Johannesburg, 11 Dec 2017
Nintex contract flow enables contract process automation for everyone, across all systems of record. It provides a powerful solution to help its customers go from "quote to signed contract without friction."
That's because Nintex connects the people, process and content that make up a contract lifecycle regardless of system.
It is understood that contracts are the language of business as well as a foundational element to how business is conducted. Therefore Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), because of this, is something every company must embrace.
Contract management is a key component of the sales cycle but it's often the longest and most difficult to manage. To effectively manage contracts, a platform must be used that listens for events across the enterprise, easily hooks into different systems of record, provides workflows that can be started in various ways and provides seamless process intelligence, without the use of code.
In today's sales landscape, it often is difficult for companies to keep up with evolving technology that can improve the selling process which in turn can improve the customer relationship. Effective management of these contracts can be incredibly difficult for a few reasons.
Let's see why:
1. Multiple teams
Most contracts follow a similar lifecycle footprint. For example, the beginnings of a contract are often rooted in a marketing lead generated from within a sales or marketing process. Once a lead is established a quote is usually needed from the sales side. Once the quote is agreed to legal teams and assets are leveraged to acquire a contract for the opportunity. From there, order forms are often used by sales operations teams to begin the fulfilment process leveraging the quote and contract established with the customer. Fulfilment connects the sales and finance organisations to ensure a customer pays for and receives the product or service. Finally, account management teams are needed to service customers through the course of the contract and renewal.
This example covered six teams and, in some cases, more are included.
2. Disconnected systems
Regardless of company size, multiple applications are typically used to manage a contract process. Many, if not most, businesses have complex IT environments. People have to navigate dozens of applications, services, interfaces and document types. That's because a contract is connected to a customer and a customer exists in multiple systems. In order to manage the customer holistically, the process requires coverage in multiple systems of record. Some of these systems are off-the-shelf while others are homegrown. The myriad of applications creates gaps and disconnects that again makes CLM difficult. This is why most automation gains are isolated to parts of the process and not the holistic process.
3. Manual processes
When a contract process spans multiple teams and disconnected systems, it takes a lot of manual time and energy to orchestrate the decisions and flow of information. According to Aberdeen, 85% of companies are using manual processes to manage contracts. The uniqueness and complexity of each customer, contract and a company's pricing agreement make these manual processes expensive from a throughput and a quality control standpoint. While Forrester reports the average time to approve a contract is three to four weeks. That is an incredible amount of time - especially if the company is trying to grow. The net end result is a negative impact on contract risk, speed to market and speed to revenue.
The solution: Nintex contract flow
Nintex Workflow Cloud delivers the ability to automate contract lifecycle management processes regardless of how they start or the system of record.
Let's walk through a Nintex contract workflow to demonstrate how this all works:
Pricing approval
This example starts after a lead has been captured and nurtured in salesforce.
The customer, in this case, is the NFL. Casen, our sale rep, works for a company named Safalo and has been working an opportunity with a customer, the NFL. He is at the perception analysis stage within the Salesforce opportunity. At this point, Casen is ready to provide a price quote to the NFL. For this example, we've landed at pricing that is below the retail price. According to a global approval matrix used within the company, a pricing approval will be needed to continue.
This is where Nintex Workflow for Salesforce can be leveraged to show a pricing approval form once a particular stage is reached within the opportunity. Casen can quickly request and justify the pricing he would like to offer and kick off a Nintex Workflow from within Salesforce by submitting the form.
The pricing approval request form
The workflow will use Nintex Document Generation to create the quote dynamically pulling in all relevant information and submit the pricing information to the right approver based on the level of discount. Casen's manager Sarah is the approver and would receive an e-mail with the pricing document at which point she can "approve" or "escalate".
The pricing approval document contains two key pieces of information. First, it includes list price vs quoted price. Second, it includes the approval rules based on the discount percentage in the quote. Nintex Workflow Cloud makes participating in this process easy. Participants are responding to different steps in this automated process via e-mail. There are no other systems or apps to use which makes things much easier for the people involved.
Process insight - Nintex Workflow Cloud highlights in this step:
1. Nintex Forms - Used to kick off the pricing approval from within the opportunity.
2. Nintex Document Generation - Used to dynamically generate the quote and route to the appropriate approver based on the Global Approval Matrix information.
Contract generation, redlining and approval
Once pricing has been approved we are ready to engage the customer with both the quote and the contract. John Bavo is the customer contract at the NFL. Nintex Workflow Cloud used the Document Generation action to produce the contract dynamically and generated an email task. As a result, John will receive an e-mail with the contract along with some guidance on how to respond. If edits to the contract are required, John can easily make them and respond to the email with "redline." Nintex Workflow Cloud will pick up the response along with the redlined document and route it to Safalo's legal group for review.
Customer e-mail with contract
In many cases, a contract negotiation requires a number of redline steps between legal and the customer. Nintex Workflow Cloud makes this easy through the use of state machines within the workflow that allow for nonlinear processing. As changes are being made to the contract, the Workflow Cloud helps keep track changes by posting each redline version to Salesforce. This makes it incredibly easy for Casen and the legal team to see the changes in real time and refer back to each if needed.
Contract signature
Once the contract has been approved, we are ready for signature. When the customer's final edits are accepted by the Safalo legal team, Nintex Workflow Cloud routes the contract for e-signature. Signatures can happen via DocuSign or Adobe e-sign. This again is all facilitated over e-mail, making it seamless and easy for everyone involved. Once a signature is captured from each party the signed documents are stored in Salesforce as the contract of record.
E-Signature actions within the Nintex Workflow cloud designer
The benefits
Nintex has covered a lot of ground in this blog post and excluded a few things this workflow is doing behind the scenes! There are a lot of benefits to using the Nintex Workflow Cloud to tackle contract lifecycle management issues. If you are looking for ways to sell faster, eliminate complexity, and gain compliance Nintex can help.
In summary, let's review some of the core tenants of successful contract flow:
* Simplifying the buying and selling steps.
* Integrating to where your customers live.
* Converting manual tasks to logical flows.
* Transforming data into data-driven contracts.
* Automating global clauses based on your data.
* Tracking and notifying all related parties.
* Centralising global contract creation and management.
* Enabling constant change.
* Providing control within the line of business.
For more information on how you can go from quote to contract to signature without friction with Nintex visit www.nintex.com.
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