Transform Your Contract Management Process with Docusign CLM Essentials

Many organizations have begun to digitize aspects of the contract process with e-signature, but there are still manual steps that reduce productivity and efficiency. Of the 1,300 respondents in a recent Docusign survey, 70% said they were manually copying and pasting data while drafting contracts.

This approach is repetitive, error-prone and a headache for employees. It’s the step of the contract process that users find most frustrating. Other pain points include searching for contracts that contain the right language and liaising with multiple people in multiple departments to finalize drafts.

All of those manual activities are unnecessary with the right approach and the right tools. Docusign CLM Essentials is a contract management tool specifically built to help growing organizations gain centralized control over their end-to-end contracting process and solve problems created by manual work.

It has all the tools your team needs to centralize your contracts, standardize agreement processes and eliminate busywork with automation. CLM Essentials is designed with ease of use in mind so you can start seeing results in weeks not months. It offers fast results and the opportunity to expand down the road as your business grows.

Streamline document generation

Even the most basic sales contract workflows involve numerous levels of bureaucracy. Once a contract is drafted, it’s typically edited, sent for internal approvals and reviewed by legal counsel. When all of the handoffs are taken into account, half a dozen people could be roped into the process.

Docusign found that it’s taking organizations more than 30 hours to create and finalize a contract. The time-consuming process results in unwanted consequences, including delayed contracts, lost revenue and poor customer experiences.

In response to organizational demands for a better process, CLM Essentials simplifies document generation. With contract templates, you can create custom contracts in minutes, avoiding extra review hurdles by starting with preapproved legal language. Plus, CLM Essentials is integrated with Salesforce, so sellers can generate compliant contracts faster without leaving their everyday business tools.

Accelerate contract negotiations 

It's no secret that the negotiation process can be a lengthy ordeal that involves several stakeholders to finalize a contract. In fact, the average contract goes through 3.1 versions before it is finalized. When this drags on, it costs your organization time and money.

CLM Essentials speeds up the process by allowing you to collaborate easier and reach an agreement faster. In the contract itself, you can easily assign comments and tasks to internal stakeholders. With the Slack integration, stakeholders can collaborate in real time and receive alerts via Slack, keeping everyone on top of negotiations. Once finalized, the contract can be signed with Docusign eSignature, the world’s #1 way to send and sign documents from practically anywhere, at any time.

Route agreements efficiently

Before a contract can be signed and put into action, it needs to be sent for review to a series of internal and external parties. Our State of Contract Management survey found that 66% of organizations are still using email to send contracts. While that might be acceptable for some businesses, it’s not always the best course of action when it relates to confidential or time-sensitive agreements. We’ve all heard horror stories about contracts being sent to the wrong person, ending up in a junk folder or getting buried on a busy day.

CLM Essentials was designed to avoid those scenarios with automated, templatized workflows that support the most common contract processes. Automatic triggers ensure the right users are notified when an action needs to be taken, speeding up the contracting process.

Centralize storage

Once the contract is signed, it can be difficult to find. Our study found that 43% of contract professionals are spending an average of 45 minutes searching for a contract. It took nearly twice the amount of time if they were looking for language within a specific agreement.

That’s why it’s so important to store contracts in a central, searchable location, which is exactly what CLM Essentials does. Rather than spending hours trying to find a contract or guess if it's the right one, users can search and filter all their contracts to quickly find the document they’re looking for.

Simplify contracting 

Some CLM systems can be highly complex, costly and require hours of training to function. It can take years to implement and help employees effectively use such tools.

Docusign CLM Essentials was built to be a simple, intuitive solution to common contracting problems. It serves as a single source of truth for all contracts which streamlines your contracting process by removing redundancies from beginning to end. Just weeks after implementation, your team will see increased productivity, lower costs, more consistency, fewer errors and enhanced security.

Learn more about Docusign CLM Essentials.