Salesforce is a great tool for managing the sales leads and pipeline flow until you need to create the contracts to seal those deals.
At that point:
All of this can really slow down lead closure – lost time, backlogged revenues, and missed opportunities.
Here’s a simple fix.
Integrate Salesforce with a contract lifecycle management software.
Companies that use a contract management solution enjoy 80% faster average cycle time.
With an enhanced Salesforce contract management, there’s no more back-and-forth emails, contract stress, and process inefficiencies for your sales and legal teams.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use Salesforce with a solution like Avokaado to simplify and speed up your entire deal-closing process.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform used to manage pipelines, track activities, and log customer interactions. In most cases, it’s the central hub for analyzing, visualizing, and boosting overall sales efficiency around prospects, deals, and clients.
With Salesforce, sales get a full 360-degree view of every customer contact and opportunity. When set up correctly, it lets teams enjoy shorter sales cycles, boosted revenues, and less leads falling off the cracks.
Some of its most outstanding features are:
Again, Salesforce is a CRM excellent for tracking sales activities. Sure, you can use Salesforce to generate initial contract drafts. However, beyond that, its capabilities become extremely limited.
When you push on using Salesforce to manage contracts, you’ll face:
In short, Salesforce is not recommended for contract lifecycle management because it can't fully support the specific contracting processes.
Here are some typical practices on how companies compensate Salesforce for contract management.
It’s possible to standardize contracts using templates within Salesforce and you can auto-populate it with data from relevant CRM records. This at least lets you generate an on-brand initial draft. Just be sure to approve the template language carefully.
Since Salesforce is not built to handle the functionality required for full contract lifecycle management, you must set up custom workflows like approval tasks, due date tracking and reviewer notifications.
To extend Salesforce's native capabilities for contract processes, companies explore integration with third-party tools. These include applications that allow for advanced e-signature and route approvals.
With contract data fragmented across different systems and a high possibility of doing duplicate work, proactive communication is crucial. Companies make up for this by establishing rigid communication SOPs to align sales, legal, and other stakeholders.
It's important to note these procedures are still somewhat limited — especially if you’re a fast-growing company with a high contract volume or complex contract management needs. A full-suite CLM system is required to streamline and automate the entire agreement process.
When you invest in dedicated contract automation solutions together with Salesforce, you’ll reap these benefits.
Contract lifecycle management software automates the entire contracting process. Whether you start with pre-built contract templates or draft from scratch, the whole process is automated. There are also legal-approved clause libraries, automated routing for reviews or approvals, and e-signature workflows.
Rather than contract data being scattered across different tools, drives, and email threads, a dedicated CLM system becomes a single hub for all important contract information. It can store key contract terms, parties involved, obligations, milestones, and performance metrics. Also, the system provides a log of all contract versions, revisions, and updates.
If your businesses grow and you start engaging with more customers and suppliers, a dedicated contract management solutions can scale to support this as well. These tools can manage diverse contract types, multiple complex workflows, and expanded user bases as they’re designed to accommodate such.
A CLM gives you comprehensive analytics of contract status, cycle times, and bottlenecks through its advanced reporting dashboards. The visibility empowers you to continuously monitor, optimize, and keep a closer eye on critical processes that increase cycle times, legal risk, costs, and other friction points.
CLMs enforce corporate policies and guardrails around contracting processes. It automates compliance checks, setting approval workflows, and storing audit trails. Plus, there are clearly defined permissions and controls on who can view, edit, and execute contracts, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access that could cause non-compliance issues.
With a dedicated CLM, there's a seamless connection and sharing of data between the platform and other commonly used business applications involved in the contract management lifecycle.
An example is integration with e-signature providers and CRMs. Its native integration capabilities are the key to why CLM serves as the hub for contract management data exchange with other critical systems.
Now, let’s check out how Avokaado integrates with the same system your sales team uses daily, the Salesforce CRM.
If you're managing contracts or you’re part of a team that must produce contracts regularly, you’ll love this.
Power up your Salesforce account by connecting it with Avokaado.
Here's how to connect Avokaado with your Salesforce for contract management:
Doing this is your ticket to managing contracts better.
Through the Salesforce integration, your sales team can auto-generate contracts using Avokaado's pre-lawyered templates. It will also be auto-populated with data from your Salesforce account.
With Avokaado-Salesforce contract management, there’s no need to constantly switch between different apps and data sources. You’ll have a single unified environment to handle all contract management activities from start to finish.
Avokaado has notification features around key events and dates in the contract lifecycle. When connected, important contract dates, activities, and pending actions automatically syncs. This allows you to proactively know and respond to critical contract milestones like renewals and deadlines.
Contract stakeholders include viewers, editors, approvers, and signers. With this type of Salesforce contract management, you can configure pre-built approval routing paths and rules that automatically determine where contracts need to flow. So rather than having your sales team manually forward contracts via email to each stakeholder for review, Avokaado will instantly route it to the next person to sign or approve.
With Avokaado’s aDoc, all contract elements like clauses, details, and formatting are organized into a structured data model, offering you accuracy, efficiency and security. This way, users can readily reference key terms within client records, audit past agreements, and negotiate with version comparisons, and renewals.
Salesforce is a leading CRM. Yet, it has limitations when it comes to full contract lifecycle capabilities. While it can be used for initial contract creation, it stops there.
Salesforce lacks features for contract automation workflows, version control, e-signatures, clause libraries, and advanced reporting specific to contract management.
This specific type of Salesforce contract management solution accelerates deal velocity. Automating the contract creation, negotiation, approval processes, and signing in a single tool, eliminates the administrative overhead of the sales team so they can just focus on selling, closing, and moving the deals forward.
Avokaado is your go-to tool if you want to draft error-free contracts at speed. Our customizable templates and clause library enable you to automate the contract drafting process so that you can save time, money, and resources!
Discover how contracting can be fast, streamlined, and stress-free for everyone in your organisation, especially HR teams.
Book a demo