2 Document Assembly Groups on Linkedin

If you are looking for document assembly resources, there are two groups on Linkedin you may want to check out.

The Document Assembly Group is an open, networking group comprised of members using document assembly in a variety of industries, as well as consultants and document assembly vendors. The group's overview states that "This group is dedicated to trying to find new ways to use document assembly to empower business users to do things better, faster and with less risk."

Lawyers and IT professionals are well represented in the group. Members start discussions and post questions and interesting articles. If you use document assembly or are interested in the topic, you're welcome to join and participate.

The Exari Community is a corporate group that serves as an online community for Exari clients, partners and consultants to facilitate best practices and communication. Anyone who uses Exari Document Assembly Software is welcome and encouraged to join. It's a great place to share tips and ideas, ask a question, get a pat on the back for automating complex conditional logic, and network with colleagues. People are very willing to share information and help each other.

If you have other document assembly resources to recommend, please do so in the comments below.

7 Reasons To Automate Your Contracts

Contracts are the backbone of every organization. They define and contain every aspect of all corporate relationships; with employees, customers, vendors, partners and stakeholders. Managing your contracts efficiently amounts to managing your business efficiently. And the same holds true whether your contracts are sales contracts, insurance policies, or financial documentation such as ISDA Master Agreements.

As pressures rise to reduce costs, safeguard against risk and improve compliance, a high quality contracts solution is becoming a “must have.” The cost of NOT implementing these efficiencies and safeguards is too high. IACCM President, Tim Cummins, has been quoted as saying, “Organizations which don’t manage their contracts effectively will be at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.”

Do any of the following issues apply to your contracts process? Take the self diagnostic test below to determine your contract creation and management needs.

1. Do you create a number of predictable negotiated documents each month?
2. Does re-keying contract data result in too many errors?
3. Is it too costly or time-consuming to have lawyers reviewing so many similar agreements?
4. Are you at risk for business people creating non-compliant agreements?
5. Does it take too long for the legal department to turn around agreements for internal business clients?
6. Are you unable to keep track of your rights and obligations when they fall due?
7. Do you have a clear understanding of the level of risk associated with your portfolio of contracts?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, it might be time to consider implementing a document generation and contract management system. These systems encourage staff adoption of best practices and help to build in compliance. You want to be sure that the solution you choose has the flexibility to expand to all contract types, even if the initial project is only for automating one. It is also important that the solution you choose meets your company's IT objectives and integrates with existing systems such as Salesforce.com, SharePoint, corporate databases, ERP systems, etc.

Click here to see a demo of Exari's document generation software.

Photo credit: jk5854

Faster, Safer NDAs & Sales Contracts

Sales and legal teams are investing excessive time and money creating repetitive, mission-critical documents. Experts indicate that, depending upon the industry, sales people can spend up to 25% of their time creating repetitive documents such as NDAs and sales contracts.

While producing these documents seems routine, it’s anything but. In fact, your organization can be losing money and increasing your exposure to risk using error-prone document creation processes.

Traditionally, organizations have relied on creating contracts by manually copying, pasting, and modifying content to meet specific needs or to accommodate unique customer requirements. However, this approach demands the close attention of the legal team who must review various drafts.

This approach to contract creation also creates bottlenecks, particularly at the end of a quarter when volumes of sales documents grow. In some cases, organizations can miss a revenue opportunity if appropriate terms and conditions are not included or are unreported. It also introduces compliance and regulatory problems when salespeople inadvertently omit or alter critical information.

Keeping an accurate list of active contracts is another challenge. And even if those contracts are kept in a central location, the visibility into their terms is limited. By capturing data when each contract is created and making EVERY piece of data searchable, you are able to run a wide range of reports to perform analysis and gain insight into performance and risk across your contract portfolio.

Innovative companies are moving past “copy and paste” to interactive document generation software which streamlines the contracts process by letting end users create legally pre-approved contracts, NDAs, etc. —simply by filling out web-based interviews.

Just as important, interactive document generation solutions bring these documents into a controlled and secure environment to minimize risk, maximize revenue opportunity, and free-up your sales team and General Counsel from spending time on low-value document creation and review to focus on high-value activities like closing business.

See it in action! Watch this 3-minute demo of interactive document generation for sales contracts now!

How to Win More Sales: Empower Your Sales Team

We've been talking a lot lately about ways that sales teams can win more deals. And, we've noticed that others across the blogosphere are too. Tim Cummins has two recent posts on Commitment Matters that speak to this very issue.

In Empowering Users for Better Decisions, Efficiency, Cummins says "Many contracts, commercial and legal groups struggle with the challenge of ‘user ineptitude’ They complain about the lack of understanding and ‘irresponsible’ behavior that is common within business units and Sales organizations."

This sometimes antagonistic relationship between sales and legal seems to come down to the sales team being in a rush to receive a contract they can execute to close their sale, and the legal department's obligation to carefully draft a contract that is most favorable for the organization. These are not mutually exclusive goals, and in fact, can be served by the same solution - sales contract automation.

If the legal team employs a document generation system to create a web-based questionnaire which, when completed by the sales person, outputs a compliant contract, both sides win. The sales team is empowered to take an active role in the process in a SAFE, CONTROLLED way and the legal department isn't dragged into the kind of document review pictured above.

And to add another layer of speed and efficiency to the process, there's esignature. Cummins also looks at this issue in Electronic Contracting: Have You Signed Up? where he interviews Jason Lemkin, CEO of Echosign {disclosure: Echosign integrates with Exari}. He asked Jason for his thoughts on the growing use of esignature – was it, for example, primarily seen as another way to cut costs?

The answer was interesting. Jason’s view is that the driver has more to do with web-based technologies maturing than with efficiencies and cost. “Executives are saying ‘We’re doing so much on the web, why can’t we do contract signatures?’” The failure to automate is seen increasingly as not just an irritant, but contrary to the image that businesses want to project.

Isn't it time to empower your sales team and speed up your contracts process? To learn how, try a demo of Exari's interactive document generation software here.

Photo credit: Cushing Library