How To Know If Your Team Needs to Automate Your Contract Process

Agreements touch all aspects of your business. Your teams and customers are connected by contracts, and organizational operations run on them. And yet, many companies are still grappling with outdated, manual contract management processes that drain time, money, and resources. 

For such a vital part of your business’s day-to-day, shouldn’t you make sure the process is as streamlined, error-free, and compliant as possible? Especially considering Deloitte research found that agreement management ineffectiveness drives a $2 trillion loss in annual global economic value?

Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) modernizes your entire contracting lifecycle. But how do you know if your business could benefit from it? Let's examine the common pain points that often signal a need for this kind of AI-powered automation and standardization. If these challenges resonate with your team's daily struggles, it’s a strong indicator you're ready for the next evolution in agreement management.

How do you create contracts? 

The initial phase of contract creation is often riddled with inefficiencies that ripple throughout your entire organization, impacting productivity, increasing risk, and causing massive deal delays.

Problems to watch out for

Here are some of the most common examples of issues during the create phase of contract management: 

• Inability to find and access previously approved contracts

• Frequent use of outdated templates

• Spreading inaccurate or non-compliant information

Organizations also frequently struggle with manual data entry, leading to endless rework due to errors from transferring information like customer, product, or vendor details into agreements. This introduction of incorrect information upfront results in high "Not-in-good-order" (NIGO) rates, directly slowing revenue recognition and delaying business operations.

The impact of manual contract creation

These inefficiencies leave high-value talent focused on low-value work, which will only increase as organizations scale. Instead of focusing on strategic initiatives, legal professionals, for example, are often tied up in tedious manual reviews. The lack of centralized tools and processes makes it difficult to minimize risk and maximize compliance by enforcing standardization. While playbooks can help, they often exist in documents that quickly become outdated, posing significant version control challenges. This also creates yet another step in the process for someone to search for answers, which takes away time and patience.

Customer-facing teams see delayed deals and wasted valuable selling time because employees are tasked with paperwork and internal tracking instead of focusing on core business activities. Tedious steps like form-filling and printing create a poor customer experience, often resulting in abandonment or drop-offs. The financial impact can be catastrophic: research shows that contracting inefficiencies can result in an average of $1.5M in missed revenue per company.

Additionally, the sheer volume of requests to keep track of without a centralized intake process burdens procurement and other operational teams. This leads to poor preparedness for negotiations, increasing the risk of unfavorable agreement terms and conditions. Organizations also frequently miss opportunities for renegotiation and cost savings due to a lack of tools to track and analyze agreements or to find opportunities for vendor consolidation. A startling 56% of respondents reported struggling to find the latest approved vendor terms and rates to use, resulting in overpayments. 

How IAM helps with the creation phase

Docusign Agreement Preparation is designed to help you navigate the create phase with ease. Agreement Preparation makes it easy to create and manage templates, so sales teams can quickly generate new agreements with confidence that they include the most current, approved terms. It offers no-code template creation and a centralized way to maintain templates, saving you hours in updating language, dates and product information. Templates and the data fields within them are connected throughout the entire agreement process, eliminating room for error and saving time. 

Contract commitment bottlenecks

If getting contracts signed and approved feels like pulling teeth, your team is likely experiencing the friction that an advanced agreement management solution is designed to resolve.

A lack of visibility into the status of agreements while waiting for signature, for instance, can cause uncertainty across teams. The reliance on inefficient, repetitive internal approvals slows down the entire process, creating frustratingly tedious steps. Organizations consistently face delays in obtaining the correct signatures in the proper order, leading to a poor experience for both employees and customers.

From getting signatures from busy executives to high-value or regulated transactions that require physical location visits for ID verification or notarization, there are plenty of time sucks across the commitment phase. These delays can result in lower up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and have a negative impact on customer relationships. In fact, 48% of respondents to a Deloitte and Docusign report said their customer relationships deteriorated significantly due to agreement delays.

The reliance on wet signatures also presents major operational and compliance challenges. They are hard to collect, verify, and store, encouraging fraud and introducing delays that cause compliance and regulatory issues. In heavily regulated environments, the complexities of identity verification or notarization pose a significant risk to business operations, increasing the heightened exposure to financial penalties and reputational damage. This also leads to an increased backlog of agreements to review, further straining internal resources. Alarmingly, respondents to the same report had an average of 22 major agreement compliance incidents in the last year.

How IAM helps with the Commitment phase

If commitment is your sticking point, Docusign Maestro offers a solution. This no-code workflow automation tool helps you design standard, automated agreement workflows that move seamlessly from one step to the next.

Docusign offers a range of options to digitally verify the identity of signers, including ID Verification, SMS / Phone authentication, and with a CLEAR account, as part of a secure, intuitive and mobile-first experience for customers. No more manual handoffs or lost agreements. 

If you have multiple agreements to complete as part of a transaction, Docusign Workspaces organizes all collaboration in one secure, cloud-based hub, ensuring everyone is always working on the single, most current version of the document, even as updates are made.

The disarray of managing completed contracts 

Once a contract is signed, the work isn't over. If your team struggles to manage and utilize completed agreements, an advanced agreement solution could provide the necessary structure and automation.

The duplicative work that’s required to reenter data from signed agreements into various systems of record for tasks like provisioning or billing a customer, or onboarding an employee is a reality of many companies. This is compounded by the manual routing of agreements to multiple teams that need to act on them, which results in errors and changes due to incorrectly entered information.

There's also a pervasive lack of visibility into the location and status of signed documents, leading to significant wasted time for employees trying to find completed agreements. Companies face risks when they cannot search for critical contract language, impacting business operations or compliance. Additionally, valuable insights remain buried due to a lack of tools to automate tracking and analyzing contract data.

Most signed agreements are not actively managed. They are hard to find and distributed across multiple systems. In fact, 62% of professionals struggle to locate existing contracts. This prevents a holistic view of contractual obligations and opportunities.

Ultimately, disorganized agreement management leads to errors and non-compliance with regulatory and internal policies, exposing the business to significant risk. This can result in missed renewal opportunities, keeping organizations locked into agreements that are no longer cost-effective. 

How IAM helps with contract management 

The IAM platform offers an AI-powered agreement repository to streamline and simplify agreement management. All contracts within the repository are searchable so you can find completed agreements or identify differences in terms across lines of business or geographies. AI can help standardize agreement data and unlock insights about your agreements to help you drive efficiencies, uncover opportunities to lower costs, and reduce risk.  Customizable notifications and pre-built reports help teams stay on top of renewals, identify cost-saving opportunities, and make more informed decisions. 

It’s time for IAM

The problems with modern contract management are clear and cut across every facet of your business. If your organization is experiencing these widespread inefficiencies, delays, and risks during contract creation, commitment, and management, it's a strong signal that a solution designed for advanced agreement management like the IAM platform could be transformational.

By addressing these pain points with automation and standardization, your business can unlock substantial time and cost savings, drastically reduce risk, and create a much smoother, more positive experience for everyone involved in your agreement lifecycle.

Learn more about the Docusign IAM platform here.