3 signs your sales contract process is broken - and how to fix it

Sales teams are laser-focused on one thing: closing deals. A broken contract process can get in the way of reps achieving their goal - so how do you fix it and enable your team to succeed? 

Below we look at three common signs that your contract process needs improvement, and identify the steps you could take to fix it. 

1. There’s a single point of failure

Having one person manually approving all your sales contracts might work out fine when the business is in its early stages and only dealing with a handful of contracts a month - but what happens when contract volumes increase?

What happens when the business is dealing with dozens of contracts a month? The cracks begin to show in this process, in multiple ways: 

• The approver, usually the CEO or COO, has to balance contracts-related work alongside their many other responsibilities. This usually slows down the time taken to approve a contract, especially when it’s a lower-priority on their list
• As this contract work becomes more of a burden, there’s a greater risk of human error when the approver is dealing with a seemingly endless stack of contracts. This opens the business up to risk
• The time taken in the process could lead to friction between teams - especially with sales, where time is of the essence and reps need to build momentum with their leads to ensure they close a deal 

This is a common scenario we hear with customers when discussing their contract process before Juro. Koombea’s Director of Customer Ops and Account Management, Nicolas Costa, faced a similar issue. 

Every contract request went through me, and there were so many different edits I needed to make each time.

I’m also not the one closing the deal; I'm just getting information from a sales representative, so there was plenty of back-and-forth to make sure the contract was accurate

Koombea was losing precious time to an incredibly manual, time-consuming contract process, which would only continue to be a problem as the business scaled and more contracts ended up on Nicolas’ ‘to do’ list.

How can sales teams resolve this?

An effective way of overcoming this problem is by implementing a contracts platform that streamlines the approval process. 

Juro’s mass-approve feature allows time-crunched leaders to approve contracts with the click of a button. Plus, contracts created from predefined templates reduce the risk of human error or freestyled terms.

Find out more about how Koombea implemented Juro to save time in the approval process.

2. There are multiple tools that don’t communicate with each other

You’ve likely heard of the tools used in a lengthy, manual contract process; it usually involves Word, PDF, email chains, sometimes Slack, an eSignature tool, and so on. 

There are several problems with this workflow, but one that may impact sales the most is around how each tool is separate from the other. 

There’s no communication between tools, and there are several points in the process where sales (and other teams) teams lose visibility on commercial contracts.

This makes it difficult to:

• Understand which version of the contract is the most up-to-date and ready for signing
• Gather data on bottlenecks in the contract process 
• Identify whether the counterparty has viewed the contract, suggested changes, and so on - as usually, the contract is downloaded as an attachment from an email

Funnel had a similar problem where multiple tools were slowing down time-to-sign and causing friction in the sales cycle. Keep reading to find out how they fixed this problem.

How can sales teams resolve this?

Implementing a contracts platform that can integrate with other systems in your tech stack is a huge benefit. 

Juro’s integrations allow for a two-way sync of information between Juro and the sales team’s CRM, such as HubSpot or Salesforce. This means contract data is ready to access from the platform you use every day. 

It also means that there’s a unified workspace for contracts, and sales (and other teams) don’t have to worry about jumping between systems to find the information they need, reducing time taken to get sales contracts signed.

Funnel’s legal team implemented Juro, and integrated with their systems to create a detailed contract workflow where visibility was key. Victoria Sörving, Chief Legal Officer at Funnel, said:

We’ve integrated Juro with Slack so we have a contract renewal channel for different teams. All our notifications are to open channels, so everyone knows the status of each contract. No more DMs to the legal team

Instead of several detached tools, being used in isolation, their contract workflow now looks like this:

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For more information on how Funnel implemented Juro, and why Funnel’s sales team ranks Juro as one of their top tools they can’t work without, check out our case study.

3. It takes several steps to agree a contract

Sales needs to move fast if they want to close their deals and meet their high targets. When reps have to complete several tasks just to draft a sales contract template and send for approval, it’s a strong indicator of a contract process that needs improvement.

Contracts shouldn’t slow the sales team down - and yet that’s a common problem we hear from sales teams at high-growth businesses. 

For example, Paddle’s lengthy contract process impacted both sales and legal teams, as Callum Hamlett, Senior Revenue Operations Analyst at Paddle, explained:

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

With several steps involved in simply drafting the contract and getting approval from legal, this was a problem that was only set to grow with the business. Sales were losing 30 minutes of their time on this process, whilst the legal team sank hours into negotiation and review. 

Clio Anderson Garwood, Senior Legal Counsel at Paddle, said: 

Deviations from standard terms and back-and-forth negotiations would take up three to four hours of legal’s time, per contract

How can sales teams resolve this?

All-in-one contract collaboration software like Juro can help sales teams simplify this process, replacing several steps with just a few clicks. 

Templates pre-defined by the legal team allow sales reps to self-serve without worrying about outdated terms or incorrect information. 

Paddle decided to implement Juro to reduce manual steps in the contract workflow, and enable reps to speed through the process. The results were clear: 

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

Find out more about how Paddle uses Juro in our case study. 

And if you’re interested in learning more about how all-in-one contract automation can help your sales team close deals faster, get in touch below.