Most contracts at companies using contract lifecycle software get signed quickly, but the slowest ones lose the most time after they have already gone out, according to a report ContractSafe released on Nov. 12. Its 2026 Contract Lifecycle Report draws on timestamps from more than 55,000 contracts at ContractSafe customers between August 2025 and September 2026, including more than 15,000 approval requests and 48,000 e-signature requests.
Half of contracts were signed within 2.8 days of being added. The slowest 10% took 24 days or more, and for those, 44% of the time in the four steps ContractSafe tracks went to waiting for signatures, against 19% for approval. A request with one signer was fully signed in a median of 1.5 hours; two signers took 22 hours, and four or more took 5 days. When approvers were asked one at a time, the slowest took a median of 3.4 days.
Why it matters for deal desks
“The ones that get stuck are often waiting on one person, an approver who hasn’t answered or a signer who hasn’t signed,” said Randy Bishop, CEO and co-founder of ContractSafe. ContractSafe sells CLM software, and the data comes from its own customers, so it describes teams that already track contracts in a system.
In our reading, the signer count is the number a sales leader can act on before quarter end. Each extra signature added hours or days in this data, so reps should confirm who signs on the buyer side during negotiation and cut internal countersignatures that add nothing. The report also found that asking two approvers at once took a median of 1.3 days against 2.2 days in sequence, a setting most deal desks can change. We have argued that automating the quote moves the sales bottleneck to the order, and signatures sit in that same stretch. Pricing approvals are covered in our article on Conga’s deal-level pricing controls.
Source: ContractSafe via PR Newswire
