Companies lose contracts. And therefore, lose revenue, product and future partnerships. Even though companies spend countless hours and money negotiating and signing these complex deals, when they are executed, the contract ends up sitting in email, a hard drive, a personal Dropbox, etc. Then, there is a different person who is expected to "manage" the partnership now that the deal is closed. That person may never see the contract, but gets told some of the key things that are expected, and goes on their way with the best intentions.
This starts to break down when:
- The person who executed the deal leaves the company, and their email account is deleted. Then the Partner Manager has a question about the deal, but the physical contract and the person who did the deal are nowhere to be found.
- This gets worse when you have hundreds or thousands of contracts, with many different divisions inside of a large corporation.
- What happens when you change your Privacy Policy or your Terms of Service, and you remember you committed in a few of your contracts to notify your partners if those change, otherwise the deal could automatically terminate. How do you find those deals? That's not something your partner manager would normally get in their initial briefing.
- Or when you hire a new General Manager to take over a division that hasn't had a General Manager for over a year. You know there are thousands of pieces of content that have been licensed, but no one knows where those agreements are. You start calling all these partners and find out some of these partners have not been paid in two years, and some of them had gone out of business years ago. These deals are now far out of compliance. Technically, this content has been illegally on your site. You could be sued.
There are many other horror stories I've lived through and heard about. But these are just a few of the reasons why having a contract storage and partner management platform in place is so important.
DealSafe helps organizations manage these pain-points--the areas of an organization that are still run by paper and word of mouth. DealSafe helps a company digitize every contract, extract the key terms into a database, and then provides a number of partner management tools to alert you at key times of the deal, analyze deal performance, and optimize future performance.
To read more from John, visit dealsafe.co/blog.