Modernize intelligent contracting for sales

Typical sales organizations focus the vast majority of their time, energy, and budget on acquiring new accounts. This includes all of the standard pre-signature activities like phone calls, emails, demos, proposals, and quotes. Complacent sales leaders are satisfied with traditional customer lifecycle visibility—starting with lead activity insights and ending with a view of opportunities. And when they think about optimization, their efforts are aimed at streamlining customer acquisition.  

Forward-thinking leaders, on the other hand, recognize the importance of capturing every revenue opportunity and take steps to pivot from sales leadership to revenue leadership. They understand that optimizing contract value means looking at the entire customer lifecycle and capturing incremental revenue through “post-signature” activities like cross-sells, upsells, renewals, and more.   

Current state of sales 

The current state of sales leadership is concerned with maximizing revenue opportunities through traditional sales activities like prospecting, lead generation, phone calls, demos, proposals, and quotes. They work hard to negotiate each contract for maximum value, but once the deal is signed, they hand over responsibility for contract oversight to the legal team. As a result, contract visibility extends only across this early segment of the customer lifecycle.  This leaves contract optimization—the way terms and obligations impact revenue after the contract is executed—in an information black hole. Sales leaders have no visibility into things like cross-sells, upsells, renewals, liability clauses, and other obligations that can impact revenue post-signature. 

The future state of true revenue leadership lies in capturing every revenue opportunity. To do this, sales teams must identify revenue opportunities across the entire customer lifecycle and proactively manage customer accounts to act on those opportunities. 

There is a significant gap between the current state of sales leadership and the desired future state of comprehensive revenue leadership. To close this gap, leaders must commit to transforming revenue operations to deliver a better experience for buyers and sellers alike.  

Reaching the desired future state of sales means the cycle no longer stops with a closed-won opportunity. This thought process requires closing the visibility gap to allow revenue lifecycle leaders to understand each contract's obligations and actual lifetime value to power accurate and complete forecasting for cross-sells, upsells, and renewals—and deliver an exceptional customer experience. The key to achieving this fundamental shift is contract intelligence. 

What is contract intelligence?  

Contract intelligence is a new approach to contract lifecycle management that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform static contracts into a valuable business asset. Instead of negotiating contracts and filing them away, contract intelligence puts revenue opportunities at your fingertips. How? A contract intelligence platform can extract dates, terms, and other critical information from existing contracts. It then aggregates this data into a searchable, centralized repository where it can be leveraged to provide end-to-end contract insights.  

Read the full eBook to learn how Conga Contract Intelligence uses best-in-class AI and machine learning capabilities to extract unstructured text data from contracts and organize it into the most accurate, structured data you can trust. With full visibility into your contracts, you can confidently track obligations and manage opportunities to maximize revenue.