Founded in 2012, Playvox provides workforce management software to help companies improve quality assurance, streamline employee scheduling, capture customer feedback, and provide improved coaching and training. Since 2020, Playvox acquired two other companies, bringing their total headcount to approximately 250 employees globally, with entities in Colombia, Australia, the UK, and the US.
To help manage this post-acquisition growth – along with global commercial transactions, corporate governance, and privacy and compliance – Playvox brought aboard Kristen Shaheen as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Along with her standard in-house counsel functions, Shaheen was specifically tasked with integrating the contracts from the acquired companies into Playvox’s portfolio, accelerating the creation and completion of sales contracts, and providing the finance team greater visibility into the company’s contractual obligations.
As a legal team of one and the company’s first in-house GC, Shaheen knew that she was going to need to onboard a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution to centralize and analyze thousands of legacy agreements and automate key contract creation and reporting processes. Fortunately, she had implemented LinkSquares at her last company and knew that it would be the ideal solution for Playvox.
“I came to rely on LinkSquares so much in my previous role that I viewed the tool not as a ‘nice to have,’ but as a ‘need to have,’” says Shaheen. “Thankfully, when it came to bringing in a CLM platform, the Playvox management team and I were on the exact same page. In fact, when I interviewed with the CEO, CCO, and VP of Sales, they all asked if I had experience implementing a contract management tool… they knew it was going to be critical for growth and risk mitigation.”
For Kristen, the Playvox challenges were threefold. First, through the recent acquisitions, Playvox absorbed more than 250 contracts that had been negotiated and signed by the acquired companies – and they had little insight into the terms that had been agreed to and where there may be any potential risk areas.
Second, Playvox’s legacy customer and vendor contracts were stored in a static shared drive, leaving the finance team without an easy way to track upcoming renewal and termination dates. This led to missed deadlines, contracts auto-renewing before they could be terminated, and forfeited opportunities to renegotiate specific agreements.
And third, the process for completing a sales contract was disjointed and onerous. The requester on the sales team would draft the contracts themselves, then email the legal and finance teams with the details and drafts for input and review. The contracts were then reviewed and redlined in Google Docs, and communication between departments was done via Slack and/or email. This led to miscommunication, poor version control, and prolonged time-to-close.
“LinkSquares is a tool for contracts, but it’s not just for the legal team – it can truly be leveraged by every department across a company for their particular needs. Bringing on LinkSquares was a quick win for me and for the organization,” says Shaheen.
To get started, Shaheen set-up LinkSquares Analyze to get a handle on both Playvox’s legacy contracts and the 250+ agreements inherited from the acquisitions. She worked with her dedicated LinkSquares Customer Success Manager and Implementation Consultant to automatically import every contract from a Playvox shared drive into the LinkSquares repository, extracting dozens of key data points, called Smart Values, per agreement.
“The Smart Values are incredible. They give us the ability to run reports across our entire population of contracts and, at a glance, get access to any specific agreement or clause that we need,” shared Shaheen. “Everything I need is right there, both the contract and the insights associated with it. It’s extremely intuitive to use.”
With both the contracts and data centralized, Shaheen worked with the Playvox finance team to build out dashboards reports to surface the insights the finance team needed. The dashboards included all vendor and sales contracts with the upcoming renewal date, the renewal clause, and the specific contract terms. This gave the finance team significant visibility and ample warning before a renewal, providing them time to determine whether the contract should be renewed, what terms should be renegotiated and, if the contract was going to be canceled, how much notice they needed to provide. Likewise, a calendar that auto-populates with all renewal and termination dates keeps this information front and center.
With her legacy contracts dealt with, Shaheen turned her attention to her new contracts. At Playvox needs to get over 200 contracts completed every quarter, from simple NDAs to lightly negotiated renewals to highly negotiated MSAs. With so many contracts and a legal team of one, Shaheen needed a way to automate the process and get those new contracts drafted, negotiated, and executed more quickly. Enter LinkSquares Finalize.
Shaheen remembers, “Our old process was convoluted. Some approvals came in through email, others through Slack. Version control was a challenge. And I spent a lot of time chasing down approvals from across the company and required information from across different tools.”
With Finalize, Shaheen was able to move all the previously disparate aspects of the contract creation process into one platform. With a single contract record housing each contract version, all contract details, and any communication about the contract, Shaheen could focus solely on getting the agreement out the door.
“Centralizing the entire contract creation process in Finalize created some truly tremendous efficiencies,” says Shaheen. “We’re always working off the latest agreement version, all communications are captured in one place, and I can easily tag the stakeholders to look at particular parts of the contract.”
But she wasn’t done yet. Shaheen then integrated Finalize with Playvox’s instance of Salesforce. This integration enables the sales team to complete a short intake questionnaire inside Salesforce that gathers key sales information like the contract’s parties, dates, and value, which populate the relevant contract template and kick off a workflow. This allows Shaheen to get a jump start on drafting and approving, significantly reducing turnaround time.
“When you’re an in-house GC, you need as many tools in your workbench as possible. For me, LinkSquares is like having another lawyer on my team. It provides that single source of truth that allows me to work fast and confidently.”