The modern sales cycle is perpetually slowed down by factors outside of sellers’ control. By the time you’re ironing out the final contract language with customers, you want to believe you’re in the homestretch. Unfortunately, contract management is a common stumbling block that can delay and even kill deals. Whether it’s getting internal approvals from all of the teams that must approve the contract language or back-and-forth revisions to the terms of the contract, sales teams commonly encounter unexpected—and often avoidable—delays and setbacks.

Businesses should be doing everything they can to minimize the chances of deals becoming derailed during the contract negotiation and approvals stage. One of the most important systems a business can implement is a contract lifecycle management solution (CLM), which integrates with the business’s core Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Contract management harnesses the information and insights from CRM to keep contract management processes moving rapidly and continuously toward the finish line. No matter how busy people get during contracting, contract management solutions are designed to prevent contracts from slipping through the cracks, especially at critical, time-sensitive junctures. Let’s explore four key reasons why you should integrate a CLM with your core CRM platform:

You’ll reduce errors

Customers choose to do business with you because they trust you to do right by them. And that includes being accurate, precise, and thorough with contracts. Not only do errors in contracts cause customers to lose faith in you, but they also can have serious legal and financial implications down the road. A contract management solution minimizes your opportunities to introduce errors into the contracting process. Contract management uses templates you select as the building blocks for all contracts, and auto-populates key fields and sections with text that’s been previously validated and approved. 

You’ll gain more visibility and control

Contracting typically is a multi-step process that involves negotiating with customers, drafting contract language, and then passing the draft contract through multiple layers of reviews and approvals. At any step of the process, contracts can slip through the cracks or be sent back for potentially extensive revisions. Although this process can quickly become complicated and difficult to manage, contract management helps ease the burden. With a contract management solution, teams across the organization can gain real-time updates on the status of contracts, including the date a contract was created, who created it, who it’s been shared with, and what specifically has been modified. This enables managers to readily monitor contracting across the organization and keep contracting processes in continuous motion.

You’ll be able to focus on higher-value work

Contracting can quickly become an unwieldy process to manage, with organizations devoting extensive resources to writing contracts, reviewing and revising contracts, verifying and fulfilling contract terms, and preparing and sending out renewal notices, reminders, and other alerts. Contract management helps streamline and automate many of these common, straightforward tasks, freeing up teams to focus on higher-value work. Each organization configures its contract management solution with customized, rules-based actions and dynamic triggers, enabling key review and approvals processes to happen consistently and automatically. 

You’ll centralize access to all contracts

Inevitably, customer service teams, legal teams, and others in your organization realize they suddenly need to retrieve an existing contract. Rather than having to hunt down the final executed contract, contract management keeps all contracts in a centralized, universally accessible repository. Basic keyword searches can be used to retrieve these contracts, and there’s never any danger you’re pulling an outdated or incomplete version.

So much of the information and insights that an organization needs to generate contracts are already housed in Salesforce CRM, so it just makes sense to add contract management to this core system. When you integrate CLM, you’ll reduce errors, gain improved visibility and control, free up resources for higher-value tasks, and centralize all contracts for easy retrieval later.

Simplus has extensive experience helping organizations to integrate contract management solutions with CRM. To learn how Simplus helped Dyno Nobel transform their contract lifecycle management process with DocuSign, watch this video. If you’re ready to supercharge your contracting processes with a contract lifecycle management solution, please reach out to the implementation experts at Simplus. We’ll be glad to connect you to a leading contract management solution that will accelerate and optimize your contracting processes.