Whitepaper

Accelerate sales
with a frictionless
agreement process
Time kills all deals. Get to revenue faster
with a modern system of agreement.
DocuSign Accelerate sales with a frictionless agreement process

Executive overview

In today’s digitally connected world, the way you sell

is just as important as what you sell. Best-in-class
sales organizations are using technology to gain
an edge by automating processes that otherwise
consume reps’ time with paperwork and status
tracking. A key area of opportunity is the agreement
process: how you prepare, sign, act on, and manage
sales contracts, from nondisclosure agreements to
quotes to master service agreements to statements
of work. When handled manually, they introduce
errors, frustrate customers, and suspend selling—
multiple times throughout every sales cycle.
There is a better way to do business. Organizations
that arm their B2B sales teams with a modern
system of agreement can eliminate this agreement
friction in their sales cycles, enabling reps to
close deals faster while contributing to a superior
customer experience.
DocuSign Accelerate sales with a frictionless agreement process

The agreement-automation opportunity

As business pundit and author Geoffrey Moore points out, organizations that have yet “There’s no doubt
to embrace digital transformation aren’t just wasting money by doing things manually. that digital is rocket
They are also creating unnecessary risk by failing to deliver the superior employee and fuel for sales
customer experiences that can be enabled through automation. In other words, if you’re organizations. B2B
not automating what can be automated, you’re leaving money on the table. As Moore so sales leaders using
eloquently states: digital effectively
“To be sure, there will always be value to the human touch, but that touch needs to
enjoy five times the
be reserved for truly complex situations beyond what can be readily automated.”1
growth of their peers
who are not at the
B2B selling as a whole typically qualifies as a complex situation that warrants a human cutting edge of
touch, from establishing rapport and understanding problems to recommending solutions digital adoption.”2
and building relationships. But within the B2B sales process there are opportunities for
automation and further competitive differentiation—in the agreement process—that McKinsey & Company
2018
remain largely untapped.

Agreements are an essential How modern is your

part of the B2B sales process system of agreement?
Agreements form the very fabric of business relationships Your system of agreement includes all the people,
today. They are used across the customer lifecycle and in processes, and technologies involved in the entire
every stage of the sales cycle, for example: agreement process—from preparing and signing contracts
to acting on terms and managing completed agreement
Sales contracts
documents. It uses data that lives in other systems, such as
Master Service Agreements (MSA) customer relationship management (CRM), and it triggers
actions in yet other systems, such as billing. If the steps
Purchase Orders (PO)
along the process, and the connections among systems,
Statements of work (SOW) are being executed manually by your reps, you have a
legacy system of agreement. Although not desirable,
Supplier onboarding agreements
legacy systems of agreement are common because, until
Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) recently, there were no other options.

Financing agreements Today, a modern system of agreement can connect and

automate the entire agreement process, significantly
Renewal contracts
reducing, if not eliminating entirely:

Every sales organization already has a “system” for getting Manual and paper-centric processes
these contracts and other agreements done. Unfortunately,
Bottlenecks and delays
for most organizations, it involves a rep manually preparing
the agreement document, usually using word processing Errors and rework
and email for reviews and approvals; then manually
Customer and employee frustration
emailing, faxing, or overnighting documents to customer
approvers and signers; following up with those involved Security and compliance risks
to return their signed versions; and then pushing
the agreement along for yet more manual processes When agreements get bogged down in manual tasks, the
downstream, such as creating an account and establishing sales process can’t proceed, and business comes to a halt.
billing. The results are needlessly long sales cycles, But the sooner agreements get done, the sooner reps can
large amounts of rep time diverted from selling, delayed deliver revenue, and the sooner customers can realize the
revenue recognition and—while the customer is waiting value of their investments.
for things to happen at every step—a less-than-ideal
customer experience.
1
Linkedin: Operational Excellence is the New Customer Intimacy
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/operational-excellence-new-customer-intimacy-geoffrey-moore/
2
McKinsey & Company, 2018
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-secret-to-making-it-in-the-digital-sales-world
DocuSign Accelerate sales with a frictionless agreement process

