaDoc made their old Word Docs obsolete. It took 15 minutes to create a proposal from start to finish with PandaDoc, allowing his team to reduce their creation time by 91%.

Farrell adopted the new software with open arms. He experimented with the intuitive drag and drop features of the templates and was delighted at the newfound visibility he had into the stage of his documents. His personal favorite was the customizable reminder functionality his proposals included, calling it “an introvert’s dream”. He was able to easily trigger automated reminders. This way he didn’t have to get on the phone or spend more time crafting the perfect, personal email to his clients.

Farrell and his team took advantage of the ability to integrate PandaDoc with other software in their tech stack to more fully support their business processes. Farrell has exercised a substantial level of customized integration of PandaDoc with his professional services stack and as a result, increased operational efficiency, information flows and reduced human error.

The result

Mercury ISS was more efficient and profitable than ever. The combination of the time saved on document creation and detailed insight into customer interactions with the proposals, their sales cycles accelerated.

It accelerated so much that their revenue skyrocketed, and people noticed. In fact, shortly thereafter Mercury ISS was named one of the Technology Fast 500 – Asia Pacific by Deloitte in 2019.

A huge honor – and PandaDoc is thrilled to have played a role in getting them there.

With the help of PandaDoc, Mercury ISS is now able to provide more focused advice on specific technologies and evaluate risks.

Farrell’s latest comment on how he’s liking PandaDoc?

“It’s still awesome and has saved us a ton of time, no need to ask me twice.” Edward Farrell, CEO at Mercury ISS