What I love about Ironclad is its ease of use. The platform is constantly improving, as evidenced by the regular updates that are released. Ironclad listens to their customer base.
When revenue execution platform Invoca invested in Ironclad in 2020, their use case was pretty straightforward. They needed a centralized contract repository to manage all of their legal paper. Ironclad contract lifecycle management (CLM) was up to the task, so much so that as the Invoca team started to see the benefits of using a CLM, they wanted to do more and more with it.
Four years later, Invoca still uses Ironclad CLM to wrangle contracts. But now it does so much more, from handling NDAs to running the company’s quote-to-cash process. How did Ironclad become their business system team’s go-to platform for so many mission critical operations? Through customization, ease of use, and expandability. Let’s take a closer look.
From order forms to vendor contracts and beyond
Invoca’s platform helps business-to-consumer companies drive revenue growth by offering a unified view of the buying journey, optimizing marketing and sales efforts. The team was carrying out a similar initiative internally, going through its sales processes with a fine-toothed comb. They uncovered that Salesforce CPQ was not the ideal space to carry out their order form processes and that they needed a single source of truth to be able to maintain order form accuracy and consistency. They also knew that because they relied so heavily on Salesforce, they’d need a contract management solution that would integrate easily with its existing instance. So they turned to Ironclad, beginning their implementation by building a contract repository. They started slowly, using the CLM only for their master services agreements (MSAs).
“Nobody looked back. The adoption pivoted Ironclad into the spotlight here,” said Matt Loos, VP of Business Systems at Invoca. “When our people in legal and sales saw Ironclad, they immediately were like, ‘What else can we do with it?’”
Matt’s teammates weren’t short on ideas. They quickly wanted to expand usage for order forms, NDAs, credit requests, vendor contracting, and more.
Easy integration with tech they already had
According to Loos, who oversees Invoca’s IT, Salesforce development, and business intelligence teams, one of his biggest wins was implementing Ironclad for order forms. Automating the process relieved the sales team of the manual effort and maintenance of generating multiple forms for each customer order. In turn, Ironclad became a key part of Invoca’s contracting process.
The implementation was made easier by Ironclad’s native Salesforce integration capabilities. Loos called the Ironclad-Salesforce integration “seamless,” and said getting the systems talking to each other has improved the efficiency of the quoting and order process, especially since sales can manage the order forms without ever having to leave Salesforce. “Ironclad’s dynamic nature allows for easy configuration and customization of order forms,” Loos said. Invoca’s in-house developers have also been able to build supplemental functionality in Salesforce to complement Ironclad’s capabilities. Beyond ease of use benefits, the integration has yielded tangible benefits: Deal velocity increased by standardizing the order forms pulled into Ironclad.
Buoyed by the success of their Salesforce integration, Invoca then moved to integrate Ironclad with Slack, which had the benefit of meeting users where they already are. Another success? Absolutely.
Integrating Slack with Ironclad has allowed for the easy launch of legal vendor request forms and improved communication within the team.
Ease of use begets lots of use. Even four years ago, Loos and his colleagues at Invoca were smitten with Ironclad’s ease of use and adaptability. As time moved on and Invoca expanded its use of the platform, that same ease of use remained — but the benefits started piling up.
“There was no pushback after implementation because the system was so easy to use,” Loos explained. Instead, his teammates pushed to use Ironclad even more. And the benefits extended throughout the company:
- Legal benefitted from a centralized repository with metadata tagging capabilities.
- Communication around contracting and new orders improved thanks to Ironclad’s tracking of redlines and comments.
- Self-service capabilities improved internal efficiencies.
- Sales processes simplified by standardizing on one order form template.
Overall, Ironclad has been extremely well-received within Invoca. A lot of that is down to the platform’s ease of use — to wit, Ironclad has become central to Invoca’s quote-to-cash process, using a single configurable order form workflow. But the CLM love also extends to Ironclad’s adaptability as business needs change. Loos said his teams have really taken to Workflow Designer, finding it easy to reconfigure and expand workflows as needed.
Constant innovation that sparks business ideas
Loos sees potential to extend Invoca’s use of Ironclad CLM, particularly for customer-facing interactions. Specifically, he sees potential for leveraging Ironclad to interact directly with customers, beginning with situations in which customers would typically download and read PDFs. Loos is also keen to get more guidance from Ironclad when it comes to maximizing the platform’s potential for existing use cases.
While there’s always room for improvement, Loos said that overall, Ironclad has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of Invoca’s business systems.
Ironclad is a disruptor. I would sell Ironclad day and night, no problem.