Between negotiating contracts that help close deals and mitigating financial risk for the company, it’s clear that in-house legal teams contribute to the bottom line. When you partner with other teams across the organization, the impact goes even further. Today, we’re sharing the techniques your team needs to be an efficient profit partner at your organization.
Legal and Sales
When a sales rep closes a deal, a new customer signs a contract. Virtually every modern sales team measures time-to-close and time spent on long-closing or never-closing deals is time and money lost. The legal team can help on both fronts. Here’s how.
- Implement a standard contract that is the basis for all deals to lower friction.
- Create pre-made sales templates with pre-built clauses for variations to lighten your workload and keep close times short.
- Implement a solution that integrates with your CRM software to keep both teams on the same page.
Legal and Marketing
If the sales team closes reference-customer deals, the marketing team should know exactly what they were allowed to say about those customers. You can help on this front too. Here’s how.
- Create a report of reference customers with a description of the marketing assets they are contractually obligated to provide and the ways in which the marketing team is permitted to use them. Put simply, tell marketing whose logos they can put in sales decks, please.
- Have a polite boilerplate letter informing a reference customer of their obligations to your marketing team, delivered upon contract execution. Giving the marketing department a little "per our contract" ammunition to nudge a slow-moving client along is more helpful than you can imagine.
- Use a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution that can identify reference customer clauses in your contract repository and help you easily generate a list of appropriate customers and their obligations.
Legal and IT & Software Engineering
Your IT department has a very thorough list of procedures for protecting and repairing your software and data after a system failure or security breach, but do those procedures match up with your contractual obligations to your clients? If not, your company could be racking up a lot of unnecessary expenses.
Helping IT handle system failures in a contract-conscious manner saves money and shows the value of legal. Here’s how.
- Offer different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to different clients, complete with outage compensation. The legal team should provide IT with a report of these cases so they can properly prioritize repairs during a mass outage; They need to know who to fix first based on how expensive their outages will be.
- Suppose your Terms of Service or Privacy Policy require notification of a data breach within a specific time frame. In that case, the IT department needs to know how quickly and how often to update customers before they put contracts in jeopardy.
- Use a CLM solution that can parse out Service Level Agreement contract language and provide an ordered list of the clients that must be repaired or notified soonest.
Proactive legal teams that collaborate with other teams drive profits. Legal can solve problems for other business departments, and all those solutions have dollar figures attached to them. You only need a little effort and the right tools to implement such profitable proactivity.
Ready to get started? Schedule a demo today to learn more about LinkSquares, the CLM to get you there.
