Capitalising on the DocuSign Agreement Cloud

DocuSign has been experiencing rapid growth within Australia’s channel. With 66 active partners, ranging from distributors (such as Ingram Micro) through to ISVs, leveraging its capabilities within their own applications, DocuSign is resonating as a solution that can benefit organisations in every industry.

At the heart of the future growth of DocuSign is the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. A comprehensive solution announced in March, the DocuSign Agreement Cloud aims to address an issue most organisations experience, but few pay much notice to. According to Forrester research, 98 per cent of organisations have experienced revenue impact from poor transaction management. For 37 per cent of them the loss was significant – from 11 per cent to 25 per cent.

Addressing this challenge is a major value-adding opportunity for the channel.

What, exactly, is the DocuSign Agreement Cloud?

The DocuSign Agreement Cloud is an end-to-end solution designed to canvas the entire agreement process. It has five key areas:

Prepare: Organisations can negotiate contracts from within the Agreement Cloud platform. They can also generate sales contracts within Salesforce, and provide stakeholders with simple, guided forms, rather than complex blocks of text.

Sign: The area for which DocuSign is renowned – organisations can sign and send forms from within the platform. The DocuSign Agreement Cloud also features enhanced identity options (for example, the ability to verify government-issued IDs) and functionality to allow customers to capture consent with a single click.

Act: The DocuSign Agreement Cloud can automate agreement workflow as part of the contract lifecycle management system, and collect payments via credit card (and other popular methods).

Manage: Organisations can make the management of their contracts more efficient through index and search features, as well as AI-driven analytics and clause identification. The DocuSign Agreement Cloud also centralises these contracts into a single location.

Integrate: Finally, the DocuSign Agreement Cloud is a highly customisable solution, with APIs and SDKs allowing for additional application development if an organisation has a specific need, beyond the 350+ pre-built integrations.

What challenges does the DocuSign Agreement Cloud solve?

DocuSign CEO, Dan Springer, speaking in a Geekwire interview, said: “E-signature was the first step to unlocking the modernisation and automation of [customers’] system of agreement.

“But now we are coming to what feels like the natural fruition of the start of that journey, by saying that we have a full agreement Cloud solution. You can go back through your entire system as a customer and modernise and automate that process and get rid of the paper and manual processes to allow you to have a much more cost efficient and effective system that’s also a lot friendlier for the environment.”

The Agreement Cloud represents the cumulation of DocuSign’s investment in electronic signatures, as well as the depth of the SpringCM platform, which DocuSign acquired in 2018 for $US220 million. SpringCM, an on-demand content management platform focused on preparing, acting on, and managing contracts, is integrated deeply on every level of the Agreement Cloud.

DocuSign’s organic growth, and the strategic acquisitions that it has made, has helped it become the leading name in automated systems of agreement. These solutions resonate with the market because they are so valuable. Manual input and management into contracts and other formal documents is time consuming, error-prone, and can become very expensive. By consolidating the process to a single platform – the Systems of Agreement – workers are spared both in terms of the time taken to manage these business-critical documents, and the risk profile of them doing it.

The channel’s role is to leverage technology to make its customers’ businesses run more efficiently and productively such as by tailoring the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to the specific contracts, forms and agreements that the customer and industry they operate in require.

Property listing specialist, Domain, has benefitted from using DocuSign, according to Chief Commercial Officer Tom Blamey.

"By digitising contract handling, Domain has experienced a 70 per cent reduction in contract rework time, virtually eliminating non-legible writing and missed signatures. In real terms, the effectiveness of DocuSign’s platform has resulted in a labour cost savings of over $300,000," he said.

DocuSign – and its Agreement Cloud – are by nature solutions that are designed to be tailored to the individual customer and their own contract and agreement needs. As such, it is a strong channel play, with partners wrapping unique services and their understanding of their customer into the solution.

For more information on how to become a Partner, visit the DocuSign website.

To see how DocuSign is helping the channel boost Australian productivity, click here.

Find out more by attending Docusign's upcoming event - Signature Moment (Brisbane)

Signature Moment | 28^th November '19, 4:30pm – 6:30pm | Register Today