How to Turn Your Legal Team Into Your Sales Team's Secret Weapon
Step 1: Be Proactive
Deal friction from the legal team can only happen if the legal team has to scrutinize a contract. Proactively creating a sales contract from pre-approved legal language avoids this problem, removing internal deal friction entirely. The problem with this common solution is the on-size-fits-all sales contract, which boxes in a sales representative to one offer for every customer. The better solution for the legal team to be even more proactive in meeting the sales team's various needs.
This is where smart contract management software comes in.
With advanced contract drafting tools, you can break down a sales contract into component sections and clauses, then build a semi-custom contract for every customer. Need a different privacy policy for sales prospects in a regulated industry like finance or healthcare? Swap out your terms of service from a legal-approved library, each customized for a specific vertical. Need different payment terms for SMB vs. enterprise customers? Drop in the appropriate clause as defined by both the head of sales and the corporate counsel.
By the same token, legal can proactively analyze existing contracts to see which customers have contracts coming to term, so the sales team can re-win any deals that may soon lapse. A similar advance analysis of any customer with a termination for convenience clause -- which means they can cancel at any time -- will help spell out precisely which clients the sales team should take extra care to keep happy.
This analysis gets much simpler and more thorough with modern contract analysis tools. Build a "terming customer" query once, then run it as often as needed to keep the deal flow moving. It's easy if you have the right software.
Step 2: Measure, So You Can Manage
While building a "contract toolbox" can avoid most legal reviews for client agreements, some deals still require bespoke solutions that the legal team must approve. Moreover, when a deal requires third party paper, legal has to review and consent to the outside language. And, regardless of whether the deal came from in house or a third party, it still has to be executed by an authorized signatory.
That means there are a number of places where a contract can get "stuck" before being fully finalized, signed, and executed. If the legal team isn't tracking every deal and measuring this pipeline, they'll be blamed for slowing down deal-flow -- even if it isn't legal's fault.
A contract dashboard, which tracks the status of every deal in your pipeline and reports on who and what is holding up an agreement, is a must-have feature for every legal and sales team. Are too many contracts really stuck in legal review? Time to find out why, and fix it. Are contracts actually stalled waiting for signature from the CEO? Time to add more authorized signers to the roster. Is the real hold-up the need to review third-party paper from large customers? Time to bring on more due diligence resources.
You can't manage what you don't measure, and the key to managing deal friction is to measure what is causing it. With little measurement, legal can remove the friction and be an asset to sales. And it all starts with a smart contract management solution that can track down every deal in your pipeline -- including those that have already closed.
Step 3: Integrate to Automate
A modern sales team has its own deal-management or customer relationship management software like Salesforce or HubSpot. Most sales representatives run their entire job through these software solutions. It's where they are the most comfortable and effective.
Legal, on the other hand, has its own tools, including contract management software, research portals like LexisNexis, and drafting tools like Microsoft Word.
To join these two worlds, most organizations either have to force the legal team to manually update a Salesforce report, or require the sales team to consult a "tracking" Excel spreadsheet created -- and manually updated -- by the legal department. There's a better way.
Cutting-edge contract management solutions integrate with tools like Salesforce, so the contract analysis data they generate is automatically pushed to where the sales team can best make use of it. When the legal team flags a contract as coming to term, Salesforce knows instantly, and customer data, call sheets, and email campaigns all automatically update and execute.
Moreover, by integrating a contract dashboard with tools like Salesforce, the sales team will have up-to-the-second statuses on every in-flight legal agreement, as well as highly accurate time-to-close averages. Forecasting deal flow and revenue has never been easier or more precise.
Provided, of course you have the right contract management software.
Conclusion
Software Can Turn Your Legal Team Into a Sales Accelerator
Nobody knows more about your contracts than your legal team. Nobody depends more on your contracts than your sales representatives. With the right processes and the right tools, your legal staff can become a sales accelerator. By building a pre-approved contract tool kit, measuring and monitoring contract deal flow, analyzing existing contracts to avoid customer churn, and sharing all this data in your sales team's native software, your legal team can drive up revenue and drive down close times.
All it takes is a little effort and the right software.
LinkSquares Can Help
LinkSquares is the end-to-end Contract life-cycle Management (CLM) solution you need to help your legal staff help your sales team.
With LinkSquares Finalize, you can create the flexible, extensible contract drafting system you need to build pre-approved agreements faster.
With LinkSquares Analyze you can parse out the deals that are vulnerable to churn and arm your sales staff with the data they need to keep your customers in the fold.
With the LinkSquares Dashboard you can track every deal, improve every sales process, and forecast your revenue more quickly and accurate than ever before.
And with LinkSquares Salesforce integration, your sales team can enjoy all these benefits without ever leaving their preferred CLM solution.
If you're ready to adopt the AI-powered contract management that can improve the performance of both your legal and your sales teams, then contact LinkSquares today.