Less Busywork, More Revenue: How Sales Teams Sell Faster

We recently held our flagship annual conference, Docusign Momentum. During a breakout session entitled Less Busywork, More Revenue: How Sales Teams Sell Faster, Docusign leaders and customer Payworks explored how manual contract generation, disconnected workflows, and inefficient approval processes create friction throughout the sales cycle and what organizations can do to reduce it.

The hidden cost of agreement inefficiencies

Caleb Bauers, a senior product marketing leader at Docusign, recounted a painful end-of-quarter experience as an account executive. He shared he’d been working with a potential customer, and the deal seemed all but closed—until internal delays finding the right contract and aligning on terms caused the agreement to miss the deadline.

The result? A lost deal, a missed quota milestone, and a lesson that still resonates today. Unfortunately, Bauers’ experience is far from unique. Research conducted by Docusign and Deloitte opens in a new tab found that:

• Organizations lose an average of $1.5 million in revenue annually due to contract inefficiencies

• Disconnected agreement workflows cost employees 18% of their time

• Locating a standard Master Services Agreement (MSA) takes an average of 60 minutes

"We can all agree that slow, manual agreement generation stalls deals and is a direct threat to company revenue," said Bauers.

For sales teams, these inefficiencies translate into hours spent chasing templates, tracking approvals, and navigating disconnected systems instead of engaging customers and closing deals.

Reimagining the agreement process

According to Bauers, organizations need a fundamentally different approach to sales agreement management that embeds agreements directly into sales workflows, automates governance, and unlocks insights from contract data.

He outlined three key principles:

1. Generate and manage agreements directly within the CRM

2. Automate approvals and governance behind the scenes

3. Use AI to surface critical contract data like pricing, renewal dates, and key terms

These principles are the foundation of Docusign IAM for Sales, which helps customers transform agreements from static documents into strategic levers.

From weeks to minutes: what modern agreement management looks like

Dominique Austin, lead solutions consultant at Docusign, demonstrated how IAM for Sales streamlines every stage of the agreement lifecycle. Austin showed how sellers can launch agreement workflows directly from Salesforce, automatically populate customer information into pre-approved templates, and track contract progress without leaving their CRM.

Legal teams benefit as well. Instead of searching through email chains, reviewers receive centralized requests with complete audit trails, AI-assisted summaries, and clause review capabilities.

The impact can be dramatic. According to Docusign internal research, customers using IAM for Sales have reported:

• 81% improvement in document turnaround times

• 2x increase in sales team productivity

• Approval cycles reduced from three weeks to just 45 minutes

How Payworks reduced friction at scale

Willie Malcolm, Vice President of Operations at Payworks, shared how the company has tackled the pain points of agreement inefficiencies. 

Payworks is one of the largest payroll and workforce management providers in Canada, serving more than 45,000 clients. Before modernizing its agreement workflows, Payworks faced a familiar challenge: information arriving through PDFs, emails, handwritten notes, and multiple forms, creating manual work and data inconsistencies. "Every sales rep, unfortunately, was doing what worked for them," Malcolm explained. "That was creating a lot of challenges for us."

While Payworks already used Docusign eSignature technology, Malcolm emphasized that digital signatures alone don't solve broken processes.

The company adopted a four-pillar approach focused on integrating customer data directly into CRM workflows, automating fragmented processes, improving customer and employee experiences, and modernizing contract generation.

The results have been significant. Eight months into the initiative, Payworks reported:

• Contract generation time reduced from 45 minutes to 7.5 minutes

• Contracts completed within 24 hours increased from 55% to 87%

• Approximately 9,000 hours returned to the sales team in terms of efficiency and productivity

• More than $656,000 in annual savings

The improvements didn't stop with sales. Better data quality reduced downstream bottlenecks for implementation teams, improved forecasting accuracy, and enabled employees to focus on higher-value work rather than administrative tasks.

The future of sales operations

As organizations look to improve productivity, accelerate deal cycles, and drive growth, agreement management is becoming increasingly important.

As Bauers summarized, "When we start to replace fragmented processes, you start to see automation, elimination of selling friction, and you start to reclaim hours and reclaim revenue."

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