How AI-Driven CLM Can Help Increase Efficiency and Shorten Sales Cycles for Your Sales Team

As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to transform the contract lifecycle management process, much of the focus tends to be on how it can improve legal review or procurement. But AI-driven CLM solutions have a vital role to play in the sales process as well.

Here are 10 examples of how AI-driven CLM solutions can increase efficiency and improve the return on investment of sales teams’ efforts in virtually any organization.

1. Make Informed Marketing and Sales Decisions

There are two critical elements to making the best strategic decisions for your organization’s sales and marketing teams. The first is having as much data as possible, and the second is being able to analyze that data effectively.

An AI-enabled CLM solution can help to consolidate all of your organization’s historical sales and contract data. It can then intelligently parse it and look for patterns that lead to desirable and undesirable outcomes and help you adjust your processes accordingly.

Risk of inaction: At best, you are making informed guesses about what is working and needs adjustment in your sales and marketing processes, and you are leaving a lot of valuable insights on the table.

2. Speed Up Contract Review

With the advantage of machine learning, an AI-driven CLM sales solution can review, redline, and conduct a first-pass review of a contract in minutes. As it learns from the feedback that it receives from human analysts, it becomes even more efficient and accurate over time.

Risk of inaction: Without AI-enabled CLM, contract review can either be thorough, or it can be fast, but it cannot be both.

3. Enhance Existing Tools

An AI-driven CLM platform can integrate with the existing tools that your sales team is already using, like Salesforce and Slack. It expands their utility by automating the tasks that your team is already using them for, like generating proposals or contracts that are e-signature ready.

Risk of inaction: Your sales team members will have to continue to spend time on rote tasks instead of landing their next deal.

4. Speed Up Contract Drafting

With a repository of contract clauses and best practices already defined by your organization, an AI-powered CLM solution can quickly draft contracts compliant with your organization’s standards.

Risk of inaction: the contracts that you draft will take longer and may include unnecessary clauses or conditions that could delay execution or lead to other unfavorable outcomes.

5. Prioritize Deals Likely to Close

An AI-driven CLM sales solution can parse millions of data points to determine which deals in the sales pipeline are most likely to close. It can also analyze which deals are in need of further action to move them along, as well as suggest what actions are likely to move them toward execution.

Risk of inaction: Without the ability to analyze the vast amount of quantifiable data that is available to your sales team, you are limited to making educated guesses about which deals stand the best chance of closing and what needs to be done in order to get them there.

6. Shorten Sales Cycles

Even if absolute revenue remains the same, an AI-driven CLM platform can result in greater efficiency that shortens sales cycles. A shorter sales cycle means better cash flow for the organization, which can eliminate the need to rely on short-term debt and leave the organization in a better position to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.

Risk of inaction: Even in a best-case scenario, a sales team that does not operate with the benefit of an AI-driven CLM platform cannot move deals through the pipeline as quickly — and lost time is lost money.

7. Focus Sales Team on Strengths

In recent years, more and more of the sales process has been automated, but many tools still require sales team members to do most of the rote work to get the best results from them.

With the integration of an AI-driven CLM solution, your sales team is freed up from work that the platform can do with a high degree of accuracy. This allows them to spend their time cultivating relationships and networking with new and potential customers.

Risk of inaction: Every minute that your sales team is spending on doing the work that an AI-enabled platform can do, it means that they are not doing the kind of work that it cannot do: making human connections with the customers that your organization needs to thrive.

8. Optimize ROI of Incentives

An AI-driven CLM platform can analyze more than just your sales pipeline. It can also analyze how you are incentivizing your sales team, and if those incentives are driving the best results. AI-enabled analysis helps you make the right decisions about who to reward and what to reward them for.

Risk of inaction: you may be overlooking unintended consequences of an incentive plan that rewards short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth, or other undesirable outcomes.

9. Increase Transparency

With an intuitive AI-driven CLM sales solution that manages the entire sales pipeline, it makes it easy for senior management to see the state of every single deal at a glance. Not only does this give managers a clearer picture of the pipeline in a fraction of the time, it frees them up to actually manage their team and support junior or underperforming team members.

Risk of inaction: A lack of visibility into the state of deals in progress limits insight into where they are, who is responsible for the next steps, and what those next steps are.

10. Access Critical Information On Demand

Having access to a huge volume of information is only half the battle. You also need to be able to find the data that you need, when you need it. And depending on where you are in the lifecycle of a deal, that is an ever-changing need.

An AI-enabled CLM sales solution can quickly parse enormous amounts of data and serve your sales team members only the information that is relevant to their specific situation, providing clear insights in a fraction of the time.

Risk of inaction: The value of your data is buried under its own weight, and the most useful pieces of information may never be surfaced to your sales team members when they need it most.

These are just a few of the ways that an AI-enabled CLM sales solution can improve the efficiency and ROI of your organization’s sales team. To learn more about how AI-enabled CLM can deliver results for your organization please schedule an assessment here.