Making Business Flow More Efficiently: KORE’s Contracting Transformation

There’s a well-known adage in the sales world: Time kills deals. No one knows that better than the sales rep whose to-do list is constantly bogged down by manual tasks. Many sales teams are tapping into technology to automate things like quote generation. But getting the quote is only half the battle. There are many more complex, error-prone steps to navigate before sealing the deal—from contract negotiation to final signature.

We chatted with KORE’s director of enterprise applications, Nicki Brock, about how her team is leveraging Docusign CLM’s powerful workflow engine to create a friction free quote-to-cash process while streamlining other internal processes.

Here are the key takeaways from our talk:

The contract gap struggle is real

Tackling challenges is in Nicki Brock’s DNA. In the off-hours, she’s a LEGO master, Peloton guru and mentor with Champions for Learning in Naples, Florida. By day, she’s the in-house expert on all enterprise applications at KORE, including Salesforce, Zendesk and Docusign.

“My team does a lot of empathy mapping - a lot of working backwards to really understand the business problems we need to solve,” Nicki said.

In 2019, Brock and her team were tasked with a challenge that took center stage as the company grew rapidly through acquisition: closing gaps in the company’s quote-to-contract process that were creating loads of unnecessary manual work.

KORE had already automated critical pieces in its sales stack—using Salesforce CPQ for quotes and proposals and Docusign eSignature for signing. But everything before and after the signature still required a lot of human intervention.

“We were getting pricing from one place, signatures from another—and we had an entire resource devoted to creating contracts outside of those systems,” Nicki said. As a result, deals were delayed, and sales reps had no visibility into where contracts were in the approval process.

CLM is the key to connecting the digital dots

Nicki found the solution she was looking for at a Salesforce World Tour event. “I saw a demo of Docusign CLM and thought: Wow, this is exactly what we need,” she said. Bringing CLM into the contracting flow not only solved KORE’s contract gap problem—it also helped boost the company’s Salesforce ROI. Now, sales users can self-generate standard proposals and contracts directly from the CRM opportunity, eliminating the need for tedious data re-entry.

“Timewise, we’ve seen an amazing improvement,” Nicki said. “Sales teams can have a standard contract out to a customer within an hour.” Resource-wise, KORE doesn't require nearly as much effort from its contracts team, which is primarily performing quality control now.

Since everything is happening in the tool sales users have been using for years, ramp-up time was super short. Nicki and her team involved everyone in user testing before go-live—so they knew what to expect. They went live with CLM on a Monday—and everyone was comfortable with the new process by Tuesday.

The benefits of CLM go beyond sales and contracting

When quotes and MSAs are sent out by sellers from a CPQ tool, they’re rarely final. The biggest pains in the contract process are often felt during negotiations and approvals. When handled by email, the process can drag on—with negotiations taking an average of 25 days, according to our research. As KORE discovered, this can be made exponentially easier with a little bit of automation.

“Legal has really appreciated the streamlined redlining and version control,” said Brock. Now, everything is tracked centrally—with a complete audit trail of who did what and when—enabling faster contract reviews. The speed of turning agreements around has gone from multiple days to a couple of hours or less.

The benefits of CLM extend beyond contracting. KORE is also tapping its workflow capabilities to streamline other processes, including order fulfillment. For example, when a customer places an order for parts, a workflow kicks off for the fulfillment team in CLM. And now, instead of printed orders and manual handoffs, the entire process happens on a tablet.

“In the old days, an email might be sitting in an inbox for days if someone’s out of the office. Now, another person can just take over their tasks,” said Nicki. “By digitizing this with CLM, we’re saving a ridiculous amount of time while creating a frictionless user experience.”

Looking to the future, Nicki and the team are excited to see what else they can do with CLM. “We’re continuing to build out more advanced workflows for what we’re calling ‘Paperless KORE’ initiatives,” she said.

Read the full story here.