According to Forrester, getting a contract approved takes an average of 3.4 weeks. But using Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software reduces that time by an average of 82%. A smart CLM platform enables your legal department to focus on higher-value initiatives by automating and even accelerating their contracting processes. It allows users to improve a business’ operational performance, scrutinize agreements, and receive timely alerts and reminders to meet contractual obligations and compliance requirements. As a result, it helps reduce manual work, costs, and risks, while ensuring compliance and security.
One valuable benefit of CLM is Self-service Contract Management (CM) – leveraging customizable workflows to enable anyone in the organization to create, negotiate, edit, and execute enforceable contracts without significant consultation from your internal legal department or outside counsel. It allows the client/partner/vendor to accept the contract and move forward vs relying and waiting on others to initiate the contracting process. Self-service contracting is generally used for low-value, high-volume, standardized contracts, such as Non-disclosure Agreements (NDAs), vendor agreements, Business Associate Agreements (BAA), and master service agreements (MSAs). Not only does this save countless hours, it can also have a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.
Advantages of Self-service Contract Automation
Avoid Inter-Departmental Conflict 
Unfortunately, when contracts are not standardized, lawyers must go over every line to ensure enforceability and legality. This can often cause contract approval to take a long time, causing contention between Legal and other departments.
Automate Workflows
Self-service contracts are typically signed much faster because they don’t require lengthy editing or legal review. Most automatic contracts also feature intuitive signing features that allow the recipient to agree to the contract terms without delay.
Create Competitive Advantage
Automated contracting helps reduce approval time and associated expenses to give the business a competitive advantage. Your staff can spend more time focusing on higher-level, strategic work instead of tedious, monotonous tasks.
Generate Revenue
Standardized agreements do not typically bring the company significant revenue. Self-service contracting means less time spent on lower-producing legal agreements so more focus can be given to more revenue-generating efforts.
Ensure Consistency with Version Control
Automated self-service contracts ensure all agreements can be supervised, tracked, and controlled. They rely on pre-approved language that allows legal to minimize risk, maintain uniformity, and reduce their time spent on redundant review.
Close Deals Faster
Each day spent waiting on a contract means business delays that impact different areas of your business. It could mean lost sales or missing time-sensitive orders. Self-service contracts makes closing deals faster and in turn, expedites related business efforts.
Self-service Contracts for Sales
A good salesperson wears many hats. Staff, vendor, and client meetings. Phone calls, reports, chasing down leads, and closing sales. Administrative tasks – lots of administrative tasks. So, finding any way to support their role and streamline their duties is helpful to the overall health of the employee and the entire team. Contract lifecycle management software can do just that.
Aberdeen cites that contracts are responsible for nearly 19% of the selling cycle. Automated and self-service contract workflows enable your sales team to take better control of that part of the sales process. This can accelerate time to contract, reduce paperwork, and shorten sales cycles. It also ensures your sales team stays up to date regarding contract status via improved, streamlined collaboration capabilities.
Leading CLM software offers the following functionality to enhance your sales team and other business users’ contracting efforts: 
Intuitive Navigation
Learning and teaching others to use a new self-service contracting process needs to be fast and simple. All contract creators should be able to easily leverage and navigate through the solution.
Contract Templates
Legal teams can create contract templates that are utilized across the company. This should include the most current terms, clause language, commercial positions, etc. to ensure consistency and compliance.
In-Browser Changes
Audit trails and version control is critical so sales teams can stay on top of any and all changes. Leading platforms offer negotiation and commenting in-browser.
Negotiation PlayBook
Playbooks should be clearly created so your sales team has clarity throughout the negotiation process and ongoing conversations go smoothly.
Legal Team Approval
Still want legal to have final approvals? A workflow can be designed to give the legal team approval rights before contracts are shared with counter-parties.
Self-service Contract Process
Request or Create
Build contract templates with standardized, pre-approved clause language to ensure compliance and consistency. Easily automate workflows based on your current processes to move business forward faster.
Redline, Version, Negotiate 
Collaborate easily with legal and across the organization using native tools that integrate with the platform, such as Microsoft Word. Store all documents, information, and agreements in a secure repository.
Track
Generate automated reminders to stay on top of renewals, important dates, and deadlines.
Sign
Leverage a secure eSign tool to streamline and accelerate the entire signature process. A direct link to the document is provided to the signee for instant approval.
Analyze
Unlock powerful data to better understand how your contracts perform and identify ways to improve the process.
Self-Serve Contracts with ContractPodAi
Adopting the right Contract Management software for self-service contract creation can make your sales staff more productive, close contracts faster, enhance business relationships, and give legal counsel a break from unnecessary work. ContractPodAi offers the technology and training to get you started on the right path to improved, smart Contract Lifecycle Management. Contact us to learn how our platform has helped sales teams across industries enhance their sales cycles through self-service contracting.
