Let’s say you have the hottest sales team on the block — you were lucky enough to recruit high-performing reps, and you’ve structured a well-balanced team with AEs, BDRs, and sales managers who are clever and driven. They know your product and your audience and how to sell the former to the latter. You feel really good about your chances of improving your sales performance because you have good people on your team.
Now the question is, do you have good processes to support your all-star team? Even the best sales organization in the world is no match for a disheveled contracting process. If you store your agreements poorly if your sales team creates contracts using random templates they find in their inbox if they go rogue just to get the deal over the line fast, then what will winning cost?
To address this problem, think of legal (and CLM software) as an extension of your top-notch sales team. This way, your contracts can meet the excellent standard of your sales org; without this reframe, the thing that governs your transactions becomes a liability rather than an asset. And with a CLM Salesforce integration, you can cover all your bases and ensure that every aspect of the sales process is accounted for and matches the standards your company has set.
Sales reps need autonomy so they can work their magic on a deal. Having to ask for permission constantly interrupts their flow, and they’ll never get a deal done. What’s the point of having the best sales team in the world if you won’t allow them to do their jobs?
Reframing your internal processes to consider legal as an extension of the sales team allows you to have your cake and eat it too. You can categorize legal activity in a way that fits into your sales process, and with CLM as a part of your lean legal team, you get more done faster. This will require your teams to collaborate on what the structure of the process looks like, and once you do, you’ll notice the efficiency boost.
The intersection of the sales and the contracting process is the collaboration sweet spot. Though legal may want to control contracts to protect the business, it’s counterproductive to interrupt deal momentum to check on contracts.
Instead, enable your sales team by putting systems in place to help them create contracts from templates with pre-approved language. Take advantage of your CLM’s Salesforce integration so sales won’t have to dam their flow to ask legal for a status update of an agreement, or worse, to input data manually into Salesforce. Collaboration like this allows you to create processes that match the excellence of your sales team.
Though sales sometimes see them as a bottleneck, legal is protecting the business. But when other teams and leaders see legal solely as risk mitigators, they miss an excellent opportunity to seamlessly slot them into the sales process.
Without a more strategic approach to collaboration with sales, legal runs the risk of facing burnout. If they touch every single agreement, regardless of contract value and quarterly volume, they will only be able to care about getting the contracts done rather than done well. Not only will this approach wear legal out, but it will drastically slow down the sales process, which is the opposite of what sales want.
Instead, allot your legal resources more strategically. With CLM as an honorary legal team member, think of ways you can use it to make the sales contract process easier. What can you automate? How can you use technology to take some work off their plate? And even more, how can you allocate legal time more appropriately? Do you really need senior commercial counsel to create and review NDAs each time a prospect needs one?
No, you don’t. But a more judicious approach can show management where legal’s strengths are and how to be smarter about using legal resources.
With the right tools, sales and legal can work together more seamlessly and efficiently. Since each department has its preferred tech stack, a key component of successful collaboration is ensuring that their tools can integrate with and talk to each other.
You know firsthand the headache that results from having the back-and-forth between legal and sales to close a deal. Passing information between teams and then manually entering it into your respective tools is tedious and time-consuming and leaves you with even less time to complete tasks that drive the business forward.
With LinkSquares CLM, for example, you can integrate your CLM with your Salesforce instance so that both teams have real-time access to up-to-date information at any given time. This removes double work and smooths out a lot of the inherent friction between the two teams. Using this Salesforce integration, legal can become a powerful extension of sales, not only helping them close deals faster but also cementing their position as a strategic arm of the business that contributes to the bottom line.
Even better, this equips sales with the tools they need to create legal-approved contracts and move through the sales process more quickly. It also removes the burden from legal and allows sales to do their job without having to leave their Salesforce environment. How’s that for a win-win?
Too many teams see the sales and legal friction as innate to the process of doing business. But what kind of innovative business sticks to an inefficient status quo for the sake of tradition? Reframing the working relationship between the two teams and encouraging alignment through their CLM’s Salesforce integration will go a long way in helping them to get on the same page, remove resentment, and close more business faster.
Don’t believe us? See for yourself — request a demo of LinkSquares today!