The Hidden Revenue Driver: Automation and AI in Sales Agreements

One of the most common causes of deal slippage, revenue leakage, and margin erosion isn’t a missed phone or email —it’s a breakdown in how sales teams manage contracts and the data that backs them up. 

A recent Deloitte study found that 77% of sales leaders view agreement management as fundamental to revenue generation and team performance.

It’s no surprise. Agreements are more than legal formalities—they’re the foundation of your customer relationships. Every price, term, renewal, and upsell hinges on them. When managed well, they accelerate revenue. When fragmented or neglected, they drag it down.

Yet many organizations still treat sales agreements as back-office documents, rather than the front-line revenue instruments they are.

Time kills deals: The ripple effect of inefficient agreements

In sales, speed is everything. The longer a deal sits, the higher the risk it slips. But rushing the agreement process can be just as perilous. When sellers cut corners to hit deadlines—using outdated templates, skipping legal review, or manually editing terms—compliance gaps and revenue leakage aren’t far behind. 

One study found that 27% of onboarding agreements are abandoned entirely due to delays, putting revenue at risk before legal even gets involved.

What’s worse: agreement issues rarely stay isolated to one team. Sales teams feel the slowdown. Legal fields fire drills. RevOps struggles with visibility. IT juggles integrations. Finance can’t forecast accurately. Agreement mismanagement isn’t a single-team issue—it’s a systemic drag across the entire revenue engine.

And without the right tools, it only gets worse as you scale.

High-performance teams win with precision and visibility

Consider this: In Formula 1, the driver may get the glory, but victory takes a full team—engineers, pit crews, analysts—all working with precision and real-time data to keep the car running at peak performance. The driver doesn’t win with talent alone. They win with systems, visibility, and speed.

Sales is no different.

Your sales teams may be in the driver’s seat, but they can only move as fast as the team and tools behind them. When agreement workflows are slow, disconnected, or manual, it’s like racing on flat tires. High-performing revenue teams—Sales, Legal, RevOps, and Finance—win by working in sync, with the right data and the right tools at the right time.

For agreements, that means:

• Contracts are created from approved templates within the CRM

• Approvals are automated

• Terms are standardized and auditable

• Everyone has real-time visibility into where things stand

Precision reduces risk. Visibility eliminates delays. And together, they give your team the edge to move at maximum velocity.

Challenge #1: Sellers are wasting time—and creating risk

According to Salesforce, sellers spend up to 70% of their time on non-selling tasks like generating quotes, chasing approvals, and manually entering sales information.

They're toggling between their CRM and Word documents, retyping details, digging up old templates, and adjusting tables by hand—often with no guarantee that the terms are current or compliant.

The result? Agreements that take way too long to produce, are inconsistent in structure, not up to brand standards, and riddled with risk.

And once an agreement leaves their hands, sellers often lose all visibility. Did legal review it? Is finance holding it up? Has the customer even opened it? Without a clear view into where agreements stand, revenue gets stuck in limbo.

The solution: Generate compliant agreements without leaving the CRM

Sellers shouldn’t have to guess which template is right or juggle disconnected systems just to create a contract. With IAM for Sales and Gen for Salesforce, sales teams can generate agreements directly from the CRM using pre-approved templates, automated approval routing, and real-time visibility into status. Legal can trust the process. Sellers can focus on closing and move deals ahead up to 3x faster with fewer back-and-forths.

Example: Automate agreement creation

Imagine a scenario where customer agreements must be updated to reflect new international privacy standards. At a mid-sized company, the legal and sales teams would have to quickly roll out the latest terms across more than 100 reps. Without an integrated system, that process would mean manually distributing updated templates, relying on reps to apply changes correctly, and auditing agreements one by one. 

Instead, the teams could use Gen for Salesforce, IAM for Sales, and Template Management to standardize and automate the process. Sales ops can create the latest MSA template directly within Salesforce, map key fields, and configure custom buttons to eliminate confusion. 

