Sales enablement best practice for legal

Tom Bangay: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this community session on how legal can enable the sales team. So we are, as I'm sure you're all aware, seven, eight days away from the end of the quarter. So everyone looks quite stressed in the panel, but they're holding it together quite well. So we've got to make this a really good use of your time. And if your company's doing anything like Juro, the legal review Slack channel is going off right now. So we're looking for tactics and strategies and approaches that can help the legal team to support the sales team in closing deals. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to ask our panel to briefly introduce themselves. So maybe just tell us who you are, why you work, and a bit about the company. And I think I'm going to go left to right to do that. So let's start with Kate, if you're on my left.

Kate Montgomery: Hi, everyone. I'm Kate Montgomery. I'm head of legal in the US for Funnel. I'm located in Boston, and I joined Funnel about nine months ago now. So I'm relatively new to the position, and it's a new legal function for our global teams.

Tom Bangay: Lovely. Thanks very much, Kate. And then I have Alastair in the middle.

Alastair Scragg: Hi, guys. My name is Alastair Scragg. I'm director of legal for EMEA and APAC at Invicti Security. I'm based in the UK, and I've been at Invicti for just about a year, coming up beginning of April.

Tom Bangay: Lovely. And what does Invicti do? Sorry, I'm familiar with Funnel, but I don't think we've spoken.

Alastair Scragg: Yeah, sure. So real web application security SaaS tool, essentially, to scan people's websites and target applications for vulnerabilities in their code.

Tom Bangay: Cool. Very nice. Thank you, Alastair. And then finally, but not least, Pratik.

Pratik: Yeah, I'm Pratik. I head up legal for Zero Height. We're a SaaS business, so we're a design documentation platform that helps the world's biggest companies to manage their design systems. Currently, we serve about 20% of the NASDAQ 100. So, you know, deal a lot with enterprise customers. And I've been involved in this business since there were about six people, about two and a half years ago to about 90 today.

Tom Bangay: Lovely. Thanks very much. I misemphasized your syllables there, Pratik. Sorry about that. I bet it happens all the time. All right, so let's dive in. So what we're going to cover today is collaborating with the sales team, automation workflows, quick wins, low-hanging fruit, all that good stuff. Your relationship with the sales team, sales and legal, perhaps not always best of friends. And then we've got time for Q&A, so if you have any questions at any point, please just put them in the chat, and we'll talk about them on air.

So first of all, I guess probably the foundational question in terms of where you get started in the process. Like at what stage does legal get involved in a deal? And I suppose that's going to have a very "it depends" answer. But that's probably a good place to start. Maybe, Kate, if we go back to you to start off with that one.

When should sales enablement start?

Kate Montgomery: Yeah, so for us, I'd say the earlier that legal can get involved, the better. You know, we can help guide our sales team along the way about, you know, maybe we don't even have red lines from a customer yet, but sales knows exactly what the customer is going to ask about. And the more that sales can kind of head off those legal questions from the beginning with their business teams and educate their business teams on how to talk to their sales teams, it's really beneficial for us to have that collaborative working environment right from the get-go before pen hits the paper, click into the Salesforce, or whatever it is that you use.

Tom Bangay: Okay, makes sense. And then I guess in terms of contracting as well, obviously all of the mechanisms through which you recognize revenue, close deals, you guys wrote those in the first place, right? So before there were even deals, there were lawyers, right?

Kate Montgomery: That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, those templates are constantly being updated. We're always taking feedback from our sales team about what's working, what's not. But also just educating the sales team on why something is written the way it is and why it looks like that is really important and goes a long way with, again, their being able to educate their own customers about those contracts.

Tom Bangay: Makes sense. Alastair, is that similar for you, the earlier the better and try and have an open dialogue?

Alastair Scragg: Yeah, 100%. So one of the things I do at our company is I always attend the sales forecast meetings each week. Most of the time, I'm just a silent observer because no one wants to hear from me. But what it does give me the opportunity to do is see what deals are coming down the pipe so I can then plan for my team and have a bit of an understanding as to what might hit us at quarter-end. And it also, like Kate said, gives you the opportunity to influence how sales are approaching things. Most of the time, our contracts obviously come towards the end of the process and sales think they've already got it over the line, but you can initiate them to send over your templates and start those conversations early enough to give my team and I a chance to get it done on time. And don't get me wrong, we're still at quarter one now, and I'm getting grayer by the minute, but we do at least have that visibility to know what's coming, and we can resource accordingly.

