Too many legal teams suffer from manual, ad hoc processes — or worse, having no process at all. It’s why deals take longer to close and the reason for friction between legal and sales at the end of the quarter.
Sales and legal need to work together to close deals and drive revenue, so it’s crucial that they build out contract processes that help execute contracts quickly to maintain momentum in the market. CLM is a powerful tool that helps your teams create contract workflows and optimize them over time.
What Is a Contract Workflow?
A contract workflow is the path a particular contract takes during the contract management process.
For example, teams may have different workflows for vendor contracts than for terms of service agreements — each workflow has different steps, stakeholders, and goals associated with its execution.
As the company scales, it’s important that your sales and legal teams work together to create contract workflows that will make their lives easier.
3 Ways to Optimize Contract Workflows Using CLM
CLM enables legal teams to design and automate workflows that shorten the sales cycle and introduce efficiency into the contracting process. With templates for easy drafting, eSignature for digital signing, and automatic task routing and notifications, CLM allows legal and sales to automate approval workflows, create no-touch deals, and streamline contract execution.
Here are 3 ways sales and legal can optimize their contract workflows.
Create No-Touch Contracts
The last thing sales wants to do in the flow of a deal is to stop and ask legal for a contract, especially for low-value standard agreements like NDAs. This creates a bottleneck that slows down the deal and creates an opportunity for the buyer to walk away.
Legal teams can use CLM to create self-service contract workflows for sales reps. Using templates with pre-approved legal language, sales teams can generate basic contracts that don’t require legal sign-off. Best of all, by integrating the CLM with a Salesforce, sales teams can initiate this contract workflow without leaving their CRM instance.
Automate Contract Review
While all contracts are important to your business, they’re not all worth the same, and so they shouldn’t take the same amount of legal’s time. Legal’s time is better spent on higher-value contracts, since those have more at stake and potential to generate more revenue for the business.
To avoid giving equal weight to unequal value, automate contract review on agreements below a certain dollar value. Legal AI can take the first pass at your contracts and point to clauses you should pay attention to, allowing you to be more strategic with your time.
Build Approval Workflows
Similarly, low-value agreements have different approval requirements than high-dollar contracts. In some companies, contracts over a certain threshold require CEO or CFO sign-off before being finalized. But without a proper workflow in place, legal teams can spend far too long chasing stakeholders to get their final okay.
Thankfully, CLM enables legal teams to automate tasks and notifications that alert stakeholders to when their attention is required.
Takeaways
Streamlined contract workflows are the key to efficiency in your legal department. By optimizing your workflows, you can improve collaboration between sales and legal and finalize contracts faster. Learn how LinkSquares CLM can help your team build out efficient contract workflows. Request a demo today.