This would allow reps to simply click "Generate" from within their CRM and send agreements pre-filled with up-to-date branding, approved legal language, and accurate customer data—no version control issues, no guesswork. 

For organizations using other platforms, Docusign also supports seamless agreement generation through eSign integrations with Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle NetSuite.

For more complex workflows, legal teams can use Agreement Prep to update existing templates—replacing branding and clauses without recreating documents from scratch—and apply AI-powered field mapping to pull data from Salesforce and other systems. Once changes are published, they are automatically carried over to all active templates, even those already in circulation. Using the Template Library, sales ops can build rules-based workflows to route agreements to multiple reviewers based on content, giving the company more control with less manual oversight. 

Together, these solutions gave sales and legal teams the ability to move faster, ensure compliance, and scale with confidence.

Docusign Maestro and Web Forms ensure accurate workflows and data sharing

IAM for Sales takes automation even further so that sales teams can maintain their momentum. Maestro tailors routing logic and writebacks to tools like HubSpot and Google Drive—ensuring that agreements and approvals land exactly where they’re needed.

And for sellers who don’t work directly in the CRM, Web Forms offers an alternative entry point. Customer inputs captured through branded forms automatically trigger agreement generation, routing, and real-time writeback to Salesforce using Maestro—making it easier to kick off agreements from anywhere without losing control or visibility.

Challenge #2: Agreement storage is scattered—and so is your revenue data

Just because a deal is signed doesn’t mean the work is done.

Too often, sales agreements are left sitting in inboxes, desktop folders, or scattered across shared drives. Maybe the seller forgot to upload it to Salesforce. Maybe the file lives in an account manager’s email, who’s since left the company. Or maybe only part of the agreement was ever saved at all.

This lack of centralized storage leads to real downstream consequences:

• Teams can’t find the right agreement at renewal time

• Revenue ops can’t track key terms

• Fulfillment and billing teams are slow to respond to customer questions

• Sales misses opportunities for upsells, cross-sells, and faster renewals

In short, revenue gets left on the table.

The solution: A single source of truth for every team

When sales, legal, finance, and customer success all work from the same agreement repository, everything moves faster and with accuracy. Sellers can instantly pull up last year’s agreement. Finance can check payment terms. Legal can monitor obligations. Customer success can plan for renewals or expansions.

Example: Give RevOps teams full contract visibility

Many RevOps teams struggle to prep for quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with enterprise accounts. Contracts are buried across shared drives, email threads, and Salesforce attachments, making it nearly impossible to identify renewal timelines, pricing changes, and usage thresholds. By implementing Docusign Navigator and IAM for Sales, RevOps can filter and search agreements by contract type, renewal date, and clause language directly within the Salesforce-embedded Navigator experience. In just a few clicks, the team can pull reports showing which accounts are up for renewal, which contain auto-renewal or early termination clauses, and which are candidates for upsell—turning a week of prep work into a few hours.

Now, imagine a customer requests a consolidation of their accounts. Agreements are scattered across systems, owned by different departments, and varied in format. Using Navigator’s AI-powered search and contract hierarchy grouping, the team can surface every relevant MSA, order form, and addendum tied to the customer—complete with key terms like expiration date, contract value, and renewal rights. This makes it possible to quickly respond with a consolidated summary that helps retain the customer under a cleaner, larger renewal. Internally, it can also reduce contract sprawl and improve visibility into future opportunities.

These examples show how centralized agreement access turns scattered contract data into a strategic advantage—fueling faster renewals and deeper customer relationships.

Run sales at maximum velocity with Docusign

Just like in Formula 1, peak performance doesn’t come from one driver alone—it comes from every part of the system working in sync. The same is true in sales: when agreement workflows are fragmented, deals stall, teams scramble, and revenue leaks out from every direction.

But when your systems, tools, and teams are aligned, agreements become your competitive advantage.

Ready to run sales at full speed? Check out IAM for Sales and let’s talk.