Controlling the Chaos of Preparing Negotiating Commerical Agreements

While electronic signature technology has done much to speed up the agreement process, many organisations still rely on manual processes and disconnected systems to prepare a contract for signature. Errors go unnoticed, negotiations take longer than they should, sales reps create contracts from scratch and in-house legal counsel is seen as a bottleneck for contract review and approval.

Valuable legal resources end up spending significant amounts of time searching for completed agreements, shepherding contracts and managing back-and-forth communication instead of dedicating time to strategic legal work. Customers get impatient and revenue suffers.

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of DocuSign shed light on the problem. More than 50% of legal organisations report inefficiency due to manually transferring data from other business systems into contracts and 62% of legal respondents report having to rework contracts as a result of errors. In addition, with email and Microsoft Word as the primary contract preparation tools, half of all respondents report delays due to a lengthy contract preparation process, as well as difficulty maintaining security and confidentiality.

With digital technologies available today, there’s no reason for contract preparation to take so much time and effort. Organisations can streamline the generation, negotiation and approval of commercial agreements to accelerate sales cycles and improve experiences for everyone involved without needing to invest in a robust contract lifecycle management solution.

Here, we’ll discuss some of the common inefficiencies in agreement work and suggest four simple ways to automate contract preparation that bring impactful change and quick wins on both sides of the table.