Everything you need to know about contract life cycle management

Is the contract a document like any other? Obviously not. The issues raised by its content engage the companies that sign them and involve financial compensation. In fact, managing the life cycle of contracts is a central problem for companies. According to a report published by SpringCM, 50% of the sales professionals interviewed replied that the contractual process spanned more than a month.

A long delay - too long - generally linked to the use of time-consuming manual tools as well as a lack of visibility during the contractual process. In a world that is accelerating and becoming more complex, companies must keep pace with technological developments to improve and accelerate all their processes, including the management of the life cycle of contracts.

The basics of contract life cycle management

What is contract life cycle management (CLM)?

One of the most important issues in digital transformation is contract lifecycle management (or CLM for contract lifecycle management). This is why contract lifecycle management solutions are gaining ground in many companies.

According to SpringCM , which joined the CMx product portfolio in 2018, contract lifecycle management refers to the process allowing a company to reinforce and exploit the value of its contract portfolio in order to shorten the sales cycle and reduce customer acquisition costs. Managing the life cycle of contracts involves multiple tasks and many people from other departments, just like the client himself.

What does contract life cycle management bring?

By increasing the productivity of contract management tasks, it is possible to speed up the conclusion of your agreements and thus free up time to win other contracts, develop sales and expand your activities. The life cycle management of contracts (CLM) is also an innovation to improve and strengthen collaboration between internal teams (commercial and legal team for example) but also between the company and its customers.

More concretely, CLM software helps to streamline and speed up the contractual process by reducing the number of tools used to process contracts. This makes it easier to automate repetitive tasks and gain better visibility into monitoring the contracts generated.

Who can benefit from a CLM solution?

Managing the life cycle of contracts can involve many players at the same time, such as General Management, salespeople and commercial directors, lawyers and legal directors, as well as IT departments. However, external players such as customers benefit from the advantages of contract life cycle management. CLM solutions are designed to simplify collaboration between these different players but also to increase everyone's productivity.

According to the report published by SpringCM, 48% of those questioned think that it would be useful for their management team to be able to know the progress of the contracts in the light of the expected revenues. Also, almost 50% of sales professionals indicated that a transparent contractual process would facilitate reporting and predicting revenue.

How to control the life cycle of contracts?

The way a company manages its contracts can therefore have a direct impact on revenue growth. According to an IACCM study, poor contract management software can cause a company to lose more than 9% of its resources!

The use of a CLM tool makes it possible to master the management of the life cycle of contracts and therefore to conclude a greater number of contracts thanks to an acceleration of the sales process. This directly impacts the volume of revenue and the productivity of salespeople who free up time to canvass.

To learn how to control the life cycle of your contracts, you can watch the replay of our webinar and discover our 5 tips for:

1. Make contracts accessible and searchable securely
2. Standardize your contracts using templates
3. Create contracts containing a previously approved legal language thanks to a library of clauses
4. Improve the efficiency of contract processing with workflow automation
   5)Minimize risks by following each modification to a contract