When evaluating a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) SaaS tool, many companies will (rightly) look at their existing contract review process and envision how DocuSign CLM could speed up stages in the process, or how the digitization of contracts could improve their day-to-day execution of contract activities. While this is valuable, our clients have seen exponential benefits from revising, or even eliminating, business processes that existed in a world without DocuSign CLM.
Risk management is a vital part of contract management. When our team recently asked a client’s third-party risk management lead what sections of the contract they were responsible for, they rightly answered “all of them”.
Where DocuSign CLM streamlines, possibly even eliminates steps, in contract risk assessment is during archaic, manual contract review. Several of our clients have lamented poring over their contracts prior to signing to ensure their vendor or customer hasn’t slipped in a revised indemnification policy or a punitive breach of the contract clause.
With DocuSign CLM, easily visible redlines and version control capture any and all contract revisions. Once a contract is sent for DocuSign eSignature, a bad actor on the other side only has the option of signing/not signing – this eliminates bogeys like converted PDFs or scanned/signed copies.
Before utilizing DocuSign CLM, most of our clients have either created contract templates or, at a minimum, established a framework for creating a contract at their company.
During requirements gathering, our team frequently unearths gaps resulting from tribal knowledge and a lack of standardization in the creation of contract templates. This isn’t at the fault of our clients – legal, sales, procurement, and product teams haven’t previously had a tool to facilitate this process prior to DocuSign CLM.
DocuSign CLM’s ability to standardize contracts by creating dynamic contract templates is undoubtedly a game-changing benefit. What most of our clients don’t realize is that the tool creates the impetus for collaboration. While digitizing a standard agreement is valuable, that value increases when 1) business and legal teams collaborate to make that agreement, and 2) these teams are always working off the same version of the contract.
Recently, our team had the opportunity to map out a client’s existing process for uploading their contract to a central drive. The process had several steps, many of which were dependent on either the salesperson, an administrator, or an operations leader to source, send or ensure the contract made its way to its final resting place.
When our clients have become reliant on a chain reaction, DocuSign CLM’s ability to automate storage in a central repository can reduce hundreds of hours of administrative tasks.
A centralized repository is truly the tip of the iceberg. The unlocked benefit is compounded when involving DocuSign CLM’s ability to apply contract attributes, retrieve document history, search contracts with native OCR, and create connections with other SaaS platforms like Salesforce. Not only is DocuSign a central location for your contracts, but it is also an engine that enables faster and more efficient contract reporting.
Founded in 2018, Spaulding Ridge is a top management consulting firm, dedicated to client success and helping organizations implement and adopt best-in-cloud technology to solve their most pressing challenges. We provide the office of the CFO financial clarity to Sales and Operational complexity by integrating financial and sales SaaS Platforms.
We help:
• Finance gain control ” Increasing financial effectiveness, insight and impact
• Sales increase Productivity ” Hitting quota more quickly, consistently and efficiently
• Operations increase Competitiveness ” Through productivity rates, customer service outcomes, and efficiency
Questions on how the DocuSign CLM function can make your business more efficient? Contact us at [email protected].
