Why CLM Tools are important for your Start-up Business

A Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM Tools) strategy is essential for small and medium-sized businesses to map the customer journey. It allows them to build a plan to cater to their customers’ needs during various stages. It also helps companies retain customers, improve customer satisfaction, and encourage brand advocacy.

You can measure and track these metrics to get a 360-degree view of your customers’ satisfaction. No doubt that a CLM strategy ensures nothing will slip through the cracks, especially when it comes to making your customers happy, allowing you to understand your customers’ needs. It also helps you streamline your business process as a whole.

In this post, we’ll discuss what are CLM tools about and the key reasons why you need to use them for your start-up business.

1. Simplifies the work process

One of the most crucial aspects of contract management is monitoring compliance, milestones, timelines, and other parameters.

It has a proven contract management program that tracks potential risks and issues and alerts the teams. Therefore, CLM is a handy tool that effectively saves time, effort, and your company’s reputation.

It also involves authoring, approval, negotiation, storage, tracking, and reporting. Mishandling the contract during any stage of the lifecycle can be detrimental to your business’ reputation.

CLM builds a streamlined process that makes handling and working with the contract effective.

2. No more manual tasks

A CLM system can let you manage the front end of a contract and back end experience without needing a custom code. Contract management also tends to be hyper-manual and exhausts more time and productivity.

You can simplify your business process using a CLM tool in several ways:

• Send customers auto-generated contracts to sign based on the quote you choose.
• Forward renewal and approval notifications to the applications and individuals move the contract along after the task is complete.
• Auto-update and store the contract based on your database once the customer signs it.

A CLM system will ensure that you don’t miss out on the lifecycle of the contract. You can easily

run through the whole sales process without needing to do it manually.

3. Eliminate delays

An automated and managed CLM tool allows you to save money by eliminating payment errors, compliance penalties, and opportunities you’ve lost otherwise because of manual errors.

Furthermore, contract management systems have features that allow you to save time looking for contracts. With its streamlined functions, you can minimize errors, avoid reworks, and eliminate delays in the process.

4. Safe keeps your emails and attachments

There are times when saving contracts and their versions aren’t enough to safeguard your company fully. You want to keep all attachments and emails exchanged between parties during the negotiation.

An excellent CLM tool will integrate with your email provider. You can import attachments and emails seamlessly and link them with the proper contract, client, or supplier for safekeeping.

5. Gets rid of human-related roadblocks

Again, as we mentioned, managing your contracts manually takes immense time and effort. The process may also increase the chance of errors because of human intervention and handling.

In fact, according to experts, human-related errors are one of the primary roadblocks when it comes to contract management. With an automated CLM process, your business can effortlessly eliminate these concerns.

6. Track your documents effortlessly

Contract negotiation often involves one or two parties and can get tricky quickly since version after version is being exchanged. A cloud CLM will allow you to store every version and quickly compare the two properly.

Your team no longer needs to worry whether or not you’re working on the correct version or the clause’s original proposition.

7. Evaluate your contracts’ success

You can evaluate your contract’s success with analytics tools with the CLM software. A great example of this is Nintex Analytics. If this is one of your contracts that are most commonly entered, track how it moves through a cycle.

With the analytics software, you can quickly know whether a particular step in a process takes too long to be approved, which will need permanent stages in an approved customer profile.

Similarly, there might be people who want to change a section of your e-sign document. Therefore, you might have to change the original draft you’re always sending out.

With CLM software, you can easily measure your business agreements and make necessary changes in the lifecycle of your contract. Doing so will eventually determine whether a particular contract is helping you reach your end goal. You’ll know what needs improvement versus what is worth keeping.

8. Strengthens customer’s trust and brand reputation

One of the benefits of having a well-drafted contract is that it plays a crucial role in earning your customers’ trust and meeting their expectations. It elevates the credibility of your brand and increases customer retention.

Meanwhile, the wrong form of agreements and terms is one factor that leads to value leakage.

9. Real-time collaboration for quick turnarounds

CLM has a centralized repository for handling and storing contracts. These CLM tools store these contracts in secure clouds, which helps with security and privacy. A team that works with contracts can safely and securely access them collaboratively.

A cloud CLM allows your legal and sales team to collaborate more effectively on a contract, which shortens the review and the redline cycle.

Conclusion

So there you have it. No matter the size, industry, or region, all businesses have a few things in common. One of those things is that they operate based on a foundation of contracts.

With a CLM tool, you can accurately measure the heartbeat of your business agreements to make changes in a contract’s lifecycle early on.

It also lets you know whether or not your contract is helping you reach your business’ goal so that you’ll know if there’s any room for improvement or if it’s even worth keeping in the first place. Doing so is especially useful if you’re managing a large volume of complex contracts.