Revenue Cloud: Part 6 - Salesforce Contracts

Author: Anuj Vaishampayan

Revenue Cloud (formerly Revenue Lifecycle Management or RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into Revenue Cloud and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.

Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post. See all the posts in this series below:

• Revenue Cloud Part 1 - Introduction
• Revenue Cloud Part 2 - Product Catalog Management (PCM)
• Revenue Cloud Part 3 - Salesforce Pricing
• Revenue Cloud Part 4 - Product Configurator (Configure, Price, Quote – CPQ)
• Revenue Cloud Part 5 - Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO)
• Revenue Cloud Part 6 - Salesforce Contracts
• Revenue Cloud Part 7 - Summary & Closing Thoughts
• Revenue Cloud Part 8 - Revenue Cloud Performance

Salesforce Contracts - Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Introducing Salesforce Contracts

Managing the end-to-end lifecycle of contracts is a critical component of any organization's sales process. The Salesforce Contracts application provides a comprehensive solution that allows customers to associate contracts with opportunities, orders, quotes, standard Salesforce objects, and even custom objects. This integration ensures that contracts seamlessly progress through various sales stages, from initial opportunity to final contract.

With Salesforce Contracts, you can streamline the creation and management of all types of contracts, including transactional agreements tied to sales processes and standalone contracts like non-disclosure agreements or partner agreements. The application’s capabilities extend to contract lifecycle configuration, object state definition, and built-in integration with DocuSign for e-signatures, ensuring a smooth and efficient contract management process.

Key Features

Salesforce Contracts APIs

Salesforce Contracts APIs facilitate industry-specific use cases by fully orchestrating application functions. These APIs allow for seamless integration and customization, ensuring that businesses can adapt contract management to their unique requirements. With these APIs, companies can automate the creation, updating, and management of contracts, reducing the need for manual intervention and minimizing errors.

See more Salesforce Contracts API Details.

Create and Update Contracts

Salesforce Contracts enables the creation and updating of contracts directly from opportunities, orders, quotes, or any standard Salesforce object, as well as custom objects. This feature ensures that contracts are always aligned with the latest sales data, providing a seamless flow from sales activities to contract finalization. The ability to generate contracts from various objects allows for greater flexibility and efficiency in managing the contract lifecycle.

Contract Document Generation

The contract document generation feature allows users to produce documents within a contract document version. This ensures that all contract-related documents are consistent and up-to-date, reflecting the latest changes and agreements. Document generation can be customized to include specific terms, conditions, and clauses relevant to the contract, providing a comprehensive and accurate representation of the agreement.

Document Version Management

Document version management simplifies maintaining an accurate record of changes made to contract documents throughout their lifecycle. This feature enables users to track modifications, revert to previous versions if necessary, and ensure that all stakeholders are working with the most current information. Effective version management is crucial for maintaining the integrity and reliability of contract documents.

Contract Type

Salesforce Contracts supports the management of various types of contracts with different lifecycles within an organization. This feature allows businesses to define and handle multiple contract types, each with its own unique characteristics and requirements. By accommodating diverse contract types, companies can ensure that their contract management processes are tailored to their specific needs.

Contract Lifecycle Management and State Model Integration

Contract lifecycle management and state model integration automate and streamline end-to-end contract lifecycles. Using Object State Definition, users can define the lifecycle for a specific contract type, controlling the actions and operations available at each state of a contract. This structured approach ensures that contracts progress through their lifecycle in a controlled and consistent manner, reducing the risk of errors and delays.

E-Signature Integration

The e-signature integration feature enables users to review and sign documents electronically. Salesforce Contracts integrates with DocuSign to provide a seamless e-signature experience, expediting the contract execution process. Electronic signatures enhance the efficiency and security of contract management, ensuring that agreements are finalized quickly and accurately.

Unique Features

Obligation Management

Obligation Management tracks, fulfills, and manages obligations, assesses compliance, and keeps related risks under control. This feature ensures that all contractual obligations are monitored and enforced, reducing the likelihood of breaches and enhancing accountability.

• Track Obligations:?Capture and track obligations directly from the contract.
• Assign Obligations:?Assign specific obligations to individual stakeholders for fulfillment.
• Understand the Status:?Receive timely updates on obligation status for risk mitigation and prompt course corrections.
• Notifications & Alerts:?Get alerts and notifications on obligation status changes.

Integration with Microsoft Office 365

Salesforce Contracts offers integration capabilities with Microsoft Office 365, allowing seamless data exchange and improved operational efficiency for users leveraging Office 365 collaboration capabilities. This integration ensures that contract management processes can be enhanced with the advanced functionalities and scalability provided by Office 365, supporting more robust and flexible contract solutions.

