How vendors can maximize tech adoption

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The legal team’s just purchased software to help them enable the business - what now?

When it comes to legal teams buying a tool like Juro, it’s possibly the first kind of tool they’re buying that’s bespoke to their workflows; legal typically wouldn’t own platforms used by other teams, like Salesforce for example.

The onus is on the vendor’s sales team to actively educate legal on next steps. By the time legal gets round to purchasing and implementing the software, they should have a reasonable understanding of what the next steps and commitments are - on both sides.

Legal teams could consider questions like:

• What does the training (provided by the vendor) look like? How is it going to run and be distributed?
• Have we completed the required work to kickstart that onboarding process?
• If our templates are supplied by an external provider, have they finalised them?

It’s also important to bring the wider business into the project. If I’m the Head of Legal, buying a tool that helps legal manage sales contract workflows, it’ll be useful to bring in sales at a director level to run through the journey alongside them.

Running a workshop where the customer has control and is sharing their screen works well from a learning perspective. It helps the vendor identify the customer’s confidence in the product

What does ‘great’ look like when it comes to onboarding?

Any vendor with a strong implementation process should be guiding you through this binary process of what needs to happen. They should have a checklist of tasks that need to be completed throughout onboarding. Here’s an example of ours:

At Juro, the first touchpoint is a kickoff meeting with our implementation team. This is an introductory call that covers roles and responsibilities, and recaps the value that the customer is seeking from this platform.

We also set out crystal clear timelines and next steps, which includes requirements on what the vendor needs from the customer in order to help them succeed.

After this, we run an admin training session, which involves training the super users of the platform on their authority as admins. Running a workshop where the customer has control and is sharing their screen, rather than passively watching the vendor, often works well from a learning perspective. It also helps the vendor identify the customer’s confidence in the product.

Depending on the scope of the rollout, we may run additional sessions on integration setup and so on - the aim is to help the customer get value from Juro as soon as possible, and that’s why implementation takes weeks instead of months.

How can the customer maximise adoption of the tool with the wider business?

Stakeholder engagement is key - make sure that people are brought into the platform early on and understand the value it brings them.

I would also recommend leaning on your vendor - any experienced vendor should be able to give some advice on best practices, especially if the implementation involves multiple teams, across various timezones.

How do we do this at Juro?

The constant with anyone buying any tool is that people just prefer to do what they’ve always done!

It can be difficult for some people to switch processes and change their ways of working - because it may be important, but not urgent for them personally.

Email blasts to stakeholders work well - legal can send out an email to the relevant stakeholders, clearly explaining the top three reasons for purchasing this software. In the case of Juro, reasons from legal teams include:

• We need to automate our contracts so we can help the business close more deals
• We’ve just raised our funding round, and contracts are taking X amount of our time
• We need to manage renewals better - last year, they cost the business X amount of money

What this does is drive an impetus: ultimately you have to learn the system, or you’re going to be left behind as we move to a new way of doing things. This works particularly well with a soft launch of the product, followed by a stricter cut-off date.

Juro is the #1-rated platform globally for speed of implementation and ease of use.

What can the vendor do to keep customers up-to-date with new features and upgrades?

The vendor should be going over the product roadmap in their quarterly business reviews with the customer. It’s really useful for customers when vendors don’t just list upcoming features - but instead go through a thematic overview of the roadmap and explain:

• The journey that we’ve been on as a company
• The big problems we’re currently focusing on
• Recent releases that address these problems
• What we’re looking to build in the future

As well as asking for any feedback. Beyond that, the vendor should be sending automated updates that keep customers updated with the latest in the platform.

And when it comes to customer feedback, how does that process play out at Juro?

We have a customer insights database, which is where feature requests get formally passed on. We proactively seek out feedback on a regular basis, including in our quarterly business reviews.

This is also something that customer success teams can populate on behalf of the customer - for example, when I’m on customer call, I might see the customer clicking on a button in a certain way.

That’s something that I can pass on as indirect feedback: “the customer felt an inclination to do X in a certain way. Maybe we can improve the user experience here.”

With any good vendor, there’s probably plenty happening behind the scenes in terms of making sure any feedback that customers give is captured and triaged, before being actioned if necessary.

Perfection is the enemy of the good - it’s good to have an objective you can iterate and develop, as long as you have something to get you started

When it comes to tech implementation, what metrics can legal teams track to measure success?

When it comes to broader metrics, legal teams can track the implementation itself: is the system in place? Are certain teams using the platform? If so, that may be how you measure success.

At a more granular level legal can look at:

• Whether the system has reduced time spent on contracts by 70 per cent
• Whether time-to-sign has decreased
• Whether this automated process has streamlined the sales cycle

There is a challenge with this that ties in well to the first question - if the legal team is buying a software solution for the first time, they can find it difficult to measure success. We see this in particular with contract automation - legal teams live in Word, or Google Docs, and aren’t sure of the correct metrics to track.

How can legal teams overcome this?

There are ways in which legal can think about this and carry out a basic pen and paper calculation on what success looks like. It’s also important to remember that perfection is the enemy of the good - it’s good to have a basic objective you can iterate and develop as you get used to the new system, as long as you have something to get you started.

The vendor should also actively help you create a success criteria - in Juro we can produce data on how many people are signing into the platform, the active percentage of users, number of contracts being created, and so on.

Success is really dependent on a collaboration between customer and vendor, so legal should lean on their vendor when and where possible to make sure their tech implementation is a surefire win across the business.

Want to learn more about how Juro can help you agree and manage routine contracts at scale? Get in touch.