Time is Money: Learn How Cloud Peritus Is Helping One Of Our Hi-Tech Clients, Estimated To Save 1000s Of Hours Of Manual Work Through Salesforce CLM

One of our Hi-Tech clients, named a leader by Forrester Wave™ in Critical Event Management, partnered with Cloud Peritus to leverage Salesforce Contracts to:

1. Simplify and automate contract generation specific to their business needs 
2. Collaborate (with internal & external parties) for redlining/negotiation
3. Trace back the legal service terms during renewal cycles
4. Establish a well-defined System-of-Record & System-of-Engagement for all relevant documents pertaining to a sale with a mission to improve their Contract Lifecycle Management. 

The CLM process is a crucial part of any sales cycle and is often deterred by bottlenecks of negotiation cycles between legal, finance and/or sales operations representatives of customers and service providers. Most organizations are burdened with the mundane tasks of reviewing contracts, redlining and maintaining an efficient finalized document(s) filing system. Choosing and using a software application that specifically addresses these needs is the most obvious solution. Though this approach seems the most logical route, it can quickly lead to information/data leaks between the multiple departments involved in the contract execution process. Since the documents are worked on and stored in distinct systems, it often requires swivel chairing between multiple software applications to capture and understand the most relevant information. Utilizing Salesforce Contracts in conjunction with Salesforce CPQ/Revenue Cloud eliminates all these pain points in a single strike. 

Our client was one of the veterans in adopting Salesforce for their sales organization and primarily relies on tracking the deals within the platform. One of the major challenges while using a different system for their contract management integrated to Salesforce was inconsistency in identifying the status of the contract. This led to the sales team experiencing a lot of frustration when the contract data was not present in the Salesforce workflows as expected. Key metrics and data, like renewal dates, were often a treasure hunt to be included in forecasting & reporting. 

Contract negotiations involved offline methods like editing pdfs, swivel chairing between multiple applications for document(s) generation, collaborating between the customer and internal stakeholders, dealing with a nightmare in regards to version control and manual input of all terms and conditions during contract renewals. 

Keeping abreast with the current trends of adopting legal tech, our client decided to evaluate various industry-leading CLM applications for their business needs. We helped the client through the product evaluation process to help them understand the pros and cons of each product through multiple proof of concepts before recommending Salesforce Contracts for managing their legal paperwork. Template libraries provided the client flexibility to store all the applicable and necessary documents in a single place. Terms and Conditions libraries made it possible for the redlining process to be simplified by just a few clicks. The client was also able to leverage all the data that was already available inside Salesforce from other objects/fields like Accounts, Opportunities and Quotes to dynamically populate the content onto the contract document making the CLM automation workflows seamless. This addressed one of their pain points of unstable data sync & flow from Salesforce to the CLM application. Salesforce’s robust integration provisions with a wide range of external applications came in handy while connecting the platform to capture e-signature tool and all updates made to the e-sign envelope were also captured back onto Salesforce. Any approvals required during the negotiation process were automatically routed to the appropriate parties and timely notifications were sent to the approvers for their attention. The inbuilt Salesforce Contracts feature to edit documents within the platform with Microsoft 365 enables the legal, sales ops and the sales teams to make changes to the system collaboratively rather than working offline. 

Choosing Salesforce Contracts as their contract lifecycle management tool resulted in the following improvements for the client compared to their previous solution.

1. Automated document generation: The solution will be able to automatically generate appropriate documents based on the opportunity stage in the sales cycle (Non-Disclosure Agreements at the “Evaluate” stage vs Master Service Agreement post “Negotiation” stage). Additional/Supplemental documents can also be tracked against a single record for a more comprehensive context. More complex scenarios have also been accounted for like use of customer paperwork in lieu of the clients’, capturing wet signatures in lieu of digital signatures, etc. 
2. Template Versioning: Maintaining and updating the key templates necessary for the paperwork will now be seamless with the versioning capabilities that have been enabled. Previous versions will still be available in a single place for reference; however, the newer versions could easily be activated to be used as a standard for all deals.
3. Automated approvals on terms and conditions: Advanced approvals feature has been configured that will enable our client to define the rules for routing them to the appropriate teams/groups and eliminate the need to collaborate via emails or other channels. The requests could either be approved/rejected via a click of button. The timely notifications sent to the responsible teams will lead to a decrease in bottlenecks due to processing times (~5hrs per approval) in comparison to their previous solution.
4. Tracking data from signed contract documents: All important attributes and terms agreed upon during the contract negotiations are tracked on fields within Salesforce. During renewals, these agreed upon values are automatically applied to the renewal quote document rather than having to manually edit 4,000 quotes a year. This alone is estimated to eliminate 1000 hours of manual work (25 person weeks, full-time).
5. Simplified redlining/document versioning: With the built-in Microsoft 365 editor, the legal team will now be able to accomplish the redlining process seamlessly with the customers’ legal team without the need to edit them offline. 

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Any organization that leverages Salesforce CPQ/Revenue Cloud for their Sales organization would greatly benefit from Salesforce Contracts as their CLM tool since it eliminates the need to swivel chair to additional applications, allows for seamless collaboration with the legal and sales ops teams, provides a single repository for all document storage; whilst also allowing for automating some crucial processes like document generation, e-signature envelope creation, sharing and audit log captures with granular customization required for each firm.
‍_{*The results are estimated over the next 12 months.}

For more information and to book a free consultation on how we can help transform your business.

Contact us at info@cloudperitus.com