To many sales professionals, legal requirements are a necessary evil. Deals simply can’t be closed without the right documents in place. However, problems quickly arise when the contracting process becomes so tedious that it disrupts sales velocity – or even worse, prevents deals from closing at all. Not only does this waste the sales representative’s time and cost them commission, it’s also a loss for the company as funds and resources are thrown away.
Legal bottlenecks don’t originate solely from the legal department or the sales department, but they require the collective participation of both teams to overcome. With modern contract acceptance methods, companies can take a more streamlined approach that restores ownership to each department without requiring one to rely on the other.
Related: PactSafe's Guide to Making Contracts Key to Revenue Recovery
If you suspect that legal requirements are the source of delays in your sales cycle, we suggest a three-step approach to improving efficiency:
The length and structure of your sales cycle will depend on many factors, including the product you sell and the value of each deal. No matter what your company’s cycle looks like, it’s important to track and analyze data from sales to help identify opportunities for improvement.
One of the most common bottlenecks in the sales cycle is the process of drafting contracts and getting them signed. Oftentimes, legal teams use outdated workflows that require intensive amounts of manual labor to create contracts on a 1:1 basis. This solution may work at first, but it simply isn’t sustainable as the business scales. When the legal team can’t efficiently keep up with the volume of demand, a bottleneck occurs.
INTERVIEW: Todd Caponi, author of Transparency Sale, On How to Shorten Sales Cycle
By naming the legal bottlenecks in your sales cycle, you’ll be better prepared to move forward with a solution that addresses your specific needs. Read our eBook on sales velocity for a more detailed walkthrough on how to identify bottlenecks.
If your company has been using the same 10-page sales contracts for years, it’s past time for a review. To give an example, you may be able to shift the bulk of your terms online and simply refer to them in your contract. Many companies are able to reduce the length of their contracts to just one or two pages by following this structure. Shorter, more efficient agreements are easier both to manage internally and for clients to read and accept.
Related: How Contract Simplification Improves Sales Velocity
There are also ways you can improve efficiency from a back-end administration standpoint. Putting signed contracts into a cloud-based file storage system can be a complete nightmare to manage, with multiple versions floating around and no easy way to keep track of who has signed which documents. PactSafe offers a solution to this with a single dashboard that allows you to view and track signers in just a few clicks – without sifting through hundreds of PDFs.
Emailing PDF contracts to be signed digitally was once a huge step up in efficiency, but there are much better ways to do business nowadays. The multi-step process of sending a document via email, using a third-party app for digital signing, and returning it takes time and creates extra hurdles for your client. With modern signing technology, there are plenty of ways to bring contracts directly to the client while staying compliant.
Related: How to Help Your Customers Sign Contracts More Quickly
These are just a few of the ways PactSafe enables your customers to accept terms:
Digital transformation has led clients to constantly demand more efficiency, and many are willing to walk away from a deal that feels too cumbersome. By offering clients more convenient ways to accept contracts, you’re demonstrating a company-wide commitment to a better overall user experience.
Read: Is A Text Message A Legal Document?
Sales contracts require input from both legal and sales teams, but forcing each to work co-dependently is an easy way to kill sales velocity. With PactSafe, each department can take full ownership over their part in the contracting process. Managing and updating terms is a breeze and only needs to be done once for multiple clients to sign, reducing the burden on the legal department.
At the same time, sales representatives can quickly send contracts and track who has signed without needing to follow up internally.
With fewer bottlenecks and a more efficient sales cycle, how far can your company scale?
Check out our eBook, Sales Velocity: Identifying Bottlenecks and Improving Efficiencies One Variable at a Time.
