How to manage and create contracts in Salesforce

Sales teams live in CRMs like Salesforce. Enabling them to create and manage contracts within the platform can empower them to reduce time-to-sign and capture revenue faster. 

However, not all businesses use Salesforce effectively when managing their contracts.

In this guide to Salesforce contract lifecycle management, we’ll cover everything legal and sales teams need to know about how to manage contracts in Salesforce more effectively, and how integrating Salesforce with a contract management system like Juro can help. 

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) tools on the market, with over 150,000 customers. Businesses use Salesforce to connect with potential and existing customers, track deals, and capture opportunity data.

The data stored within Salesforce is usually used to draft a contract once a customer is ready to buy. However, it’s often during the contracting process that friction occurs. This is because deal management and contract management tend to be two completely separate workflows. 

Can you use Salesforce for contract lifecycle management? 

While Salesforce can be used to support contract management processes, it is not a substitute for a contract management system. 

That said, if you integrate Salesforce with a contract tool like Juro, you can enable your sales teams to generate contracts in Salesforce in seconds, and with minimal risk. 

We’ll get onto how this works in a moment. But first, let’s take a look at how businesses without a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system use Salesforce to initiate contracts. 

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How to manage contracts in Salesforce without a CLM system

Legal and sales teams without a CLM solution in place won’t be able to create their contracts directly from Salesforce. Instead, they’ll have to follow a process like the one below. 

1. When the sales team decides that a contract needs to be created (e.g an MSA, order form, or SOW), they email the legal team or submit a contract request form.
   
   
2. Legal teams are then tasked with drafting a contract in an editor like Word, and they populate the contract manually using the deal data stored in Salesforce.
   
   
3. Once drafted, the contract enters the review, negotiation, approval and signing stages of a contract’s lifecycle - all of which happens across numerous different platforms, with teams jumping back and forth between tools.
   
   
4. Post-signature, a copy of the contract is saved (usually as a PDF) and attached to the relevant opportunity in Salesforce.
   
   
5. If they remember, legal or sales teams will update the data in Salesforce to make it consistent with the contract’s terms. But in most businesses, it’s not clear whose job this is, so the information captured in Salesforce is often not kept up to date.

However, there are a few problems with this approach: 

• Loss of control: allowing sales teams to self-serve on contracts in a non-controlled environment can invite contractual risk and increase the likelihood of disputes due to inconsistent terms and language‍
• Too many tools: the process we just described consists of several different tools, and jumping back and forth between these can create friction ‍
• Decentralized contract storage and data: different data points are captured in different places, meaning there’s no single source of truth for sales contracts and their data

A better approach to Salesforce contract management

Fortunately, there’s a better, more efficient way to manage contracts in Salesforce. You can integrate Salesforce with a contract management solution like Juro. Let’s explore this approach, and the benefits of it, now.

How to create a contract in Salesforce via Juro 

Once sales reps have chosen the opportunity they’d like to create a contract for, they simply select ‘new contract’,  choose a pre-approved contract template from the drop-down list, and click save. 

This creates the contract automatically for them, pulling all of the information about a deal into the template to populate it. 

Since the fields within a template have been pre-defined by legal when they were created in Juro, this makes sure that the necessary information is pulled into the right sections of the contract. It also means that contracts only include terms that have been pre-approved by the template owner, and are written using contract language pre-approved by legal. 

Legal teams may even decide to use conditional logic for more complex sales contracts. This Juro feature means that certain rules are baked into a contract template so that certain terms either appear or disappear depending on the data pulled in from Salesforce. 

For example, if the contract value is over a certain threshold in Salesforce, this could result in an additional clause being added to the contract automatically. This is a great way to make sales contracts customizable without introducing more risk.  

How to manage contracts in Salesforce via Juro 

Once a sales rep has created a contract in Salesforce, a copy of the agreement will be automatically attached to the opportunity in the CRM, making it quick and easy to access the contract. 

The status of the opportunity in Salesforce will also be updated automatically to reflect the fact that the contract has been created and the opportunity has progressed. 

Legal and sales teams can then finish managing the contract in Juro, with all of the functionality needed to review, negotiate, approve, and sign a sales contract in one unified place. 

The contract data is also captured in Juro within customizable contract dashboards, with the ability to set up automated renewal reminders in the tool. This enables you to access up-to-date information about a contract in both Salesforce and Juro, with varying levels of detail. 

Benefits of integrating Salesforce with Juro

For lawyers, integrating Salesforce with Juro can reduce the scope for human error, standardize sales contracts, and reduce contract risk. But it also enables them to focus on high-value work, rather than becoming buried in low-value contract admin work.

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For sales reps, Salesforce contract management means they’re able to close deals faster and generate contracts on demand. This is a huge benefit for scaling businesses as it enables them to capture revenue faster and more efficiently as a result of self-serve. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how Juro’s integration with Salesforce can help your business automate sales agreements, hit the button below. To find out which other tools you can connect with Salesforce, check out this guide to the best Salesforce integrations in 2024.

Frequently asked questions about Salesforce contract management 

Does salesforce have a contract management system?

Salesforce does not offer a native contract management system. However, sales teams can integrate Salesforce with a contract management tool like Juro, which will enable them to create and manage contracts from within the CRM. 

Can you manage contracts in other CRMs?

It is definitely possible to manage contracts in other CRMs if you integrate them with a contract tool like Juro. Check out these guides on how to manage contracts in other CRMs:

• How to manage contracts in Hubspot 
• How to manage contracts in Pipedrive
• How to manage contracts in Zoho CRM
• How to manage contracts in MS Dynamics 

Do legal teams use Salesforce?

Legal teams often use Salesforce for certain manual tasks, like extracting deal data to populate contract templates, for example. But this is only necessary if they don't have a contract management tool like Juro in place. To find out more, check out this brief guide to Salesforce for legal teams.