Commercial teams work tirelessly to bring deals in, but revenue won’t be recognized unless contracts get signed.

This means that your contract management process needs to be as efficient as your sales engine - if not more. 

How do you get it there, though? And which problems do you need to solve along the way?

How to improve your contract management process 

1. Give the gift of great contract templates

Optimizing your contract templates is one of the single most impactful things you can do to improve your contract management process. 

Small tweaks like cutting or softening the clauses that create unnecessary friction and improving readability can go a long way, encouraging counterparties to progress from review to signing faster. 

Lawyers are programmed to draft contracts with risk mitigation in mind, but commercial outcomes are equally as important, so you’ll need to strike the right balance between the two objectives.

Don’t wait to optimize the terms mid-negotiation when this friction already exists. Bake improvements into your contract templates early on and enable commercial teams to use them to their advantage. 

Looking for inspiration? Find out how you can streamline your MSA to close more deals.

2. Empower commercial teams to self-serve

The next best way to improve your contract process is to remove bottlenecks caused by too much stakeholder involvement. 

In a traditional, more manual process, it’s common for contracts to jump back and forth between teams, with legal usually responsible for drafting or approving agreements at different stages. 

But what if you enabled commercial teams to self-serve confidently on contracts and eliminated the need for legal’s oversight and input as a result? Well, it’s possible. And businesses like yours are making quick wins there already with Juro’s contract management software. 

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Before implementing Juro, Paddle’s legal and sales teams were feeling the pain of a long and manual process:

“It would take a sales rep at least 30 minutes to download a template and adjust the information. On top of that, legal had to invest a chunk of time into reviewing the document,” says Clio Anderson Garwood, their Senior Legal Counsel. 

Now, commercial teams can self-serve on contract creation using automated contract templates pre-approved by legal. Better yet, they can do it directly from their CRM in just a few clicks.

“It takes the sales team four clicks to generate and approve a contract in Juro. There’s less manual work, less admin, and we’re saving 25 minutes per contract,” says Callum Hamlett, a Senior Rev Ops Analyst at Paddle. 

Want similar results? Hit the button below to find out how Juro can free up legal's time and progress deals faster.

3. Don’t sweat the small stuff in negotiations

Choosing if and when to back down in negotiations is another effective way to improve the speed and efficiency of your contract management process.

Instead of getting bogged down in the small and insignificant details, focus on a handful of areas that actually matter to your business - the ones that are of strategic importance, or are crucial to safeguard the business.

A great way to achieve this is to reframe a simple “no” into a more meaningful and actionable pushback. Ask yourself:

• What can we propose instead that allows us to meet the counterparty or commercial colleague in the middle?
• How important is this term to our commercial success and safety in reality?

Try to reserve the hard pushbacks for your non-negotiables. This will also reinforce the idea that legal is as invested in commercial growth and success as the wider business, which supports with better collaboration in future conversations.

4. Automate your guardrails and playbooks

Setting guardrails and building playbooks gives contract owners clear instructions and safety nets when drafting, negotiating and approving legal agreements. Automating the guardrails and playbooks ensures teams adopt and implement these instructions properly. With Juro, this automation can be achieved in a few ways:

• Automated templates: legal teams can pre-define clauses and required fields by building (and updating) automated contract templates for the wider business to use
  
  
• Conditional logic: businesses can consolidate several contract templates into one with intelligent conditional logic that updates contract terms based on the values in a contract, like geography of ACV
  
  
• AI Assistant: teams can get more accurate and contextual responses from Juro’s legal AI Assistant by submitting their rules, conditions and guardrails
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• ‍Approval workflows: legal teams can derisk contracts by automatically routing contracts to the relevant stakeholders for approval and signing, so no problematic terms slip through the cracks

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5. Keep it simple

Lastly, don’t overcomplicate things by bringing too many tools, stakeholders and new processes into the mix. The best way to improve your contract management process is to streamline it. For example, you can:

• Swap five tools for an all-in-one solution like Juro that manages contracts from start to finish
• Only send contracts for approval when they’re over a certain value threshold, or include deviations
• Find ways to generate and sign routine contracts in bulk, rather than individually 
• Assign clear roles and responsibilities to avoid double work

These are all effective ways to speed up your contract management process and reduce the burden of contract admin, so you can focus on higher-value, more strategic tasks that help you progress in your career.

Juro's contract management platform brings all of your contract processes together, enabling you to agree contracts 10x faster than traditional tools.

Companies like Trustpilot, Deliveroo, Remote and GitLab are among the 6000+ companies already benefitting from faster turnaround times and reduced risk. If you're interested in finding out more, fill in the form below.