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Lizzy Painter and simon Erdély

What’s Slowing Down Your Contract Management Process?

Consistency and reliability are key when it comes to effective contract lifecycle management. If your CLM processes are unorganized, hard to follow, or just plain unreliable, it can have serious consequences and downstream effects — slow contract cycle times, strained relationships, or worse, a hit to your bottom line.

Outdated contract management practices can end up costing you a lot of time and money, especially if you’re constantly chasing approvals, dealing with the headaches of creating and reviewing contracts, or struggling to find important agreements. The good news is that you can proactively identify and fix these pain points to improve your CLM process and set yourself up for long-term success.

Constantly chasing approvals…

The contracting process is often lengthy with various workflows and approvers to ensure terms are correct and enforceable. 

When sales or procurement teams are left constantly chasing approvals, there are many downstream impacts that can occur. With an end-to-end solution at your fingertips, you can bridge the divide between different parties so everyone knows what to expect and when.

Moving at the speed of snail

Getting approval from your legal team can be a real nightmare as a sales rep. Often there are steps in the review process that take place behind the scenes and add to cycle times. Legal also has a myriad of responsibilities, which can tax their resources and can make it harder to turn around agreements.

As a contract requester, it can leave you feeling frustrated, especially if there’s no visibility into what’s happening. Worse, it can put a strain on relationships with the internal stakeholders involved.

The Solution

Malbek’s robust CLM solution gives you a clear and consistent picture of your contract status so you aren’t left in the dark  — or worse, leaving a prospect hanging. By automating contract approvals, you can have a set of pre-approved terms straight from legal to avoid potential slowdowns or risks for unapproved items. 

Malbek makes it easier for all parties to communicate issues or share changes in real-time and reduce the risk of miscommunication. Custom notifications let you know what stage of approvals you’re in at all times.

 

creation and review headaches…

Contract drafters and negotiators must be careful when creating contracts to carefully craft terms and omit undesired language. They also have to consider whether they’ve properly accounted for potential risks or strategic conditions they wanted to include. Forgetting to do so can be detrimental.  

Today, contract life cycles must be able to produce quick results to avoid missed opportunities and slowdowns. A robust legal framework helps accurately summarize your contract terms, making it easier to get it through review.

drafting woes

No matter how difficult things get, the business world doesn’t slow down. Many negotiations can get fairly complex and lead to mistakes that can make it harder to finalize agreements.

If you have to ask Legal every time a term is amended or changed, the process will slow to a crawl, harming your ROI. Similarly, missed terms or causes can create unnecessary risk for your organization, making the review process even more difficult than it needs to be.

The Solution

If you don’t want to be left in the dust, you’ll need a nimble and configurable CLM solution that is capable of handling everything you can throw at it. Malbek allows users to initiate contracts with premade templates, removing the guesswork for a more reliable process. It also includes out-of-the-box to popular CRM, ERP, and CPQ solutions. 

Rather than relying on other teams to create contracts, you can rely on Malbek to keep things rolling. Packed with AI features that allow users to get a look at contract hierarchies, compare versions, swap clauses, or insert pre-approved language, Malbek removes the headaches from the creation and review process for good.

 

Difficulty locating agreements…

After executing a contract, you have to know where it’s located. Most companies have a wide variety of agreements they’re negotiating at any given time and contract management practices involve organizing and properly housing contracts for safekeeping.

Due to large volumes of documents, companies often need a good tool in place to view the hierarchy in one place. Robust search is an essential function to get right for any business. 

messy, unorganized Contract Repository

One of the biggest issues companies have with contract management is keeping track of all of their ongoing agreements. Market research indicates that 71% of companies can’t find 10% or more of their contracts. This issue often comes about due to poor organization practices or mismanaged CLM.

The worst thing you can do when negotiating contracts is to ignore mismanagement. Spending too much time searching for contracts, reviewing terms, and getting signatures will ruin your contract cycle time, which can be especially harmful if you’re in the middle of negotiations. 

The Solution

Knowing the basics of contract management can help, but things can get overwhelming if you have a lot of documents to sift through. The right CLM solution can make all the difference in your turnaround times, improving ROI across the board.

Malbek offers an Amazon-like approach to searching, making it easier than ever to find your contracts when you need them. If you want enterprise-level search capabilities for performing searches, there’s no better solution than Malbek.

 

Improve contract management with a reliable CLM

The right approach to contract management helps you limit costs, receive on-time payments, and eliminate silly mistakes. With Malbek, you’ll have a CLM solution capable of improving your entire business from top to bottom. As a long-term partner, we believe you should love your CLM! 

If you need to close deals faster, gain insights into your agreements, or integrate with third-party business applications like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Microsoft Dynamics, Malbek is the answer.

With state-of-the-art solutions that help cut your contract cycle time in half, our award-winning CLM helps countless users navigate their contract lifecycles from negotiation through execution. 

Don’t just take our word for it… Thousands of users rave about how simple it is to use our solution. Get started by taking a self-guided CLM tour to see Malbek’s modern take on contract management.