Reduce Agreement Prep Time to Boost Productivity

Today, listening to customer feedback is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. Our customers were telling us that while they loved the ability to accelerate getting sales contracts signed, their process for generating agreements was a source of wasted time, needless cost, and increased risk. We heard that too many cycles are spent retyping information, copying boilerplate language from other systems or documents, futzing with formatting, or using outdated templates. It’s a slow, manual process — one prone to errors and delays that frustrates customers or, worse, causes them to look for a faster competitor. In fact, recent DocuSign research found that 59 percent of sales managers say agreement preparation takes too long.

That's why we're so excited to introduce DocuSign Gen for Salesforce, an automated way to generate polished, customer-ready agreements straight from Salesforce. From NDAs and proposals to quotes and invoices, sales reps can produce any agreement, using data already stored in Salesforce, with just a few clicks. Gen allows reps to spend more time selling and less time dealing with administrative headaches.

“DocuSign continues to expand its partnership with Salesforce on AppExchange with the recently announced DocuSign Agreement Cloud,” said Woodson Martin, EVP and GM, AppExchange. “The powerful combination of Gen, DocuSign eSignature, and Salesforce helps our customers streamline common sales workflows to drive sales productivity.”

Here are several Gen features that our preview customers found the most valuable:

Generate professional-looking agreements in less time

When reps copy, paste, or retype data from other systems into a contract, errors, and ugly formatting can result. In contrast, Gen seamlessly merges customer, product and pricing data from Salesforce directly into the contract. This eliminates errors due to manually transferring data, and it ensures agreements look polished, as if created from scratch.

Edit generated contracts in Microsoft Word

If a generated contract needs to be edited or reviewed, Microsoft Word can be used. This allows all agreement reviewers—legal teams, reps, and customers—to make changes without hassle, in an editing environment they already know.

Prepare, sign, and store agreements within Salesforce

Gen is a Salesforce-native application, powered by Lightning, that is also integrated with DocuSign for Salesforce, our popular eSignature offering. Our customers are already seeing the value of an integrated solution. Trucking startup Convoy’s sales operations manager Dustin Gransberry told us, “We’re always looking for ways to accelerate deal closings. After recently partnering with DocuSign, we’ve seen how DocuSign Gen for Salesforce can help businesses like us streamline and centralize the agreement process from preparation to signature.”

Send the correct agreement every time

There’s no one-size-fits-all contract—pricing, term lengths, and other business rules vary depending on the size of the deal, location, and other variables. To handle this complexity, admins need to create and manage many contract templates each addressing a different scenario. Reps then need to choose the right template and fill it in correctly. All of this takes time and is error-prone—to the point that it’s not a question of “if” but rather “how often” an erroneous contract gets sent to a customer. To ease this burden, Gen can automatically include or exclude specific terms in agreements based on predetermined business rules. This allows an admin to create a single template that adapts a contract’s content according to your business rules, driven by Salesforce data.

Easy enough to set up yourself

Gen is easy to implement and admin-friendly. An admin can install DocuSign Gen from AppExchange, then configure templates easily with step-by-step guidance. See how quickly you can enable your reps to close more deals faster by automatically generating polished agreements with just a few clicks from Salesforce. Visit DocuSign Gen on AppExchange and start a free trial today.

This post is written by Ron Hirson. As DocuSign’s Chief Product Officer, Ron leads the product and customer experience teams. Ron has more than 20 years of product management experience in large and entrepreneurial ventures.