In today’s cutthroat marketplace, it has become common practice for companies to integrate technology into their daily operations to stay ahead of the competition. They usually start by automating all their business processes with an automation tool or software. This includes contract management as well.
Perhaps you’re a company in need of a marketing professional to promote your products or services. Or maybe, you’re a contractor or freelancer looking to get hired by a company to help them with marketing strategies and ution. In either case, managing different contracts at the same time is not a particularly exciting part of running a business. And for that reason, you might dismiss contract management as tedious. But here are some ways it will benefit you, particularly when you use software for it.
1. Simplified Workflows
Contract automation software helps automate contract workflows by providing users with a platform to create, manage, and ute contracts digitally. It streamlines the entire contract process, from creation to signature, by automating repetitive tasks and reducing the need for manual data entry.
Here’s how using contract automation software results in simpler workflows:
- Contract Creation: With contract automation software, you can create a legally binding contract in a jiffy. All you have to do is fill in the fields you need for a specific contract. Once done, the software automatically generates the document. Easy, right?
- Contract Approval: Most contract automation software comes with a no-code workflow builder that will allow you to build an approval workflow for contracts without code in minutes. You can also set up approval criteria to ensure that all contracts go through the right individuals for approval before you ute them.
- E-signatures: You and other stakeholders can sign contracts quickly without having to print, sign, scan, and re-upload the document. The software integrates with an electronic signature application, enabling everyone to sign documents within the platform.
2. Reduced Business Risks
There are five main ways that contract management software can reduce business risk.
- Contract Visibility: The software creates a digital record of every action taken for a contract and generates a comprehensive audit report within seconds. It also sends automated alerts to the relevant stakeholders to apprise them of a contract’s current status in its lifecycle.
- Contract Compliance: The software analyzes the health of business relationships and generates reports on stakeholders’ adherence to regulatory requirements and service-level agreements.
- Template Library: Using pre-approved clauses and templates helps maintain corporate standards, thus allowing for better control over business practices.
- KPI Tracking Dashboards: Failure to meet KPIs can harm your reputation and result in legal action. Contract management software helps you track KPIs by extracting critical insights from contract metadata and presenting them on intuitive BI dashboards.
- Problem Analysis: In just a few clicks, you can get a summary of all contracts, including their status, expiry date, and other relevant data. Your team can use this information to identify non-performing or underperforming contracts that require urgent attention. Based on their prospects of future revenue, you can then decide which ones should be up for renewal, renegotiation, or termination.
3. Well-Managed Contract Renewals
Contract automation software increases the efficiency and accuracy of contract renewals, which results in better negotiations in less time. In turn, this results in cost savings, time efficiency, and more favorable deals for both parties involved. How? Keep reading.
- Faster Review Process: Contrary to manual review which can take weeks or even months to complete, contract automation software can review contracts within minutes or hours at most. This expedites negotiations and reduces the time needed to renew contracts.
- Access to Historical Data: As we mentioned earlier, contract automation software keeps audit trails for every contract. A good marketer always reviews previous agreements, identifies patterns in past negotiations, and uses those insights to inform future negotiations.
- Standardized Agreements: Contract automation software allows you to generate routine agreements at scale. A standardized format keeps manual input to a minimum and simplifies creating future proposals.
- Real-time Collaboration: Contract automation tools provide an online platform to share and discuss contract details with everyone involved in the negotiations. Additionally, multiple parties can edit and negotiate a contract together synchronously.
- Automated Reminders: The software can send you reminders automatically for important dates and deadlines, such as contract expiration, renewal, or payment due dates. As a result, it ensures that you never miss an important deadline.
- Minimizing Manual Errors: An automation tool reduces the inaccuracies common in manual contract writing and editing. Consequently, fewer issues arise during negotiations and the deal is closed sooner.
Final Thoughts
Contracts are crucial for all organizations. Poor contract management can cause disruptions in business operations, leading to revenue loss. Consider investing in good contract management software for your marketing team. It will save time and money, prevent financial penalties and business risks, and increase profits.
Author Bio:
Qurat-ul-Ain Ghazali, aka Annie, is the growth manager at Contract Book and looks after all the organic channels. She has been with tech startups and scaleups for a couple of years with a B2B focus. You can find her socializing, traveling, indulging in extreme sports, and enjoying the local desserts when she is not working.