Enterprise businesses have specific requirements when it comes to contract lifecycle management. But what should they look out for and consider? Find out in this guide.
What is enterprise contract management?
Enterprise contract management describes the process large organizations use to handle their contracts, from creation all the way through to signature and execution.
It involves the typical stages of the contract lifecycle, but with added complexity due to the high value, volumes and risks with enterprise contracts.
Why is effective enterprise contract management important?
Due to the scale of their operations, enterprise businesses manage a lot of contracts. They hire a lot more people. They work with more vendors. They close higher value deals.
This means that their contract management processes can have a sizeable impact on other business objectives. There’s a significant upside for enterprise companies that manage their contracts more effectively. There’s also a lot of risk involved for those that don’t.
How can enterprise contract lifecycle management software help?
Enterprise contract lifecycle management solutions provide the functionality businesses need to streamline their contract workflows.
Rather than relying on a combination of different tools and fragmented processes, businesses with an enterprise CLM platform can regain control over their contracts and automate work that’s otherwise completed manually.
The right enterprise contract management solution can benefit businesses in the following ways:
- Risk mitigation. Enterprise contract lifecycle management software can help to identify and manage risks associated with contracts, ensuring that organizations comply with legal and regulatory requirements.
- Cost-savings. Effective contract management can lead to cost savings by optimizing terms, preventing overpayments, and identifying opportunities for discounts or renegotiation with vendors.
- More control over contracts. Enterprise contract management platforms can give legal greater control over contracts by reducing the risk of unauthorized changes or deviations from agreed-upon terms.
- Operational efficiency. Enterprise CLM solutions can streamline the entire contract lifecycle, from creation to renewal. This makes the process of agreeing contracts faster and more efficient.
- Enhanced visibility. Centralized storage of contracts provides stakeholders with easy access to relevant information, promoting transparency and improving decision-making.
- Time-savings. Enterprise contract lifecycle management tools enable teams to automate contract-related tasks. This means faster contract lifecycles and more time to focus on higher-value tasks.
However, it’s important to recognize that these benefits are only possible when businesses choose the right contract lifecycle management solution for them.
Fortunately, there are plenty of resources to help enterprise companies evaluate their options, including the ones below:
- 11 contract lifecycle management requirements for 2024
- Your guide to an effective CLM demo
- Legal tech vendor comparison template
- How do CFOs evaluate CLMs in 2024?
Features should also be a focal point for enterprise companies when evaluating contract management tools. Let’s run through some of the most important features for larger organizations in 2024.
Enterprise contract lifecycle management features to look out for
1. Unlimited contract templates
Access to unlimited contract templates is a core feature for enterprise businesses that manage contracts at scale. Without them, large corporations will need to pay per template, or worse, will be blocked by limited templates. Given how many contracts enterprise companies process on average, this quickly becomes expensive.
2. Conditional logic
Conditional logic is another useful feature for enterprise legal and business teams since it enables commercial teams to self-serve on contract creation at scale, without inviting contractual risk.
Conditional logic allows businesses to set rules and bake fallback positions into contract templates, enabling legal teams to retain control over the terms drafting and reiviewing them individually.
3. Conditional approvers
As we just mentioned, legal teams in enterprise stage companies won’t have the capacity to review every contract that lands on their desk. They need to optimize their contract process. Conditional approvers enables businesses to ensure that only the contracts that require legal approval are pushed to legal, unblocking those that don’t in turn.
This works by automating when certain contracts require approval from certain individuals, based on the terms or value of a contract.
4. Enterprise-grade security measures
Simple and secure sign-on is also important for enterprise contract management since many large organizations will operate with multiple business systems and lots of employees. Single sign-on enables users to sign in using quickly and securely using one set of credentials to streamline the process.
Want to find out more about what enterprise-grade security looks like? Check out these articles on compliance, security and privacy.
5. Custom branding
Trust is critical for enterprise businesses that manage larger transactions and customers. Custom branding is a fantastic way for large companies to build and maintain this trust.
Within Juro, for example, users can update the text used within transactional emails, as well as insert company logos and colours to increase trust and engagement from counterparties.
6. Advanced electronic signature
Although most contracts won’t require a specific type of electronic signature, offering a more secure way to sign can be a dealbreaker for some large enterprises. That’s why it’s a good idea to choose a contract management software that offers or integrates with an advanced eSigning solution.
Other useful enterprise contract management features for the signing phase include identity verification, audit trails of key actions and immutable document records, all of which help to ensure compliance.
7. Automated renewal reminders
The more contracts you create, the harder it is to track upcoming contract deadlines. This means that monitoring contract renewals as a large business can quickly become chaotic without the right safeguards in place.
Renewal reminders are a fantastic way to improve this process, as it enables key contract stakeholders to manage contract renewals at scale and minimize contract value leakage.
8. Bulk actions
Bulk actions empower legal and business users to manage the creation, sending and signing of contracts at scale, making large contract volumes more manageable for enterprise businesses.
This enterprise contract lifecycle management functionality is particularly useful for HR departments in large organizations that need to issue employment documents, like salary increase letters or option agreements, at scale. It’s also a great way to streamline onboarding document creation for large groups of new hires.
9. Popular enterprise integrations
Enterprise users will typically move between different business platforms within their roles, so it makes sense to integrate these with their contract tool. When selecting an enterprise contract management system, it’s worth seeking one that’s compatible with core business systems, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Workday and Greenhouse.
To find out more, check out this guide to enterprise CLM integrations in 2024.
How to choose enterprise contract lifecycle management software in 2024
Along with the features we just discussed, it’s important to consider the following factors when choosing an enterprise contract management platform.
1. Ease of use
An extensive feature set is only as good as your ability to use them. That’s why it’s important to balance functionality with ease of use when choosing an enterprise CLM solution.
Certain legacy CLM solutions are renowned for offering a lot of complex features. However, independent reviews on G2 often express frustration from customers that find these features difficult to access or amend without the vendor’s support.
This is because the features are too complex and lack the flexibility required for users to self-serve on important tasks like editing a workflow or contract template.
By contrast, Juro is rated above the industry average for ease of use on G2, with a score of 9.1 out of 10. In fact, Juro is frequently praised for its user-friendly interface and flexible workflows:
Juro is the first CLM I've encountered that has truly been adopted (and enjoyed) by various company departments/stakeholders. It's easy to navigate and feels very familiar - no fuss in terms of training colleagues to utilise the tool - Verified Juro user, G2 review
They've done a cracking job at making it really easy to create contracts and make edits to those contracts afterwards. I'm always impressed at how easy it is to make changes and adjust formatting - Verified Juro user, G2 review
To find out more about how enterprise businesses can benefit from Juro, hit the button below hear from a contract specialist. Otherwise, read on.
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