In today’s fast, competitive business environment, every organization wants their sales team focused on one thing: generating revenue for the company. Sales teams that are slow in responding to opportunities, or that can’t quickly and nimbly respond to customer demands, won’t last long.
On the other hand, an enterprise must find ways to ensure the deals its sales teams are closing are assets and not liabilities. Sales contracts that are poorly written introduce errors and expose the company financial and regulatory risk. Poor organization of contracts limits the company’s ability to leverage existing deals with cross-sells, upsells, and renewals. Service-level agreements (SLAs) may get overlooked. Materials necessary to fulfill obligations can go unordered.
Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, recently described the dynamics facing business this way: “The velocity of business has rapidly increased in recent years, while the need to effectively manage risk and compliance has become a strategic priority for successful businesses.”
It can seem like a catch-22.
So, how does an organization keep its sales team focused on their core mission, while assuring their contracts are driving the company toward its goals? It starts with enterprise contract management.
Icertis’ enterprise contract management software accelerates contracting, protects companies from financial and regulatory risks, and optimizes their business operations. The Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform offers these powerful features for sales teams:
- With an intuitive, configurable user-interface that seamlessly integrates with leading business applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Office 365, ICM can efficiently move contracts through a system.
- Configurable proposal creation rules and templates, self-service contract wizards and adaptable approval workflows, help keep deals moving forward, minimizing frustrating delays and cutting through red tape.
- Negotiating contracts after the sale is easier too, for both your team and your customers. ICM intelligently reads 3rd party paper and automatically compares the terms and clauses to your own approved language. The robust clause library includes fallback clauses to help speed negotiations and the permissions-based collaboration portal helps keep everyone, on your team and your customer’s team, on the same page.
The result is a frictionless process, from proposal to negotiation to contract to revenue.
In one successful implementation, an international automobile distribution and service organization with $10 billion in revenue had complex contracts involving rebates, discount processes and customization packages in 32 countries. The manual process to create contracts involved pulling information from several disjointed systems. ICM integrated with the company’s disparate systems, improved accuracy and reduced lag time in the contracting process.
To learn more about how ICM is helping sales organization, download our eBook: The Definitive Guide to Sell-side Contract Management.
