How to Increase Renewals Using Contract Data

Efficient contract management helps you stay on top of the information you need to increase renewals. If you’re constantly searching for new partners or vendors, it will be a struggle to maintain a healthy business. Contract renewals increase retention, and retention increases savings and revenue. This likely isn’t news to you, but your current contract management processes may not provide the actionable insights you need to increase customer retention.

Contract renewals directly affect a business’ overall efficiency. Without them, you are constantly scraping for new business. Ironclad’s software provides you with the insightful data you need to increase renewals across your business. With automated reminders and searchable contracts, you can know:

• When a contract is set to renew
• Conditions for renewal
• Whether the agreement will automatically renew or require renegotiation
• Roadblocks to past contract acceptance
• What forms were used in the last agreement

Contract renewal is the last stage of the contract lifecycle. It occurs when the agreement comes to an end and a new one may be ready to begin. Most agreements have a specific end date that was previously negotiated between the parties. These parties can decide whether they will continue their business relationship. A renewed contract may utilize the same terms or may require renegotiation of the contract.

Contracts state if they will renew automatically and if there are any conditions imposed on that renewal. You need to know these conditions and be prepared to meet them. If you want to renew a contract, proactive steps can empower you to get the result you want. Automated software can provide you with useful data to help with this process. In other cases, you may wish not to renew or to renegotiate for better terms.

Ultimately, what you want is software that gives you the information you need to make good business decisions.

You are now at the contract renewal stage. This is a vital time to assess how valuable the contract in question really was to your company. Your team should be brutally honest when determining what went right and what went wrong in getting the original contract signed. You will want to:

• Evaluate the actual value of the contract and any self-made losses
• Note any challenges the organization faced in getting contract acceptance
• Use digital software data metrics to improve renewal of contracts
• Decide how to tailor new contracts to avoid previous pitfalls

Improving the renewal stage takes a concerted effort. This effort, however, is greatly reduced when you use comprehensive contract management software. It can provide you with the vital information you need to improve the renewal stage.

Missed contract renewals are lost revenue. They can cost your business an incredible amount of money. This revenue can be captured by appropriately tracking your contracts to handle renewals. Otherwise, you will miss out on important business opportunities. This may require starting from scratch or even the total loss of that contractual relationship. 

A few factors often affect why renewals are missed:

• Lack of centralized repository: Scattered contracts make them hard to find or lead to inconsistent results.
• Lack of effective contract tracking: Poor contract tracking means you have to do it by hand. This wastes time and increases the likelihood of missed renewals.
• Lost contracts: Contracts lost in the cloud or a dusty filing cabinet may mean the loss of renewal revenue.
• Lack of searchability of contract terms and key data points: When you cannot easily find contract terms or important dates, significant employee hours are needed to make these simple assessments.

Effective contract lifecycle management software keeps your contracts in the same place. It makes them searchable and automates many of the renewal processes.

A centralized repository for your contracts keeps everything in one place. The benefits of this one location are immense. You can improve overall accuracy, make searching easier, and increase the likelihood of a contract renewal. Ironclad’s Dynamic Repository helps make sure you never miss a contract deadline. It highlights the information you need to ensure you responsibly track contract renewals.

A repository does more than simply store your contracts and their data. It is a software solution to your contract renewal needs. It makes the contract a living, breathing document that gives you the data it holds—instead of searching through it yourself. It transforms the information into intuitive legal documents that enable you to complete a renewal.

Centralized storage

With Dynamic Repository, you get to keep all of your contracts in a single location. They are no longer scattered across the cloud or local storage. Without a centralized location, you can lose contracts or spend hours searching for agreements created years before. Not only are these agreements stored in this central location, but they also become searchable in this easy-to-use software.

Contract metadata for increased renewals

Completed and stored agreements are analyzed for their metadata. The software helps your legal, sales, and other teams analyze contracts automatically for important dates, including renewal dates. It can provide searchable information such as, but not limited to:

• The renewal dates
• Automatic renewal, termination, or extension 
• Conditions of contract renewal
• Party names and contact information
• Contractual expectations and requirements

Ironclad’s Dynamic Repository gives data life and makes it useful for you. Intelligent alerts and process automation allow for cross-system integration into your existing processes.

Contract reminder software

Too often, key information like renewal dates is lost in antiquated systems. A dedicated contract reminder software built into the Dynamic Repository can help you stay on top of your contract renewals. Most companies tend to rely on individual employees to remember when these deadlines arrive. Manual tracking of these critical dates does little to protect your company from a potentially significant revenue loss.

Digital contracting software can navigate contract data to find renewal dates and create automatic reminders. Additional metadata provides you important information on how to renew including conditions and past roadblocks to success. “Best in Class” companies are proactive in getting contract renewals.

The other side of the coin is accidental renewals. You may not want to renew a contract with a particular company. If the contract is set to renew automatically, you need to know this information to avoid getting locked into unfavorable contract terms. You may wish to renegotiate the contract or terminate it entirely if the business relationship is not ideal.

With contract reminder software, you have the power to determine what contracts you will renew without the risk of missing important dates.

Contract metadata provides you with the information you need to enhance sales growth. Not only do you want to renew and keep the customer happy, but you also want to look for opportunities for expansion revenue. Options to upsell could enhance the value of your existing contract on top of the revenue gained during a successful contract renewal.

Driving a successful upsell means understanding how the client would like to grow. They need to see the real benefits of an upsell. With contract metadata, you can analyze the benefits they already receive to demonstrate your company’s value to the client. Further, you can analyze the terms of the contract to determine potential points of upsell. It’s cheaper to upsell an existing customer rather than acquire a new one.

Upsell opportunities are more readily apparent with the right data in hand. A digital contracting platform can provide you with useful information like:

• The previous length of the agreement
• The sales terms and services provided to the customer
• Potential services that were previously turned down
• Legal requirements for the client

Using metadata, a sales or CS teammate can compare the services offered in the previous contract with potential upsell options offered by your company now. Where these opportunities fit the client’s needs, you can seek to upsell services and create client growth.

Identification of sales terms is not the only way to drive client growth. Digital contracting software can identify key non-sales terms the marketing team may be missing. Key terms in a contract may help you identify areas where you can grow your revenue, even when the marketing team didn’t catch it themselves.

This can include key areas such as dealing with logo and trademark rights. The use of a company’s logo requires special permissions but can create an opportunity for potential growth. The same is true of case study rights. A proper case study can help determine where processes can be optimized for the client. 

These types of rights may not have been readily apparent or considered in the pre-digital age. Optimized contract lifecycle management software looks for these types of non-sales terms to further enhance your ability to renew and upsell contracts.

Too many companies lose out on contract renewal opportunities because of antiquated tracking systems. You deal with too many contracts to manually track data and renewal dates. Let digital contracting software do that work for you while it also collects critical metadata for your use. You can increase revenues and decrease the effort it takes to increase customer retention.

Request a demo of Ironclad today. See how to cut your contract processing time by 80% and get business done better.