Capturing Value Through Simplicity at Perceptyx

When you’re a leader at a growing company like Perceptyx, it means you “wear a lot of hats,” says David Hollady, general counsel and data protection officer at Perceptyx.

“When you work at a small business, it means you do all of the things,” Hollady says. “I came in as general counsel, and that’s the core of what I do. But I also own our IT team, our internal AI development team, our partnership team, and our infrastructure. It’s a lot of different areas of focus, which creates opportunities to put things together and make holistic decisions.”

Perceptyx employs 300-400 people and helps over 500 global enterprises, including a third of the Fortune 100, gather and analyze feedback to improve engagement and business outcomes.

For small to medium enterprises like Perceptyx, every bit of cost savings is crucial, as it helps accelerate value capture and serves as a catalyst for growth. Growing firms are always looking for ways to enhance efficiency, reduce task time, and improve ROI.

Seeking alternatives to CLM 

Agreement management is an area that’s ripe for improvement. Often, the process involves a patchwork of methods, including email attachments, redlined documents, and decentralized storage. Traditional contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions can streamline and enhance many of these processes, improving accuracy and accelerating agreement timelines. But CLM platforms require a significant investment of time and resources to implement, so they’re generally a better fit for large enterprises with a high volume of contracts to manage. 

“I’ll admit, I don’t actually like CLM,” Hollady says. “The ROI case just doesn’t make a lot of sense for us. We have about 500 customers—that’s 500 contracts. That’s a really bad weekend if I have to go through all of them, but it’s doable.”

Despite these misgivings, Hollady did see value in certain CLM features, such as document generation. He researched CLM alternatives and found the Docusign IAM platform a better fit for their needs.

“When we looked at what to do next, we figured out we still needed document generation capabilities—it fit our budget—but then there were all these other things we could get with it, whether it’s AI contract review, ticketing, or other features. [We] can [harness] those same capabilities [as CLM] through IAM at a much lower cost and with an easier setup.”

Capturing value quickly

Perceptyx recognized the value of IAM early on, with a single use case: legal ticketing.

“Ticketing is the core use case we use all the time,” says Hollady. “I’ve found that if I want sellers to interact with legal, I need to keep it as simple as possible. Putting everything into the same place where we have ticketing is really productive. If I cause more friction for sellers, that’s not a winning combination.”

Brendan Mills, contracts administrator at Perceptyx, says: “We were using a mix of our previous CLM solution, Slack messages, and our email inbox, but we didn’t have one streamlined process. Our team wanted a real solution to get organized all in one place.”  

“The simplicity has been huge,” Hollady adds. “It’s taken us out of an additional system.”

Another of Perceptyx’s early wins with IAM involved creating a self-service form for NDAs. What used to be a days-long email chain suddenly became a fully automated process.

Transforming workflows through IAM 

Perceptyx is already seeing value from its IAM implementation. Legal has reduced the time spent generating documents by 99% and is saving more than three hours a week previously spent on manual tasks.

“If we can click less and download less, we’re saving time,” Mills says. “Manual processes don’t engage the mind here. If we can get rid of them with technology, it’s better for everybody.” 

Visibility across teams has seen a major boost as well, particularly through the deployment of Docusign Agreement Desk, which empowers users to effortlessly manage requests, collaboratively negotiate and redline, and automate busywork—accelerating the path to signed agreements.

“When you open a request in Agreement Desk, you can see a timeline of everything that’s happened," Mills says. "We can see different versions, send messages, and track what’s been worked on. That transparency has helped get everyone on the same page.”

Using AI in contract processes

Hollady is always seeking ways to enhance process efficiency at Perceptyx. Right now, he’s exploring the use of AI in contract review. 

“Contract review isn’t something we’ve used a ton of yet, but we want to dive deeper,” Hollady says. “From my perspective, most products on the market are using the same frontier models and will produce similar results. Having AI in a ‘package’ with everything else—as opposed to a point solution—is a no-brainer. I get it from a partner I trust, within a system I’m already getting value out of. It’s one more use case I can turn on inside the box I already have.” 

Hollady is also interested in identifying potential IAM use cases for other teams, including procurement and HR.

“We’re saving money, but we’re also focusing on areas we didn’t before,” Hollady says. “No business our size has a dedicated procurement department; it’s just not something you think about. We just have a Google Drive where contracts live. That’s a great opportunity. Having the ability to automate that process gives us the ability to actually start reviewing procurements that we just didn’t have before.”

“HR is another one,” Hollady adds. “HCM [human capital management] systems are notoriously bad at document management. I used to be general counsel at an ATS [applicant tracking system] company, and I saw it there, too. Documents end up scattered between the ATS, the HCM, and Google Drive. By the end of the year, I expect we will be utilizing IAM for HR as well.”

Hollady is excited about the expanded opportunities for process improvement that IAM offers, and encourages other legal departments to consider it as a prudent alternative to CLM.

Each business, no matter its size, has unique needs. Perceptyx found IAM works best for its contract volume.