Make Sales Contracts Easy and Keep Your Legal Team Happy

No matter the industry, nearly every company depends on its Legal team to make informed decisions, and create and update complex contractual agreements. In many cases, an organization’s Sales and Legal teams work hand in hand to deliver and maintain new sales contracts.

Creating new sales contracts falls on Sales’ shoulders but Legal is ultimately responsible for its accuracy and enforceability. No matter the agreement between Sales and the customer, the Legal team must review every manual contract – a process that isn’t instantaneous.

And, the longer the sales contract process takes the more money and time is lost. According to research, on average $215,000 is lost each day the contract management process is delayed in large companies.

However, the process of creating sales contracts doesn’t have to be manual and tedious, requiring a review process and endless revisions. Implementing document generation with your customer relationship management tool can help Sales painlessly generate new contracts, with little, if any, necessary review by Legal.

How Can Document Generation Improve Sales Contracts?

Utilizing document generation with your CRM system eliminates any potential delays between Sales and Legal during the sales contract process. Legal can completely control what contract data and content are eligible, which eliminates errors and the need for multiple revisions.

People can access the sales contracts only in your CRM and only CRM data can be used to modify the contract. This results in Sales ensuring the accuracy of the information in your CRM and creating contracts faster. It also drastically reduces the amount of time that Legal dedicates to reviewing sales contracts.

Successful Sales Contract Generation

Intralinks, which provides secure online data exchanging technology, struggled with quickly turning around sales contracts quotes and invoices while maintaining its complex pricing models and other requirements.

Using Nintex Drawloop® Document Generation, Intralinks created a solution to generate documents linked to an Excel file containing all the pricing models. The solution evaluates every proposal and contract to enforce accurate pricing, and determine if further review or approval is needed.

Now, then salespeople need to generate a new document, they simply generate it from Salesforce, which feeds the data through Excel to evaluate the pricing model. Then, Nintex Drawloop® Document Generation either sends the document directly to the client or routes it to a manager for approval.

The solution reduced the time spent creating sales documents by an estimated 80 percent, and reduced the number of invoice versions by 75 percent, thanks to pricing controls.

Eliminating Inaccuracy = Save Time and Money

One of the biggest time kills in the contract management process is ensuring that customer information is up-to-date, and that contracts are also the latest revision. With a manual process this usually requires a review cycle and a number of drafts – adding days instead of minutes to your sales cycle. Eliminating inaccuracy and non-compliance factors can mean saving 33-41% of costs.

Meritage Homes, a United States home builder, faced a similar struggle as Intralinks when it came to its sales contract process. Employees manually compiled and edited home sales contracts, which included multiple legal documents and addendums.

In addition, each contract is also division- and state-specific, which resulted in countless versions over time. If any document is left out or errors are made, the entire contract was null and void – delaying business and the reporting of the sale.

By implementing Nintex Drawloop® Document Generation in Salesforce, Meritage gained control of its documents and created a more efficient contract process. Meritage created a sales and contracting database to account for ever data point pertaining to a new home, and integrated it with Salesforce and Nintex Drawloop® to generate accurate documents.

The solution meant that Legal has 100 percent control over all the contractual documents, and what can and cannot be edited. Now, Sales just has to choose the correct sales contract or document in Salesforce and document generation automatically populates the appropriate clauses and data. By utilizing document generation, 98 percent of custom documents fields are automatically populated vs. manually edited.

Implementing a contract process with document generation in your CRM makes creating new contracts quick and painless, resulting in a significant reduction of revisions and review cycles. Sales gets back time to spend on winning new business, and Legal can focus on more critical projects – a win-win for both teams.

Learn More

Want to learn more about how document generation can improve your Sales processes? Here are a couple other useful resources:

• Nintex Blog post “Sales Documents: From Productivity Pain to Gain” – In this post, I discuss the typical sales proposal process and how it’s shortened with document generation. I also share how automating the generation of sales proposals benefits sales executives, too, by making it easier for them to create pipeline and account summaries.
• Nintex Blog post “Help Sales and Marketing Work Together Effectively” – In this post, Michael Machado discusses how a few of the biggest reasons why Sales and Marketing teams sometimes struggle, and the ways that document generation can help bridge the communication gap between Sales and Marketing teams

 

To see for yourself how document generation could help your organization, try it for free.