5 Reasons to Digitally Transform Your Agreement Process

Digital transformation is all around us.

Most business leaders agree that driving digital transformation within their organizations is vital to long-term success.

What’s trickier to agree on, though, is which digital transformation initiatives are worth their time and investment of resources.

Agile leaders are forced to reckon with questions like: 

• What digital initiatives will maximize profitability in the short run? How about the long run? 

• What are the inefficiencies in my business today? Could I solve them with technology? 

• Are we leaving money on the table in any of our day-to-day operations? 

• What are the best businesses out there doing to stay on the cutting edge of digital transformation?   

The answers may vary from business to business and in different industries. But one common process that can benefit from digitization is the agreement process.

Agreements are everywhere throughout businesses of all sizes. Businesses can unlock enormous value by thinking of contracts less as a peripheral utility and more as an opportunity to accelerate revenue, increase productivity and create a competitive advantage.

See five examples of how companies have created long-lasting profitability gains by digitizing the agreement process. 

Five tangible benefits of digitizing the agreement process 

Most businesses start with e-signature as the first step in automating the agreement process. Our recent research reveals the many benefits of e-signature, from cost savings to sales acceleration, including: 

• 73% of organizations realized an ROI in less than three months—and by six months, nine out of ten had seen some sort of financial return.

• 66% of e-signature users say the technology has positively impacted sales revenue.

• Docusign customers reported a 75% faster turnaround time with eSignature.  

Here are five reasons to prioritize the agreement process on your list of digital transformation efforts. 

1. Close deals faster 

Digitizing sales contracts frees up salespeople to focus their efforts on selling rather than paperwork. This pays off in big ways as Calendly’s story below illustrates.

In short, companies that have an automated agreement process can move deals along more quickly and close them more successfully. With higher win rates and faster deal cycles, teams can more effectively drive growth. Sellers can convert even more customers and pursue opportunities that their nondigital competitors wouldn’t have time for. 

Case study: How Calendly created a friction-free agreement flow 

Adoption of Calendly for Enterprise grew 61% year over year in July of 2023, and the company continues to capture the lion's share of the scheduling market. The problem? Its sales agreement process couldn’t keep pace—and the company was missing out on valuable automation and insights.

The company switched to Docusign eSignature and saw a significant increase in adoption by the sales team. eSignature makes it easier for reps to close deals—faster—by keeping them in the tool where their most important data lives: their CRM. eSignature works seamlessly with Salesforce, enabling reps to generate order forms, renewal agreements, NDAs and MSAs with a single click directly from the opportunity. Now, everyone knows where a document has been, who’s seen it, and where it needs to go next—without leaving Salesforce.
 

2. Offer a superior customer experience 

Docusign and Deloitte research opens in a new tab found 66% of respondents reported inefficient agreement workflows as a driver for negative customer satisfaction. A system that makes contracts easier for customers to navigate can significantly improve customer satisfaction.

Smart leaders understand that a digital-first customer onboarding experience sets their organization apart. In a world where consumers increasingly expect frictionless,  personalized experiences and 24/7 service opens in a new tab, providing a fast and consistent onboarding process puts them ahead.

But customer onboarding is a complex process—and one that’s difficult to improve.  It involves transferring significant institutional knowledge and multi-departmental collaboration. Plus, each relationship is unique, making 
 it hard to fully standardize the process.  While a modern agreement 
 platform can’t solve all of the challenges that come with  great onboarding and implementation, it can speed up the very earliest phases of the  onboarding process.

To customers, time spent waiting is essentially time wasted. 90% of companies  opens in a new tablose a portion of potential customers during the onboarding process, and 32% of customers  opens in a new tababandon a brand they love after just one bad experience. A digital contract process that integrates with key business systems helps improve the customer experience by automating time-sensitive interactions, including automatic account provisioning, without any lag time.

Long story short, faster customer onboarding translates to faster time-to- revenue and takes the pressure off internal resources. Meeting customers’ needs at the beginning of the relationship also means fewer customer support calls, lower churn rates and increased customer satisfaction down 
 the line. 

Case study: How Refinitiv cut time spent on agreements from five days to six hours 

Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest financial service data and infrastructure providers, uses Docusign to improve its CX.

After a slew of strategic acquisitions, they needed to integrate all the new sales processes into a single, streamlined solution. And their customers needed an easier way to buy from them.

Implementing Docusign eSignature for Salesforce into their customer onboarding and acquisition workflow reduced contract turnaround time for customers by 95%— from five days to just six hours. They also eliminated lag time. Now, when a customer signs an agreement, they get an email a minute later with everything they need to onboard. 

3. Uncover cost-reduction opportunities in procurement 

Rising prices, labor shortages and unpredictable supply disruptions are creating a challenging environment for procurement teams. To navigate these headwinds, procurement professionals need to streamline their procure-to-pay processes.

Intelligent agreement management (IAM) solutions offer greater visibility into the contract portfolio, which can help procurement professionals uncover ways to: 

• Reduce vendor overspend: Identify duplicate purchases of the same vendor solutions from different parts of the same organization. 

• Spot discount opportunities: Renegotiate vendor contracts at a better rate, leveraging the organization’s consolidated buying power. 

• Improve compliance: Avoid penalties and fines from compliance breaches and regulatory missteps. 

