Automating contract management accelerates sales

The challenge

At Immersion Corporation, a company at the forefront of one of the most exciting consumer-facing technologies in the world, the Legal team worked to maintain over 5,000 contracts and 3,000 records in SharePoint, supplemented by PDFs in a desktop folder. Approvals took place over email and reporting was limited. Immersion had deployed Salesforce Sales Cloud but it didn’t integrate contract management processes and functionality. This was further complicated by the number of channels by which a contract could be initiated and the need for templates to support the unique requirements of a licensing company.

The most pressing requirement regarding contract requests is seamless integration with Salesforce. The Immersion team uses a custom Salesforce form they refer to as a deal sheet. Once this form is approved, it’s imperative that it moves into contract review and subsequent approval as quickly as possible. To enable Immersion’s rapid sales response, a purchase request (PR) commences in sync with the contract. This PR workflow needed to be integrated with the contract approval process as the two are intrinsically linked from start to finish.

Due to this crucial connection between a contract and a purchase request, Immersion required a system that could suspend select contracts in the midst of their approval cycle. It would need to intelligently distinguish these particular contracts from others, and then automatically suspend the record until the related PR was released by the Finance department, then resume where it left off.

The Immersion team had one more requirement to ensure a quick initial engagement for sales: a varying approval process based on the purchase threshold. Immersion’s Legal team needed a system with the sophistication to skip certain approvers when their review wasn’t required, thereby accelerating the sales cycle even further. This unique hierarchy would be reflected within the workflow so that the approval could move swiftly through an integrated sales and contract cycle.

“My biggest takeaway was how Yuhao was able to understand our needs and implement the right solutions.”

– Catherine McCaffrey, Immersion Senior Stock and Contracts Administrator

Catherine McCaffrey, Senior Stock and Contracts Administrator for Immersion, describes its solution search: “The Legal team drove the process. We needed to make sure that we addressed all of the company’s contracts, including licensing contracts. Several people had different ideas across the company and we considered a number of options. In the end, we decided that Agiloft would be a good platform for moving us forward.”

The solution

The first step was importing all existing contracts and ensuring that new agreements were generated as intended. Once Immersion and Agiloft laid the foundation, they began configuring Agiloft to align with its customized Salesforce form.

Agiloft implementer Yuhao Zhou developed the solution to import information related to newly approved deal sheets from Salesforce on a nightly basis. The information includes details from the accounts and the contacts, as well as some metadata. These deal sheets then become contract requests, which initiates its unique workflows. The workflows include the requirement to pause certain approvals based on PR status and to skip approvers based on the PR threshold. This functionality required the configuration of custom relationships to ensure the automation works as intended and the right approvers are identified each time.

Catherine shares, “My biggest takeaway was how Yuhao was able to understand our needs and implement the right solutions without creating more work. When we would say that we needed something—not even articulating what we wanted— he would just know it and make it happen. Yuhao also made sure we didn’t exceed the implementation budget. Still, he was always available to us. We never had a sense of having to ration his time to make the budget work.”

The impact

The evenings at Immersion are a busy time for its Agiloft system. As soon as the lights dim, the system syncs with Salesforce, generating contract records and initiating approval workflows. This includes more than 10 fields of Salesforce data transferring seamlessly into Agiloft without any additional steps taken by the Sales or Legal teams. The efficiencies go beyond the initial process: reminders to the sales requesters regarding necessary follow-ups are automatically triggered once they’ve completed the deal sheet. If Sales people want to see their contract, they can log in to Agiloft from the general employee portal. They are assigned to the “creator” group and can easily review all the contracts where they are listed as “requester.” The system ensures that only the appropriate team members can view the contracts, maintaining a high level of security that protects important customer information. In addition, Sales managers can easily access all the contracts that are assigned to their sales region(s) even if created by another team member.

The solution also helps the Finance department complete their work in Oracle Finance. Agiloft prepares reports containing the necessary information, including purchase request details. Finance staff can use the generated reports from Agiloft to quickly import contract and purchase request records into Oracle.

“Yuhao made sure we didn’t exceed the implementation budget. Still, he was always available to us.”

– Catherine McCaffrey

“One of the directors in the Legal department is accustomed to asking for contracts and reports. I can now just point to where it exists in Agiloft and he can access everything he needs from there.” Catherine concludes.

Challenges

Need to automate contract execution
to accelerate sales cycle

Accommodate unique association between licensing contracts and purchase requests that involved workflow pauses and skipped approvers

Ability to pull data from custom templates in Salesforce crucial to successful contract uploads

Benefits

Seamless integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud achieved greater efficiencies and accelerated completion of sales deliverables

Configured for Immersion-specific Salesforce templates to support automated uploads

Increased transparency and harmony across Sales, Finance and Legal throughout contract lifecycle

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