Docusign Exchange: How to close faster, forecast better, and fix the broken middle

In sales, every forecast call and quarterly review hinges on one thing: a contract getting finalised and signed. Yet when the process is inefficient, revenue momentum slows and your forecast loses its position. 

Unfortunately, inefficiencies still exist in many organisations, despite heavy investment in digital transformation in recent years. These organisations may have built high-speed engines for identifying opportunities, but the “middle” of the sales process – drafting, redlining, and internal approvals – often remains manual and disconnected from the rest of the tech stack. 

As our VP of Sales for Docusign in Asia, Kartik Krishnamurthy, said, “We’re using 2026 AI tools to find prospects, but relying on fragmented processes to bring them across the finish line.” 

Kartik recently spoke to Kevin Wo, Chief Partner Officer and Managing Director, Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft about this topic. Their chat was a big hit at Docusign Exchange, and you can now watch the full session on-demand or read on for the highlights.

Three macro trends shifting the APAC landscape

To kick things off, Kartik shared three of the big trends that are impacting the APAC landscape right now:

1. Closing the opportunity gap: In a study with Deloitte, it was found that fragmented agreement processes cost businesses roughly US$6 billion in lost value every year in Asia Pacific. This is dead air, the period where momentum stalls between a verbal “yes” and a deal getting booked in a market where every basis point counts.

2. Efficiency is a new growth strategy: The mandate has shifted from “grow at all costs” to “profitable growth”. McKinsey found that while 72% of the leaders recognise the need for change, the winners are treating efficiency as a primary engine for scale, not just as a cost cutting measure. 

3. Building the AI sales stack: 62% of organisations are now scaling agentic AI to resolve operational bottlenecks. But AI can’t effectively process a flat PDF stored in a siloed folder. To remain competitive, your agreements must be structured data that feeds your forecast in real time. 

Four friction points that hamper growth

How do the above trends impact daily operations? According to Kartik, four points of friction are commonly felt across the region. These elements, what he calls the “broken middle”, hold organisations back from getting a customer across the line, and include:

1. The commitment-to-cash visibility gap: That is, the space between the verbal “yes” and the booked revenue. When a contract leaves the CRM and enters a manual email chain, it becomes invisible to leadership. 

2. Addressing guesswork and pipeline: Deals are marked as committed, only to find out later that the key terms are still under negotiation. There’s no real-time visibility into agreements. 

3. Reducing the sales admin tax: Research shows that reps still lose a significant portion of their week to non-selling tasks. By standardising workflows, high performing teams can reclaim almost a day a week for actual customer engagement. 

4. Agile governance: You need guardrails, and you need these guardrails to be built into workflows so sellers stay compliant with local regulations without slowing down the pace of the deal. 

Kevin agreed with this sentiment, adding, “Across Asia Pacific, we see three common friction points that slow down sales agreements. First, buying committees are getting larger and more cross functional, which means more stakeholders are involved in reviewing and approving contracts. Second, most teams are still managing red lines and approvals through emails and spreadsheets, with every change becoming a manual handoff. And third, systems are often fragmented.”

One digital solution to standardise and automate sales

Given all the above pain points, both Kartik and Kevin agreed that there’s a huge opportunity to standardise and automate key elements of the sales process. 

As Kevin explained, standardised templates help reduce legal review times, providing a clear playbook for sales teams to follow. And automated approval workflows ensure that things like discounts and data residency clauses get routed to the right stakeholders instantly, instead of sitting in someone’s mailbox or waiting for someone to manually follow up. They also have a really positive impact on the accuracy and the health of pipelining, particularly in fast growing APAC markets. 

Kevin also explored the impact of AI and agentic AI on how sales teams create, navigate and manage agreements. He said, “AI is fundamentally going to change the agreement from being workforce- or workflow-driven, to somehow outcome driven. Agents are able to actively plan, act and adapt to how to move deals to signature and completion.”

These agents can help draft agreements and shorten cycle times. They can flag non-compliance clauses. They can manage reminders and keep deals flowing across time zones. It all adds up to faster sales cycles, less manual follow-up, and better compliance and visibility. 

Together, Docusign and Microsoft Copilot make all of the above possible

The above opportunities aren’t just pipedreams. They are available right now thanks to partnerships like the one between Docusign and Microsoft. Within the Microsoft ecosystem, sales teams can use Docusign to create, negotiate and manage agreements with help from agentic AI; and organisations can build intelligent agents powered by Docusign to check agreement status, trigger workflows, retrieve contract insights and guide users to the next steps.

To learn more about how this partnership helps streamline and accelerate sales, get in touch. Or, to catch all the other breakout sessions from Docusign Exchange, visit here.