Improving the performance of your company's contractual process is a challenge faced by many players with very different objectives: salespeople, lawyers, buyers, etc.
It is in everyone's interest that the contractualization, materializing the act of sale of their products or services, takes place under the best conditions and as quickly as possible.
If you are currently in the process of optimizing your contractual process, you have certainly heard of contract management software.
In this article, we propose to present you this category of technological solutions and their contribution to the daily management of all your contracts.
Software to improve the performance of your contracting process
According to research conducted by the independent organization[World Commerce & Contracting] , good contract management can save a company an average of up to 9% of its revenue.
Optimizing contract management is therefore a growth lever that is often neglected by companies, allowing them to act directly on revenue.
Losses due to poor contract management can manifest themselves in a number of ways, such as the non-renewal of a contract or the inability to expand the scope of the original contract with new services or products sold, or as a result of delays in performance, litigation, etc.
As you can see, there are several areas that can be optimized in terms of contract management and this is precisely what contract management software can contribute to.
But how do you know if your organization really needs such software?
Very simply, if you answer positively to any of the statements below, there is a good chance that a contract management software will allow you to optimize the income related to your contracts:
- Managing your contracts is time-consuming for your HR, legal, sales or administrative teams.
- You sometimes feel overwhelmed or pressed for time to deal with all the issues related to your contracts.
- You have difficulty finding all the contracts signedwithin your organization.
- It is difficult for you to quickly assess the important provisions of your contracts to inform your contacts.
- You have trouble keeping track of your contractual commitments and sometimes you miss important dates (renewal, notice, etc.)
Do you recognize yourself in one or more of these statements? Then the rest of the article should interest you.
A contract management software is a tool accessible from your web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc.) that allows you to optimize the entire contractual cycle, from the creation of a contract to its end of life, through its negotiation, signature and execution.
It allows companies to regain full control of all contracts that are created by giving them a high level of visibility on contract activity.
A contract management software can be used to meet the following objectives:
- Reduce the time required to create contracts and therefore reduce the risk of abandoning the contracting process
- centralize exchanges and keep an audit trail of all actions taken on the contract
- centralize all contracts signed electronically or by hand
- reduce the time spent searching for information in one or more contracts
- Easily monitor the company's contractual activity through automated statistical reports
- be alerted to all unmissable contractual events
A useful software for all actors handling contracts
A contract is built by several people. Sales, operations or buyers often have key information for the elaboration of the contract: financial terms, payment and delivery schedule of services or products, etc.
Lawyers also have the knowledge and expertise to draft certain crucial parts of the contract: liability clauses, litigation management, acceptable penalties, intellectual property framework, confidentiality, etc.
The information systems department or the company's technical consultant can also intervene in the contract to specify, for example, the service levels provided by his team in the case of software supply.
Bringing together all these players with different profiles to build a contract in a common and rapid way does not come without some challenges.
Contract management software will therefore meet this need to centralize the actions of each type of contact and collaboration.
Indeed, lawyers will be able to make contract templates available to all actors authorized to launch the creation of a contract. These templates will be dynamically modifiable by answering a few simple questions. In other words, the contract templates are always up to date and the modifications to be made are formulated in the form of simple questions to the different interlocutors.
The time saved by lawyers in answering questions from operational staff frees up their time to devote to high value-added tasks.
Sales, purchasing and other operational staff are called upon at the right time to integrate the key information they have into the contract. They can follow both the progress of the negotiation process with the co-contractor and the progress of the internal validation process prior to sending the contract for signature.
Once the contract is signed, all stakeholders can schedule reminders of important contract dates and view a summary sheet to quickly find key information.
Of course, contract management software also allows you to limit access to certain sensitive files or contracts to a specific group of people, in order to guarantee the confidentiality of certain information.
The contract management software is therefore a real collaborative work tool allowing all the actors of the company who have to participate in the elaboration of the contract to work more efficiently.
In some very special cases, contract management software can also be used for special contractual processes such as the simultaneous and automated creation of several dozen or hundreds of contracts through direct mail.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, a contract management software allows you to optimize all or part of the stages of the contract life cycle according to your organization's specific needs.
Do you find the process of creating a contract in your company laborious? The features for automating the creation of contracts from dynamic templates will be particularly useful.
Are you having trouble managing your contracts because of the follow-up of your important deadlines? The automated reminder and notification features will be your best allies.
If you still have doubts about the usefulness of such a contract management software in your particular case, do not hesitate to write to us at contact@seraphin.legal (or by clicking directly on the button below) so that our team can help you to better define your needs and indicate whether or not this technological solution is relevant for you.