The entire agreement process is CRM

ripe for digital transformation Marketing

Sales
Service

Sales organizations that already use electronic Prepare

signature technology are ahead of the curve
in accelerating the agreement process. But
there are still manual steps before and after the Manage
Modern
systems of Sign
agreement
signature that waste too much time and money
and put revenue at risk. Thanks to new digital HCM Legal
technologies, a modern system of agreement HR

can automate and connect them all. Act

Sign
The use of electronic signatures isn’t a given,
but it’s expected
Signatures are what turn ordinary business documents
into valuable agreements, so it makes sense that many
sales organizations already enable stakeholders to sign
most or all agreements electronically. Still, a recent
Forrester Research survey shows that more than half of
B2B sales teams report a lack of visibility into the status
of agreements out for signature.4 If your agreement
process involves printing, scanning, faxing, emailing, or
physically mailing agreements, that’s a big red flag for
B2B buyers who by now expect better.
With a modern system of agreement, customers and
employees can sign agreements quickly and easily, from
practically anywhere on any mobile device, when it’s most
convenient for them. They can also verify their identities,
whether via email authentication, SMS, or government-
issued ID, as well as certify the signing process, all
digitally and in accordance with regional laws. And, sales
reps are always able to see who still needs to do what
to get the deal over the line. Is that how things work in
your organization?
ERP
Procurement
Finance
IT/Ops
Prepare
Paper and email are so 20th century
Before agreements can be signed, they must be written
and approved, usually with multiple rounds of redlining and
legal review. While most agreements can be prepared from
templates, or by copying and editing an existing document,
they still require sales reps—or worse, customers—to
manually fill in fields with information and send around
paperwork. Typos and errors only cause rework and delays,
and that’s assuming the rep uses the right template in the
first place. Research shows that 87% of sales organizations
still prepare agreements using a highly manual process
that involves word processing and email technologies, which
haven’t seen significant innovation in decades.5
71% of B2B sales professionals report
71% inefficiency due to manually entering
information into contracts.6

>50 % More than half of sales

organizations say their
contracting process
takes too long.3 Today, sales reps should be able to click a button and
generate a polished yet easily editable agreement right
from an account record in your CRM system—based on the
correct template with most, if not all, of the fields already
pre-filled—and automatically route it to the right approvers
or signers in the right order. Can your sales reps do that?

3
Commissioned study conducted by Business Advantage Group Limited on behalf of DocuSign, April 2019
4
Commissioned study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of DocuSign, February 2019
5
Ibid
6
Ibid
DocuSign Accelerate sales with a frictionless agreement process

Act
Acting on executed agreements is easier
than it used to be, but there are still efficiencies
to be gained
When an agreement is complete, its terms need to be
fulfilled. Usually this means that downstream processes
need to be executed, such as provisioning a customer
account or initiating billing. In your organization, are
those downstream processes automatically triggered the
moment an agreement is signed, or do employees need
to push buttons or send email requests? Research shows
that relying on people to communicate and coordinate
next steps to multiple teams causes delays, errors, and
rework, including duplicate work to enter data from
completed agreements into systems of record.7
63% of B2B sales professionals
63 % report rework due to manual
errors in contracts.8
Manage
Agreement documents are
stored digitally but basically
in a black hole
While 76% of sales organizations store most or all
agreements digitally, nearly half (44%) are unable to
search for and find specific agreements easily using a
single digital interface.9 If agreements aren’t printed and
stored in actual file cabinets, they are saved on individual
employee or shared drives across the organization. As
a result, many organizations lack visibility into the location
and status of signed documents, which leads to increased
security, compliance and confidentiality risks.
A modern system of agreement enables the centralized
and intelligent storage, visibility, and searchability of all
agreements. Like Google gives you a single interface to
search the internet, there should be a single interface to
search all your organization’s agreements using keywords
and phrases. Even better, that interface should be smart,
allowing you to use artificial intelligence to search for
concepts not easily described in a simple set of words
or phrases—for example, the many concepts related to
compliance with privacy laws, such as the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR).

