As a quick caveat, I did a bit of consulting work for Contract Live over one year ago, because I thought they had an awesome product. I received a general press release for this announcement and thought it newsworthy.
Contract Live has launched an updated version of its Contract Management platform, and has rolled out features to allow companies to negotiate contracts via Contract Live. Founded in 2010, the web platform allows companies to manage contracts online, receive alerts concerning actions like payments to be made or conclusion/renewal, as well as an easy search access to them. Disrupting the filing cabinet, Contract Live has always been useful, with clients all over the world, but today they have taken the next step, introducing negotiations and digital signatures to their platform.
The new feature has, first of all, a great impact on Contract Live’s stickiness as a platform. With sales managers able to digitally track the talking points of a certain contract, they will become more effective at managing more sales processes at once, and may be finding themselves closing more deals more often. Negotiations have always been a face-to-face discussion – and many large contracts will remain that away – however, many negotiations are just a matter of agreeing on one or two talking points, and focusing those discussions on a digital platform may help keep discussions impersonal and on-track
The feature also well help is making sales autonomous, by introducing new businesses to Contract Live in a B2B-style virality. For each client that uses the negotiations and digital signature tool with their clients, that is an opportunity for Contract Live to grab another user themselves. Of course, Contract Live will have to be careful about how they on-board new clients this way – no one will want to do negotiations on their platform if it means spamming their clients with invites for the next six months – but that is a question of ‘how’ not ‘if.’
In addition, they have introduced Digital SIgnatures – a tool which has existed in the US for quite some time – which I am quite excited about. Conforming to all the French laws (and I assume, the laws in general around digital signatures), Contract Live allows users to digitally sign and confirm their signature by text message, like at the bank, and any change to the signed contract will require another signature, which means that both parties have access to the mutually agreed upon contract at anytime via the Contract Live platform.
This digital signature alone may disrupt the way contracts are handled in France. Contract Live claims this process will reduce one month on average off of the contract signing process – not surprising if you’ve ever tried to get something signed by your bank, for example. Contract Live already counts SNCF, Free, and Lagardere as clients.
The service is currently available at 29,99€ per month
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