And, what happens when contracts get delayed? They affect your revenue – and your quota. You don’t simply lose time (which you could devote to the deals in the pipeline). You also lose revenue for every day’s delay in your contracting cycle. For contracts that are already signed, you bite your tongue when renewals slip under your radar. Long story short, every day counts in the bottom-line growth of your business.

In an ideal world, you would like to focus on solving customer problems, guiding potential customers, and building long-term relationships. Not on contract operations. That’s precisely why managing sales contracts better can improve key business metrics.

So, how do you transform your sales contract management processes? We at SimpliContract list down three things you can do:

1. Shift from dependencies to empowerment

What’s the first thing you do when you have to get a new contract initiated? Do you write to your legal team? Do you duplicate a recent contract and start editing it in MS Word? Chances are, you are greatly dependent on your organization’s legal department if you are reading this blog. And that’s one of the factors causing your contracting cycle to be so slow.

Best-in-class sales contract management teams are self-reliant when it comes to initiating new contracts. They have the expertise and know precisely which templates and clauses apply to a given geography, business unit, customer type, or product line.

In this case, legal teams are enablers who empower sales operations with tools and resources. And this mechanism helps to shrink customer contracting cycles by about 40%. Imagine adding up those many days of revenue for every single contract you sign in a year.

2. Shift from reactive to proactive monitoring

Another pain area for product companies lies in the whole contract renewal management process. It is impossible to monitor a contract throughout its lifecycle manually, and CRM-based reporting and tracking come with their own set of challenges and limitations. Often it is the finance team that notices the slippage. And before you know, you have already missed a month’s revenue. That’s a whopping 8.33% of your annual revenue from that customer.

The good news is, there are ways to set up alerts and reminders for upcoming customer contract renewals. You see it coming. You prepare for it. You can use the opportunity to assess customer satisfaction, the scope for upsells, and cross-sells. You may even be able to pull some strings to retain an important customer. All these things require proactive monitoring – best done with smart contract management solutions.

3. Make it all achievable right within your CRM

Let’s be honest. You live a good part of your life inside your organization’s CRM tool. No matter how complex or easy it is to use, you’ve gotten used to it over time. All information and resources about your potential and existing customers lie there. And that’s how you prefer it.

So why should you have to use another application for initiating new contracts? It breaks the flow and affects your efficiency. To make your deal-to-signature cycles seamless and frictionless, we suggest contract management solutions that integrates with your CRM.

If you resonate with these and would like to know more about how to transform your sales contract management, drop us an email at hello@simplicontract.com. We would be happy to walk you through SimpliContract’s SaaS-based Contract Lifecycle Management platform.