How Docusign’s Sales Team Uses IAM to Sell Smarter

The friction customers sometimes feel often reflects how work gets done within an organization. At Docusign, we’re not immune to this. As we've scaled, even well-intentioned processes have introduced friction: folder searches to find agreements, manual extraction of critical contract data, manual handoffs, gaps between systems, and moments where work has stalled. 

That’s why the sales team at Docusign turned to its own Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform to solve real, day-to-day challenges. Just like our customers, Docusign teams need to automate contract workflows to reduce errors, handoffs, and delays—and to drive better experiences. Docusign’s legal operations team, which streamlined sales contracting using IAM, led the way for other business divisions, like customer experience. That same momentum is now accelerating across sales.

The foundation: CLM and Salesforce

At the core of Docusign’s internal sales engine is a tightly integrated system. All agreements—MSAs, order forms, NDAs—are created and managed in Docusign CLM, part of the IAM platform. Deep integration with Salesforce enables seamless, end-to-end sales workflows. 

This foundation ensures that agreements can become actionable, connected, and embedded directly into the systems that sales teams already use. 

The challenge: manual agreement work

Even with a strong system in place, inefficiencies can creep in, especially during sales contract renewals. Sellers often spend significant time searching for contracts and extracting key terms, like SLAs, fees, and termination clauses. With over 1.8 million Docusign customers, this process can be slow and repetitive. “In the past, an account executive would spend 30 minutes extracting agreement data buried in folders,” said Raisa Yang, Product Manager at Docusign.

That’s time sellers could be spending on tasks that drive revenue, like helping deliver high-touch, white-glove experiences to customers. Instead, they’re searching for documents and piecing together information.

The upgrade: Docusign Agreement Manager

To reduce this friction, the Docusign sales team integrated Agreement Manager, including Iris, its AI-powered agreement intelligence layer.

With Iris, a portfolio of agreements is easier to analyze and index. As Yang explained, “Last year, we brought in thousands of sales agreements, ingested those to the Agreement Manager, and had the AI run through all of those agreements and extract key information. Now we’re rolling that out to our sales team.” No more toggling between systems and opening agreements one by one—AI analyzes and compares all of them at once. 

Iris doesn’t just extract data; it brings the entire portfolio into focus, so sellers can easily identify growth opportunities or spot churn risk. This leads to optimized renewals and better obligation management. Iris provides instant access to contracts, auto-stores executed agreements, and makes everything searchable and actionable. AI-powered insights are only a question away. It all adds up to less time searching—so there’s more time for selling. The sales team experienced an approximate 50% productivity gain, reclaiming 42,000 hours annually.

The impact: faster, smarter sales

At Docusign, sellers now have the same one-click access to agreements and key data as customers. “When sellers are in Salesforce, post-sales execution, and they’re planning for an add-on or expansion to their current deals, typically the pain points we’ve heard from them are that they have to go back to Salesforce, go into different opportunity records and attachments, just to find an agreement or MSA,” Yang said. “Searching through these old agreements has been so hard.” Now, AI-assisted reviews, including contract comparisons, help accelerate deal cycles, and Salesforce directly generates agreements. 

With these improvements, the team saw a 60% reduction in cycle time and approximately 70 minutes saved per contract across sales and legal teams.  

Will Petry, an account executive at Docusign, reiterated these improvements:

“Locating previous order forms used to take up to 20 minutes of navigating multiple tabs and making manual calculations. Having a single view for all appropriate agreements is incredibly convenient and gives me that time back to focus on the customer.”

The benefits can ripple across the business as well: Sales teams can spend less time chasing status updates, rev ops and finance can accelerate revenue recognition, and operations can scale without adding headcount. 

What’s next

Internal interest in using IAM continues to grow. The digital sales team wants to deploy AI agents and ID verification to streamline pre-pay workflows and speed up customer onboarding. Embedded verification steps can improve trust without adding friction for customers, while AI-powered summaries will help customers better understand agreement terms. And it won’t stop there. AI capabilities will continue to expand across the full sales lifecycle, from prospecting to renewal.

The goal is to reduce friction, increase speed, and enable smarter decision-making at every step. And when agreements are centralized, this becomes much simpler. Sales teams can move faster, customers can receive better experiences, and the business can scale more efficiently.

For the Docusign sales team, using its own IAM platform has led to accelerated revenue and scaling operations. See what it could do for your organization here.