Transforming Business Series Part II…Dealer Agreements

Channel and dealer agreements and paperwork are iterative, lengthy, and arduous. And that’s on a good day. It gets even more interesting when multiple parties are involved.  Yet for companies whose businesses are dependent on channels, dealers and retailers, these agreements are absolutely critical to doing business.

A manufacturer has hundreds or thousands of dealers across the country with which they do business. Each dealer relationship requires a regular contract renewal. For every contract, as many as eight executives inside and outside the company need to understand, approve and sign it. What makes things more interesting is that eight out of ten contracts come back with missing signatures, crossed out clauses and unauthorized changes.  Addressing this challenge requires no less than whole team of full-time staff.

Now, whether your specific company has actively looked for a way to automate contract signing or not, something intuitively tells you that technology must exist to improve the process. (Why does the world still rely on pen, paper, fax and overnight in the Web era, anyway?) In this case, the key to successful signing automation was DocuSign Professional Services leveraging the DocuSign API.

In looking at the pieces of the process that were best suited to automation (typically the most repetitive and often the most painful) the first obvious candidate was just getting the agreements sent out to dealers. Using the DocuSign API interface and customer provided database of dealerships, Professional Services created a mail merge program that emailed eSignature envelopes out in bulk for electronic signature. Before DocuSign the process involved bulk faxing and bulk mailing, countless steps and people and days managing and executing this program. Now, in minutes, agreements were sent to thousands of customers for electronic signing. The savings in time, people and costs continue to be significant.

Another process pain was routing agreements in the proper order. This would be akin to asking FedEx to not just overnight a document, but to make sure that it went to eight different places in a particular order, while waiting to make sure that each executive reviewed and signed their section of each agreement. Using the DocuSign routing feature, each agreement (via a DocuSign envelope) was routed to eight or nine recipients in order with an added bonus—a custom-branded e-mail notification and signing experience.

When this project was complete, DocuSign Professional Services—working with the manufacturer—succeeded in eliminating tedious work and actually improving legal compliance as an added benefit.  As a result, the company has experienced an unprecedented e-signed, completed and closed contract return rate in a fraction of the time compared to pen and paper.

The best part of this story?  None of the electronically signed contracts had changes or crossed out clauses – DocuSign, unlike fax, doesn’t allow it.