The ultimate guide to digitising your agreements, and your business

Can we let you in on a little secret? Digitising your business doesn’t have to be hard. Or time-consuming. It doesn’t have to be costly, either. In fact, when it comes to digital transformation, there’s one simple thing you can do right now to make a big difference. 

That’s right, one thing. Get rid of paper.

You’ve no doubt already got digital systems like CRM and productivity suites in place. These tools hum away nicely, helping your teams do great work. But there’s often still one big roadblock in the way of true digitisation. You guessed it. Paper.

It’s all to do with your systems of agreement. How do you currently prepare, sign, act on, and manage all the agreements and contracts that circulate through your business? If paper’s still involved in the process, then the system is likely to be rife with slow turnaround times, human error, and unnecessary costs. Not to mention a burden on the environment.

There is a simple solution. It’s called Docusign Agreement Cloud – a single platform that helps digitise every aspect of the agreement process, so you can banish paper for good. Let’s take a look at the key features of Docusign Agreement Cloud and how the platform can help you do business better.

It all starts with eSignature

eSignature has become synonymous with convenience and speed in business today. With a tool like Docusign eSignature, which is part of Docusign Agreement Cloud, contracts and agreements can be approved in minutes – instead of the days or weeks it typically takes for a paper-based contract to do the rounds. 

Look under the hood of eSignature and you’ll see that it’s about so much more than just a digital signature. A platform like Docusign lets you create reusable templates to save time and standardise processes; with instant status visibility making it easy for you to keep track of exactly where everything’s at.

Most importantly, it comes with a robust audit trail for every agreement, and meets the most stringent security standards to keep every agreement safe. 

It gets even better with CLM

There’s more to contracts and agreements than just signing on the dotted line. Once you’ve got your eSignature solution set up, it’s time to turn your attention to digitising the processes around setting up the contracts and agreements. If your sales teams are currently starting from scratch each time they prepare a new contract, or they’re cobbling something together manually from previous contracts, then you’re losing valuable time and resources.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) helps you automate and organise all the workflows in your agreement process to eliminate costly bottlenecks and help your team move at the pace of business today. 

The end-to-end agreement platform is full of rich features that are easy to implement, such as flexible workflows, a central repository of contracts, seamless document generation and more. You can pre-approve templates for sales reps to use when generating agreements, and you can set up a clause library with pre-approved contract clauses to minimise lengthy legal negotiations. 

Then it’s time to collect payments

If your sales contracts or agreements require payment – for example, you need to collect a deposit for an order, or membership fees from a new customer, or perhaps an event registration – you can seamlessly integrate payment collection into the signing process. 

Docusign Payments enables you to request payment at time of signing. There’s support for numerous payment gateways, and customers can pay with credit card, debit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Keeping it all in the one place helps eliminate the need for you to manually chase payments after an agreement’s signed.

Ensure signers are who they say they are 

When you’re dealing with high-value or highly regulated agreements, or you need to validate a new hire’s ID during onboarding, you may need to add extra verification steps into the process. This can all be automated as part of the agreement process in Docusign Agreement Cloud. Docusign Identify automatically verifies all major government-issued IDs – scanning the ID, making sure it’s valid, and cross-checking that the name matches the envelope – to reduce the manual burden on your team and to make the process easier for your customers or new hires, too.

One platform, so many other opportunities to digitise

With more than 350 pre-built integrations with other products where work gets done, Docusign Agreement Cloud fits in seamlessly with your other digital tools and processes. It’s all about helping you save time, cut costs and improve the experience for both your own team and your customers. 

To see how easy it is to get started, start a free trial of Docusign Agreement Cloud today.