Commvault Reduces Sales Contract Time-to-Close by 50%

Founded in 1996, Commvault is a data protection and management company built to protect data in a difficult world for enterprise-level organizations. Today, they have nearly a $3B market cap, nearly 3,000 employees globally, and count among their customers some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Adidas, Sony, and Panasonic. They were listed on the Nasdaq exchange in 2006.

To support Commvault’s legal needs are a team of 25 global professionals including 12 attorneys and 3 legal operations managers, led by Chief Legal Officer, Danielle Sheer. Key responsibilities include drafting, negotiating, and approving all the contracts requested by the company’s 1,000+ person sales team.

80:1 – the scaling challenge

When Sheer joined Commvault in 2021, she arrived with the philosophy that a company’s legal team should be a revenue driver instead of a bottleneck that slows down deals. That meant putting in place a system that made it simpler for a salesperson to request a contract from the legal team, faster for the attorney to draft and negotiate that contract, and easier for both parties to communicate and get visibility into the process.

“Sales was constantly asking for status updates on their contracts. Our team found itself chasing down details for the contract and various internal approvals, all through email and Microsoft Teams,'' says Sheer. “It was a slow process that was only going to get worse as we scaled.”

With about 80 salespeople per attorney, and each attorney responsible for 2-4 contracts per week, Sheer knew that contract management software was the only way to streamline the process – and that the tool would need to be able to integrate with Salesforce.

Fortunately, Sheer had leveraged LinkSquares at both of her previous companies. She knew that it offered the functionality Commvault needed to provide transparency and partnership to the sales team, close deals faster, and accelerate the productivity of their commercial negotiators. They purchased LinkSquares and were up-and-running and integrated with Salesforce in thirty days.

Empowering sales for faster deals

The Commvault team began by onboarding LinkSquares Finalize to fully centralize and streamline all pre-signature tasks, including drafting, internal collaboration, and external negotiation. They then created Finalize templates for each of their most used sales contracts – 25 in all – helping to accelerate the first draft of these contracts and enabling self-service drafting for lower risk agreements. With the legal team set-up on LinkSquares, they integrated the Finalize App in Salesforce with Commvault’s Salesforce instance, and trained the sales team on how to leverage the new system.

With the Finalize App in Salesforce, the Commvault sales team can now initiate their contracts by simply selecting the relevant template, completing a few fields, and submitting the request. This creates a contract record in Salesforce that is both associated with the relevant deal and is linked with the legal team's contract record in LinkSquares, providing up-to-date visibility into the contract’s status with bi-directional updates and a chat log for fast communication.

“Sales can now complete a contract request right in Salesforce with all the information the legal team needs. Then that request gets routed to legal operations,” explains Sheer. “And since LinkSquares shows each attorney’s workload, legal ops can quickly load balance the commercial team’s work and send that contract to the person who can address it the fastest.”

For the Commvault legal team, all contract details and drafts are centralized in one contract record. This provides improved version control and allows them to easily pull other stakeholders, like security or finance, into the record to approve specific language, drastically reducing their internal review process. Likewise, any questions for the salesperson can be asked via the chat log, eliminating the hassle of chasing down answers across different tools.

“It’s a massive timesaver for everyone involved, and it’s also helping us create better contracts and serve as better partners to our sales team,” says Sheer. “I need my team to delight customers and close deals – not get buried alive by paperwork and process. With LinkSquares, we’re minimizing risk and optimizing revenue while reducing time to signature by 50%.”