How Sales CLM with Contract AI Helps Business Development Automation

It’s impossible to imagine any organization’s sales function without considering contracts. Sales operations professionals handle some of a company’s most value-generating activities: overseeing daily sales activity, meeting with major clients, drawing up sales reports, designing new and more effective sales strategies, and working to market and promote company products and services. 

None of those activities are possible if you can’t effectively manage your sales contracts and glean insights from them. Tools to manage contracts, including contract AI, are designed to ensure that sales operations and the VP of sales have a single point of truth for contracts. In addition, business development automation makes the sales Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) process more efficient, and the entire sales function more effective. 

Contract AI Software in Sales

The sales function at any enterprise encompasses various duties, ranging from discrete contractual tasks to overarching strategy. On the contractual front, sales operations are responsible for many phases of contract lifecycle management, including: 

• Creating requests for contracts 
• Drafting contracts 
• Monitoring the progress of those contracts 
• Keeping contracts moving forward when things stall 
• Approving contract terms 
• Delivering contracts to customers for signature 

The sales function doesn’t end there. In addition to handling contracts daily, sales operations professionals find new opportunities to expand the organization’s client base and devise new and innovative ways to market products and services. It’s also responsible for setting specific critical enterprise goals and ensuring they’re met, including quarterly or annual sales and ongoing productivity goals. 

Underlying all sales functions, whether drafting a contract or setting the right sales goals for the entire company, is the expectation that the VP of sales and the sales operations team will continuously improve the sales team’s effectiveness and productivity. 

Technology is the key to ensuring continuous improvement. Sales CLM tools and contract AI empower sales operations professionals to better tackle both aspects of the job by making the contract process more efficient and effective from start to finish. In addition, AI–enabled sales management software helps create a central repository for the organization’s contract data. The central repository is a critical source of information for making informed decisions about sales goals and marketing strategies.

Finding the Right Sales CLM Solution and Contract AI Software

While every company and sales department is different, some common barriers prevent sales operations from performing effectively and efficiently. These include: 

• Having little to no insight into where deals are, who’s responsible for them, and what the next steps are
• Missing an easy way to keep deals moving forward
• Not having mobile technology options to effectively handle work tasks in today’s on-the-go and remote working scenarios
• Lacking self-service options that allow the various interested parties to create and manage that contract or request information directly.

A valuable sales CLM tool and contract AI software will remove barriers and help sales by: 

• Closing deals faster with features such as self-service and contract AI that reviews, redlines and edits first-pass review within two minutes
• Automating the contract request process to improve sales representative productivity 
• Giving sales a real-time view of bottlenecks, where every contract is, and if the process is stalled 
• Only showing the information you need when you need it, rather than burying you in a mountain of data irrelevant to what you’re doing at any given moment. Having immediate access to the correct data is critical to setting the right sales and productivity goals for your team and the entire organization. 

Speeding Up CLM for Sales – and Welcoming Revenue More Quickly

Sales operations professionals understand the role of contracts in doing their job right. However, they need the right CLM tools for sales to manage those contracts end-to-end. Onit’s CLM solution helps with business development automation for the entire contract management process, allowing for a more efficient sales function and better insight into sales data. Contact us today to learn more.