Businesses commonly struggle with contract management. Whether they are using out-of-date pricing information or not staying on top of approval processes, businesses tend to be inefficient, inconsistent, and uncoordinated when it comes to managing contracts. If businesses were to invest strategically in improving their contract development and management processes, they could boost their annual revenue by the equivalent of nine percent on average, according to a seminal study by the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management. 

To reduce the costs and time associated with contract management, modern organizations are turning to the contract management capabilities built into the Salesforce CPQ (Configure Price Quote) platform. CPQ comes pre-loaded with all the tools a business needs to create, review and approve, and store and retrieve contract information. CPQ ensures organizations don’t waste time and money on inefficient contract management activities. Best of all, contract management is part of your broader Salesforce ecosystem, which means CPQ is constantly drawing upon Salesforce data and insights to improve and enrich your contracts. Let’s explore four key ways that you can save time and money when you use the contract management capabilities in Salesforce CPQ:

 

You can use contract templates

In most organizations, multiple teams must review contracts before they can be executed. This process is often inefficient, with back-and-forth changes taking place and multiple versions of contract legal language floating around. Salesforce CPQ’s approach to contract management eliminates these inefficiencies by enabling teams such as legal to control and maintain a single, centralized set of templates that contains only the most recent version of contract language. These contract templates offer field and clause merging so that when changes get made the revisions populate automatically to all relevant templates. As a result, sales teams are never scrambling to find the correct templates. And more pointedly, legal is never seen as the roadblock standing in the way to finalizing a contract.

 

You can automate common processes

The average organization wastes precious time on routine contract management functions. They manually generate batches of identical contracts, manually keep individual contracts moving through required internal review and approval processes, and manually send out renewal reminders and quotes. The contract management features of Salesforce CPQ enable businesses to permanently automate these routine activities. Through simple configuration steps, businesses can get CPQ to auto-generate contracts for them, including renewal reminders and renewal quotes. CPQ’s contract management capabilities can even be configured to auto-notify appropriate reviewers and approvers when they need to sign off on a contract—and to keep reminding them automatically until they’ve signed off. 

 

There’s no need to retrieve data from other systems

Historically, contract management software has been its own siloed system. As a result, businesses needed to manually reenter data from their CRM and other systems into the contract management program—a time-consuming, error-prone task. Not so with Salesforce CPQ. Because CPQ is part of the broader Salesforce ecosystem, all data from CRM and other Salesforce apps flow seamlessly from one app to the other. In fact, data from your CRM can be used to auto-populate many sections of your contracts. Additionally, because manual data entry is largely eliminated, the chances of human error are reduced—a win-win situation. 

 

Getting sign-offs is a breeze

Contracts that require multiple layers of internal reviews and approvals often take more time than they should to get all required sign-offs. Approvers get busy and drop the ball. Furthermore, even when approvers want to sign off on a contract, it often requires jumping through hoops—for example, logging into a separate portal, or printing out each contract and signing it by hand. CPQ is an elegant alternative that is sensitive to both cost and time. When approvers need to sign off on a contract, they’re auto-notified, and when they don’t respond within a given timeframe, they’re auto-reminded. Similarly, because CPQ contract management is fully integrated with the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem, there’s no special system for approvers to log into—the entire review and approval process can be done from within Salesforce itself, including the ability to obtain digital signatures.

 

Contract management doesn’t need to be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. When businesses choose Salesforce CPQ for contract management, they can take immediate advantage of templates to streamline the creation of contracts, as well as automate common processes, retrieve relevant data from Salesforce CRM, and get required sign-offs before contracts can be finalized.

Simplus would love to help your organization use CPQ to improve and streamline your contract management activities. To learn how Simplus helped a SaaS company streamline the process for approvals of custom orders, please check out this Simplus case study on MuleSoft.

If you’re ready to save time and money on contract management, please reach out to the implementation experts at Simplus. We’ll be glad to show you how to make contract management as efficient, consistent, and coordinated as possible.