Integrate to Accelerate: Empower Sales & Legal Teams with Automated CLM

Today, when any business process requires the interconnection of several tools and interfaces, the risk of inefficiency is greater than ever before.  

Disparate data sources that aren’t seamlessly integrated are a common cause of frustration, especially when working across functions in a large organization with siloed practices leveraging different flavors of tools and software. Any disruption or delay can significantly impact your sales cycles and revenue generation. 

As a contract professional, creating structure from that complexity and chaos is a tough challenge. Fortunately, an agile contract management platform that’s designed to flex, extend, and integrate can help—but how? 

In a recent webinar, Paul Branch, Chief Networking Officer at World Commerce and Contracting, and Brittany Lees, Business Systems Architect at Health Catalyst (a leading provider of data and analytics technology for healthcare organizations), explained how integration was the key to a fruitful implementation of Agiloft CLM within the larger Health Catalyst ecosystem.  

Don’t just implement – integrate

Organizations at the onset of their CLM journey typically focus on implementation—getting capabilities up and running to deliver quick value. Stakeholders are consulted, requirements are drawn up, and vendors compared for ease of onboarding and availability of support. For most organizations, this is a perfectly adequate first step, but for Health Catalyst, this was far from enough. A recent period of growth and internal transformation had created an unwieldy system that needed immediate attention. 

“We went from one business unit of just a few hundred employees to acquiring five additional companies in the span of two years. Our previous methods of tracking contracts through email and spreadsheets quickly became obviously non-scalable. We had no way to track our contracts or provide any type of metrics. Version control was a problem, and we really needed to have a consolidated approach that was scalable as we continue to grow,” Lees said. 

Workflow streamlining, task automation, document management, and version control are the obvious quick wins that most SaaS solutions offer and can immediately bring efficiency gains to any sizable business. But the real game-changing aspect of a solution isn’t how disruptive it is, but how integratable. That’s because in any organization, productivity and efficiency comes from giving users the freedom to work in in their preferred tools, and the most effective path is integrating with existing workflows and processes wherever possible. 

“We had these five disparate contract flows…we wanted to integrate them into one standardized process…[and] integrate this with our selling process. We felt strongly that sales and legal needed to work closer together,” Lees said.  

Leveraging a Salesforce integration to drive results

With Agiloft’s ability to sync seamlessly with Salesforce, Health Catalyst had found its solution. Sales and legal teams could work hand-in-hand within a well-defined process. With designated owners, clear review and approval processes, and powerful reports and dashboards to provide visibility, teams were able to take control of contract management and deliver results. 

“We married our contracting and our sales process together, and now we’re bringing in data from our CLM into Salesforce forecasting…that better visibility into where we are within the overall lifecycle is a better indicator of where you’ll close the deal. We’ve consolidated our end-to-end document handling process from selling to contract execution,” Lees said. 

CLM solutions that integrate seamlessly with other software, such as Salesforce, enable businesses to further automate their contract processes and negotiate deals in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Additionally, data integration between systems allows for easy access to contract and customer information, creating a more efficient workflow for the various internal stakeholders, such as sales and legal teams. This allows for better collaboration throughout the organization through real-time syncing, all while ensuring compliance. 

“The Agiloft implementation has standardized contract generations and approvals, and we’ve freed up valuable resources and enabled transparency and visibility across the organization,” Lees said. 

 Furthermore, it is when integrating with other systems that the value of CLM gets unlocked.  

“It was critical for us that Agiloft synced with our Salesforce process, and we use it not just for a CLM but for our selling documents as well…The bidirectional feed has been key,” Lees said. “It’s really enabled us to keep a seamless process depending on what system you’re in. You’re able to update information wherever you’re at.” 

Empower teams with visibility

With automated CLM, powerful integrations, and the ease of a no-code platform, Health Catalyst is leveraging the full capabilities of Agiloft to bring unparalleled visibility and transparency into their contract management.  

“We’re able to see where we’re at within a pipeline: when we think we’ll close the deal, contract metrics, retention rates, all the way to invoicing…You can start to see if a client may not renew, [say] if they’re not paying their bills on time, [and we can] be proactive by having our account managers get in front of them…We’ve been able to really turn quite a few of those potential non-renewals around,” Lees said. 

Read the Case Study: Learn How Health Catalyst Leveraged Automated CLM to Break the Sales Bottleneck