How to Choose the Best Contract Management Software

Contracts are the foundation of revenue generation for scaling businesses. Per World Commerce and Contracting (WCC), 80% of B2B revenue is governed by contracts.

However, modernizing contract management processes to maintain legal compliance, achieve business continuity, and maximize sales acceleration remains one of the biggest challenges for scaling companies.

This is where contract management software has proven to be a game-changer for optimizing efficiency in today’s highly competitive digital landscape.

Plainly put, contract management software streamlines and automates manual and laborious parts of the contracting process while improving compliance and reducing financial risk.

A key question now is how to choose the best contract management software for your business.  What factors and features should you consider? Here’s what you should look for.

Choosing the right contract management software: What to look for?

A searchable central repository – Tracking paper-based contracts take up your employees’ time. Adding to that, misfiled or lost contracts remain a significant issue in business environments ruled by paper. As per a study, poor contract management can cost businesses up to 9% of their bottom-line revenue leakage.

A contract management system provides an easy way to store and retrieve contracts and documents.

One of the key features of CLM software is searchable contract repositories. They remove the contracts from filing cabinets and put them in cloud-based repositories that are safer and easier to access.

Searchable contract repositories go a step further by enabling you to organize and search for documents by metadata, including tags, date signed, contract type, and other key contract identifiers. Additionally, the cloud-based software should let you import contract data, including historical contracts.

Unified platform with shared capabilities – The contract management process often involves collaboration between multiple teams, ranging from legal to sales, operations, business, and procurement.

A unified platform within the contract management software stores and organizes all contracts and related documents. This allows teams to quickly search and access files, clauses, and contracts and receive the updated contract versions.

Sales and legal teams can use this unified digital platform to review and redline documents in real-time, eliminating the time-consuming to-and-fro and securing version control alongside.

The single source of truth gives stakeholders and all parties involved visibility into where the contract stands, what actions need to be taken, and where the contract is getting delayed – all critical for retaining customers, generating recurring revenue, and securing loyal customers.

Powered by AI and ML – An AI contract management software has several benefits, including reduced cycle time by accelerating access to different contracts at any time, eliminating errors and making traceability easy, learning at scale, and processing data at scale.

Machine learning can identify, exact and analyze key terms and clauses in contracts. AI helps your company keep terms usage consistent throughout all contracts. AI can also identify contract types. Lastly, AI searches more efficiently, allowing legal teams to quickly spot risk areas, identify opportunities, and report trends.

Smart reminders – At most companies, individual employees track renewal dates and contract terms. Yet, when employees are responsible for manually tracking and managing contracts, it becomes a risk-prone process. The reasons can include high workload and human errors.

The goal of smart reminders in contract lifecycle management software is to alleviate this risk by taking out the guesswork and cutting down the inefficiencies. As a result, you will never miss a critical renewal deadline.

The contract management platform Revnue allows you to choose if you want reminders and what you want to be reminded about. The built-in reminder functionality ensures that you never miss a contract deadline, expiration date, or other important milestones again. Smart alerts, process automation, and integrations allow you to control your contracts with greater efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility.

 Advanced reporting and analytics – Contract analytics is defined as the process of reviewing your organization’s contracts to identify data that can lead to better risk management.

Analytics gives you a clearer picture of contract hotspots by providing visibility of obligations, risks, and opportunities in your contracts. Your legal team and general counsel can manage and quantify risk and compliance.

Advanced reporting allows you to build custom reports with custom filtering to search and filter data, share and collaborate on reports in multiple formats (Excel, Notepad, and more), and review, document, and strategize the information.

Using advanced analytics, you can get visibility into the most important metrics for your business and gain business intelligence.

3rd-party integrations – Contract management is a complex process that spans departments. Businesses need end-to-end contract management software that streamlines, accelerates, and optimizes operations throughout the contract lifecycle.

Enterprise-wide integrations with existing CRM, CPQ, public APIs, other applications, and business tools ensure your processes and everyday tasks become effortless. 

Wrapping up

You can choose from a plethora of contract management software to streamline the contract management process. The key is to look for an end-to-end integrated contract management solution like Revnue that reduces risk, boosts efficiency by optimizing every step of contracting, and improves efficiency.

At the end of the day, your teams should be able to create, negotiate, sign, manage and analyze contracts quickly so they can do impactful work instead of spending time on repetitive, manual tasks.