Deloitte, Docusign Research Uncovers Costly Problems in the Agreement Process

New research from Deloitte and Docusign found poor agreement management practices and systems cost organizations nearly $2 trillion in annual global economic value and an overwhelmingly negative impact on customer relationships.

“New research from Deloitte validates what we’ve intuitively known: It’s too hard to manage agreements with existing tools and processes and that difficulty is weighing you and your company down,” according to Deloitte.

Key takeaways:

• Disconnected workflows are the root cause of poor agreement management. On average, companies spend an extra 18% of their time on agreements, resulting in over 55 billion hours wasted globally per year. An agreement can undergo 15-plus handoffs internally before any counterparty negotiation. 
• Customer-facing functions like sales and marketing contribute 40% of the global value loss, driven by missed revenue opportunities such as delayed deals. In contrast, support functions represent 60% of the value loss due to time wastage and operating costs.
• Poor agreement management processes have overwhelmingly negative impacts on customer and partner relationships. 48% of businesses reported their customer relationships deteriorated significantly due to agreement delays. 66% reported inefficient agreement workflows as a driver for negative customer satisfaction.
• Seamless collaboration across stakeholders, artificial intelligence (Al)-enabled search and analytics, up and downstream process integrations with applications and databases, and persona-based workflows are opportunity areas to prioritize.
• 2 out of 5 companies are looking for solutions with smarter capabilities, and more than half plan to increase spending on agreement management solutions over the next three years.