Beyond signing, the real business challenge is that executed contracts disappear into inaccessible repositories like SharePoint or email inboxes. The CEO argues this makes them "harder to find now than it used to be," locking away valuable business intelligence.

Related Insights

A successful deal can be derailed by poor information transfer between the diligence and integration teams. Without a structured handoff process and a centralized system of record, valuable context on risks and rationale is lost, forcing the integration team to rediscover critical information post-close.

In an era of opaque AI models, traditional contractual lock-ins are failing. The new retention moat is trust, which requires radical transparency about data sources, AI methodologies, and performance limitations. Customers will not pay long-term for "black box" risks they cannot understand or mitigate.

For decades, keeping documentation updated was a low-priority task. Now, with AI support agents relying on this content as their source of truth, outdated information leads to immediate, tangible failures. This creates the urgent business case to finally solve knowledge decay.

Leaders in large companies often lack visibility into the day-to-day workflows that drive results. They see inputs like salaries and outputs like KPIs, but the actual process of how work gets done—the institutional know-how—is a black box that walks out the door every day.

A digital signature's value isn't the cursive graphic, but the auditable trail confirming a verified identity took a specific action to indicate consent. This redefines the core product from simple signing to identity and consent management.

Despite having over 95% of the Fortune 500 as customers, DocuSign's CEO estimates that even long-term clients like large banks have only automated about 30% of their total agreements. This shows a massive, untapped market for growth within existing enterprise accounts.

The company had a significant 'prospecting black box.' For 40% of all opportunities, there was no traceable sales trigger or activity log, such as logged calls. This meant they couldn't measure or optimize a huge portion of their pipeline creation process, particularly SDR outbound efforts.

Companies are trapped by the dogma of creating 'bulletproof' contracts, a process driven by legal precedent and risk aversion ('nobody got fired for having the lawyers look at this'). This institutional inertia, codified in policies requiring standard terms, prevents the adoption of more flexible, relational contracts, which are often dismissed as 'fluffy' despite being 'radical common sense.'

Instead of just emailing a contract and hoping for a signature, schedule a specific, short "Signing Day" meeting on the calendar. This creates a clear closing event, adds a sense of ceremony, and prevents the deal from stalling in the final step.

The fragmentation of knowledge across 12-20 work apps renders individual search bars inefficient. A universal search tool like Dropbox Dash, which ingests and connects content from all sources, is necessary to restore productivity for knowledge workers.

The Core Unsolved Problem is the "Deep, Dark Place" Contracts Go After Signing | RiffOn