One of the biggest challenges we hear from legal teams is, “I have this innovative improvement roadmap and technology plan, but I can’t get the executive support and funding I need.”
This brings us to the second key tip in our quick wins series.
How to Accelerate Buy-In For the Biggest Impact
Let’s assume you’ve solved the contract visibility and access challenge and have all your contracts in one place. Now is the time to think beyond legal for the most strategic impact on the business to accelerate buy-in.
So, how do you think beyond Legal? While there is value in legal productivity, you have to think more broadly if you want that 10x – 20x return to the business.
Instead of concentrating on just productivity needs, Legal teams can lead the organization toward centralized, complete contract visibility and access for those frontline teams that need it. With this approach, Legal teams can end up with a roadmap to funding what they want while improving and providing value in people’s daily lives.
Drive Value Across The Business
Not only does centralized contract access and insight drive value for the legal organization, but our customers have also seen an impact in many areas across the business:
Sales Productivity
Every company is concerned with renewals, and many companies struggle to know when their contracts renew. Is it a fixed term? Is it an auto-renewal? Making this information available in seconds can significantly impact your sales teams.
M&A
Many of our customers do high volumes of M&A. Some have acquired dozens of companies. For example, one of our customers was trying to do a spin-out of an asset sale and could populate a data room in less than two days. And for those of you that have been in the deal business, that is borderline miraculous. They were able to answer where they had MFAs, where they had contracts, and where they had assignment issues in less than two days.
Improving Contract Terms
There are opportunities to improve contract terms. For example, if you’re a raw materials company, the ability to line up payment terms across buyers or sell-side and buy-side is essential. You can make a significant impact on working capital.
Extracting Financial Value
Ensuring you get all the financial value out of every contract that you should be is critical. Price uplifts must be applied, and customers should meet their revenue commitments. These are the areas we look to help drive value.
One key thing that you don’t see here is compliance. This is because it’s either the best ROI or it’s difficult to capture people’s attention on preventing an unknown future event. Unfortunately, it often happens after the fact. And by that time, it’s a great ROI driver, but it’s not something we see at the forefront of the day-to-day.
I hope this tip is helpful as you think through your contract management challenges and how to approach thinking beyond legal for the biggest ROI. Read our guide on Making the Case for Contract Management.
