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:
- your sales reps (aka CRM users) spend hours on collecting contract data and hunting for signatures
- the legal team swims through the mess of inconsistent templates, legal languages, and contract approvals
- everyone’s stuck in the neverending game of uploading and downloading documents
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.
What is Salesforce?
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:
- One integrated CRM platform that unites marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT departments with updated data
- Lead management for tracking and nurturing prospects through the sales funnel
- Opportunity management from initial contact to closing
- Account management with existing customers
- Analytics for better insight into sales performance and customer activity
Can you use Salesforce for contract lifecycle management?
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:
- Inefficiencies and errors, resulting from manual handling of high volumes of contract creation, approvals, and revisions
- Challenging dynamic collaboration across sales, legal, and finance
- No proper transparency and accessibility when contract data are scattered across uncontrolled cloud storages or email inboxes
In short, Salesforce is not recommended for contract lifecycle management because it can't fully support the specific contracting processes.
How to manage contracts in Salesforce without a CLM system
Here are some typical practices on how companies compensate Salesforce for contract management.
They utilize templates
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.
They implement custom workflows
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.
They integrate into third-party tools
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.
They are heavy on communications
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.
The benefits of using a dedicated contract lifecycle management system
When you invest in dedicated contract automation solutions together with Salesforce, you’ll reap these benefits.
It eliminates manual contracting workflows
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.
It serves as the "single source of truth" for all contract data
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.
It’s scalable and adaptable
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.
It gives full visibility into key contracting metrics
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.
It enhances compliance and reduces risk
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.
It has native integration with other contracting solutions
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.
How to manage contracts in Salesforce with Avokaado
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:
- Go to settings and click the Integrations tab. You should be logged into your Salesforce account to see the connected confirmation text.
- Choose your environment, either Production or Sandbox, based on your Salesforce setup. Click on "Authorize" to log in to your Salesforce account.
- Once connected, you can now configure the Salesforce integration.
- Select the contract you wish to connect the integration with. The default configuration name will be the contract’s name — but you may change this afterward.
- Choose the connected object and fields from the Salesforce side. Object can either be Opportunity or Account. Then toggle Activate to make you’re set configuration active.
- Next, configure the Field Mapping tab to set the Salesforce field into the pulled fields from the Avokaado template
- Also, configure the Pull triggers tab that will serve as the contract data source (from Salesforce) and the Push triggers tab where the contract data is pushed back (to Salesforce) when done.
- Lastly, navigate the Sharing tab to set the document owner and collaborators in their defined role or access rights.
- Don’t forget to save everything when done. Integration starts after you click the play button.
Doing this is your ticket to managing contracts better.
The benefits of integrating Salesforce with Avokaado
- Draft and generate error-free contracts faster
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.
- No need to switch between different systems
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.
- Stay on top of important contract milestones
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.
- Automatically route to designated contract stakeholders
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.
- Transparency with aDoc format
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.
Frequently asked questions about Salesforce contract management
1. Can Salesforce be used in managing contracts?
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.
2. What are the main limitations of trying to manage the full contract process solely within Salesforce?
Salesforce lacks features for contract automation workflows, version control, e-signatures, clause libraries, and advanced reporting specific to contract management.
3. How can integrating Salesforce with Avokaado shorten the sales cycle?
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!
