The 3 Types of Contracts That are Indispensable

It doesn’t matter if you’re in tech, manufacturing, retail or another industry. From NDAs to sales and service agreements, contracts touch every aspect of business life.

Better managing, streamlining and optimizing these types of contracts can reap huge rewards in business. To start, your in-house legal team can “do more with less,” mitigate business risk for your company, and even negotiate better deals. But it can also empower team members in marketing, sales and operations to self-serve some types of contracts, freeing legal to focus on legal work rather than paperwork.

The catalyst to unlocking all this efficiency? Contract management and, specifically, digital contracting, which connects the people, processes and data involved in business contracts so companies can execute smarter agreements, faster.

The three titans of contract types:

Customer engagement often starts with sales agreements. By helping businesses manage and fast track these types of contracts, digital contracting can help in-house legal teams and business users save time and money as well as make faster, better informed decisions.

Imagine being able to:

• Cut down on deal closing time by enabling sales team members to generate their own contracts — within guardrails set by Legal. This is a great way to kick start sales deals.
• Predict deal pipeline more accurately by having all discussions and contract details easily accessible and reviewable. Bonus: sales leaders can stay up on deal status.
• Drive sales decisions by having all completed sales agreements automatically populated in a CRM like Salesforce. Result? You have a single source of truth for key data, such as renewal dates and payment terms.

Related: What Do Contracts Have to Do with Sales Velocity?

Non-disclosure agreements are essential for everything from candidate interviews to sales demos.

By removing the guesswork from this high-volume type of contracts, digital contracting helps companies protect their key assets, reputation and business.

Imagine being able to:

• Make NDAs quick and easy so you ensure the security of all intellectual property — without bogging down Legal.
• Set and maintain high standards by baking in company compliance standards via standardized confidentiality, permitted use and agreement term. Result? Employees follow all regulatory and company standards.
• Maintain a single source of truth by storing completed NDAs in a searchable archive or repository. Ongoing, this provides easy and organized access to the records and necessary data.

Related: Creating and Automating a Universal NDA

By optimizing service agreements, digital contracting helps businesses move quickly and — more importantly —  responsibly.

In the process, Legal can reduce company risk by creating standardized provisions, such as intellectual property rights, data handling and liability to protect the business and maintain compliance.

Imagine being able to:

• Onboard contractors quickly by setting up convenient contract workflows within Legal-approved guardrails that guide business users through all aspects of creating an agreement. It’s a great way to cut down turnaround time.
• Prioritize compliance and reduce company risk by creating standardized provisions such as intellectual property rights, data handling and liability. This helps ensure employees follow all regulatory and company standards.
• Leverage contract data to find and monitor performance of key contract terms, including scope of work, billing schedule, performance milestones and deliverables. Result? You maintain better contractor relationships.

Learn more about the benefits of contract management and how it fast-tracks all contract types and what goes into evaluating a contracting platform. Read our implementation guidelines to find out if you’re ready to adopt a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. Then request a demo and see how easy it is to launch an NDA!