How Oneflow Makes Contract Management Seamless in Membrain

Remember when signing a contract meant printing multiple copies and sitting at a desk with the customer to put ink on paper? Today’s e-signing tools have simplified the process and made it possible to close even large, complex deals electronically.

But Anders Hamnes, CEO of Oneflow, says we haven’t gone far enough.

“Most e-signing tools just make a copy of the old analog process,” says Hamnes. “Instead of truly understanding the possibilities within the browser and reinventing the process, we use PDFs, which are just a picture of paper - a dead document.”

Hamnes and the team at Oneflow set out to completely transform the way that contracts are written, signed, and followed up on. When I heard about their tool, I saw that their vision was similar to Membrain’s - we both want to create tools that actually transform and improve the way we do business, instead of just recreating analog processes in a digital space.

That’s why we’re proud to announce Membrain’s new integration with Oneflow, making the contract process seamless within one workflow.

Why Oneflow is Different

“When I started this company in 2012,” says Hamnes, “it was never my intention to create an e-signing tool. E-signing is a commodity.”

Instead, he wanted to reinvent the entire contract process, from negotiation to management, and give companies more control and more ability to collaborate.

“It’s chaos out there,” says Hamnes. “People sending PDFs back and forth by email, redlining offline, then scanning and sending them back. Someone has to manually update the file and print to PDF and send it back again.”

Instead of taking photos and recreating an analog process, Oneflow uses web-based contract documents that allow you to negotiate in real time, show who makes what changes, and communicate and collaborate directly inside the contract. When everyone is in agreement, e-signing is done within the document.

Membrain customers using the Oneflow integration will experience smoother contract creation, better collaboration, and shorter sales cycles.

But what makes the tools even more powerful is what happens after signing. With a PDF contract, the only “data” in the contract is an image. If you want to manage the terms of the contract, someone has to manually track it.

With Oneflow, all of the information in the contract is text. This means it can be searched. It means it can integrate with other tools to automatically invoice on renewal dates, trigger notifications when time-based milestones are met, and be filtered to provide key legal information to the right teams at the right times.

How Oneflow Inside Membrain Helps You Win More Sales

“For us, contracts are not contracts,” says Hamnes. “They’re a part of something bigger. They have information that you need in other parts of the company. A contract is liabilities, obligations - it’s the data that defines your PNL and your future. It defines your company.”

For sales, contracts often signal the end of a successful sales cycle, but for the company, they signal much more. Oneflow makes it possible to go seamlessly from completing a sale to executing on the contract.

But it’s not just about signatures and the post-sale process. Oneflow inside Membrain can help you win more sales.

“One of the most important benefits of Oneflow is that it will save you time,” says Hamnes. “Instead of a contract template in a Word file, locally stored, that you have to make a PDF of, upload, then go back and forth with the customer - you have a snappy, fast process that integrates all of the information already in Membrain with the contract and makes it easy to complete your sales process.”

An efficient workflow is an important aspect of Membrain’s interface, and Oneflow provides yet another way to keep everything inside one workflow, reducing friction and increasing speed.

With Oneflow, you won’t have to switch contexts in order to develop and manage your contracts. With a few clicks, the salesperson creates the agreement, populated with information from Membrain, and Oneflow communicates back to Membrain the status of the agreement.

You can share the contract writing and negotiating process across your organization and with the client organization, and automatically see when changes and comments are made.

When negotiations are complete and the contract signed, the information within the contract becomes a part of the data associated with that customer, and becomes actionable.

We expect that Membrain customers who use the Oneflow integration will experience shorter sales cycles, greater collaboration around the contract process, and more beneficial contracts. Because Membrain guides the salesperson to the contract process, and then through it, the contract will be customized every time - and your salespeople won’t be sending it prematurely or to the wrong people.

Best of all, the Oneflow integration with Membrain will create a better experience for customers. The seamless workflow reduces errors, ensures you don’t send the wrong contract to the wrong person, or with outdated information copied and pasted from another contract.

It also allows everyone on both teams to see the progress of the contract and track its terms across time.

E-signing is about efficiency, but Oneflow is about more than that. It’s about collaboration, and reinventing the contract concept to make it a living process instead of a snapshot of the old analog process. This is why we love it and use it ourselves.

I think you’re going to love this new integration. I’d love to hear how it changes the way you get contracts signed quicker. If you are a customer, here's the help desk article on how to enable it. If you are not a client, feel free to spin up a trial of Membrain and Oneflow today.