As companies grow through acquisition, the contracts that underpin their business relationships become increasingly difficult to manage, and that’s true across every corner of the organization: from Legal to Accounting to Sales and beyond. Fortunately, Contract AI has the ability to transform how these agreements are managed.
One example of Contract AI’s power can be seen in a recent engagement between Pramata and a global enterprise software solution company. The company’s challenges weren’t unique, and its story highlights how Pramata and Salesforce together create an optimal environment for contract management, especially after multiple acquisitions. Keep reading to learn how Pramata’s enterprise grade Contract AI solved this software provider’s M&A induced contract chaos by complementing the organization’s existing Salesforce-based contract management.
Expanding Salesforce’s capabilities for post-acquisition contract management
This global software solution provider expanded rapidly through multiple acquisitions over the past three years, incorporating businesses from different countries and with varying product lines. This growth created a complex contract ecosystem with inconsistent templates, customer relationships spanning multiple entities, and agreement structures that didn’t align with its current business model.
As their General Counsel explained during our discussion, “When we analyzed our contract management process, we recognized an opportunity to augment our Salesforce implementation with specialized contract intelligence capabilities. We needed more robust search functionality and clearer visibility into agreement status.”
The company was already leveraging Salesforce as its central customer relationship platform—a smart approach for tracking sales and customer interactions. However, leadership recognized that specialized contract intelligence could enhance their existing investment.
Storing contracts in—and trying to manage and analyze them with—Salesforce alone, presented some key challenges because CRMs are designed to manage customer relationships, not complex legal documents.
- CRMs aren’t built for contract organization: Despite being excellent for sales and customer relationship tracking, CRMs lack the specialized architecture needed for contract organization, version control, and relational document analysis. These limitations become painfully apparent for companies that attempt to use their CRM as a contract repository, especially after acquisitions.
- A patchwork of contract management practices: Each acquired company brings its own contract templates, storage approaches, and amendment processes into its new corporate family. This creates a fragmented ecosystem that’s nearly impossible to navigate within a CRM’s built-in document capabilities.
- No contract intelligence: CRMs store documents as static attachments with basic metadata, but can’t extract, analyze, or derive insights from the actual contents of agreements. Without this ability, valuable contract data remains locked away in unsearchable PDFs.
- Missing essential post-signature functionality: After executing agreements, a CRM may be able to store them, but provides no systematic way to identify and manage ongoing obligations that might affect multiple departments.
As the company’s Vice President of Sales Operations noted, “We had many back and forths between teams. We needed to enhance our existing workflows in Salesforce with more specialized contract intelligence to streamline these processes.”
The solution: Combining the company’s existing Salesforce with advanced Contract AI.
Creating synergy: When Salesforce and Contract AI work together
This software provider knew it had issues, but what it didn’t know was how to solve them. The breakthrough came when they explored Pramata’s Contract AI Knowledge Base approach, combined with Salesforce’s strengths in managing customer relationships, tracking sales activities, and providing a central platform that teams already used daily.
Unlike traditional CLM systems that primarily focus on standardizing the pre-signature process, Pramata flips the script to start with bringing intelligence to existing contracts, regardless of which acquired entity created them.
Our combined solution specifically addresses M&A-related challenges by:
- Enhancing Salesforce with a Contract AI Knowledge Base: We do this by automatically organizing and bringing intelligence to thousands of existing documents within a Salesforce environment, handling OCR challenges and viewing limitations, while maintaining their central CRM as the system of record.
- Unifying customer data across platforms: We automatically identify when different entity names across contracts referred to the same customer, and create a cohesive view that aligns with Salesforce’s customer records despite different naming conventions from acquired companies.
- Adding intelligent contract hierarchies: We automatically map the relationships between master agreements, amendments, orders, and related documents within the Salesforce ecosystem without manual tagging or intervention—even when these documents originated from different acquired businesses.
- Delivering dynamic contract insights: Not only do we extract static information from contracts, but we take it further by intelligently calculating active dates, understanding renewal terms, and tracking amendments that modify original provisions across the entire portfolio, enriching the customer data already in Salesforce.
- Seamless Salesforce integration: We deliver contract intelligence directly within Salesforce through a purpose-built iFrame integration. This means users never leave their familiar CRM environment—transforming Salesforce from an excellent CRM platform into an even more powerful contract intelligence hub. For their specific use case involving multiple acquired companies, this means sales representatives can now see the complete customer relationship history in Salesforce regardless of which acquired entity originally signed the agreement—creating a unified view that enhances their existing platform.
The power of Contract AI + Salesforce in M&A scenarios
As this Pramata customer and many others know, M&A comes with a multitude of challenges, even when it’s a smart business decision. By bringing specialized contract intelligence capabilities into Salesforce, organizations maximize their existing CRM investment while gaining sophisticated contract analysis tools. Pramata’s approach focuses on delivering value where users already work—within Salesforce—rather than requiring use of an entirely new system and process, which is especially critical when bringing together different corporate cultures after acquisitions.
For organizations managing complex business relationships across multiple acquired entities, the combination of Salesforce’s relationship management strengths and Pramata’s contract intelligence transforms contracts from static documents into strategic assets that drive business growth and accelerate post-merger integration. The real power lies in how these platforms complement each other, creating a solution greater than the sum of its parts.
Learn how Pramata’s AI-driven approach to contract management and intelligence can enhance your existing Salesforce implementation and give your organization the best of both worlds: the CRM platform your teams know and trust, now supercharged with the contract intelligence capabilities needed to thrive in today’s complex business environment.
Contact us today to get a custom demo.
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Read Blog #1 in the series: How the Procurement team at a Large Technology Company broke free from repeat vendor lock-in using Contract AI
