- September 3, 2024
- 15 min read
- Nia balbo
Introduction
You hear it all the time: “Well, that’s a job for that team, so pass it to them.” Actually, let’s be honest. You’ve probably said that a few times yourself, haven’t you?
Do you know a particularly common time when you hear that phrase? When it comes to contracting, everyone tends to toss any contracting task over to Legal. Maybe Legal Ops can take some of the load if your enterprise has built out that function.
Except, here’s the thing. Legal may end up with every contracting task. You know who uses those contracts? Everyone.
Sales needs Legal’s sign-off to close a new deal. Procurement needs to reference the contract to ensure suppliers deliver on time. Finance needs to see how much money deals are bringing in to plan company-wide budgets.
When nearly every team across the enterprise has a hand in the contract lifecycle, not everything can fall onto Legal’s desk. That’s where cross-functional CLM comes in.
Keep reading to learn how cross-functional CLM contributes to each department’s success and how those teams can use contract AI to make better business agreements.
On average, enterprises lose 45 minutes locating a contract and 84 minutes looking for the relevant section or language – a total of more than two hours – before they can analyze or apply the information.
What is Cross-Functional CLM?
Legal
To no one’s surprise, Legal has a huge need for contract lifecycle management solutions. Counsel needs a better way to perform due diligence and minimize contract risk.
Without CLM, lawyers spend more time on non-strategic work. That builds up bottlenecks and leaves other teams saying the same phrase over and over: “I’m waiting on Legal.”
Legal Ops
Legal Ops needs to centralize, standardize, and optimize contract operations so they can empower Legal to execute deals.
Left to do everything manually, Legal Ops sees larger workloads, more errors, and greater inefficiencies when working on compliance and reporting tasks.
Procurement
Procurement needs to leverage contract intelligence to improve supplier relationship management and inform strategy.
Working without a strong CLM, Procurement teams need to draft and negotiate contracts from scratch. Even once they execute the agreement, they struggle to track and ensure suppliers fulfill their contract obligations.
Sales
Sales needs to manage customer relationships and drive account growth by using contract goals to prove their achievements.
If Sales doesn’t have a way to efficiently author and negotiate contracts, they tend to see a breakdown in communication, a lack of visibility of contract versions, and seriously longer cycle times.
Finance
Finance needs to understand how the enterprise’s current and potential contract portfolio impacts costs and revenue.
Without a CLM, there’s no way for Finance to monitor the risks of each contract. That leads to a lot of payment and invoicing errors, poor cash flow, and revenue leakage.
C-Suite
Executives need a 360-view of all customer relationships and quick access to contract performance, risk, finances, and new business opportunities.
A lack of CLM leaves them grasping at straws as they try to use contract data to answer bigger questions about the enterprise.
Contract lifecycle management platforms that use advanced AI can offer solutions that benefit each team and increase collaboration across the enterprise.
Where Does AI-Powered CLM Make a Difference?
CLM, on its own, significantly improves how teams across your enterprise leverage contracts to do their jobs. Add in artificial intelligence, and every contracting task becomes a breeze.
For Legal
CLM lets Legal establish a contract repository and extract contract clauses and data, giving them greater visibility and insight into their entire portfolio. They can leverage this to determine what’s missing in an agreement, improve the outcomes of contract review, and reach faster resolutions in contract negotiations.
Workflow automation also allows other teams to self-service agreements, so the team is free to focus on more strategic tasks.
For Legal Ops
Contract AI creates contract drafts in seconds, automatically redlines agreements based on your playbook, and visualizes contract performance—all tasks that normally take days, sometimes weeks, to complete manually.
Legal Ops can leverage that technology to automate routine tasks, reduce the risk of human error, and inform stronger decision-making.
For Procurement
By establishing a single source of truth for contract data and integrating with existing ERP systems, CLM fills the gap between every function connected to your procurement team.
Procurement can use that contract intelligence to improve collaboration, measure risk, and strengthen contracts while maintaining ideal cash flow.
For Sales
AI-powered CLM extracts critical data points—such as obligations and contract termination and renewal deadlines—so Sales can partner with customer-facing teams to realize full contract value. They can also use Legal-approved contract templates, clause libraries, and workflows to self-service agreements.
The result? CLM speeds contract lifecycles, alerts Sales to ongoing and upsell opportunities, and allows for enhanced customer engagement.
For Finance
CLM displays real-time data and offers deep insight into the connection between revenue-related terms and your financial strategy.
This empowers Finance to improve budgeting and forecasting, streamline invoices, and enhance audit readiness.
For C-Suite
CLM delivers a level of contract visibility that is not achievable through manual, static contract management. This gives executives the accurate, holistic contract intelligence they need to make strategic decisions for the business.
Now, simply implementing a CLM and telling everyone to use it is not going to work. You need to have a game plan in order to get everyone on board and make contracting a more collaborative process.
How Do I Make Contracting More Collaborative?
With most things, the specific process you follow to champion cross-functional CLM will vary slightly depending on your unique enterprise.
However, these are a few easy steps to follow that work across the board.
Identify Roadblocks Early
It’s time to get honest. Determine where bottlenecks are across teams and why tasks get held up.
Don’t simply finger-point at a specific department or colleague. Really take a look at where the problems are along the contract lifecycle. Use your findings to inform the rest of your collaboration efforts.
Set Up Systems for Open Communications
Asking for reviews from those who are using your CLM solution is the best way to improve your use of it.
Establish a way for every team using the CLM to provide feedback on how to improve processes and report on continuing struggles that need additional attention.
Outline Specific Responsibilities
Change management can be difficult.
Clearly explain why you’re bringing other teams into the contracting processes, outline the benefits, and assign the exact tasks each department will be responsible for to keep things moving smoothly.
Rank Project Priorities
While Legal can take on high-risk or high-value projects, other tasks, like contract review or authoring, can get a first pass from non-legal teams. Let Sales create their own first drafts. Let Procurement review the obligations of a supplier contract.
Preserve Relationships
Friction develops because there’s not much information to go on, communication breaks down, and mistakes happen.
Use the contract intelligence your CLM now provides every team to reduce risk and maintain and improve relationships with your suppliers, partners, and colleagues.
Check In Regularly
As your business needs evolve, you’ll need to adjust how you use your CLM across teams.
Establish a schedule and revisit how various teams use the CLM. Consider if there are areas that could use tweaking.
Smarter Contracting for Every Team
Contract management responsibilities don’t just belong to Legal. When every team partners to improve how they create and manage contracts, the entire enterprise wins.
Sirion empowers every team to deliver their best. No matter your function, you have the visibility and automation you need to help your team contract more efficiently.
See how you can use our end-to-end CLM solution to work better cross-functionally and get the most value from your contracts. Schedule your demo today.
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