Forrester Study: What challenges do organisations face when preparing agreements?

Forrester Study: Digitally transform how you prepare contracts

Many organisations want to digitally transform how they prepare their agreements. To do so,  they need to overcome the challenges of manual or disconnected processes in their workflow when they prepare contracts, proposals and offers for customers and employees. Creating agreements too often involves inefficient manual processes such as printing, emailing and scanning. 

The Forrester State of Systems of Agreement study 2020, commissioned by Forrester on behalf of DocuSign, evaluates the systems of agreement within several organisations. Forrester conducted an online survey of 954 global technology purchasing decision-makers to explore this topic and shared the results in The State of Systems of Agreement 2020 study.

The study highlights some of the problems organisations encounter when preparing contracts, offer letters, sales agreements and more.

What challenges do organisations face when preparing agreements?

• Nine out of 10 respondents said they feel burdened by manual processes.
• 61% of respondents said that they had to rework an agreement or contract due to an error in the manual transfer of customer or product information and data.
• 55% of respondents said that manually adding information to contracts that already exist causes inefficiency.
• 48% of respondents said that the lengthy contract preparation process was causing delays.

Many companies are still creating agreements manually. For leaders that use digital technology to automate their agreement processes, the organisation’s employees can generate agreements with the correct data with just a few clicks and send it for signing, often without leaving the systems they already use. This type of digital transformation ensures agreements are received quickly and correctly, providing a strong employee and customer experience. 

How are organisations transforming how they prepare agreements?

Many leading organisations have already started moving towards a more streamlined and effective workflow to create a better experience for employees and customers during the agreement preparation process. Of the decision-makers interviewed by Forrester:

• 64% responded to say their CRM system automatically feeds data into agreements
• 55% said their ERP system automatically feeds data into agreements
• 43% said their HCM system automatically feeds data into agreements
• 26% said another system automatically feeds data into agreements

18% of respondents plan to improve or implement new digital capabilities in the preparation of their agreement process in the next year. Those leaders that have started doing this are already recognising benefits: 

• 51% of respondents said they had a faster deals cycle
• 48% indicated lower error rates and error reductions
• 46% cited speedier turnaround times 
• 45% experienced time savings 
• 39% decreased financial costs
• 38% experienced less manual data entry

How can you digitally transform how you prepare agreements like sales contracts and employee offer letters?

An agreement cloud is a suite of purpose-built cloud software for automating and connecting the entire agreement process. The DocuSign Agreement Cloud helps organisations to digitally transform how they do business via different forms of agreement like sales contracts and new employee offer letters. It gives organisations the choice of many products along with over 350 integrations to existing systems. 

Using products from the DocuSign Agreement Cloud can help you automatically generate polished agreements with just a few clicks. This software helps to cut-out manual processes, reduce paper use and remove printing, allowing your team to conduct business faster with less risk. This transformation saves time and money. You can easily generate sales agreements from a prepared template using data already available in an existing system.

DocuSign Agreement Cloud products that help you prepare agreements

DocuSign CLM is a contract lifecycle management solution that was  named as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 CLM Magic Quadrant report. It can integrate with many existing solutions via pre-built connectors and rich APIs so you can pull in data to create agreements and begin workflows. CLM allows organisations to build workflows for new contracts, with pre-configured templates that auto-populate contracts with data from other systems and use approved language. CLM also features a clause library that allows users to select pre-approved clauses, which reduces the resource required from the legal department. DocuSign CLM also has a native app on the Salesforce AppExchange, which helps to accelerate CLM integration. 

DocuSign Gen for Salesforce and DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce allow you to generate customised agreements automatically from within Salesforce with just a few clicks. DocuSign Negotiate has the same features as DocuSign Gen, but it also provides additional support for redlining and version control.

To help you understand and visualise how organisations are using DocuSign solutions to  prepare agreements and contracts, watch the video and see how Tally leverages DocuSign to automate the generation and negotiation of a new contract, directly within Salesforce. 

See how Tally uses a variety of DocuSign solutions after the prepare stage to sign, act on and manage agreements. 

Or, discover how the DocuSign Agreement Cloud can help you digitally transform the way your organisation prepares agreements.