This scene is one you know all too well: sales teams are scrambling to close (and win) all open deals in their pipeline, which means you’re scrambling to create, review, and approve dozens of contracts as quickly as possible. Your Slack or Teams is pinging off the hook with status update requests, sending you down another rabbit hole looking for internal approvals. You’re trying not to be a bottleneck, but the contract review process is seriously slowing you down.
It makes sense that you’d want to be as thorough as possible in the contract review process — being casual about your contract terms leaves you open to all kinds of risk. But a manual review process isn’t the most efficient use of your time, and can leave you burnt out and unable to support sales.
To avoid the squeeze, partner with sales to create a contract review process that works for both your teams and drives business forward. Here are four ways sales and legal and collaborate to streamline contract review.
1. Share tools.
Rather than messaging back and forth for deal information and manually entering data into your respective tools, integrate your CRM and contract lifecycle management (CLM) so both sales and legal have access to the same data. Linksquares CLM, for example, integrates with Salesforce, allowing the two ecosystems to share data and update deal and contract information.
2. Automate contract creation.
Creating contracts from scratch each time a deal is generated in your CRM is not the most strategic use of your time. It leaves you playing catch-up when you want to be leading the pack. Instead, configure your CRM/CLM integration to automatically generate a contract with pre-approved language whenever the deal status changes. This enables self–service contract creation and makes contract review leagues easier on you.
3. Standardize low-risk contracts.
Taking a look at your process right now, how much time do you spend on NDAs and terms of service agreements? Spending too much time on standard, low-dollar contracts decreases the amount of time you could be spending closing big business. Consider standardizing your lower-risk contracts and automating execution. This gives sales more autonomy, and you more time back in your day.
4. Use AI contract review.
Things that take humans hours or days can take AI hours, if not minutes. While AI can’t make independent legal decisions, it’s good at analyzing contracts and identifying trends. With Linksquares, you can use AI to automate the first pass of a contract. It can pick up on anomalies, inconsistencies, and risky terms, letting you know exactly what to focus on during contract review so you can get the deal over the line faster.
Takeaways
By working with sales to establish a contract creation and review process, your team can collaborate your way to a shorter sales cycle. Use technology that both sales and legal have access to (like a CLM and CRM), and for maximum efficiency, integrate your two tools so that both teams have a single source of truth.
