Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

With more than 500,000 customers accumulated over a span of 45 years, Vertafore was faced with massive, complex stores of customer contracts, documentation and data. To further complicate matters, many customers have undergone mergers, acquisitions and name changes over the years. It is also common for customers to have multiple contracts and agreements with different terms and renewal dates.

In addition to the expense and general inefficiency of our paper-laden processes, the fragmented nature and complexity of our agreements made it extremely difficult for sales and finance teams to locate and have confidence in the most current terms of the relationship. Too much time was wasted on account research and even if the right information was found, it did not provide a complete picture of the relationship, making for poor customer renewal outcomes and less profitable renegotiation efforts.

The Solution

Pramata allowed Vertafore to consolidate huge stores of contracts and customer documentation across databases, business applications, legacy systems and hard-copy storage facilities into a “single version of truth.” With this clean, consolidated information, the team can perform risk analyses and assign risk scores to contracts and that gives insight needed to measurably improve terms and increase customer lifetime value. 

Creating a single, reliable commercial relationship system for sales and finance has not only provided better understanding and support of customer relationships, it’s driving more profitable renewals, reducing storage costs, making it easier to assess relationship risk and speed completion of business processes.

The integration of Pramata with Salesforce application presents this relationship data in a very convenient and usable way to more intuitively and quickly to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

The results

“We now have a shared, centralized and real-time version of truth regarding our commercial relationships. Critical contract data that once took several hours, or even days, to locate and assess is immediately available at our fingertips,” said Jayne Rothman. “Pramata enables us to have streamlined and enhanced information about our relationships with our customers available across all of our legal, finance and sales teams.  For our customers, this translates to faster response times and intelligent support when we need critical information quickly.”

Before Pramata Vertafore had:

• Massive, complex stores of customer contracts, documentation and data
• Commercial relationship data scattered across our organization and internal systems, which made it very difficult for legal, sales and finance to do their jobs effectively
• Significant revenue leakage happening with their existing customer base because they weren’t optimizing terms and pricing to be most favorable

After Pramata Vertafore was able to:

• Better understand and support customer relationships
• Drive more effective renewals
• Reduce storage costs
• Identify specific risks in existing contracts to trigger key renegotiation topics during a renewal, and speed business processes
• Free up professionals to work on higher-value tasks. 

Metrics

With Pramata, Vertafore has locked in future revenue by taking short-term contracts and turning them into 3- or 5-year auto-renew contracts, with 7 or 5 percent year-over-year price increases respectively.

The Technology

Pramata’s Account Research, Renewal & Renegotiation solution

Disruptive Factor

Because Salesforce.com was integrated directly into the Pramata platform, buy-in was required from a cross functional team in legal, sales, sales operations and finance teams. Vertafore also went totally paperless, emptied file rooms, and digitized all customer information, which required the cooperation of a broad group of employees.

The challenge was to identify risk across all contracts down to the term level, which allows Vertafore to Segment customers and transition sub-optimal contracts into optimal contracts. The reporting from this project is at the Board of Directors level, and Jayne and the Vertafore team significantly changed operations to bring clarity to a previously undefined contractual exposure. The project definitely changed the status quo.

Jayne Rothman, who is leading the charge at Vertafore, is a visionary, is ultra-progressive, and her role extends beyond a traditional General Counsel role into a broader Corporate Operations role. She is leading the industry in thinking of solving the commercial relationship challenge in an entirely new way. And she’s succeeding.

Shining Moment

Vertafore had contracts everywhere – hard copies in filing cabinets and storage rooms across the US, contracts in emails, Sharepoint in different locations and contracts in Salesforce.com.  Now, Vertafore has risk scoring across all of their active customers, they’ve associating it to revenue attributed to the customer, and they’ve put action plans in place to lead to higher revenue. The results have been mind-blowing!