You’re not alone if you’ve felt increasing pressure for your company to navigate growing market demands. The need to stay competitive despite economic uncertainty, a fickle customer base, and the need to do more—often with fewer resources and less time—is a reality for most organizations. 

The need to maximize efficiency for tasks is motivated by both administrative and emotional concerns. For example, around 80 percent of employees reported feeling stressed at work, based on a recent survey by The American Institute of Stress. And employee burnout was to blame for over half (60 percent) of absenteeism. 

For many of our customers, inefficient processes aren’t just bad for business; it’s awful for the people who keep them running. And that impacts your bottom line. 

If you routinely face delays in your daily operations because of unclear business agreements or compliance guidelines, expired, incomplete contracts, or inaccurate, outdated, or lost information, this isn’t a document problem—it’s a process problem. 

The primary focus of the Simplus team is to design solutions that simplify essential processes for higher productivity, business continuity, and the best value for company resources. It’s one of the reasons why we partner with companies like DocuSign to access the ideal tools, resources, and product expertise to create a customized system solution. 

Whether your primary focus is selling or you need a better way to streamline vendor relationships, a robust CLM helps strengthen your infrastructure by focusing on essential details and documentation that helps close deals faster, track contracts easier, monitor compliance, and improve document accessibility with secured confidence. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the increasing market demands that require today’s businesses to add a modern CLM system to their digital transformation to deliver faster output amid higher work volumes, heightened security, streamlined document management, and modern collaborative, consolidated, and automated contract and document capabilities that are improving how we interact with customers and vendors. 

 

Document Generation

Never underestimate the time required to create a valid document. Whether your business manages hard files or is moving toward more sustainable and scalable paperless processes, documentation lies at the heart of business operations. But recent studies found that employees spend more time than a company can typically afford to gather information to create documents. 

A study found that most employees can spend almost two hours every day gathering information for writing a document. That’s over 9 hours every week dedicated solely to curating and organizing information. Even tracking down a required signature can present time-consuming challenges. 

 “A CLM system like DocuSign’s speeds up all aspects of the process: reducing the amount of time generating a contract, time spent reviewing terms, and generally increasing the speed of negotiations,” says Dominique Carter, Implementation Consultant at Simplus. “If you’re talking to someone who says that it takes them months for things to close out because of these reasons, you can then dissect those problems. And then you can say, ‘Well, this potential solution can shrink the amount of time that it takes to close a deal.’ I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve seen as well. Utilizing a CLM eliminates the need for hunting down information or past documents because it’s consolidated in a central location. And if your business has a continuous need for a specific document, setting up a templatized process is simple.”  

 

Template Management 

Studies show that most employees spend around eight hours every week on tasks that could be automated. That impacts sales, accounting, shipping, human resources, customer service, and other vital branches of your workforce working on manual tasks rather than focusing on more impactful, business-expanding activities. 

This is one reason why templatizing forms and typical documentation is a strategic move that adds value to your employees’ workload. Investing in a CLM system that integrates automated contract management tools that generate templates for everyday operational purposes, for instance, transforms system capabilities, ensures accuracy partnered with more efficient processes, and sets the stage for expanded and faster revenue opportunities–even during uncertain economic times.  

 

Legal Compliance

Users can feel confident that the documents they rely on for their MSA are current and compliant. There’s no risk of grabbing an obsolete contract with an expired pricing agreement or accessing an old file folder for information on supplies.

Sometimes, your legal team may not fully understand why a document was shared via email. What is this for? Who is this supposed to go to? A CLM system creates transparency. From a sales perspective, documents are created and verified faster, which is what businesses want, and they also have transparency over it from a legal standpoint. 

 

Process Automation

The collaboration necessary for most documents, such as an MSA or other contract, often requires a tangled network of draft reviews, revisions, edits, more reviews, more revisions, stakeholder approvals, signatures, and the like. 

Email is a common tool for contract management. But if teams rely on email threads to share information with stakeholders for review, you understand how confusing and time-consuming this process of organizing and saving folders can be among departments. 

Have all of the vital stakeholders reviewed the document? Which file version was shared with them? Was it the most current version? 

Document management from a central location ensures critical players have access, current drafts are correctly identified, edits are tracked, and signatures are securely kept on file. 

 

Document Management

Streamlining document generation is essential for simplifying operations. But creating the document is only half of the process. Where does it live? 

A recent report found that employees generally spend around 3.6 hours every day searching for information. That means your sales, finance, management, administrative, and other vital teams spend almost half their workday tracking down essential documentation that may likely be living on someone’s laptop, a shared drive, or buried in a Salesforce opportunity or account. Who can be sure? 

Using a CLM like DocuSign consolidates and standardizes this information in a secure central location. It also ensures the information you find is the most current document version.  

 

Converts Unstructured Data Into Standardized Business Intelligence

Documents carry essential information, but it’s unformatted data. Factors like payment terms, contract values, government or industry guidelines, subscription expiration dates, rate terms, etc., can quickly get buried in the text of a document.  

With process automation, users can extract or identify those important pieces of information and convert them into structured, standardized data. Imagine easily running reports on expiration dates, renewal terms, uplift amounts, and various non-standard terms. You could maximize your revenues from clients and minimize your spend with vendors. You could more easily identify risks and increase rates of compliance.  

If you’re considering implementing a new CRM system with CPQ or if you’re thinking about sales transformation, CLM should be a piece of that.  

During these challenging economic conditions, you need a system that delivers quick, consistent, and accurate results. Rather than trying to operate within a haphazard, outdated process and cobbling together unorganized agreements and contracts, your data will be nicely structured and seamlessly synergize with a modern CRM system. Reach out to Simplus today to get started establishing your streamlined process.