Procurement Contract Management Best Practices

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 15th, 2024

When organizations need to focus on procurement contract management, they start to manage contracts related to purchasing with legal content. Some examples of contracts that fall into this category include fixed-price contracts, cost-reimbursable contracts, and time-and-materials contracts. These agreements are often shared with customers, business partners, and suppliers.

Join us in the article below to uncover the best practices for procurement contract management and other topics related to contract management.

Contract Management Best Practices

Starting with some good advice, we know that to purchase goods and services that are essential for business operations, there needs to be some standards put in place to reduce risks and costs. As promised, here are a few best practices for managing procurement contracts in your business.

Create Comprehensible Contracts

When creating or generating a procurement contract with Salesforce and a third-party app, clearly define your business requirements. This approach will ensure that all parties involved in the agreement are on the same page and clearly understand the contract’s purpose.

Use Pre-Designed Templates

Start creating templates with content pre-approved by brand managers and legal or financial teams. Templates are a great way to speed up contract creation processes and reduce the errors usually obtained from creating a new contract from scratch each time.

Get those Contracts Approved

Procurement contracts are serious documents and must go through an approval stage with legal and compliance teams. This stage of the CLM process will ensure that your contract follows the laws and regulations stipulated in your country and will protect your business from any legal problems.

Contract Management in Salesforce

So, how do we make the most out of contract management in Salesforce? For starters, let’s make sure we are all on the same page with the basics .

Managing contracts throughout their entire lifecycle is called contract lifecycle management. Many organizations that use Salesforce to handle customer data and automate workflow processes related to customer services, marketing, and sales need CLM software. Although Salesforce does have many features and tools to assist with working with contracts, they do not provide a custom, out-of-the-box CLM solution.

Even if CLM is complex and quite a long process, it is integral to business operations. For this reason, companies get CLM solutions to quickly create contracts that comprise accurately pulled data from Salesforce. This feature, alone, helps employees speed up workflow tasks, resulting in more time to spend on leads and customers. As a result of boosted workforce productivity, businesses increase sales consistently. This leads to our next question…

Does Salesforce have a Contract Management System?

Unfortunately, they do not have a dedicated Contract Management System solution. However, Salesforce is a powerful and advanced platform, so it can integrate well with third-party CLM applications to streamline contract management workflows and tasks.

Contract Management Software for Salesforce

Let’s look at a few third-party CLM applications that can help you with effectively using Salesforce for contract management.

Icertis

First up on our short list of third-party apps for CLM solutions in Salesforce is Icertis. This platform allows businesses to use advanced tools and features in the different contract lifecycle management phases. They integrate well with Salesforce, too.

Pros

You get to integrate Salesforce with Icertis to manage contracts in a single location so your workforce can quickly manage and track customer documents inside your favorite CRM.

You get better visibility of your contract data. Employees can check contract statuses, renewal dates, or essential phrases and words in the contracts. Sales and customer service employees are empowered to make informed decisions with these capabilities offered by Icertis.

Creating contracts, processes for approvals, and monitoring compliance can all be automated by Icertis. Businesses that integrate Salesforce with Icertis and use the automation features get to decrease the number of errors found in their contracts and save time.

Cons

Integrating Salesforce and Icertis is complex if you do not have technical experience.

Icertis is not free and is a subscription-based service. When you integrate Salesforce and Icertis, you will have to increase your overall costs for CLM, which include user licenses, implementation, and maintenance.

Your employees will need time to learn how to use Icertis effectively with Salesforce. You should budget for a trainer to teach your employees the platform. Both of these factors will affect your deliverables and project timelines.

ContractSafe

Next up on the list is ContractSafe, a cloud-based solution organizations use to manage contracts. It integrates with Salesforce to store contracts in a central location and automate tasks in your workflows related to tracking documents or sending reminders to employees.

Pros

With ContractSafe and Salesforce, you get features and tools to assist with analyzing and reporting on data. You can use the insights from contract performance, compliance, and customer interactions to make business decisions.

ContractSafe lets you collaborate with colleagues on contracts with the ability to track changes with version control features. This feature is essential for getting everyone working on the latest and correct agreement.

Contract data is usually sensitive, so ContractSafe provides security features to assist with data security.

Cons

Both platforms have regular changes and updates to their software. Managing the updates and ensuring that Salesforce and ContractSafe remain connected and work as intended can be time-consuming and expensive.

ContractSafe might not be compatible with the other applications in your software stack. Any compatibility issues can slow down your work tasks and processes.

You will need custom development for more complex integrations with Salesforce that need data synchronization or other specific features.

Apttus

If you were looking for Apttus, note that they are now a part of Conga. This app provides solutions that work exceptionally well with Salesforce for quote-to-cash and contract lifecycle management processes.

Pros

Apttus is flexible and supports small or large businesses with CLM tasks and processes that have goals to grow and scale.

Integrates well with your favorite CRM platform to streamline quote-to-cash processes and tasks, which include managing contracts in Salesforce, generating quotes, and managing billing practices.

Has UI/UX features that regular Salesforce users find familiar and easy to use.

Cons

Your organization can become dependent on Salesforce and will have issues to face if the need arises to transfer to a different CRM platform.

Even though Apptus has tools for a contract management system in Salesforce, they are not a dedicated CLM solution, so it has less advanced features and tools than other CLM and CPQ solutions.

Start-ups and small businesses find Apttus expensive as there are investment and licensing costs to consider.

Titan CLM

Titan CLM is the perfect solution for your Salesforce and CLM needs. The app and the other Titan modules integrate directly with Salesforce for bi-directional data flows on all web and business projects. Many organizations use Titan to track the entire CLM process in Salesforce.

Pros

Employees can manage, review, and track every contract change directly in Salesforce.

Key stakeholders can approve or reject contract changes to make the best deals for an organization.

Employees across multiple departments and customers can collaborate on contracts.

The app is flexible as it allows you to add participants at any stage of the CLM journey.

All solutions for CLM require no coding experience with Titan.

Contracts can be signed with electronic or digital signatures.

Contract owners can view every piece of content that is added or deleted in Salesforce.

And so much more!

Cons

Each business use case is unique, so the time to implement Titan CLM will vary.

We hope to see you soon! 

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.