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A verbal yes can feel like the finish line, but the deal may still have weeks to go. Once a contract moves to legal, procurement, or another approval team, the sales rep often has little control over how quickly the other side signs it.
That delay can create problems for sales teams. A deal may look nearly complete in the pipeline while still waiting on reviews, edits, or approvals. If teams don't track those steps, they may blame the sales process for delays.
Looking at the full path from agreement to signature gives companies a clearer picture of where deals actually slow down, and what they can do to keep them moving.
Sales teams usually track a deal closely through negotiation. But once the prospect agrees to move forward, that visibility often drops. That gap can hide a major source of delay.
A 2025 study from Deloitte and DocuSign estimated that poor agreement management costs organizations nearly $2 trillion in lost economic value worldwide each year. The firms linked much of this loss to disconnected workflows between teams negotiating deals and those reviewing contracts.
Legal review exists for good reason. Contracts carry real risk, so someone has to check liability terms, payment clauses, and data protection language before a signature happens. But that review rarely runs on the sales team's timeline, since legal departments juggle every deal in the pipeline at once, not just the one closest to closing.
Each round of review adds days. A redline goes out, sits in an inbox, comes back with questions, and someone routes it to whoever can answer them. Multiply that by a few rounds, and a deal that felt done two weeks ago is still open.
A sales rep sends a contract, legal responds with three flagged clauses, the client's legal team pushes back on two of them, and the cycle repeats. Each round of that adds its own delay on top of the last one.
This is why deal velocity slows even after the hard part of selling ends. The buyer already wants the product. All that’s missing is the document exchange.
A more recent Deloitte and DocuSign report found that sales teams using AI-powered agreement tools saw 29% fewer contracting-related deal delays and recovered roughly 43% of the time they previously spent on contract-related tasks.
That gain comes directly from cutting review rounds down, not from changing how sales teams sell.
AI-assisted contract review can help reduce delays after a prospect agrees to a deal. Instead of reading every clause from the start, legal teams can use AI to flag terms that differ from standard language.
That first pass, which used to take hours, now takes minutes, and legal teams spend their time on the clauses that actually need judgment instead of scanning boilerplate.
That can help sales teams move contracts from verbal approval to signature faster. Tools like Spellbook AI for contract drafting work inside Microsoft Word, allowing legal teams to review and redline contracts without switching between platforms.
AI does not guarantee a faster close, but it can remove a bottleneck that sales teams cannot solve through better selling. When legal teams spend less time on routine review, they also have more capacity to handle the next contract waiting in line.
When a contract sits in review for weeks, buyers can lose interest, bring in new decision-makers, or rethink the purchase. Each delay creates another chance for momentum to fade.
Sales and RevOps teams can spot this problem by tracking the full path from negotiation to signature. Measuring that stage shows how long contracts actually spend in review and where contracts stall.
A faster contract process cannot replace strong lead generation or sales work. But it does help legal teams keep contracts moving at a similar pace, so deals that are ready to close do not lose momentum waiting for a signature.
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