The contract management and automation industry are booming, with CLM and CRM platforms becoming more prominent in business operations. However, many companies still use paper contracts or other methods of tracking their deals, which can be costly and inefficient. Since both CRM and CLM platforms are critical for businesses to stay at their best productive form, the availability of these platforms is critical for each business.
As most enterprises do have access to both these platforms, connecting both these platforms with the help of integration can bring your far better results in terms of organizing your sales activities and data, as well as managing your contracts more accurately. In this blog, we are going to give you 5 reasons to integrate your CRM and CLM platforms. Let’s first discuss a little about the significance of both these platforms before getting into the details.
Table of contents:
- Why your business needs a CRM platform
- Why having a CLM solution is critical for businesses
- 5 Reasons to integrate your CRM and CLM platforms
- Improve Contract Data Accuracy
- Enhanced contract visibility and tracking
- Make your sales team more productive
- Enable contract data accuracy
- Implement contract standardization effectively
- Double-check whether the obligations are met
- Most importantly make everyone informed
- Conclusion
Why your business needs a CRM platform
You may not have thought about it, but your company’s CRM system is a vital part of your business. It’s the central hub for managing all your customers and their relationships with you.
A CRM tool helps businesses by enabling them to track and analyze customer data across digital channels, including email, social media, and website visits. This way you can identify trends in how people interact with your brand online. Providing tools that help companies understand what makes customers tick so they can better tailor their messaging and offers accordingly.
Why having a CLM solution is critical for businesses
Contract management software is a must-have for all businesses today. It’s no secret that contract management is one of the most important aspects of running your business, and it’s also a core component of any successful business strategy.
Contract management software ensures that you can manage all aspects of your relationships with vendors, customers, or employees from a single platform. Without automated processes in place, there would be no way to accurately track contracts or manage compliance issues. Moreover, modern CMS solutions come with advanced features. It’ll let you gain better data security, cost-efficiency, intelligent decision making, and most importantly automating repeated processes to save time and resources.
5 Reasons to integrate your CRM and CLM platforms
Today businesses need to manage their contracts more efficiently and effectively than ever before. By integrating your CRM and contract management software, you'll be able to track all your contracts across multiple platforms, improve data accuracy, and improve contract visibility and tracking, all while reducing unnecessary costs associated with manual processes.
Improve Contract Data Accuracy
Integrating CRM with contract management software will allow you to ensure that every step of a value chain is accurately captured in one place. Thus, it can be easily accessed by everyone involved in making business decisions about new deals or renewals. This will help reduce time spent on manual tasks like data entry or manually updating documents. It will also provide better insights into market trends that affect future sales volumes based on past performance metrics kept track of during negotiations between parties.
Enhanced contract visibility and tracking
By integrating your contracts into a single platform, you can increase contract visibility and tracking. Your team will have access to all sales and service contracts in one place. This provides the ability to track contracts from start to finish, including any changes that may occur along the way. It also helps prevent errors by giving everyone on your team access to all the information about each contract at once.
Improve communication between departments within an organization as well as across different departments within an industry. With integrated CRM and CLM platforms, there’ll still be separate systems for customer relationship management and contract lifecycle management, but your sales team can access contract data without leaving the CRM platform. Dock 365’s CMS comes with a Dynamics 365 integration that allows its users to access contract data from the Dynamics 365 platform itself.
Make your sales team more productive
With the right tools, you can improve your sales team's productivity by shortening the sales cycle time. The more efficient your team is at closing deals, the less time they spend on the go and in meetings with leads.
Improving effectiveness is another highlight. A CRM system helps you keep track of all important information about a customer's journey so that when someone reaches out for help or advice, there's no need for guesswork about what happened earlier in their relationship with you or even where exactly it started from. All they need is to check the contract data from the integration provided.
Improving efficiency can save your budget and other resources. If each person on your sales team has access to relevant data stored within their dashboard instead of having to rely solely on text messages or emails sent by marketing personnel, it helps. This could reduce costs significantly over time because most companies would find themselves spending less money with such easy and flexible data and workflow implementation.
Enable contract data accuracy
Contract data accuracy is important for business operations. It's beneficial to have the contract information in your CRM system, but it's brilliant work entirely to get that information into the right place on time and at scale.
Integration with CRM and CLM platforms allows you to minimize manual data entry by automatically transferring contract terms and information from one system straight into another. This can mean fewer errors and more time spent doing what you do best, such as operating your company by handling more potential processes.
Implement contract standardization effectively
Contract standardization is a critical part of your company's contract management process. It will help you to reduce the number of documents that need to be maintained, stored, and managed in the future.
It can verify that all contracts are compliant with company policies and procedures. Standardizing contract management helps you to streamline your business processes across departments so that each department has access to standardized data about all contracts signed by their clients or vendors. This makes it easier for everyone involved in the process.
Double-check whether the obligations are met
It’s important to double-check whether the obligations are met. For example, you might have a contract that says that you must deliver the product on a particular date and in full. If you don’t meet this obligation, then it could affect your reputation and make it difficult for potential customers to use or recommend your services in the future.
You should also check whether the obligations are met on time. If something goes wrong with an order you should immediately know, so that sufficient steps can be taken to rectify it. Dock 365’s CLM platform is offering dedicated obligation tracking facilities to provide businesses full control over the contract obligations.
Most importantly make everyone informed
Most importantly, make sure all the stakeholders are informed about contract negotiations and business decisions. This will ensure that your company stays on track and can meet its goals. You need to make sure that everyone knows what's going on in your organization so they can help you implement it properly. By connecting your CRM and CLM platforms with integration you can get this done effectively.
Conclusion
This post should give you a clear idea of why it’s so important to integrate your CRM and CLM platforms. By doing this, you can rest assured that your team has all the information they need to make better business decisions, leading to improved sales results and contract performance for your company.
Dock 365 is offering contract management software powered by Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. From our years of experience dealing with contract requirements from clients all over the world, we have implemented a Dynamics 365 CRM integration into our CMS. It offers all benefits and features discussed above. Book a live demo of Dock’s CMS right away to learn all about connecting a Dynamics 365 CRM and Dock 365 CLM and how they work together to double your business productivity.
