What’s Your Agreement Process Costing You? Find Out with Our Assessment

Agreements are often the culmination of negotiations, the formalization of partnerships, and the foundation of crucial business operations. These moments should signify progress and evoke feelings similar to a runner taking a victory lap, but for many contracting professionals, the agreement process is instead fraught with anxiety and inefficiency. This stems from fragmented, manual systems, an overwhelming back-and-forth cycle of emails and attachments during reviews, and time-consuming redlining workflows.

If managing agreements feels more like an uphill battle than a strategic function for your legal team, it's likely costing your organization significant resources and increasing risk.

Inefficient agreement management has substantial consequences: a joint study by Deloitte and Docusign revealed it costs the average company a staggering $1.5 million in missed revenue annually. Losses include delayed deals, increased exposure to risk, and squandered productivity.

However, a different reality is possible. Organizations that adopt advanced intelligent agreement management solutions reported improved compliance, reduced turnaround times, and enhanced collaboration. The key to this transformation lies in replacing outdated methods with automated Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) workflows.

The Docusign IAM platform offers a solution tailored to agreements' complexities. By integrating AI throughout the agreement lifecycle–from drafting and negotiation to secure storage and insightful analysis–IAM empowers teams to streamline operations, strengthen compliance, and unlock strategic value. It transforms agreements from potential roadblocks into powerful enablers of business success.

How do you know if you need Intelligent Agreement Management?

The fundamental question isn't if your agreement process can be improved, but how much more efficient and less risky it can be, and where your team should focus its efforts. Our agreement management maturity assessment is specifically designed to provide insight to these answers. It's a targeted diagnostic tool that evaluates your current agreement processes against industry best practices, highlighting specific areas where IAM can help your organization significantly improve its process and agreement risk profile.

This assessment will guide you through the five critical stages of agreement management maturity, helping you identify the signs of a manual, outdated system within your contracting workflow. Here’s a breakdown of each stage, along with solutions that IAM offers to the most common–and costly–challenges.

The five stages of agreement management maturity

1. Drafting the agreement

Does your team often start creating a contract from a template found on a shared drive (or someone’s individual hard drive), leading to potential inconsistencies, outdated clauses, and version control issues from the outset of a new agreement? That’s common, but unfortunately, can create loads of issues right at the start. 

How the IAM platform helps: IAM provides a secure, centralized library of pre-approved templates with dynamic fields, so that agreements can be generated quickly and accurately to avoid manual delays and errors. Using pre-approved templates helps make sales teams self-sufficient and saves legal time from reviewing the same standard clauses over and over again. In fact, 55% of organizations are more likely to report outperforming financial goals with advanced contract creation capabilities.

2. Routing the agreement for review

Often, agreement reviews are bogged down by endless email chains, which can cause issues with version control, managing comments from multiple stakeholders, and ensuring all necessary approvals are obtained efficiently. This can inevitably lead to errors and a much longer process overall.

How the IAM platform helps: The platform automates review workflows, provides a centralized place for collaboration and feedback, and offers audit trails to track key changes and approvals, accelerating the review process and improving transparency. 47% of respondents to the Deloitte study reported outperforming their financial goals because of advanced routing, editing, and approval capabilities.

3. Collecting signatures

Does your team spend significant time chasing signatures and lacking real-time visibility into the status of agreements awaiting execution? This can lead to delays and potential deal slippage.

How the IAM platform helps: With IAM,  real-time status updates are provided for everything from signature progress to renewal reminders, streamlining the execution process for agreements.

4. Storing agreements

Once completed, are agreements scattered across various systems, shared drives, or even physical files, making it difficult to locate them, control access, or search for key terms?

How the IAM platform helps: A secure, centralized, and easily searchable repository for all executed agreements. AI-powered features automatically categorize agreements by type and extract key data, making it easy to share data across systems and optimize your agreement process overall.

5. Analyzing agreements

Relying on manual tracking for things as critical as contract renewals or expirations is no way to effectively manage agreements. Plus, there’s no way to analyze your contract portfolio to identify potential risks, opportunities for optimization, or ensure compliance when everything is managed manually.

How the IAM platform helps: With Docusign Iris, IAM’s AI-powered engine, you can track key dates, monitor compliance requirements, and generate insightful reports on your agreement portfolio without any manual work. 31% outperform strategic goals with advanced obligation and renewal management capabilities.

For each of these steps, our assessment provides targeted insight to your company’s operational efficiency and risk exposure. You’ll receive a detailed analysis for each stage, clearly highlighting areas of strength and recommended areas of attention and modernization through IAM.

Take the first step towards Intelligent Agreement Management

Stop letting outdated processes hinder your business. Investing a few minutes in our Agreement Management Maturity Assessment can be the start of a more intelligent, efficient, and strategic contracting process. You’ll gain:

• Insightful diagnosis of your agreement process health, stage by stage.

• An understanding of the opportunity for business process upgrades.

• Recommended next steps, showing you how Docusign IAM can effectively help address your identified pain points.

Take the agreement management maturity assessment now.