Tom Bangay: And do you find it's, I mean, I only really have SaaS experience in this company, but very lumpy, or the end of the month is a nightmare and the end of the quarter is a meta nightmare. Is that typical, or do you try to manage the lumps and bumps along the way?

Alastair Scragg: Yeah, I mean, I've been at a few IT companies. I was at Rackspace, which was on a monthly sales cycle like you said, and therefore you got one week off a month and then it went mad for the other three. Here we're on a quarterly sales cycle, and so it is much more of a gradual trajectory. But because of that, you don't really want to spend eight weeks sitting on your hands knowing you're going to have four weeks of hell at the end. So I do try and promote them getting us involved early, getting the contract negotiations up and running even while they're simultaneously working out commercials because you can't pull rabbits out of the hat every single quarter. You need that planning and the usual time and resource accordingly. So I try and smooth it out, but I'll be lying if I said it was just a smooth trajectory all the way through.

Making the sales process smoother

Tom Bangay: And Pratik, you've escaped to East Africa for the end of the quarter. So that's either something's going really well or something's going really badly. But does that mean you got involved really early in the process and your month ends up smooth?

Pratik: Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo what Alastair and Kate have said, which is, you know, I think if you're working on big deals, particularly if they're MSAs, then you need to have months of notice for those and be ready for those. I would almost frame the question a little bit differently, which is I think legal should be involved in designing and engineering the sales process and the legal part of the sales process. And actually, the sales team should have a framework to run with so that they can take deals really, really far without requiring legal inputs. So that actually legal is only involved where absolutely necessary. But it kind of depends on the deal that you're working on. But that's what we've tried to achieve is as much self-help as possible and as many escalation processes as possible to allow the sales team to run with as much of it as they can.

Tom Bangay: And how do you do that kind of prioritization towards the end of the month? Handle those escalation levels. Is that to do with deal size or complexity or, you know, I guess some logos are better than others. How do you try and look at that from your limited resource lawyer hat?

Pratik: So I would say that we don't have so much like an end of month prioritization strategy. I think it's probably more end of quarter or end of year process whereby we kind of allow through exceptions. But I think the main thing is we've got what we internally call a redline escalation process that the sales team have to look at and have to run through the different steps of the process to see, one, would this deal qualify for any sort of redlining? And if it does, would it just be on our terms? And in what limited cases would we allow a customer to work off the basis of their MSA? So that we're kind of limiting the pushback points as much as possible.

Tom Bangay: Okay, yeah, makes sense. On that point, Kate, on deviations, I've seen your CLO dashboard funnel, which is mind-blowing, but obviously you're tracking on a kind of iterative basis the number of deviations to standard terms with certain contracts. How do you guys work out when and if you're going to deviate based on the type of contract and that kind of thing?

Kate Montgomery: Yeah, we certainly have thresholds that we've established based on deal size, based on customer. We kind of try to stay within those thresholds of whether or not we'll start negotiating a contract. What we've also done is try to give our sales team kind of a plain English meaning of each contract section. This is written down so they can refer to it at any time. And we've also given them a traffic light system to go with that. Which section is agreeing, yeah, sure, of course we can change this here or there to meet the customer's needs? Which sections are absolute no-goes?

And so that allows the sales team to really understand, okay, this customer just sent this in a week before the end of the quarter, and every single section they've marked up is a red. So let's reprioritize here. This is probably not a deal for this quarter. Let's go back and really educate the business user, but also the legal team about what it is our platform is and what we're selling. Because I think that's typically the impasse that we see. But we've really tried to empower the sales team to be able and be comfortable to have those conversations with their business users directly.

Contracts and sales enablement

Tom Bangay: And do you find, because I remember talking to Victoria, your CLO, once about this. Trying to raise the contract IQ of the whole commercial org, which is great. I guess the thing that sprung to mind was sales headcount turnover is a bit faster than legal. So do you find it a bit of a challenge to keep everyone at the same level and try and make sure they keep that institutional knowledge?

