Stop Letting Slow Contracts Kill Your Sales: How Contract Automation Accelerates Deals

The Agreement Trap is Slowing Down Your Sales Deals

Sales teams often fall into 'The Agreement Trap', when outdated systems and practices bury critical information within static documents. In sales this leads to a cycle of slow contract approvals, siloed stakeholder input, and inefficiencies processes for redlining that delays deals unnecessarily.

Long sales cycles are a major challenge, especially for Enterprise sellers who deal with multiple decision-makers across departments. When contract negotiations drag on, it can lead to lost revenue and frustrated sales reps. According to Forrester, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers. For sales teams, time is money. Every day a deal sits in legal review or awaits approval from procurement, there’s a risk of losing momentum—and the customer.

To combat these challenges, Docusign IAM offers a streamlined approach to contract management and approval processes. By leveraging Docusign Maestro’s advanced workflow capabilities, sales managers can benefit in their day-to-day operations to accelerate contract workflows, increase team efficiency, and gain real-time insights into the status of contracts. With Docusign's IAM for Sales, sales managers can drive efficiency, improve team performance, and ultimately increase revenue.

Speed Up Contract Workflows with Digital Agreements

Docusign eliminates unnecessary bottlenecks by streamlining contract approvals. Organisations using Docusign have reported significant reductions in contract turnaround time, helping accelerate the sales cycle. With Docusign eSignature, Multiparty Review & Approvals, and Obligation Management, sales teams can:

• Reduce approval time from weeks to days with automated routing to the right stakeholders.

• Improve collaboration between sales, legal, and procurement by reducing manual back-and-forths.

• Drive compliance with obligation tracking and automated notifications for key deadlines.

With Docusign Maestro, customers can automate every step of their agreement process—from collecting data through webforms, verifying identities, enabling a seamless digital signing experience, to automatically storing completed agreements back into their systems via powerful integrations. This means critical data can be easily pushed or pulled from platforms like Salesforce. By streamlining these tasks, sales teams can spend less time on manual admin and more time focusing on what matters most: closing deals.

Docusign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) is suited to organisations with complex agreement processes and also plays a crucial role in automating contract generation, tracking approvals, and managing obligations, offering deeper automation and AI-driven insights—ensuring deals progress smoothly. A recent report by McKinsey found that more than 30% of sales-related activities can be automated, leading to increased customer-facing time, higher customer satisfaction, and efficiency gains.

Faster Sales, Higher Revenue

By digitising the contract process, companies like Canva and Commonwealth Bank of Australia have accelerated deal closures and reduced operational overhead. If your team is struggling with slow contract approvals, it’s time to rethink how agreements fit into your sales process. With B2B buyers expecting seamless experiences similar to B2C transactions, digital agreements are no longer optional—they’re essential.