What Contract Management Should Learn from CRM Systems?

Managers know how hard it was to get salespeople to use the CRM system. A story of struggle and temperaments. Managing contracts is just like managing sales. Due to poor acceptance of contract management or totally missing systems, most companies live in contract chaos that causes unnecessary stress and financial losses.

It took 15 years for the CRM sphere to put things right. We suggest you don't follow that path with your contracts and take a shortcut to the finish line.

Let us explain…We’ve seen three waves of CRM systems:

• The first systems were huge monoliths that only large corporations could afford. Often with tailor-made expensive code, they were better than nothing but getting them updated requires a lot of management attention.
• The second wave of CRMs brought Salesforce.com and other more affordable SaaS-based solutions. Still heavy but many had the determination to learn to live with these solutions. Most professionals still store their deals in Excel, though.
• And finally, now, there are plenty of clever new mobile-supported CRM solutions that truly help salespeople in their work. Even the most hesitant sales guy must admit that these are helpful.

What this has to do with Contract Management?

A lot. The CRM allegory works brilliantly for the very challenge every administrative manager, sales director, legal counsel, or SME CEO has today. The existing contract management solutions are way too heavy, expensive, laborious to implement, and more importantly, it is hard to get people to commit to using them. You’ve wasted a lot of money and still, only part of the contracts are stored in the monoliths.

The evolution of the Contract Management solutions has been slower than that of the CRMs. The existing tools were too hard to implement and the benefits did not justify the expenses.

There are many kinds of contract management offerings available today: gigantic high-end solutions, complex SaaS or on-premise offerings, and new, mobile-supported, lightweight SaaS solutions. But the masses haven’t really moved yet.

Why still manage contracts in random and sloppy ways?

You don’t need to accept that your contracts create risk and chaos. The new generation of tools are inexpensive to implement and require little management effort to stay updated.

Too many (if not most) small and medium-sized businesses suffer both financially and legally because contracts are not available when they are needed. Most SMEs have some of the contracts are neatly in folders, some are in email inboxes of the responsible persons, and the rest of them…who knows. According to international studies, 20 % of all the contracts are permanently missing. A huge risk for any company of any size.

Learn from History and Act Now

Being an early adopter is good for your business and your career, just like happened to the early adopters of modern CRM tools. Why not act now and help your company to succeed.

The benefits of modernly organized contract management are many and they are measurable. We’ve found that the four most important ones are:

1. Your company becomes more valuable. A well-managed company is a more valuable company. It has been proved in many M&As that a company that has all contracts, corporate documents, and legally mandated documents (like board meetings) in order is perceived as more valuable. Always be Due Diligence ready.
2. Your financial results improve. When sales, purchase, and co-operations agreements are always at hands for your team, it results in better, faster operations, and finally shows on the bottom line. The survey run by the International Association for Commercial & Contract Management (IACCM) found that the effect on the bottom line can be up to +15 % when contract management is well organized (of course that includes the tools and the process).
3. Your customers and partners are more satisfied. By having your company records straight, you are able to serve your customers and partners better.
4. Your employees are happier. When you offer your employees better tools to do their job, less stress and hassle there will be. And let’s be honest, they will adopt new tools only if those are genuinely easy-to-use and learn. No one is willing nor has time to learn a massive system for this.

We are very glad if you take the time to check out ContractZen. Go to My ContractZen to start your 30-day free trial. If you have any questions please send us a quick note at contact@contractzen.com. We dare to promise: With the cutting-edge technologies, unique features, and unbelievable pricing, ContractZen is a dream come true for company administration.

Why ContractZen?

• ContractZen is designed to support you in your contract management challenge, without being heavy-to-use, time-consuming, or expensive. On the opposite, it is easy to learn and very affordable.
• Smart metadata set. The way ContractZen manages your contract data is unique: we have together with the experts within the legal sphere managed to define the minimum viable metadata set that is necessary for an efficient way of working with contracts.
• Very easy search and find. With help of the Gartner recommended metadata model we have managed to tackle the challenge of how to quickly find data. No more time-consuming and frustrating data hunts! Find anything from your contract base in seconds.
• Cool interface. We have made a special effort on the user interface, it is simple and clean, intuitive to use. No training courses are needed with ContractZen.
• Finally, the technology ContractZen has been built on is highly-advanced Microsoft Azure Cloud with the highest security standards. Naturally, you wish your contract data be safe.