When sales wants to move quickly and legal wants to keep control and not be an obstacle to the transaction, contracts can be a challenging task.
Sales teams are based in CRM, therefore it makes sense for them to stay there to maintain documents, such as the sales contract that governs the transaction. Read on to learn how to use Salesforce to handle contracts and remove pain points for both legal and sales departments.
So, what exactly is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management tool that lets businesses connect more effectively with their current and potential customers. Although there is other CRM software available, Salesforce is the industry leader.
Why is it so difficult to manage contracts?
Consider yourself as a one-person in-house legal department with 30 active sales contracts to manage each month. You, the lawyer, are in charge of preparing those contracts, which usually includes churning out conventional contracts and copying data from one document to the next.
This isn’t a high-paying career; anyone could hand-write a contract. If you’re limited to using Microsoft Word, it might be a time-consuming and soul-destroying manual procedure (which is still the system of choice for most legal teams).
To meet this problem, legal departments might involve the rest of the company in the creation process. Allowing sales teams to draft their own contracts may shorten the sales cycle, but doing so comes with a risk. Lawyers may like to assist sales colleagues in moving more quickly, but they are unable to enable sales representatives to freelance contract wording.
Contract information is typically stored in many locations by businesses, such as a half-completed spreadsheet here and a shared drive folder structure there. When it comes to human mistake, the legal team knows it can’t be trusted, therefore they expect the worst.
The initial contract will still be opened, defeating the aim. The issue worsens as the number of contracts increases. Sales-driven high-growth IT companies’ contract volumes are increasing month after month. No such thing as a lawful headcount exists.
Businesses can hire one or more full-time contract managers to handle this time-consuming procedure, or they can automate it.
What is Salesforce document automation, and how does it work?
Legal and commercial users may utilize Salesforce document automation to produce and manage contracts in a single system of record. In Salesforce, sales and legal teams are usually focused on separate aspects of the contract lifecycle.
A sales team’s concentration is generally on the pre-signature stage of a contract lifecycle. Prior to signing the contract, sales must build it swiftly, negotiate it smoothly, and get it through legal clearance to generate online signature. Legal review is an important step in the process, and legal teams frequently want to reduce the time it takes.
Contract administration, including renewals, analytics, contract data, and so on, is the emphasis of the post-signature stage, which is normally the responsibility of legal (as well as other stakeholders like finance). Although most legal teams do not use Salesforce on a regular basis (this is changing), attorneys must be comfortable with Salesforce-enabled contract management so that the teams they assist may move more quickly.
Wellyx is similar to Salesforce and is an emerging CRM Software in the United States due to its amazing and powerful features. Wellyx document storage and automation promote convenient access due to its centralized information in a single, easily accessible cloud-based area.
It’s also vital to have a single source of truth for contracts; otherwise, legal and sales departments may wind up with a bevy of unconnected systems, each with its own set of contract data and no visibility. Salesforce document automation promotes process consistency by centralizing information in a single, easily accessible area.
We use Salesforce to log all client contacts so that information isn’t lost while interacting with numerous persons in a business relationship. We also track the progress of new clients we’re onboarding so that the company has a clear picture of our goals and can forecast appropriately.
In Salesforce, how can you handle contracts?
By connecting your contract automation technology with Salesforce, you can enable sales people to self-serve comprehensive, compliant contracts in CRM while keeping legal control of risk thanks to a structured approval procedure.
With this interface and procedure in place, sales people construct contracts in Salesforce using templates created by the legal team in WeSignature. The sales team may concentrate on the sales process, managing leads through the pipeline to customer status, while the legal team can concentrate on contracts and risk, monitoring legal terms and negotiating on their contracts platform.
Of course, legal staff may be trained to utilize a platform other than CRM – but if a sales team lives in Salesforce all day every day and wants to stay there, why compel them to use alternative software?
If your contracts platform interacts with Salesforce via a 2-way real-time data sync, you can be confident in its data integrity and allow sales to stay in the system they are familiar with.
As long as data is in sync between the two systems of record, documents can travel freely through the lifecycle, with contract components properly mirrored in both.
