How to close deals faster by aligning sales and legal | JD Supra

A common complaint among in-house legal teams is that sales teams provide the right information during the intake process. When creating new contracts for new or existing clients, there is a direct relationship between the commercial and legal teams. And it continues from receipt to transaction management – ​​involving everything from contract creation to review, execution and renewal.

While sales teams are typically tasked with starting the contract generation process, they aren’t necessarily good at receiving. It’s tedious, boring, and can prevent you from closing the deal and earning a commission. To complicate matters further for a sales rep, there are often pre-negotiated niceties that may seem completely trivial to sales, but are legally significant. These facts may be omitted all together on an application for admission.

To reduce the work required to create accurate new contracts, some attorneys create custom templates to capture all the information they need. But these ad hoc solutions often fail because incorrect data is entered, the whole process is skipped, or the model is completed in a hurry.

An example of a common hurdle can be highlighted by looking at the process of writing and signing the non-disclosure agreement (NDA), often required for companies to move forward. The first question to ask is whether an NDA exists with a given client. If yes, where is it? If there isn’t, what will it take to create one and sign it? People spend too much time researching the NDA with an avalanche of emails. Wouldn’t it be nice if this standard document was included in the process and easily accessible from the start?

Admissions challenges also include entering incorrect information — everything from using outdated templates to unrevised legal language or repetitive or obviously unnecessary errors or omissions. These issues simply frustrate the lawyers who are tasked with ensuring that every contract carries minimal exposure to business risk.

In most sales circumstances, both parties will have a champion – a sales rep on one side, a buyer champion (sometimes called a sales point of contact or SPOC) on the other. Both parties will work with their own legal representatives, who will offer comments and red lines. It’s not uncommon for this process to happen over and over again, wasting everyone’s time and resources. It’s the sales rep’s responsibility to manage the process – although most don’t like it and aren’t particularly good at it. Often, to move the process forward, both parties will engage their own legal representatives in a telephone or video chat, an expensive and time-consuming exercise that often turns into a deluge of emails that can introduce errors into the entire process.

Each of these cycles can be its own “mini-jack” and can be subject to all of the above problems and frustrations that come with it.

One solution is to use deal desk software, preferably driven by artificial intelligence (AI) so that it can continue to learn from all changes and significantly improve the process. For example, Advocat offers a platform that enables collaborative redlining by centralizing all activities so they are easy to access and use.

The use of software offers simple solutions to these problems that arise during the process of admitting and managing transactions. Here are some things the software can do, resulting in significant ROI for businesses using this evolving technology.

How deal desk software can help you

1. Coordination: A virtual deal desk solution allows everyone to see the same information at the same time, thus avoiding cumbersome and time-consuming communication chains. This enables a single source on brokered documents, eliminating the many different versions of Word documents that users attach to emails and circulate, becoming messy and out of sync.

2. Overcome issues: Deal Desk software provides tools that make it easy for the legal team to show what they’ve done, so it’s easier to approve changes.

3. Empowerment: A virtual deal desk allows everyone involved to take advantage of all the features built into the software, allowing all employees to use the tools to quickly move deals forward.

Essentially, admissions problems are a symptom of poor incentives, confusion, and helplessness. Adopting deal desk software can solve these problems by increasing communication, reducing confusion and overcoming helplessness. When properly adopted, deal desks can not only reduce frustration among and between business and legal teams, they can also save the company time and money and increase revenue by enabling transactions to close faster.

This is a collaborative effort, requiring the support of all stakeholders involved.

Here are some examples:

1. Highlighting areas of confusion when highlighting documents reduces the number of areas that don’t matter and allows resolution without escalation. It also points directly to things that actually matter and need escalation. AI can make a difference, allowing the legal team to focus on what really matters.

2. AI can unify the sales manual with guardrails put in place by the legal department. Often everyone has a different opinion on what the ideal contract outcome should be. By aligning these viewpoints early in the process – and allowing the software to help you – internal processes will be improved.

3. Deal Desks allow for shared and transparent timelines. The sales team may want to close a deal before the end of the quarter or around a buyer’s budget cycle. But the legal department may have a three-month backlog, frustrating the sales team, who may secretly try to avoid the legal process and create contracts on their own. It is imperative that both parties understand each other’s schedule to avoid conflicts or risky actions such as running unapproved contracts.

Deal Desk software enables employees on all sides of the deal to resolve issues quickly and easily by putting everyone in the same virtual room – both synchronously and asynchronously – to manage their time efficiently.

If you’re on the sell side, don’t let admission and deal management issues keep you from closing your next deal. If you are on the legal side, rest assured that your sales team is working in the most efficient and legally prudent manner. Consider using a virtual trading desk to improve your processes and results.