Quick & Easy Process

• Adding new customer is as easy as clicking on Add Customer in your menu. From there it’s as easy as adding in a few details about the contract that your team will be handling to get them up and running. This can be done by anyone in the team but one of the key pieces of information is the Use Case of the customer the creation of this is often done by your sales team.
  
  

Where can I view the customers that I’ve created?

• You’ll be able to view all of the customers that you’ve created on you Customers Management page that you can access from the menu. This page will give you an overall of all customers that are being managed in Contract Sent and will allow you to search by their names or filter by stages of contract negotiation by clicking on the names of the stages at the top of your Customers Management page. Created customers will show up in your dashboard reporting.

Contract Type

What should I select for Contract Type?

• The Contract Type that you select should align with the negotiation that you are having. If you are negotiating multiple contracts on one customer record you can select Other. This is to communicate to your legal team what they are looking at.

Contract Values

What is the difference between total deal value and annual recurring revenue?

• When working on SaaS contracts there are often two ways to look at the value of the contract. The first is the total deal value. This takes into context the cost of the entire service being contracted. This may include non-recurring revenue like onboarding or professional services and it may also take into context the value of a multi-year SaaS contract which are not uncommon when selling SaaS to enterprise companies.

• The annual recurring revenue is the recurring potion of the contract that applies to one year of the contract. This may be recurring software licences or services provided, as long as they are recurring and provided to the customer though-out the year.

Why are total deal value and annual recurring revenue separated?

• The two are separated because they tell us separate and interesting information. Generally SaaS companies value recurring revenue more highly than non-recurring but they also value longer term contracts more highly as they reduce risk of churn. By separating these two values and having the contract dates this will help the companies leaders and legal team understand how to prioritize the deals in the pipeline.

Dates

What date should I enter for the start and end dates of the contract?

• The goal here is to ensure that the data that is in the contract doesn’t get stuck in a PDF. The start and end date should match the effective start and end dates of the contract that you are negotiating. These can change during the negotiation and you can always got back and edit these values in your company record as you go.

Currently With

What does ‘currently with’ represent?

• The negotiation process with customer contracts is a back and forth process. To have a proper overview of where everything sits it’s important to know who or where the most current iteration of contract negotiation sits. This field will allow you to let the rest of the team know who you are waiting on in the negotiation process.

• This can help prompt leaders to follow up where needed to ensure things are getting pushed forwards, it can remind leaders when they are being waited on for commercial decisions and it can tell the team when you are waiting on the customer.

Liability Cap

What is the liability cap and what should I enter in this field?

• The level of liability that you select in this field is linked to the limitation of liability clause that is in the contract. Liability is an important negotiating point in SaaS contracts so it’s one of the most important parts of contract information to capture.

Working On

Why do we need to track if a contract is on our base contract or the customers base contract?

• Every SaaS company is trying to mitigate risk as they grow. Each new stage of grow is coupled with a de-risking of the company. One are of risk it variation of contracted terms. By themselves in one contract they are okay but as they grow to tens, hundreds or thousands of customer contracts they become unmanageable. In the early stages of startups this is a risk that a lot of startups take but as you mature this is something you look to reduce risk around by renegotiating contracts to get them on to your standard Terms and Conditions or Master Service Agreement.

• This takes time but when the time comes to do this it’s important to have a record of which customers are on your base contracts and which customers are sitting on their contracts so you know where to start you renegotiations.

Assigned Team

Contract Sent asks you to assign three key roles to each of your contracts

• These three key roles will allow you to have understand where to go for information when you need it.

• Assigning a Sales Person will tell you where to go for customer use case information and to prompt your sales team when the contract has been sitting with the customers legal team or signer for too long without an update.

• Assigning a Legal Person will tell you who is the point person from your legal team to be managing the redlines and negotiation.

• Assigning a Commercial Decision Maker will tell you who will be approving any changes that have been made to the contract before signing.
  
  

Use Case

What should I put in the use case field?

• The use case field is usually filled out by the the associated sales person. The use case describes the core functions of the product that the customer will be using, the data that will be put into the product as part of the customer using it and whose data will be captured in this process.

Why is use case information important?

• Lawyers need to understand product usage and the data that is handled during this usage. This will help them to properly build out a legal agreement that keeps both parties safe and happy with the sale that is happening.

Contracts

• The contracts section of your new customer record is where you can upload and manage the base contract that you start with at the start of your negotiations as well as the iterations of the contract as you go though the negotiation process.
  
  

• Once you have your base contract uploaded and the current version of your contract for this customer uploaded you can use our advanced contract comparison tool to view the differences between the two contracts.