Getting Your Contracts & Contracting Processes in Shape
By Jim Averill
Spring has sprung and thoughts are turning to “getting in shape”, whatever that means. To most people, it means getting toned muscles and a flat belly…a “beach body”. Many start exercising at home, participating in sports, or simply going for walks without a particular plan or specific goals. Others join a gym and hire personal trainers to help define goals and provide guidance on what to do to achieve them.
But what does getting in shape and joining a gym have to do with contracts and contracting processes? Well, when a part of your business isn’t robust enough or you are lacking certain functionality, it could be said that your business is a little flabby around the mid-section and that it is out of shape. For many businesses, this is true when it comes to how they manage contracts. For organizations with “couch-potato” contracting processes, one way to get in shape is to use contract management software. If your company is still managing contracts using some combination of filing cabinets, spreadsheets, round-robin email approval processes and wet signatures, it’s possible to create a lean and strong contract lifecycle management (CLM) process with Contract Logix.
Once you decide to take control of your contracts and contracting processes and get them healthy again, the first day of onboarding is like the first day walking into a gym to meet your team of personal trainers. Our highly experienced Customer Success Managers (CSMs) will immediately begin working with you to target the areas in which you need to see improvement the same way trainers in the gym will help you flatten your belly and tone your arms.
If you have too many people submitting contracts in too many different ways, your CSM can show you how to tighten that up and funnel everything through a single web page. If you have contracts bogging down the approval process or are losing track of where they are and who has them, our team can help you build a simple but strong workflow that shows you every step, tracks every approval, and turns your contract data into a wealth of actionable business insights.
Personal trainers understand what is required to get results and those who follow their plans ultimately do. The most successful clients learn a lot in their training sessions and then continue through the week, applying those lessons on their own. After a few weeks of this process, they can perform their movements easily and find themselves looking better and feeling stronger. They’ve built muscle, (as well as muscle memory), they didn’t even know they had! Trainers call this “sweat equity”
Contract management software isn’t just the gym for your contracts’ and contracting processes’ health, its tools are the equivalents of all the weights, machines, performance monitors, and nutrients you need. There is only a small amount of “sweat equity” required to go from “couch-potato” contracting to ”world-class athlete” contracting. The “pushups” your CSM will show you how to do are a lot easier than the physical variety, and if you spend just a few hours a week doing the “exercises” they teach in your training sessions, no missed contract deadline or incorrect terms will ever kick sand in your face again!
If your contracting process could use some training, contact one of our sales ‘coaches’ for a free CLM consultation and we’ll get you back in shape in no time.
