eBook

How to Turn Your Legal Team Into Your Sales Team's Secret Weapon

In smart organizations, legal is the sales team's secret weapon, helping tee up revenue and accelerating close times through the use of smart contract management. The key to this alliance is cutting-edge contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, which helps both sales and legal meet their goals without getting in each other's way. In this guide, we'll explain how to leverage a CLM solution to boost sales and turn your legal team into a sales asset, rather than an obstacle.

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How to Turn Your Legal Team Into Your Sales Team's Secret Weapon
The goal of your sales team is to close as many deals as possible, as quickly as possible. The goal of your legal team is to avoid legal liability and risk. On the surface, these two departments would seem to be in conflict, because the sales representative's desire to avoid "deal friction" is opposed by the legal team’s desire to scrutinize every detail of each deal to make sure there are no hidden liabilities. In smart organizations, however, legal is the sales team's secret weapon, helping tee up revenue and accelerating close times through the use of smart contract management. The key to this alliance is cutting-edge contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, which helps both sales and legal meet their goals without getting in each other's way. In this guide, we'll explain how to leverage a CLM solution to boost sales and turn your legal team into a sales asset, rather than an obstacle. Step 1: Be Proactive Deal friction from the legal team only happens 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 one-size-fits-all sales contract, which boxes in a sales representative to one offer for every customer. The better solution is for the legal team to be even more proactive in meeting the sales team's various needs. This is where smart CLM 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 advanced 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 customer success team should take extra care to keep happy. This analysis gets much simpler and more thorough with CLM. 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 a little measurement, legal can remove the friction and be an asset to sales. And it all starts with a CLM 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 most comfortable and most effective. Legal, on the other hand, has its own tools, including CLM, 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 CLM 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 CLM 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 CLM solution legal and sales need in order to join forces. With LinkSquares Finalize, you can create the flexible, extensible contact 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 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 accurately than ever before. And with LinkSquares' Salesforce integration, your sales team can enjoy all these benefits without ever leaving their preferred CRM solution. If you're ready to adopt the AI-powered CLM solution that can improve the performance of both your legal and your sales teams, then contact LinkSquares today.