From days to minutes: How Spectrum Mobility reduced time to revenue

The challenge

Spectrum Mobility is no stranger to Agiloft. That’s because they have been an Agiloft partner for the past decade. With over 200 Agiloft implementations under their belt, Spectrum Mobility knew what the Agiloft Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform could do and the benefits that their customers realized. It wasn’t until Spectrum Mobility started to feel new and unexpected pain across their business that they realized that they needed a contract solution as well.

Aytan Leibowitz, CEO of Spectrum Mobility shared their experience with us. “Our Master Service Agreement (MSA) is typically a three-year term, but one of our customers continued into a fourth year without a renewal. If they had pointed this out, it wouldn’t have reflected well on us. As a company specializing in contract services, we should have been on top of it.”

“We were performing work that was not covered by a contract because the agreement had expired without our awareness.“

– Aytan Leibowitz, CEO of Spectrum Mobility

It ended up that Spectrum Mobility was having the same challenges that they solve for their customers every day. Their business was expanding, but they lacked the ability to scale their contracting process due to their reliance on spreadsheets for tracking. As more services were being sold, more contracts were coming in, and the multiple-day turnaround time was unacceptable. The contracting process was ad hoc and lacking consistency. Often, inconsistent or outdated language would make it into a contract, and it wouldn’t attract attention until the contract was already signed. Once they did have a signed contract, keeping up with the exceptions and expiration dates was becoming more difficult with the sheer volume of contracts.

This is not an unusual scenario as the folks of Spectrum Mobility can tell you. Companies wait until the pain is consequential before solving contracting process issues. The problem is that the pain may come in the form of unintended contract renewals, unmet obligations, financial loss or penalties, or even risk exposure. Leibowitz says, “We hear our customers saying the same thing. We’re 3 years behind the service agreement and doing millions of dollars of work with a risk of not getting paid. The customer could walk away.”

Spectrum Mobility was determined to avoid delivering any further work that wasn’t covered by a valid contract. They needed a faster, repeatable, more accurate contracting process as business continued to grow.

The solution

Spectrum Mobility knew they had choices. Agiloft was not the only CLM vendor that they had worked with or implemented for customers. They also knew they needed a scalable, flexible system that would grow as they did, which made the choice to go with Agiloft an easy one. While solving today’s contracting problems was imperative, Leibowitz also wanted to know that “we’re future proof, we can integrate to other solutions to make our process more efficient, more effective.” This is what Agiloft would provide.

“One of the reasons we selected Agiloft is that we can manage not just the contracting process, but other processes as well.”

– Aytan Leibowitz, CEO of Spectrum Mobility

“We often talk about the crawl, walk, run approach in our implementations. So, the idea of continuous improvement, or having a solution that is flexible enough to allow us to scale up. We’re able to continuously make changes to the system to improve our processes. We can automate more of our workflows or add additional workflows to the system.”

Agiloft also provides the ability to create and use a clause library. Leibowitz mentions two benefits to this capability. “We’re able to get the statement of work out the door more quickly. Also, when the implementation team reads the signed agreement, it’s standardized for them. They know exactly what they’re doing versus having each salesperson writing it in a different way.”

The impact

Spectrum Mobility felt the impact of implementing Agiloft as their CLM in many good ways. With their templatized and automated SOW saving them days of waiting, they also integrated the CLM into their finance system so that a completed SOW instantaneously kicks off the finance workflow and generates an invoice.

Another way that they were able to decrease cycle-times and increase accuracy for new SOWs was by standardizing their legal language, which they house in a clause library. This gives them the ability to update the language once in the library and have that consistent language pulled into all new contracts.

“We literally bought ourselves time with Agiloft.”

– Aytan Leibowitz, CEO of Spectrum Mobility

Renewals are now back on track. Spectrum Mobility gets a proactive notification well ahead of the expiration date and now has a refined process to handle sending renewals. Leibowitz says, “We know if there’s an active SOW in the pipeline, how much work we’ve done, and how much work is expected.”

Rather than spending their time working on generating SOWs, Spectrum Mobility is now freed up to keep growing the business by meeting with more customers, quickly generating contracts, and getting the work the customers have paid for accomplished. Leibowitz concludes, “We literally bought ourselves time with Agiloft.”

Challenges

• Business growth with no ability to scale. Tracking contracts in spreadsheets

• With growing sales, couldn’t turn around contracts quickly enough to compete

• Chaotic, ad hoc contracting process

• Missed contract expirations and exceptions

Benefits

• Agiloft has allowed for growth and eliminated contract process growing pains

• No more wasted time writing bespoke SOWs. Generating standardized SOWs in the same day, within minutes of request

• Created a clause library that standardized language not only for airtight contracts but also for the implementation team that must carry out the work

• No more missing deadlines and carrying out work that is unprotected from customers walking away with an unpaid bill