Any salesperson worth their salt knows that speed is the most important factor in closing a deal. If you can't move prospects through your sales cycle quickly you'll lose them. The more time prospects have to think is more time they have to reconsider using your product. That's why you can't afford to let your prospects languish as you spend time looking for the right contracts, waiting on approval from specific people, or negotiating different line items.
Fortunately for you, contract management software can help you save time. Recent research from Aberdeen found that a streamlined contract management process can shorten a company's sales cycle by 24%. Contract management software is the number one tool for streamlining contract lifecycle management and shrinking the sales cycle.
Fast Contract Generation
One of the immediate benefits of using contract management software is that it allows you to quickly draw up sales process. No more sending a request out to legal for a new contract. Instead, you can access stored contract templates that can be easily amended for your prospects. Drafting contracts can be a lengthy and painful process. You can cut down on this by using contract management software that guides you through your templates and provides fields that autofill information for you. Because of this, contract management software can take the process of drafting a new sales contract down from weeks to mere minutes.
Expedited Approvals
If there’s one thing that can slow down the sales cycle, it’s waiting for a new sales contract to be approved. Internal approval can take anywhere from days to even weeks to acquire. You run into situations where the approvers are busy, someone forgot to send the request, or they just don’t receive the approval request at all. Contract management software allows you to automate the approval process. When using it, you can have it so that once a contract is ready for approval it automatically sends it to the next person in the process. This way, there’s no chance of it getting lost and you can ensure it happens when it needs to happen.
Streamlined Negotiations
Negotiating a contract can be the slowest parts of contract lifecycle management. Both parties want something, and neither is going to get exactly what they want. Trying to come to a compromise that works for you and your prospects takes time. Sending a sales contract over email can lead to issues where someone forgot to send it, or it gets lost. With contract management software, you can offer real time sharing and collaboration features. Both parties can access and edit the document without needing to worry about finding it. Further, with red-lining and real time status tracking you can track what’s being added and removed to get a full view of your contracts. That way both parties are up to date on all of the changes to the contract and can go into each call ready to makes changes and finalize it.
Real Time Audit Trails and Alerts
It’s important for a salesperson to know what’s going on with their sales contracts. Further, salespeople need to be able to ensure compliance in all of their sales contracts. For both of these, contract management software can help immensely. First, when a change is made to a contract it sends out a notification of the change. This allows a salesperson to go in, check on what happened, and know what to talk about in future meetings. Second, ensuring that your sales contracts are in compliance means you can spend less time going back through and checking on issues. Contract management software makes it easy to track and pull audit trails so you can make sure that there are no issues with your contracts.
Automated Workflows
The contract management process is full of tiny, menial tasks that take up your time. While a couple minutes doesn’t mean much in the moment, these minutes can potentially add up to hours of wasted time throughout the sales cycle. Contract management software with automated workflows eliminates this wasted time. Instead of having to manually move contracts through and implement processes, the system will do it for you. Automated workflows allow you to automate many of the menial contract management tasks. This way, salespeople can spend more of their time on important sales processes and close out the sales cycle faster.
Conclusion
The faster you can close your sales cycle the more likely you are to close your deals. Prospects don’t like to be left in the lurch. That’s why it’s important to use as many tools as possible to shorten the sales cycle as possible. Contract management tool is a fantastic tool that sales leaders in all kinds of industries are using to make their sales faster. If you’re not sure about adopting contract management software, feel free to fill out the form to the right. By signing up for a free demo of our contract management system we’ll be able to answer any questions you may have and help you find a tool that can help you make sales faster.
