Meet Salesforce Contracts

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe contract-management challenges.
  
• Explain the Salesforce Contracts application and its benefits.
  
• Describe how Salesforce Contracts solves business challenges.
  

Contract Management Challenges

Meet Candace Evans. She’s a sales rep at Cloud Kicks, a company that makes stylish and comfortable sneakers designed and personalized for customers. 

She directs the company’s sales activities and works with the Salesforce admin to improve the sales process, including the management of contracts.

Candace and her sales team are doing an outstanding job, and they consistently achieve their monthly targets. However, with many won deals come dozens of documents. This means the team has to maintain numerous contracts for the opportunities, quotes, and orders they create.

Cloud Kicks has an outdated contract-management system that stores contracts as individual documents. This means that Candace and her team must create and manage the files manually while processing contracts. This way of working poses several challenges to the team:

• High operating costs due to a decentralized contract database
  
• Limited visibility into contract details
  
• Inefficient contract-processing cycles
  
• Contracts with nonstandard language
  
• Noncompliance with contractual obligations
  
• A lack of standard audit history of contract data and documents
  

These obstacles spell trouble for Cloud Kicks. Even though the company is profitable, they’re in dire need of an efficient system for managing contract documents. Not to mention, compliance failures put the company at risk for fines, or even litigation. 

On top of everything, missed renewals are leading to lost revenue. As you can see, the current model of contract management isn’t sustainable for the company. Who can rescue Cloud Kicks from its plight?

Candace quickly learns that moving from hoards of paper and separate electronic files to a proper contract lifecycle management solution will standardize and organize the creation of contracts. In so doing, Cloud Kicks can transform their sales process. 

To ramp up its contract lifecycle management capabilities, Cloud Kicks has implemented Salesforce Contracts as part of their contract management system. It’s the solution that can help the company deliver a superior customer experience and dominate the market.

Let's follow along as Candace discovers Salesforce Contracts.

The Solution

Salesforce Contracts enables Cloud Kicks to efficiently and collaboratively manage its contracts, from authoring and negotiations through approval, execution, renewal, and amendments. The solution provides a customizable transaction platform that works with different Salesforce industry clouds. The sales team can use it to handle the entire contract lifecycle. Plus, the contract-signing process is simpler and faster for both the sales team and customers. The solution:

• Automates and streamlines the contract lifecycle, which reduces contract cycle timelines and accelerates deals
  
• Provides a common, cloud-based, integrated contract repository
  
• Standardizes and digitizes the contract process with pre-approved document templates and clauses
  
• Supports the conformance of contracts to internal company policies, with full auditing capabilities for compliance reviews
  
• Transforms document versioning and review, with digital signature capabilities
  

Business Impact

Salesforce Contracts helps companies like Cloud Kicks achieve impressive results.

• Increased contract renewal rates: Renewals are not delayed or missed, resulting in increased revenue.
  
• Reduced contract cycle times: Faster deal closures accelerate cash flow.
  
• Lowered administrative overhead: Administrative, material, and courier costs are reduced, which lowers operational expenses.
  
• Enhanced compliance management: Financial and legal risks are minimized. 
  
• Optimized customer experience: Process digitization increases customer satisfaction.
  

In this unit, you learned about contract-management challenges and how Salesforce Contracts solves them by streamlining and digitizing the contract lifecycle.

In the next unit, follow along as Candace takes a deep dive into the solution capabilities.