• Identify unnecessary vendor solutions: Cancel automatic renewals for underutilized products or services. 

Case study: How Unilever cut its agreement turnaround time in half 

When you manage over 400 brands and serve 2.5 billion people in 190 countries, procurement becomes a critical growth driver. Globally distributed teams at Unilever were managing agreements with a mix of office applications and tedious workflows.

Every time an employee generated a new contract, they had to manually search for the right information to copy and paste into it. To help digitally transform procurement contracting, Unilever collaborated with Docusign.

By adopting Docusign CLM, Unilever integrated all of its contracting tasks into one platform, allowing for easier contract generation and automatic routing to the next party. The new procurement system now generates documents in multiple languages.

These improvements came together to deliver a significantly faster contracting process that reduced contract turnaround time by 50% and drafting times by 80%. 

4. Delight new employees with digital onboarding 

Getting new hires set up and acquainted with their roles takes time and resources, and the process only becomes more difficult as employee headcount increases.

Successful onboarding requires collaboration across many departments. If handled poorly, this collaboration leads to delays as multiple people juggle their schedules and follow their own department-specific checklists in isolation. But getting it right has big benefits—a good onboarding program can increase new-hire retention by 82% and improve productivity by 70%.

Technology uncovers these benefits, even at scale. By automating repetitive tasks,  connecting departments and standardizing the onboarding process, technology speeds up onboarding while delivering a better employee experience.

Once you’ve improved employee onboarding, keep going. Digitizing the entire hire-to retire lifecycle makes it easier to recruit and keep talented employees.

Some ways to start include:  

• Send convenient offer letters: If you digitize offer letters and allow signing from mobile devices, you make the hiring experience easier and more convenient. 

• Streamline performance reviews: A centralized repository of performance data integrates with your HR system to allow for easier, more insightful reviews. 

• Be proactive about offboarding: When up to 15% of past employees return and a further 30% refer job openings to their network, it pays to have an easy, standardized offboarding system that leaves people feeling good about the experience. 

Case study: How ScribeAmerica increased hires without upping overhead 

Business growth causes headaches when it outpaces your systems and processes. As ScribeAmerica added thousands of new hires to its bench, its 40-person HR team grew overwhelmed. The manual processes they relied on were no longer cutting it.

They enlisted the support of Docusign to simplify the hiring and onboarding processes for their medical scribes.

With Docusign eSignature and Workday, they transformed their manual, time-consuming, paper-based processes into digital, agile, error-free experiences that worked for a company of their size. Improvements included automatically populating administrative details, such as social security numbers on tax forms, which had been a time-consuming source of manual labor (and human error) in the past.

The results speak for themselves: ScribeAmerica HR increased its offer letter preparation from 1,200 to 21,000 after implementing Docusign eSignature. Today, their HR team can onboard more than 1,500 new employees every month. 

5. Free up legal to focus on more strategic work 

From setting agreement policies to ensuring compliance and managing NDAs and other sensitive documents, legal has eyes on every aspect of the agreement process.

Maintaining such a high level of scrutiny is tough for larger organizations and heavily regulated industries. Some challenges are specific, like manually identifying problematic contract language or reviewing multiple iterations of the same contract. Others are related to the sheer volume of paperwork and regulations legal teams face.

Almost half of the legal departments say they process more than a thousand agreements every month. The same research found that 50% of contract professionals have difficulty maintaining confidentiality and security when using paper-based contract processes. Luckily, there’s a better, more digitally savvy way.

Lift the administrative load from your legal department (or reduce spending on outside legal counsel), and you yield big dividends. Do this by automating the repetitive manual tasks that slow legal teams down.

For example, make it easier to find and replace problematic contract language with a central contract repository and a clause library of preapproved terms. 

Case study: How iCIMS improved contracting speed for sales and legal teams

iCIMS delivers enterprise hiring solutions to 2.7 million users. But after multiple acquisitions and an increasingly complex workload, their legal team was stretched to capacity. They needed to find a way to boost efficiency without burning legal employees out.

To achieve this, they partnered with Docusign to streamline and automate parts of their agreement processes that caused the most friction.

With Docusign CLM and AI, they automatically route NDAs to contract specialists,  giving attorneys space to focus on higher-level work. But the humans are still in charge—the legal team added appropriate manual checks during the routing process to keep standards high.

A Docusign and Salesforce integration lets sales teams generate routine documents,  like quotes, order forms, NDAs and waivers from approved templates—giving sales teams more autonomy over their roles and saving legal’s time. Plus, Docusign makes it quick and easy to keep documents up to date with changing regulations.

After implementation, iCIMS’ legal team reported a 130% increase in complex  enterprise contracts capacity, with 78% of agreements no longer requiring legal  intervention. They handled 5x the volume of custom agreements without increasing turnaround time. Monthly requests to create one-off legal documents went from hundreds to zero.

A little digital transformation could lead to a lot of profitability 

Smart businesses are digitally transforming—and we’d argue that the smartest ones are investing in their agreement processes. Here are a few resources to help you with the next steps: 

• Take our Agreement Management Maturity Assessment to identify where to start

• Learn the basics with our Guide to Intelligent Agreement Management

• Watch a Guided Tour to see it in action