Sales teams live in CRMs like Salesforce. That’s why it makes sense for them to be able to create documents they need within the platform, including the sales contracts used to close their deals. 

But not all businesses use Salesforce effectively when it comes to managing their contracts. 

This post covers everything legal and sales teams need to know about how to manage contracts in Salesforce, including how it can be used to generate watertight sales contracts without sales teams leaving the CRM. Keep reading to find out more. 

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) tools on the market. 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. But it’s often during the contracting process that friction occurs, particularly when Salesforce is one of many tools used during the contract workflow. 

Can you use Salesforce for contract 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 management system use Salesforce to initiate and store contracts. 

Contract management in Salesforce: the manual workflow 

Most businesses that use Salesforce to initiate contracts follow a similar process. 

Any information about a deal is stored in Salesforce as an ‘opportunity’. 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. 

Legal 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. 

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.

Post-signature, a copy of the contract is saved (usually as a PDF) and attached to the relevant opportunity in Salesforce. 

If they remember, legal or sales teams may even 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 it’s often not kept up to date. 

Why is this inefficient?

Aside from the obvious friction that occurs from using multiple different tools to agree a contract, the process sounds fairly straightforward, right? Well, not for scaling businesses with growing contract volumes. 

Imagine being a one-person in-house legal team and having to manage 30 active sales contracts each month. The responsibility of creating those contracts falls on you - the lawyer - and often involves churning out routine contracts, copying information from one document into another. 

This isn’t high-value work; anyone could manually input details into a contract. And if you’re limited to using Microsoft Word (still the system of choice for most legal teams) then it can be a time-consuming, soul-destroying manual task. Not to mention how this routine admin work can slow down the sales process, turning legal into blockers rather than enablers. 

Legal teams can respond to this challenge by letting sales teams self-serve on contracts. In other words, they can create their own documents, without legal involvement, in order to speed up the sales cycle. 

But contract risk can increase dramatically when this happens. Sales teams aren’t trained in contract drafting, and giving reps free reign to choose their own terms and contract language can be a lawyer’s worst nightmare. 

More often than not, businesses often end up storing contract information in different places - a partially-completed spreadsheet here, a shared drive folder structure there. Contracts quickly become a patchwork of templates, meaning legal spend more time reviewing the initial contract anyway, which defeats the purpose. 

This problem intensifies quickly for scaling businesses with lean legal teams because, while contract volumes grow month on month, legal headcount doesn’t. Yet, given fears of a looming recession, it’s never been more important to scale in an efficient and sustainable way, and failing to do so poses a big risk for businesses in 2023.  

Fortunately, lots of businesses are already building a more scalable contract workflow by integrating Salesforce with a contract management platform like Juro. This enables sales teams to generate contracts in seconds with minimal risk, and without needing to leave the CRM. 

Let’s talk through how this works now. 

How to manage contracts in Salesforce and Juro

Juro’s integration with Salesforce allows sales teams to create contracts within Salesforce by first selecting an opportunity. 

Once they’ve chosen the opportunity they’d like to create a contract for, they simply select ‘new contract’, select 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. 

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

Doing this will also update the status of the opportunity in Salesforce accordingly to reflect the fact that the contract has been created and has moved to the next stage of the contract lifecycle. 

When you open the contract you will notice that all of the smart fields have been populated with the deal information from Salesforce. This removes the need for repetitive data entry and it helps legal to control which parts of the contract can be edited by sales by restricting their access permissions. 

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 mean that an additional clause is added to the contract automatically, and so on. This is a great way to make sales contracts customizable without introducing more risk.  

Once reviewed, negotiated and approved in Juro, the contract can then be signed using Juro’s native electronic signature. 

From here, a PDF copy of the contract is pushed back into Salesforce and the data stored within Salesforce is automatically updated to reflect the terms agreed in the executed contract, but only if they vary from the original deal details. 

The contract data is also captured in Juro within customizable contract dashboards, with the ability to set up automated renewal reminders in the tool. 

If you want to hear about how Juro’s integration with Salesforce is being used in businesses like yours, check out these case studies with Paddle, Mentimeter and Tamara. 

The benefits of integrating Salesforce with Juro

As you’ve heard already, integrating Salesforce with a contract management tool like Juro is beneficial for both legal and sales teams, as well as the rest of the business. 

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. 

“In a Google Doc, I could change the template, but there was always a possibility that individual team members would have their own versions saved locally. When I change the templates in Juro, sales automatically self-serves from that updated version” - Marcus Gustafsson, Junior Legal Counsel, Mentimeter

For sales reps, it 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. 

“It takes the sales team four clicks to generate and approve a contract in Juro. There’s less manual work, less admin, and we’re saving 25 minutes per contract” - Callum Hamlett, Senior Revenue Ops Analyst, Paddle

If you’re interested in finding out more about how Juro’s integration with Salesforce can help your business to automate sales agreements, hit the button below or check out our Salesforce integration page. To find out which other tools you can connect with Salesforce, check out this guide to the best Salesforce integrations in 2023.

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.