How to Negotiate Your Contracts in a CLM

Negotiating contracts can be a significant drain on your legal team’s time. The back-and-forth with vendors and clients alike can make it difficult to finalize contracts promptly. That’s why it’s valuable to work with a Contract Lifecycle Management platform, or CLM. 

Using a contract management platform helps you negotiate with external vendors and find the right size negotiation for your specific use case. Instead of managing paper documents, manual editing, and mixed negotiation, you can use your CLM to keep the process streamlined and on-topic. Here’s how to negotiate using a CLM like Ironclad, no matter what your use case may be. 

The Ironclad CLM is designed to make creating, negotiating, and finalizing every agreement quick and intuitive. That applies to every level of negotiation, such as:

• High-level negotiation, when your company negotiates contracts from top to bottom, performing redlining and in-depth edits.
• ‌Mid-level negotiation, when your business changes contracts by adding or subtracting clauses and heavily relies on standardized agreements.
• ‌Low-level negotiation, when your organization handles bulk contracts like NDAs. 
• ‌Negotiation-free contracts, when your company sends out non-negotiable customer service agreements or terms of service.

‌Ironclad can and does help companies navigate all four of these situations. Here’s how. 

High-level negotiation is a common requirement in B2B businesses and contractor positions. Any company that serves large businesses or works with contractors may need to negotiate contracts from the ground up on a regular basis. For example, you may need to work out items like payment rates, the term of the contract, and non-disclosure and non-compete clauses with every new customer or freelancer. 

That type of negotiation involves a lot of redlining. Redlining is the process of collaboratively editing contracts to come to a solution that both parties can accept. Ironclad’s CLM offers convenient, simple redlining and collaboration that makes high-level negotiation easy. ‌

Ironclad’s CLM provides in-browser redlining that allows your team to handle edits together with your clients or vendors without having to schedule in-person meetings or navigate version control. By using Ironclad’s browser-based redlining, you can streamline your high-level negotiation workflow for good.

Mid-level negotiation requires less work than building a contract from the ground up, but it still takes effort. It can involve swapping out pre-built clauses and altering things like payment and the length of a term, but it typically doesn’t require full redlining. 

Mid-level negotiation is common in companies that work on a contract basis, such as creative and design businesses.  For example, a design company may have two or three clauses regarding IP ownership that it is willing to offer clients. These companies want to keep their contracts workflow stable for ease of use, but still have the flexibility to change things quickly.

The easiest way to streamline these negotiations is to use a CLM. The right CLM will allow you to have a counterparty and collaborate within one platform. You can use a CLM like Ironclad to streamline your contract workflow and cut down on the number of programs you need to keep your contract process running. 

That’s exactly what Ironclad Workflow Designer was built to accomplish. It’s a system that provides a single source of truth for how to negotiate contracts. With the Workflow Designer, sales teams can pull up contracts and handle minor clause alterations in minutes. Negotiations can be smoothly passed from sales to your legal team, letting your staff collaborate to get things done quickly. That prevents wasted time and lost deals. 

Low-level negotiation is simple. It typically involves changing one or two small elements of a contract at most, such as the term or the payment. NDAs are an example of low-negotiation contracts. Most companies will only permit NDA negotiation for high-demand contractors and even then only allow small changes. 

These kinds of low-negotiation contracts tend to be very similar to each other. Still, it’s essential that you track whether the documents are signed and any changes that are made. The best thing you can do to streamline this is to use a system that stores contracts and keeps them organized. Ironclad’s Dynamic Repository is the perfect choice to help these low-level negotiations run more smoothly. 

The Dynamic Repository keeps all contracts neatly in one place. There’s never a doubt about which version is final or where a finalized NDA was stored. Meanwhile, these past agreements act as a valuable resource for future negotiations and contracts. If your business handles high volumes of simple contracts, you can benefit from integrating Ironclad’s CLM and contract repository. 

Not every contract requires in-depth negotiation. Some contracts should require no negotiation at all. For example, contracts like inbound services agreements and statements of work can be entirely automated. ‌

With a CLM that includes clickwrap agreements, also known as click-accepts or click-to-sign contracts, your legal team can automate contracts and make signing as simple as the click of a button. If you have non-negotiated contracts that are sent to dozens or hundreds of people, clickwrap signatures can help you present the contract as a seamless, digitally native agreement. The clickwrap agreement still acts as a binding contract, but it doesn’t take up your time. 

You can use clickwrap signatures for any other contract, too. Regardless of the amount of negotiation that takes place, you can insert a clickwrap at the end once you’re ready to finalize it. It’s a reliable, simple solution to collect signatures for contracts of any size. 

You may be negotiating contracts when it’s not necessary. Contracts like terms of service and privacy policies don’t need to be reworked every time you bring on a new customer. With clickwrap agreements from Ironclad, you can save your legal team time and effort on these negotiations for years to come. 

If you’re looking for the right company to simplify your negotiations, Ironclad can help. Ironclad Clickwrap is the industry-leading clickwrap transition platform. With Ironclad Clickwrap, you can rest assured that you’re using the most secure, reliable source of clickwrap agreements in the world. 

If you’re ready to negotiate contracts more effectively with a CLM, reach out to Ironclad today. You can streamline negotiations no matter what your use case may be. Request a demo to see how Ironclad’s CLM can improve your company’s contract negotiation process.