Building a sales pipeline and an effective sales team for your startup. Often relies on your ability to breakdown the steps of selling and optimize each and every one. This involves outlining each step, what it takes to engage a buyer in each step. And engaging them in an action to move them forwards to the next step. One of the most important steps, namely because it can be one of the slowest. Is the sales contract review step. Knowing how to speed up sales contract review. Can have a very large impact on your sales cycle and your companies growth. Today we’re going to have a look at how to speed up sales contract review times. First, lets have a look at the usual steps of the process.
Common Steps Of Sales Contract Reviews
Reviewing sales contracts is an important part of the pipeline process for SaaS startups to ensure legal compliance, protect their interests, and establish clear terms with customers. Here are some common steps in the sales contract review process for a SaaS startup:
Initial Assessment
The legal team or designated personnel (often a founder or a head of sales) assesses the contract’s scope, terms, and potential risks. They identify key areas that need careful review.
Review Contract Terms
Digging into the contract terms, including pricing, subscription terms, renewal clauses, termination conditions, service level agreements (SLAs), data protection, intellectual property rights, and liability limitations.
Compliance Check
Ensure that the contract complies with relevant laws and regulations, such as data privacy laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), consumer protection laws, and industry-specific regulations. This will depend a lot on what industry you operate in.
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Risk Analysis
Identify potential risks associated with the contract, such as indemnification clauses, limitation of liability, confidentiality provisions, and warranties. Assess the impact of these risks on the company.
Negotiation
Engage in negotiations with the customer to modify terms that are unfavorable or pose significant risks to the company. Negotiation may involve adjusting pricing, terms of service, or liability limitations to reach a mutually acceptable agreement.
Legal Review
Involve legal counsel to review the contract thoroughly. Lawyers specializing in technology or SaaS contracts can provide valuable insights and ensure legal compliance.
Finalize Terms
Once negotiations are complete and both parties agree on the terms, finalize the contract. Ensure accurate documentation of all changes and amendments.
Approval and Signing
Obtain internal approvals from relevant stakeholders, such as senior management or the finance department. After approvals are secured, sign the contract.
Record Keeping
Maintain accurate records of all executed contracts and associated documentation for future reference and compliance purposes.
Post-Signature Obligations
Ensure that both parties fulfill their obligations as per the contract terms. Monitor compliance, provide services as agreed, and address any issues or disputes that may arise during the contract period.
Periodic Review
Periodically review existing contracts to assess their performance, identify opportunities for improvement or renegotiation, and ensure ongoing compliance with evolving regulations and business needs.
By following these steps, SaaS startups can effectively manage their sales contract review process, mitigate risks, and build strong relationships with customers while safeguarding their interests. But the question is how do I speed up sales contract review?
Contract Management Made for Startups
Set Tasks, Negotiate Faster
How do I speed up sales contract review during each stage?
There are some key stages during the sales contract review process where you can make big gains in speed to close your deals. A lot of the changes that you can make are not ground breaking in terms of complexity or time to implement but they will help you a lot in keeping that sales cycle as tight as possible.
1. Embracing Efficiency from the Start
The early stages of contract review – assessment, reviewing terms, checking for compliance and assessing risk are all parts of the sales contract review process that can be sped up with preparation. Having a contract template in place and having your sales team get this in front of the customer and negotiate to use your paper instead of the customers contract will head off a lot of issues that can prolong things before they start.
Tech startups often find themselves grappling with lengthy contract negotiations making the sales cycle much longer because they don’t train their sales team in the importance of using contract templates and how to get these in front on customers early. This is where the focus keyphrase, “How do I speed up sales contract review?” comes into play. The key to expediting this process lies in the efficient management of contract templates from the very beginning.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent understands that sales teams are the wild west sometimes. They want to get things across the line and are willing to make some tweaks in contracts themselves to do this. Few ask whether they can do this. To tackle this, the Contract Sent provides a repository of all of your template contracts. Not allowing sales teams to edit these, simply allowing them to indicate which one has been sent to a client. This cuts down on variations that might occur and make manual review later on take a lot longer.
2. Unlocking Progress Insights While Negotiating
One of the significant hurdles faced by senior leaders in tech startups is the lack of a bird’s eye view of the progress being made in legal negotiations. As the end of the month or quarter approaches, the need for visibility becomes even more crucial and the ability to make sure the team is working on the deals that are important to them becomes extremely important.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent addresses this concern by offering a separate dashboard dedicated to tracking contract metrics. This dashboard provides senior leaders, including founders and heads of sales or finance, with insightful analytics on the status of negotiations, enabling them to make informed decisions about resource allocation and strategic planning.
3. Navigating Contract End Stages Seamlessly
Managing legal teams and the changes they make to contracts efficiently is another area where startups often encounter challenges. Coordinating efforts on approvals for changes and the communication of these, especially when tight deadlines loom, requires a streamlined approach to communicating between legal teams, sales teams and leaders.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent introduces tasks for approval and a Kanban board for managing the various stages of contract negotiation. This visual tool allows teams to move contracts seamlessly through different stages and approve contract changes along the way, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and deadlines are met promptly.
4. Ensuring Version Control and Clause Tracking
In the back and forth of redlines with a customer keeping track of versions and monitoring important clauses is a mess of a task. Mistakes in this area can lead to bottlenecks and delays.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent addresses this challenge with features such as version tracking and clause monitoring. Contract Sent’s advanced contract comparison tool ensures that teams can effortlessly navigate through different versions, identify changes, and track crucial clauses, minimizing the risk of oversights.
5. Managing Workload and Approval Processes
As deadlines approach, managing the workload of legal teams becomes a roadblock to. getting deals over the line. Additionally, obtaining timely approvals for changes to clauses is crucial for keeping negotiations on track.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent integrates task management capabilities to help teams organize and prioritize their workload efficiently. The platform also facilitates the approval process by providing a structured framework for evaluating and approving changes to contract clauses.
6. The Aftermath: From PDF Traps to Accessible Data
Once a contract is signed, the information within often becomes trapped in 30 page long PDFs or lost within poorly maintained folder systems, hindering accessibility and searchability.
- Our Solution: Contract Sent ensures that information is not confined to the constraints of a PDF. The platform offers a user-friendly interface for accessing and searching contract data, creating a centralized repository that is both easily accessible and searchable, simplifying post-signature information retrieval.
The key to expediting sales contract review lies in a end to end approach to contract management. By leveraging the features offered by Contract Sent, tech startups can not only address the common challenges in contract negotiations but also pave the way for a more streamlined and efficient sales cycle. So, how do you speed up sales contract review? Consider breaking down each stage like it was a stage in your sales cycle and manage it in a tool like Contract Sent.
