Businesses can learn how to identify the ‘agreement trap’, the critical oversight of contract management that leads to heavy losses and operational inefficiency.
Companies increasingly realize today that an ‘agreement trap’ is a critical oversight of contract management and a potential source of financial losses and shortcomings on the part of business operations in today’s fast-paced business environment. Recent studies have found that organizations that have fragmented agreement workflows might spend 16 additional hours per agreement, translating to 18% more time on each contract. This will lead to an average annual waste of 190,000 hours per year in each organization, going as high as 55 billion hours worldwide.
The term ‘agreement trap’ refers to the pitfalls organizations experience while handling contracts without any strategic policy. Issues involved here often result from technical constraints and manual processes that go across the entire life cycle of an agreement. For instance, a sales team will suffer from delay in deal closure due to slow contracting and negotiation processes, and the marketing team has to push out the campaign delayed by poor management of partnerships and service agreements.
Organizations are moving to next-generation agreement management solutions that support seamless collaborative capabilities, dynamic search and analytics, and easy-to-use integrations with all requirements. Such solutions have the ability to be adaptable to an existing technology stack of a business, so as to minimize IT overhead integration and management. With such solution implementation, businesses can smoothly streamline the workflow related to agreements, minimizing time waste and being saved from threatened financial penalties associated with increased compliance incidents.
Furthermore, in persona-based workflows, an organization’s diverse user groups are enabled with the promise of streamlining and personalizing agreement processes. For instance, pre-filled agreements in sales that automatically include the latest update in a CRM system may accelerate the contracting process, thus helping sales teams spend more time in market activities.
It is worth concluding that the ‘agreement trap’ is overcome through the adoption of a holistic approach that includes not only the best agreement management technologies but also an overhaul of internal processes. Doing so unlocks massive economic value for businesses, improves business functioning, and maintains competitive superiority in the marketplace.
