Getting Started with Contract Management Software

When your business is growing, you know how difficult it is to meet ambitious targets with limited resources. As your business expands and you welcome new customers and employees into the fold, your legal and administrative teams are left manually generating, negotiating, executing and managing an ever-growing volume of contracts. Without the proper tools, this can quickly lead to heightened risk and frustration, and slow your ability to scale.

DocuSign CLM Essentials is designed with this precise challenge in mind. Built specifically for growing businesses, CLM Essentials automates repetitive manual tasks throughout the contract process and empowers your teams to be more efficient, organized and collaborative. Best of all, CLM Essentials is affordably priced and easy to use, so you can get started in weeks, not months.

By combining the power of DocuSign CLM with the world’s largest ecosystem of agreement experts, DocuSign offers a proven approach that delivers customer success and gets you up and running with speed and confidence. 

Experience a streamlined deployment 

After becoming a CLM Essentials customer, the DocuSign team will guide you through a streamlined deployment process to help you get your solution up and running quickly. DocuSign has completed thousands of customer deployments across industry verticals, which means our experts have deep knowledge and can recommend the best business strategies, processes, project delivery and deployment options for your organization. Moreover, as a DocuSign customer, you gain access to our expansive collection of resources and tools, allowing your team to learn at their own pace and according to their preferred style.

Here’s what you can expect as you deploy your CLM Essentials solution:

• Before implementation: Prior to implementation, the DocuSign team will walk you through a readiness checklist and provide tools and resources to prepare you for deployment. 
• During implementation: DocuSign Professional Services will provide hands-on help throughout the implementation. Our team will deliver extensive deployment services, including configuring, reviewing and testing CLM Essentials to ensure it’s set up to meet your needs, and your team is comfortable using the technology. Easy-to-follow, self-paced training courses from DocuSign University—specifically geared to teach admins and end users how to use and manage CLM Essentials—are complimentary and at your disposal. 
• After implementation: The DocuSign team will be available with support post-deployment, helping to drive adoption across your organization and empowering you to realize more value as your usage grows. You’ll routinely hear from us, as we follow up with best practices, resources and tools to help your organization use CLM Essentials to its full capacity. By becoming a DocuSign customer, you’ll gain unlimited access to a plethora of on-demand videos from DocuSign University, resources and tools in the Knowledge Market and articles within the DocuSign Support Center to stay informed about new features.  

Follow these tips to ensure success

Change management can be difficult, but with decades of experience, the DocuSign team knows the ins and outs of making implementation frictionless, and provides needed assurance at each step. We recommend that businesses follow these five best practices to ensure a stress-free launch.

1. Secure buy-in: Before bringing a contract lifecycle management software into your organization, It’s important to secure high-level support. Identify a company or departmental sponsor who can green light the funding and time necessary to roll out CLM Essentials and train employees to use it. 
2. Establish governance: Someone within your organization needs to oversee the CLM Essentials program. Choose a project manager who can be a champion, serve as a source of knowledge and be a conduit for communications between your organization and your DocuSign delivery team.
3. Understand current processes: Before CLM Essentials can make a notable difference in your contract workflows, you need to understand how your business currently generates, negotiates, executes and manages contracts. Documenting your current processes makes it easier to understand inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement, allowing you to better address problem areas with CLM Essentials. 
4. Make a training plan: Devise a strategy for enabling and training your teams on the proper use of CLM Essentials, made easy with resources from DocuSign University. This will help drive adoption and adherence to proper processes, ensuring successful outcomes and faster time to value. 
5. Define and measure success: To accurately calculate your return on investment, you’ll need to choose a few success metrics and track them from the start. We recommend measuring outcomes like contract turnaround times, reduced error rates, increased productivity and faster time to revenue to help you evaluate progress.

Now that you see the process and comprehensive end-to-end support, it’s time to get started on your deployment—and embrace more efficient contract management. Learn more about CLM Essentials and the services DocuSign Customer Success offers. 

Contact our sales team today.