Love it or hate it, email is a business staple. It has largely replaced the telephone for quick communication, and in many ways, serves as the central, anchoring activity of the average business professional. On its best day, email enables instantaneous and recordable communication, but on its worst days, it's a poor substitute for automation and storage. When it comes to contract management, we've seen too many nightmare scenarios. The often-ignored reality is that email is too unstructured and lacking in security to stand in for something as critical to the business as managing your contract documents and processes.
Here are our top 10 reasons that email and contract management don't mix:
- Email is a contract storage black hole. You can be sure that what goes in will probably disappear.
- When you get that "out of office" response, you know your contract workflow is grinding to a halt.
- You have no idea whether the latest email is the latest contract version.
- It's way too easy to "reply all" and send the entire company sensitive contract information by accident.
- Whoops! You just sent the contract to the wrong Frank! 😣
- The email did not actually go through; maybe the contract document was too large or got caught in spam filters.
- You're not sure who to include for contract approval, so you email everyone and no one responds.
- You forget to email the contract for approval to a really important stakeholder, like Finance.
- You use the last version of a contract from your past emails to create a new one, and it definitely contains outdated language, which poses risk.
- You have no visibility where the contract currently sits in the approval chain, and your client is getting impatient.
If any of these hit a little too close to home, never fear! There is a better way. Have a look at Malbek's CLM solution for a simple, secure, and timely solution to manage your contracts, and let email do what it does best – organize the lunch order. 🍕
