In a busy and demanding world, we're all looking for our Zen. This state of meditative calm isn't easy to find. It takes effort. At home, many of us have begun to find ways to approach this Zen, giving ourselves much needed time and space away from the world's pressures. We take yoga classes. We write down lists of tasks. We organize our schedules.

And right about the time we finally begin to feel calm, we arrive at work.

The second you walk through the door at the office, you're thinking about money, management and the million other tasks that are anything but natively meditative. And so you may ask yourself – is it possible to find Zen in your professional life?

The answer is yes. But in work, as at home, it takes organization.  

In your professional life, doing business successfully often rests on complicated, intertwined systems with many players, and many IT elements, far out of your personal control. When it comes to contracts and documents this can be especially vexing. Your sales staff, your legal team and many others throughout your organization are creating, routing, signing, sending and renewing contracts at a mind-boggling pace every day. So when these documents are in a state of disorder, processes break down. When processes break down, you break down personally. It's everything that is not Zen.

Peak10, a leading global IT infrastructure solution provider, was able to streamline its contracting processes – and other aspects of its IT operations in a Zen-like way. Here’s a look at how they did it.

Step 1: Evaluate

The first step toward setting up your systems for professional Zen is to figure out where your flow of information is being blocked.  

As you evaluate your operations and the IT systems that underpin them, ask yourself – where is information getting stuck in the pipeline? Where are people forced to create workarounds to get their jobs done? Where is communication getting dropped when staff is communicating with clients and where are files getting overwritten or lost?   

These are the types of questions Peak10 had to ask themselves when looking for a way to streamline their contract processes.

Peak10’s challenges were probably familiar to anyone with a significant sales presence, or to those that work with numerous vendors. The hands-on routing and management of contracts was taxing them at scale. It introduced room for error and room for confusion. It opened the door to slipping up on compliance. It made for an inefficient sales team.  

As Peak10 began to map out their processes, the challenging points throughout the workflows and IT systems were becoming crystal clear. From that point, they needed to find the right tools to streamline – at every juncture – how they conducted business. "All of our teams are learning new tools this year, so it was important to us to choose solutions that our end users are excited about," said Jason Rader, Director of Process Improvement.

Peak10 was on on the path to professional Zen. They started with unmanageable, complex contracts by email. They sought a soothing sense of security experienced when data is safe, secure and organized.

Step 2: Automation

Much like when you assess your own personal schedule, once you've audited your operations, you'll see that nearly everything you're doing by hand can be automated.

Throughout an organization, it's not uncommon to have all sorts of different manual processes on hand. Tracking information through Excel spreadsheets. Searching through filing cabinets and running around the office instead of having things stored centrally. In Peak10's case, they found the opportunity to implement a contract management solution – SpringCM – that would completely clean up their contracting process. 

Streamlining the contracting process has streamlined their Quote-to-Cash cycle. Since the implementation of SpringCM they've seen expanded ROI, shorter deal cycles and an increase in revenue.

Taking a Zen approach, Peak10 aims to minimize unnecessary complexity across the board. The company has been setting the stage for the implementation of a similarly robust tool – Salesforce CPQ – to answer the similar inefficiencies of manual management in the quoting process.   

Step 3: Implement

According to the 2017 State of Contract Management Report by SpringCM, almost 70 percent of respondents reported having integrated their CPQ solution and their contract management solution. While a business may be divided up into different departments, and different people may use some solutions more than others, your business is a single organism. When one part of your operation is inefficient, it means the entire business isn't operating as well as it could. And with the quoting process and the contract process acting as complementary parts of the business, having solutions integrated together is the best way to streamline the process. 

Peak10 stands to see a continued increase in ROI as they integrate powerful tools. Each tool on its own streamlines a tremendous amount of busy work in a given part of the sales process. Implemented together, the synergistic impact can make what was once a bumpy, protracted sales process a smooth road – letting salespeople do their jobs working with clients, rather than having to struggle through a morass of manual work just to get to the starting line.

Yes, finding your Zen in your professional life is possible, but it requires the systems you work on to run as smoothly and intuitively as possible. When there's one seamless flow of information through your sales and contracting processes, it sets the stage for one seamless, successful business operation. If you're interested in more information on how you can take your first steps down the path to workplace Zen by implementing and integrating contract management and CPQ solutions, sign up for this webinar presented by Salesforce and SpringCM.  

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Jeff Piper makes it his mission to delight customers every day in his role as Chief Customer Officer at SpringCM. Prior to co-founding SpringCM, Jeff spent more than 20 years in business process consulting and general management for a variety of companies. Find him on Twitter at @jpichicago.