Why Zoho Contracts
Contracts are at the core of all commercial relationships; essentially, every dollar entering or leaving a business is governed by a contract. But there are several challenges involved in contract management. At Zoho, we deal with many Contracts, and because we deal with many customers, we deal with many suppliers and employees. We have faced many of these challenges, and over the years, we have heard from our customers that they are facing them. But in recent times, other factors are driving the adoption towards contract management. Though these problems have been evident in the adoption of Zoho contract management, has been very minimal, but in recent times the adoption is going up. Several factors are driving this adoption.
An Increase in Complexity Is in Global Supply Chains
There are several reasons for this as well, technology is evolving rapidly, and geopolitical tensions and uncertainties are causing complex supply chain environments.
Business Landscape Is Becoming Highly Regulatory
Irrespective of the industry that you are operating in, regulations are cropping up more often than ever before, right? Be the GDP, our CPA across different aspects. Whenever a regulatory update comes out, businesses are forced to go and change policies in their organization. They’ll have to go back to their Contracts and change some of their clause languages whenever there is an organization-wide policy change. This is driving a lot of contract management software adoption, which fits in the context of today’s demo.
Divers Sales Model
Businesses today are forced to have flexible pricing models flexible business models. Because customers out there have a lot of options. If we do not offer flexibility for our customers, we are just losing our competitive advantage. But the problem is in providing flexible pricing. You need to have a contract management process that can accommodate this flexibility.
Growing Emphasis on Risk Mitigation
Risk is an inevitable part of any business, but with the recent pandemic, the emphasis on risk mitigation is at an all-time high. A recent study by world commerce and contracting has found that contract managers identify risk mitigation as their number one priority. Contract management is a critical piece to solving this problem. There are also other factors like increasing trends of consolidation that we see in the mergers and acquisitions. But for such mergers to happen, businesses need a forensic analysis of their current Contracts. They have to know what exactly is their standpoint from a revenue perspective. From a compliance perspective, only when they have such visibility that they’re able to make such mergers and collaborations,
These factors are driving this movement toward contract management, and we’re lucky that we are launching Contracts at the right time. Zoho Contracts were launched in July 2021. We are pretty early in the market.
Our Approach
We also see more potential in Contracts. We see Contracts as dynamic documents that touch every part of this. This could evolve into growth engines. Our vision is to build a contract management software that holistically approaches this problem to facilitate better business outcomes.
How Do We Do That?
We address these four aspects comprehensively.
- Streamlining an individual contract lifecycle
- Risk mitigation
- Improving governance
- Promoting cross-functional integration
How A Typical Contract Lifecycle Looks
Whenever a salesperson initiates a contract, so the legal associate, in exceptional cases, people author a contract. Then if there are deviations from the standard languages we are using, it goes to approval. It goes for negotiation. This is how a typical contract lifecycle books until it gets terminated.
Without a comprehensive contract or lifecycle management software, these businesses use multiple applications to address the process. They use a word processor to author the contract, then they attach this word document as email attachments and send it over email applications back and forth. And then they have a third-party signature software integrated into this process, and then they manage all the metadata, like the financial details’ renewal dates in a spreadsheet. When there are large volumes of Contracts, they have to manage them in Dropbox, Google Drive, or a Work Drive. They use document management software and a calendar to manage to call the contract deadlines.
We aim to replace all of these applications with just one application, which is Zoho Contracts.
Zoho Contracts
Zoho contract is a personalized dashboard that gives the users a high-level overview of how their Contracts perform.
Zoho CRM And Zoho Contracts Integration
You will have to install this Zoho CRM plugin for third-party integration. Go to Zoho CRM, the settings module, and then under the marketplace, you will find Zoho. Click on Zoho, search for Zoho Contracts, and install it. And at the time of setting up your integration, you can map your account fields to the counterparty fields in Zoho Contracts.
So, this is one of the key advantages of this integration; since you already have the account information in Zoho CRM, you do not have to enter it into Zoho Contracts. You can map these fields to these Zoho Contracts counterparty. Similarly, the contact details in Zoho CRM can be mapped as the counterparty contact details in Zoho Contracts. Then you can set assignment rules. That is, if you have a legal team that manages your Contracts, you can decide what type of contract should be assigned to who. And you can also map the fields for these individual contract types.
Once you’ve set up your Zoho Contracts integration, you will find this request contract button at the top when you go to your deal record. When you click the request contract button, a window opens, and you can choose the contract type you want to create. If you choose the contract type and choose products sales agreement, a contract, type the fields associated with this particular contract type will be displayed here.
As you’ll notice, the requester is the user who is using the CRM. And the compacting name is the account name in Zoho CRM, and the primary contact is the contact details in Zoho. Once you enter all these details and a friendly request, a new contract document will be created in Zoho Contracts. And it will be assigned to the legal associate you set during the assignment tool setup.
