Close Deals Faster: How To Streamline Your Sales Contract Process www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 1 of 7 The Evolution. From paper to the web. From the biggest companies down to small, growing enterprises, sales contracts are a crucial part of business. They are directly tied to revenue, and, if mismanaged, can cost your company millions. Despite their importance, most companies don’t have visibility into the sales contract process or the ability to track it. For the last ﬁfteen years or so, there has been a standard way of dealing with sales contracts: 1. The Sales Representative creates a new contract from a template or previous contract; 2. They print it, get it approved internally, have it signed by the customer, and scan it back in; 3. Signed contracts are then stored on a shared drive, in a document management system, in an email inbox, or in a cardboard box. These three steps seem pretty straightforward, but when this process is multiplied across the entire sales organization, a myriad of problems arise. VPs of Sales and Finance have a general lack of visibility into the contract process. Understanding where contracts stand means requesting individual status updates from the Sales Reps, which doesn’t offer any objective insight into which contracts will close by quarter-end. Sales Reps are spending increasing amounts of time managing the contract process instead of with their prospects. Getting a contract from person to person for the needed approvals and signatures is a time consuming task, in which each sign off can become a bottleneck, lengthening the sales cycle. Furthermore, ﬁnding the contract after it has been signed can be problematic, and often involves looking back through email histories to try to ﬁgure out who the last person to see it was-- a hunt that is frustrating at best. www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 2 of 7 www.glider.com STAGES OF THE CLOSE Internal Approval Customer Negotiations Final Signatures Waiting on Legal The magical 90%. Where so many of your deals go to live, or die. You’ve spent top dollar and time picking out the perfect CRM, but what have you done to ensure a speedy and consistent close? Deal Kickoff MSA Requested (Legal) Legal Drafts MSA v1 Sample size: 15 SALES REPS Time Spent NAVIGATING 5 DEALS / REP ACME CORP: MSA ACMEisCORP: Lorem Ipsum simplyMSA text ofIpsum the p simplyMSA dummyLorem ACMEisCORP: ndustry. Loremtext Ipsuof the p dummy Lorem Ipsum is simply m has ndustry. been the indur Lorem Ipsuof the p dummy text y's standard m has dummy been the.Lorem indur Ipsu ndustry. y's standard dummy m has been the. indur y's standard dummy . THE SALES CLOSE CFO Approval ACME CORP: MSA ACMEisCORP: Lorem Ipsum simplyMSA dummyLorem text ofIpsum the p simplyMSA ACMEisCORP: ndustry. Lorem Ipsu text ofIpsum the p dummyLorem m has ndustry. been theLorem indur Ipsu is simply of the p dummy .text y's standard m has dummy been theLorem indur Ipsu ndustry. y's standard m has dummy been the. indur y's standard dummy . 2 APPROVALS 2 SIGNATURES Manager Review So you have the verbal, now what? Contracts go through several drafts, approvals, and redlines on their path to being signed. The process routinely gets drawn out and, when multiplied across multiple deals and reps, becomes a leading cause of unproductivity in the organization. 300 TOUCH POINTS, 48 HOURS PER TOUCH POINT, MSA to Customer MSA Rejected: v2 Kickoff 1 440 HOURS How much time does your team spend closing? www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 3 of 7 Enter: Sales Contract Management Software Sales Contract Management Software helps alleviate the pains associated with managing a volume of contracts. This software brings all of your contracts into one central repository and adds structure and reliability to the sales contract process. Contract management products vary a great deal but tend to focus on one or more of the contract lifecycle stages. 1. Pre-Execution 2. Execution 3. Post-Execution 1. The Pre-Execution Stage Before a contract is ready to be signed, there are several steps that need to occur. First, a draft of the contract is created from a contract template, a contract authoring tool, or a CPQ product. Depending on the company and the complexity of the agreement, this may be done by the Sales Rep themselves, by Sales Operations, or by the Legal Team. Once the contract is drafted, it goes through internal approval and negotiations before it’s ready to be sent to the prospect. Once the contract is sent over to the prospect, it often goes back and forth through several redlined revisions in order to come to an agreement. With contract management software such as Glider, this step can be automated and streamlined, cutting down the amount of time it takes for a contract to be “signature ready.” Historically, the process of getting approvals (both inside the company and outside of it) has been a leading cause of bottlenecks. With Glider, however, the software tracks document versions, takes care of reminders in the approval process, and keeps deals moving forward. 2. The Execution Stage The contract is signed during the Execution Stage. E-signatures have revolutionized this stage making it vastly more efﬁcient to get signatures electronically vs. the ofﬂine process of printing a contract, mailing it to the prospect, the prospect signing, and mailing it back. Dozens of countries (including the United States, European Union, and Canada) have passed laws making e-signatures legally binding and equivalent to traditional “wet signatures” in the eyes of the law. Most leading contract management products offer the ability to e-sign contracts, whether it’s built-in directly (as it is with Glider) or through an integration with a third party e-signature service, such as Docusign. If you use a separate e-signature service it’s good to be aware of any additional fees or subscriptions required. 