Kate Montgomery: So I have to be honest. We actually work on a commission-less sales model, and our sales turnover is actually minimal. It's the first place I've ever worked at that has really retained sales individuals. And it's been remarkably refreshing for me to work with such a seasoned sales operation, which you don't find at other companies. What we've tried to do though is make sure that we have our guidance written down that's easily accessible for everyone. I don't ever expect sales to remember everything I told them in one meeting on one customer contract. But we've really tried to memorialize our guidance, make our guidance accessible to everyone so that they can always go back and have a refresher. And that, of course, if and when turnover may start happening, those will be great resources that are already in place for any new starters that need to come on board.

Tom Bangay: Makes sense. Great. Okay. We've got a question here, which is about one process or tool you implemented that made the sales process faster and more efficient. And maybe let's go to Alastair on that. Is there anything that springs to mind that helped you speed up your sales flow?

Alastair Scragg: Yeah, sure. I mean, I had things in different companies. One we're using here at the moment is obviously having our CLM system heavily integrated with Salesforce. So where that was important compared to other ones I've used was sales like working within the environment that they spend their day in. And therefore to get them to utilize the tools that you're looking to push them towards, really to make sure it's easy for them to access from that platform. From our side, having them auto-generate contracts, trying to monitor the progress of both themselves as much as possible. I mean, I'd be lying if I said we were at the level of sophistication that Kate's at.

So when I came here, we were lucky if we found the contracts we'd signed two years ago, let alone having anything to organize, but we are getting there and it's taking time. I think just making sales as easy. The information to sales is readily available as you can pushing them towards process. Trying to avoid getting too many queries over Slack, which I still get, especially at the end of the quarter, but it just becomes impossible to actually monitor things through and delegate efficiently. So I would say making sure you've got a good case management system, making sure they've got access to that if they want to find historical documents that have been signed, and try and take as much of the noise out of your role as possible to allow you to focus and develop the team in that rarest.

Tom Bangay: Very nice. Yeah, I think it's probably also not unique to legal that sales need to be told things quite a lot of times to hear it. Every day I'm asked for a certain type of case study marketing whatever and I'm like here are the nine places I've already shared it with you, but thank you. Yeah, exactly, but you know there's only one thing on their mind which is quota but not in a commissionless sales orgs and maybe that's where I'm going wrong. Kate and Pratik, do you have anything that you want to throw in there as a process improvement that makes things a bit easier working with sales?

Pratik: Yeah, I mean to that point it's quite funny. I mean something that I've tried to do now when people send a message across is sending a link to the Notion page where we've got the details kind of already kind of living there to try and create that habit of the sales team kind of going to that resource rather than kind of coming to me as a sort of quick, as a quick win. But one of the things that we've implemented recently is quite a simple solution using a Slack workflow. Which is basically just like a simple way for the sales team to generate legal requests in one of our Slack channels. But what it's kind of forced the sales team to do is because the form has kind of got a particular structure to it, it kind of forces them to check that they've done all the things that they need to and that they've got the relevant information, you know, what's the deal size and stuff like that to kind of one, make sure that they're structuring their request in a way that's kind of easy for the legal team to understand.

And two, because it is a sort of transparent channel that's visible to our sales leadership, it kind of makes them think twice about the questions that they put in there without having sort of done, I guess, the relevant homework that they need to do before they submit the request. And actually, I've noticed that it has reduced the number of queries that we're getting. One, in terms of all the different channels. So instead of coming through Notion, Slack, email, it's all coming through one channel now. And also it's coming through in a way that's like structured and kind of forces the sales team to check that they've done all the right things.

Tom Bangay: Yeah, I think those kind of structured request forms work for lots of different purposes. We had a similar improvement when we had, we got lots of requests for reference calls with customers. Usually what people do is DM someone they know knows a customer and then try and hook it up or has created a form and it obviously uplifted the output there. There's a question here from Gifty in the chat, which I think is for Kate, and I need to ask you about your process improvements as well, Kate. Let's do this one in real time. How do you make sure that your internal guidance stays internal and your positions aren't accidentally shared with your negotiation partners?

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