How Ironclad Helps Signifyd Review Contracts 85 Times Faster Than Before

There comes a point in the evolution of every successful startup when it isn’t a startup anymore. Yesterday’s tools and practices aren’t up to tomorrow’s growth and innovation.

Signifyd, a platform that protects online merchants from payment fraud and consumer abuse, began to reach that point as they doubled annual revenue, started moving deeper into the enterprise market, and welcomed some of the world’s largest retailers as customers.

As Signifyd became bigger and more successful, it also became more complex—more customers, more employees, and more products could only lead to one thing: More contracts.

Not only was there a higher volume of contracts, but their terms also became far more complicated. Forging agreements with enterprise retailers called for more custom features, more unique services, and higher performance standards.

Their initial contracting process was completely manual, beginning with an intake form from the sales team. Next, legal would draw up a completely new contract each time, which would go out for internal approvals via email, and then finally land in the prospective customer’s inbox.

Next, when it was time for redlines and revisions, it became increasingly difficult to see who was requesting what changes, and in what order. This also made it impossible for both parties to keep up with the most recent version of the contract.

The old way of managing contracts was slowing down the sales process, which was completely counterproductive to the goal of continuing Signifyd’s success.

Signifyd uses big data and machine learning to instantly separate fraudulent online orders from legitimate ones. That same machine learning powers Signifyd’s customer abuse protection, used when a customer makes false claims about an order’s condition or arrival status.

Signifyd also provides European merchants with Seamless SCA, making purchases easy to complete without losing compliance to local requirements.

In addition, Signifyd’s Decision Center offers merchants globally protection against promotion and return abuse and unauthorized reselling.

The fact that Signifyd protects every step of the buying journey—and offers a financial guarantee to boot—means it also produces a dizzying number of product and service combinations within its contracts.

Before Ironclad, legal review of a contract could take up to 72 hours. But now, thanks to workflow optimization, time-to-close has been reduced dramatically. In fact, Signifyd processed nearly 200 agreements within 7 days leading up to month-end in May 2021.

“Once you understand the process,” says Signifyd Contracts Manager Zuhair Saadat—who they also refer to as their “Ironclad Architect,”, “Creating a multi-product contract can be completed in like a minute.”

Turning days into minutes can make all the difference in closing a deal in quarter—or at all.

“We can say with confidence that deals are not getting stuck in legal anymore,” Saadat says. “We can turn around a contract in less than a day.”

Seamless collaboration within the Ironclad platform also meant teams could largely self-serve customer requests whenever they needed them.

With Ironclad, the amount of time it took to create a contract covering several products, like Signifyd’s Revenue Protection and the distinct modules of Abuse Prevention or Payments Optimization, was dramatically reduced.

Another big advantage Signifyd gained with Ironclad is the ability to access details of signed contracts instantly. This allowed them to easily answer questions like, What are the performance promises in terms of reviewing orders for a given company? How many deals include Signifyd’s Abuse Prevention solution? What is the value of those contracts? What portion of that value can be attributed to Abuse Prevention?

Those questions, and the answers to them, became extremely important as Signifyd laid the groundwork for its recent $205 million Series E round of funding. Ironclad enabled Signifyd’s investors to analyze details such as deal size, how many deals included various products, and how much value each product was driving.

The increased contract efficiency drove adoption of Ironclad across many cross-functional Signifyd teams.

“Being able to establish the Ironclad repository as the source of truth for contracts really helped people jump on board,” Saadat says.

Right away, the sales team increased their responsiveness and closed deals with prospective customers faster.

“Our legal team is first-rate, but at times it could be frustrating, waiting for the proverbial T’s to be crossed and I’s to be dotted,” says Regional Sales Director David Gardner. “With Ironclad, my team can basically self-service contracts now.”

Before Ironclad, closing deals took a lot of back-and-forth between the legal and sales teams, and it all depended on manually entering information.

“You can just imagine how many steps there are, so it really does slow you down quite a bit,” Saadat says. “ Now that we have this seamless integration between our CRM and Ironclad, that problem has been eliminated. Nobody has to download anything. Nobody has to attach anything.”

Ironclad has also made things easier for Signifyed’s billing team, and before they had advanced reporting capabilities, it would take an entire week to keep track of the company’s billing payments each month.

The benefits also reach to the sales operations team, as they are now able to automatically map completed contracts to Signifyd’s CRM tool, enabling quicker implementations for their customers.

Once a contract has been completed in Ironclad, a sales representative’s job is done—Compared to the past, when they had to create their own forms and assist with closing the deals. Now, they have more time to reach out to prospective customers and be proactive about their business outreach.

The seamlessness of the Ironclad platform also extends to Signifyd’s current customers. When customers choose to add products to their contract or commit to a longer-term renewal, all Signifyd’s Customer Success team has to do is submit a request via an Ironclad workflow and a brand-new agreement is generated within a matter of minutes. 

As a fast-growing company increasingly serving complex retail enterprises, Signifyd is constantly looking for ways to become more efficient, and Ironclad has become a primary tool to drive this vision. 

Now, there’s nothing slowing down Signifyd as they look ahead to expanding their market share, adding to its roster of enterprise customers, and successfully managing each contract that comes their way.