Simplifying Sales Contract Management

SalesTech is crowded with various niche products that do the things you need done. Every company has their specific handful that work for them, from customer relationship management (CRM), renewal management, sales enablement, e-signatures, price quotes, and thousands more. But only a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform can bring all that information together for a streamlined sales experience.

Configure, price and quote (CPQ) platforms are becoming the standard in B2B sales. But getting from sales quote to order form usually requires cutting/pasting and adding attachments from various departments, systems and formats, such as finance and legal, in order to get one cohesive order form. And it’s the same chore every time.

This is certainly the hard way to go about it, and as a business grows and the deals come faster, this “solution” to sales contract management and creation becomes untenable.

Bonus: test your current contract management process!

For example, consider looking up the progress of any sales deal. Without a comprehensive reporting dashboard view, many sellers settle for using their email inbox as their “dashboard” reference and attachments as their “data repository.”

Storing your deals this way requires sifting through an inbox of birthday greetings and spam looking for descriptive titles to pinpoint when a deal originated, clues to its progress or close, and if and when the account is up for renewal. Of course, you could search through emails and subject lines, but that would require storing distinctive phrases and keywords in your memory. Then in the end, you might find what you’re looking for only to lose it all over again.

This is an area where CLM shines: by gathering and integrating customer data from various platforms, a seller is able to generate sales contracts, documents and forms in one place in the platform they’re used to. It’s the only way to get a comprehensive view of your deals and their current status across platforms, making sales contract management more efficient and effective.

A bottleneck of the deal cycle is the basic creation of the sales contract required to close the deal. The moment a deal is created, the clock starts ticking to generate the contract and get it signed. With a CLM’s workflow design capability, you have the tool that streamlines the process to create contract templates from simple non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and sales agreements to the most complex B2B deal. These templates can be pre-approved with legal, giving sales the ability to initiate the contracting process, and close deals swiftly.

A CLM like Ironclad is especially useful in contract and document creation because it auto-populates data across platforms so your legal-approved sales contract templates are generated in a professional, instantly presentable format to your prospective customers.

Small mistakes are commonly missed due to the difference between how a software tool displays the content and the actual contract produced. So before hitting the dreaded send-to-all button, Ironclad offers a preview page to see the sales contract exactly how it will appear to the client and interested parties. With this more accurate contract generation, you get more rapid acceptance and less time is spent negotiating, redlining, and reviewing changes.

Sales teams have their tools of choice, the software they know that’s useful to them in their fields. But CRM and CPQ will only get you so far on their own. To get ahead of the game, you must fill gaps between systems and keep track of it all. Ironclad’s contract lifecycle platform pulls the information together for you, unleashing and complementing a SalesTech stack’s usefulness to solve frustrating bottlenecks and lost revenue that can happen during the sales contract management experience.