Document Template Designer

Design Document Templates in Microsoft Office 365

The Salesforce Contracts Connector for Word add-in provides a quick and efficient way to design and maintain document templates, and to create and edit contract documents using Microsoft 365 Word features. It simplifies the search process for elements like clauses within the templates, prevents syntax errors, and provides a smooth editing and saving experience. Note that there are some known limitations for Document Designer for Office 365, which can be found here.

Design Document Templates in Salesforce

The Design Document Template feature allows users to create and generate documents from templates in Microsoft Word (.docx) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) formats. Key functionalities include:

• Template Creation:?Design document templates.. The Microsoft Word option is available with the ContractManagementAddOn license.
• Token Integration:?Replace tokens with object values to streamline data merging.
• OmniStudio Compatibility:?Existing OmniStudio or Industries users can enable this feature.
• JSON Data Association:?Integrate input JSON data from any source, such as OmniStudio Data Mapper (formerly DataRaptor) or OmniScript, into templates.

Document Clause Library

The Document Clause Library is a central repository of preapproved and prebuilt standardized template clauses for building contracts and other legal documents. It expedites document creation, enabling the sales team to send out contracts without contacting the legal team for every deal. Key functionalities include:

• Document Clauses: Define the terms of agreements, such as goods or services delivery, payment terms, ownership rights, or applicable law. Predefined, reusable clauses facilitate creating clauses.
• Document Clause Sets: Group and organize related clauses based on their variations and versions, ensuring consistency and accuracy in documents.
• Submit a Clause for Review: Mark specific content within a contract as a clause and initiate a review. Submit clauses through the Office 365 editor, the contract record page, or the extraction results page.
• Add a Reviewed Clause to Clause Library: Review clause requests, create or change clause sets, and add suitable clauses to the library, maintaining compliance with organizational standards.

Contracts AI

Harness the power of AI to streamline the contracting process. Note that this feature is not part of the Salesforce Contracts SKU and requires the Einstein for Sales or Einstein for Service SKU. AI capabilities enhance the efficiency of contract management by automating and optimizing various processes.

Smart Clause Generation

Draft contract clauses with a prompt, obtain Einstein GPT recommended clauses with confidence scores, refine the results, and promote clauses to the library after review. This feature leverages AI to assist in drafting and refining contract clauses, ensuring that they are both accurate and relevant.

Legacy Contract Digitization

Derive key metadata such as names and dates, extract clauses from unstructured language, and create new digital contract records. This feature helps transition traditional paper-based contracts into a digital format, facilitating easier management and analysis.

Comparison with Vlocity CLM

While both Salesforce Contracts and Vlocity CLM provide robust contract lifecycle management solutions, there are key differences and similarities. Salesforce Contracts is a native Salesforce application with rich document generation and management capabilities, with the data model and business logic moved into the Salesforce core platform, streamlining implementation and performance. On the other hand, Vlocity CLM, is part of the various formerly Vlocity managed packages such as vlocity_cmt for Communications Cloud, and the data model and business logic is part of the managed package. Key features includ:

• Document Template Designer: Both solutions provide robust document design capabilities, allowing users to create and manage document templates. Web Templates seem to be retired in favour of Word and PowerPoint templates, and functionality gaps have been filled, so you no longer need to decide between Web and Word/PowerPoint templates, and instead get the best of both worlds with Word and PowerPoint templates.
• Document Versioning: Both platforms offer document version management to track changes and ensure consistency.
• Clause Library: Each solution includes a clause library, enabling the use of preapproved, reusable clauses to streamline contract creation. As a much welcomed changed, Clauses can now be easily used with Word templates and inserted via a user-friendly UI at both design time? and run-time.
• Obligations: Obligations are quite similar to the Contract Terms feature in Vlocity CLM, though the UI/UX has been refreshed, and many new capabilities have been added, such as notifications and better collaboration.

Comparison with Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick) has a native document generation feature and can also leverage Conga for document generation. At a high level, there are many similar concepts, but it differs in the details. Salesforce CPQ has some basic Contract Lifecycle Management features such as amendments and renewals, but Salesforce Contracts bring significantly more to the table.

Closing Thoughts

Salesforce Contracts offers a comprehensive solution for managing the entire contract lifecycle within the Salesforce ecosystem. Its seamless integration ensures that contracts progress smoothly through the various stages of the sales process, from creation to execution. This application supports both transactional agreements tied to sales processes and standalone contracts, such as non-disclosure agreements.

Professionals familiar with Vlocity CLM will find themselves at home with many similarities including both the high level approach and detailed features, such as document template design, document version management, and the clause library. There are a few new things and the UI/UX has been refreshed (for the better!), but in general, it will be a quick ramp up.

For those coming from Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick) backgrounds, there will be a bigger learning curve as the document generation features are similar at a high level, but the other Contract Lifecycle Management features are much richer than what is available in Salesforce CPQ. Overall, this is an smaller and easier module to learn and master than CPQ and DRO.

We look forward to sharing a summary and our conclusions on Revenue Cloud in our next post.