A modern system of agreement connects agreement

events—most notably, the completion of an agreement—
with downstream business processes. A signed
agreement document can be automatically stored with
the proper customer record in your CRM system. A
billing system can be automatically notified, or you can
even accept payments as part of the signing-completion
process. Most importantly, reps do not need to spend
their time executing or monitoring these tasks; they can
get back to selling.

7
Commissioned study conducted by Business Advantage Group Limited on behalf of DocuSign, April 2019
8
Ibid
9
Commissioned study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of DocuSign, February 2019
DocuSign Accelerate sales with a frictionless agreement process

Get to revenue faster with Case study

Salesforce’s modern system of agreement
a modern system of agreement An excellent example of a company running a
modern system of agreement is Salesforce, one
of the world’s leading software companies. In the
Customers have come to expect digital speed and convenience in past, Salesforce reps sent out contracts by email
business as in life. Working directly with a salesperson through a and postal mail, receiving completed agreements
back in an average of two days. Once the contract
rigorous process can seem like a burden. When you add manual or was finalized, the Sales Operations team had to
paper-based steps to an already lengthy or complex process, it might follow up with the customer to get a Purchase
Order (PO) number for invoicing. Only once that
be just the excuse customers need to take their business elsewhere. process was complete would the customer
account be provisioned.
The onus is on B2B sales leaders to simplify and accelerate sales by
Using DocuSign, Salesforce now creates and
investing in digital transformation—and the agreement process is a automatically populates agreements with data
great place to focus your efforts, now that the technology has arrived from any Salesforce CRM record. This alone saves
10,000 hours of rep time per year. Next, the rep
to modernize your system of agreement. Research shows that faster can send the agreement for signature without
sales cycles, better customer experiences, and reduced administrative leaving his or her CRM application, which in this
work by sales reps are the top three benefits to be realized by digitizing situation is (of course) Salesforce Sales Cloud.
The customer enters the PO number during the
the sales contracting process.10 signing process, then the PO number is written
back to the Salesforce CRM record. The customer’s
Get to know the DocuSign Agreement Cloud™ and digitally transform new instance of Salesforce’s software is then
the way you do business via contracts and other types of agreements. automatically provisioned.
It offers more than a dozen applications and more than 350 As a result of modernizing its system of agreement,
Salesforce has reduced its sales-contract
integrations covering the entire agreement process—from preparing, turnaround time from an average of two days to
signing, acting on, and managing agreements. Given the pervasiveness an hour. This large time savings means a better
customer and employee experience and faster
of agreements in the sales cycle, organizations that move quickly revenue recognition. As well, there is a major cost
to modernize their systems of agreement can realize substantial savings due to manual work saved. Beyond using
improvement in sales productivity, revenue, and customer experiences, DocuSign for its 3,000+ sales reps, Salesforce
has also deployed it for use by HR, Purchasing/
as well as gain a competitive edge against slower movers. Procurement, and other departments.
Learn more about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud for Sales by visiting
DocuSign for Sales.

“Accelerating getting it to signature and getting it closed faster,

it's all about revenue per time. If you can close the contract
faster, you can close the deal faster, and book revenue
faster. It also saves some effort and money in terms of calling,
following up, making sure things get done, and sending
emails making sure changes are sent back and forth.”11
Director of Business Development
Technology, 501-1,000 employees

10
Commissioned study conducted by Business Advantage Group Limited on behalf of DocuSign, April 2019
11
Ibid

About DocuSign DocuSign, Inc. For more information

DocuSign helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements. 221 Main Street, Suite 1550 sales@docusign.com
As part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature: the world’s #1 way to sign electronically San Francisco, CA 94105 +1-877-720-2040
on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time. Today, more than 500,000 customers and
hundreds of millions of users in over 180 countries use DocuSign to accelerate the process of doing business docusign.com
and to simplify people’s lives.