3. The Post-Execution Stage Contract management software allows for easy online archiving and organization of executed contracts, as well as full visibility into their activity and revision history. Even if a contract has been amended several times, it’s easy to search through the contract stages to get an accurate view of the entire process. Some contract management products even send automated compliance alerts and renewal reminders so that you don’t have to keep track of these manually. www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 4 of 7 Advantages Of Sales Contract Software An age of visibility, process, and efficiency. 1. Visibility 2. Efﬁciency 3. Reliability & Repeatability Closing can be an arduous process. But with contract management software companies can close efﬁciently by easily identifying bottlenecks and automating their workﬂow. Instead of wading through papers and emails to ﬁnd out who’s holding up a deal, the rep or VP of Sales can just log in to their contract management software and see precisely who is stalling the deal and what they need to do to keep the deal moving forward. Furthermore, when there is someone holding up a deal because they missed a deadline, email reminders will automatically be sent to that person to help keep them on track. This allows the company to identify and eradicate bottlenecks. Closing a deal is twice as efﬁcient with automated workﬂows, another feature of contract management software. It will automatically track the progression of each deal and send out status updates as steps are completed. Sales reps can practically sit back and watch the deal complete itself, as the software will notify each person as their role in the deal closure approaches. Once a deal has closed, the process can be replicated with contract management software. This allows for reliability and repeatability in the contract process with task and document templates. More than just an Excel template, this is an entire closing process that can now be painlessly repeated. The process also allows for maximum visibility into the “last mile” of the sales cycle. This is a crucial aspect of contract management, that enables accurate reporting for the quarter-end. It gives objective insight into what will close by showing how many deals are out for ﬁnal customer signatures, how many are stuck in negotiation, and how many are waiting on approval. Contract management software decreases the amount of time reps and VPs of Sales spend on process, and allows them to focus on prospects and revenue generation. With increased visibility and efﬁciency in the contract process, companies can close more deals, forecast accurately, and decrease the amount of time they spend on tasks related to contracts. www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 5 of 7 Contract Management Software in the Cloud Highly secure, automatic backups, and easy access. A decade ago, data resided in the organization's physical infrastructure, and was thus controlled internally, but in the last five years or so, companies have started moving their data into the cloud. Cloud computing has undergone explosive growth in this time and now more than half of American businesses are utilizing the cloud. Some companies still have concerns about the security of the cloud, however. Let’s take a look at some of the cloud security concerns and how cloud providers address them. Concerns Data security (and thus contract security) is the primary concern of most companies when it comes to cloud services. Anxiety is natural: moving to the cloud means involving a third party (the cloud provider) in your security policy and trusting them to securely handle your conﬁdential data. Another common concern is that without a physical paper trail, it will be difﬁcult to locate contracts or view changes made to them. Because the cloud seems like a massive infrastructure, it’s easy to imagine things being hard to ﬁnd or getting lost. Solutions If you're not using contract management software already, you're probably sending contracts via email, which releases the contracts beyond your control. Contract management software today keeps you in control and offers the best in data security, through the following layered technique: • Data encryption • Access controls • Deterrents and preventative controls Storing contracts in the cloud also makes accessing them easier than ever. For each contract there is underlying data, which creates a digital trail that is easy to access and follow. Since you can locate your contract at any stage in its lifecycle, it’s incredibly easy to catch mistakes before it’s too late. www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 6 of 7 Moving to Contract Management Software Without good contract management software, companies have less visibility into the sales contract process and aren’t able to take advantage of its increased efficiencies. Contract software offers a strong digital trail with secure access controls, excellent visibility, and decreased time spent managing the process. Ready to take the next step? Glider helps companies get contracts done; streamlining the contract process, identifying bottlenecks, and bringing visibility into the "last mile" of the sales funnel. Glider empowers users with customizable workﬂows, document sharing, approvals, and e-signatures to guide contracts through from start to ﬁnish. Glider provides objective insight into which contracts will actually be signed by quarter-end, showing you how many contracts are waiting on legal, how many are stuck in negotiations, and how many are out for ﬁnal customer signatures. Request a demo today, and ﬁnd out how Glider can help your company increase visibility and efﬁciency in the sales contract process. Request a Glider demo www.glider.com 1231 NW Hoyt St., Portland, OR 97209 [email protected] 7 of 7