Collaborate with Salesforce Contracts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the stakeholders who benefit from Salesforce Contracts.
- Describe the personas who use Salesforce Contracts.
Key Teams
Salesforce Contracts is a powerful collaborative platform that enables several groups of business stakeholders to easily and efficiently manage contracts.
As the foundation of most business transactions, contracts touch many departments and stakeholders. They have their own objectives and challenges when it comes to drafting, negotiating, and registering contracts. Who are these stakeholders, and what tasks do they perform?
Key stakeholders include:
- Sales
- Legal
- Operations
- Finance
Sales
Sales reps like Candace and her team work on many deals at a time, and they’re eager to close deals quickly. Once a sale is finalized, she creates a contract, negotiates terms with the customer, and obtains approvals. The end-to-end contracting process must be fast, with minimal intervention from other departments.
Salesforce Contracts helps Candace to efficiently create and negotiate contract terms with customers and obtain approvals, with minimal involvement from legal staff and the management chain.
Legal
The main concerns of the Cloud Kicks legal team are the obligations in the contract and the risks they pose to the company. Legal wants to prevent sales reps from creating their own, rogue contracts. Also, they don’t want to spend time and energy adding input to the process for each new deal.
By offering pre-approved document templates and policy-compliant terms, Salesforce Contracts reduces the need for legal teams to manually review each contract.
Operations
Sales operations or contract managers at Cloud Kicks require full visibility into every stage of the contract lifecycle. They manage the status of individual contracts, remove contract processing bottlenecks, and ensure contract security and auditability.
Salesforce Contracts provides a centralized, cloud-based repository of contract data for seamless contract management.
Finance
The finance department is responsible for collecting and making payments specified in contracts. They strive to avoid lost revenue due to excessive discounting of products, and they work to reduce auditing, regulatory, and administrative costs.
Salesforce Contracts assists with regulatory and legal compliance, reducing financial and legal risks.
Target Personas
A target persona is a particular role that the Salesforce Contracts solution caters to. The target personas for Salesforce Contracts are:
- Contract administrators
- Contract users
- Contract partner users
Contract Administrators
Candace works closely with contract administrators to set up contract-management processes at Cloud Kicks. The contract admins define contract templates, configure document settings, create approval workflows, and define the contract lifecycle with states. They also manage actions on existing contracts, such as lock, unlock, or cancel. By customizing the user interface (UI) for sales reps like Candace, Salesforce Contracts ensures seamless contract management and administration.
Contract Users
As a contract user, Candace and her team collaborate during contract creation, negotiate terms and prices with customers, and manage multiple contracting processes.
Salesforce Contracts provides end-to-end contract-management capabilities for Candace and her team. She can save time and effort by authoring contracts from preconfigured templates, and gaining approvals from internal team members is quick and seamless.
And that’s not all. Candace can also negotiate with customers using reconciliation, maintain multiple contract versions for tracking purposes, obtain e-signatures from the required parties, and monitor contract performance.
This diagram shows the flow of tasks that a sales operations admin (contract administrator) and a sales rep (contract user) perform.
Contract admins and contract users are key personas involved throughout the journey of the contract.
Contract Partner User
Salesforce Contracts also enables Cloud Kicks partner users to create and manage contracts for end customers. Partner users are responsible for selecting templates and creating contracts, seeking approvals from stakeholders, managing different contract versions, and sending contract documents to end customers.
To make this process even smoother, Salesforce Contracts gives contract partner users access to a contract management UI with relevant functionalities through their Digital Experience Partner sites.
Experience sites are a great way to share information and collaborate with people who are key to your business processes, such as providers or employees.
In this unit, Candace discovered that Salesforce Contracts is a versatile solution that can streamline contract management for various teams and roles at Cloud Kicks.
With the adoption of Salesforce Contracts, Cloud Kicks is in the midst of a digital transformation. In the next unit, Candace explores how this transformation is boosting the company’s business.
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