To alleviate common contracting pain points and achieve significant improvements, you need an effective contract management strategy. We’ve broken down this strategy into four universal steps. As you roll out your strategy, each step will compound success, capturing more value for your business and getting more of your company on board with the benefits of contract management.
Be sure to select a contract management provider that has the expertise to help you achieve excellence across all four phases. Don’t just focus on tool functionality. Your provider should be able to guide you through each step, with the experience, service, and peer community in place to help ensure your longterm success.
Step 1: Get your contracts in one place
Contract management at its most basic level is getting your contracts in one digital location so you can start to unlock their value and understand obligations and compliance. Even though this isn’t all of contract management, it’s a great starting point. So make your first milestone to get your contractual ducks in a
row, centralizing your contract content. Once your contracts are in one place, you’ll be able to search and report, control access, receive alerts for key events, and more. You’ll have gained a business advantage from contracts— and you’re still only getting started.
Step 2: Define process and performance metrics
For most companies, the next step is to automate the process of how each person in your company interacts with the contract lifecycle. Set up workflows for contract requests and approvals. Create and enforce service levels and other commitments for teams to work together on contracts.
This step offers big gains in contract cycle times, which leads to more closed business and more efficient time use for all parties involved, including sales, legal, finance, and executives. Faster cycle times also create a more streamlined customer experience.
With these two steps complete, you’ll have implemented a significant positive change for your company. This is where some companies stop— but there are many more benefits ahead for those that continue to build on their success
Step 3: Build contracts smarter
Next, you should automate the drafting and negotiation processes using electronic templates, legal playbooks, selfservice contract wizards, and the integration of Microsoft Word with contract management software. This step offers further gains in cycle time and helps companies handle negotiations
more effectively.
By doing this, you will see fewer errors and reduced contract risk while maximizing the impact of guidance from your legal team. This will also help alleviate the tension between speed vs. control, and will further align the goals of your legal and sales teams.
Step 4: Integrate and accelerate contracts end-to-end
Finally, you’ll want to extend the value of contract management to other related systems. Contract management on its own offers a solid ROI, but the investment gets even more impactful as part of an integrated end-to-end solution that also helps transform commerce, revenue, and documents. This way, you can ensure that efficiency, visibility, and control extend from the start of your sales process, through your contract lifecycle, and into your revenue recognition, allowing
data to seamlessly and intelligently flow from step to step, from department to department, and from your CRM solution into your ERP solution.
To attain this last step, you’ll want to make sure your contract management software is part of a single, integrated, intelligent solution. You also want to know that your provider is experienced with ERP and CRM.
Why partner with us for contract lifecycle management?
Conga’s Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), an end-to-end contract management solution, eliminates manual and disjointed contract processes and delivers higher-quality experiences for both your internal and external customers. Conga CLM drives contract excellence at scale, reduces cycle times, improves negotiating outcomes, and minimizes risk. Built in the cloud, Conga seamlessly connects with CRM and eSignature solutions to simplify your commercial operations. Conga empowers all departments on their journey to transform commercial operations
Faster legal cycles and lower costs
One of the world’s largest providers of banking and payments technologies had inefficient and manual contract management
and approval processes. In addition, the company needed to securely store sensitive contract data at the same time that it needed to be able to manage multiple agreements across many divisions.
Conga CLM met the organization’s current contract management needs as well as providing a complete, end-toend solution as it continued to scale in the future. Once the company was on a single, standardized platform, it was able to quickly automate processes, reducing cycle times by 75% and lowering admin costs by $1 million.
Greater efficiency and sales volume
A large technology company had a slow and complicated contracting process before implementing Conga CLM, with new contracts taking more than 100 days to close. After setting up the contract management system, the company found that its new global contracting system far exceeded efficiency goals. New contract time was reduced to less than 25 days, and approval cycles were reduced from days to minutes: an improvement of 99.9% in approval cycle times. Standardization of language and centralization of storage enabled reporting that led to valuable business intelligence. The company saw its sales proposal volume increase by 49%,
due to gains in efficiency and time savings.
Bringing home the benefits of contract management
Drive business benefits with contract lifecycle management…
Contracts are essential to your business. To compete in the 21st century, an effective contract management system is critical. Contract management involves a series of steps that create a full lifecycle, and contract management software can offer massive benefits at every step. As you roll out contract management, you can set milestones at certain steps to deliver even greater value to your business. A contract management solution increases the speed, visibility, and control of your contracts, allowing your business to streamline sales cycles, effectively manage revenue, and relationships—and ultimately achieve more revenue and greater competitiveness in your industry.