DRG Speeds Up Sales Cycles With SpringCM

For Decision Resources Group (DRG), a firm that supplies information and technology services to healthcare providers worldwide, contracts are an essential part of the sales cycle. Prior to using SpringCM’s contract management technology in conjunction with Salesforce.com’s CRM system, however, the company’s quoting and reporting took far too long—up to three weeks in some cases, according to Carol Barry, DRG’s vice president of customer experience—and called for a messy process that required IT support.

Before deploying SpringCM and Salesforce, DRG had recently added to its roster 10 healthcare software companies, and because it inherited 10 separate sales teams, the challenge was to unify them so they could all sell to the same customers. One goal was to streamline the process with contracts. This meant “transitioning to an account manager strategy, where each account has one point of contact who will be the quarterback for all other sales, service, and support needs,” Barry says. This could “only be achieved by unifying the entire lead-to-cash cycle.”

DRG set out to tie together the various entities on a common platform that would allow them to collaborate by accessing a universal view of their contracts. The outfit had chosen Salesforce.com as that platform best suited to accelerate its sales process, as it would enable a smoother transition than its competitors. In addition, DRG had identified a number of other applications that synced with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, including Pardot’s marketing automation system, SteelBrick’s configure-price-quote (CPQ) solution, and DocuSign’s electronic signature tools—all of which it was implementing at that time.

But DRG soon encountered difficulties with this configuration, as its legal department learned that those tools would not allow employees from that department to access and review contracts without investing in additional Salesforce licenses. The company needed contract management, and that’s where SpringCM entered the picture. With SpringCM’s contract management solution, DRG added a component that would accommodate negotiations, text adjustments, and “redlines,” in addition to access to third-party contracts, and it would not require DRG to pay for extra Salesforce seats, a significant cost saving. Furthermore, Spring CM provided access to version control and history so that DRG could manage past and current terms.

With SpringCM filling the void DRG spotted in its quote-to-cash process, the company was ready for implementation, which happened in September 2015, with assistance from its partners CloudSherpas and Accenture. At the same time, the company was implementing Salesforce’s CRM and CPQ solutions from Steelbrick, DocuSign, and Pardot. This all took a total of five months.

Since then, the results have been noticeable for DRG. All of DRG’s business units and departments can now work on the same platform, and the legal department can quickly search through contract history. The company says it can now deliver up to 400 contracts a month.

“Closing business faster means more money to the company and to the sales reps individually, so getting the process done faster results in major revenue add to the company,” Barry says. For one thing, the company had been getting complaints about the amount of time it took to turn around contracts, meaning that it could potentially lose business due to low customer satisfaction. Making the process self-serve has helped the company on this front.

“In addition, how seamless the process is for DRG internally has resulted in improved productivity and minimized how many tools the teams need to work in and use, creating a much more simple process for generating, approving, and reviewing—as well as finding—documents and contracts,” Barry says. 

The Payoff

Since adopting SpringCM's contract management software to help its sales and legal teams produce contracts, DRG has been able to achieve the following results:

• deliver up to 400 contracts a month;
• increase customer satisfaction and reduce complaints on processing times;
• eliminate friction between business departments; and
• save the expense of additional software seats.