6 Common Contract Bottlenecks Salespeople Face

Key takeaways:

• Recognize that inefficient contract management costs companies an average of nine percent of annual revenue, with delays directly impacting your ability to close deals and meet quarterly targets.

• Implement collaborative contract platforms that bring counterparties into a shared workspace, reducing negotiation time by 43% or more by eliminating scattered email threads and version control issues.

• Establish standard operating procedures with legal teams and deploy contract automation for pre-approved language, enabling legal to focus review time on modified terms rather than re-examining entire agreements.

• Provide sales teams with direct visibility into contract metrics and status through centralized systems, allowing them to track bottlenecks and proactively address delays instead of waiting for legal updates.

Contract bottlenecks cost sales teams time and money by creating delays that prevent deals from closing on schedule, with one report finding that inefficient contracting can cost companies an average of nine percent of revenues annually. These workflow interruptions force salespeople to spend hours managing single contracts instead of pursuing new opportunities.

Common bottlenecks include counterparties taking weeks to return signed agreements and legal reviews that stretch deal timelines. Each delay reduces your team’s capacity to generate revenue and meet quarterly targets.

The right contract management approach turns these bottlenecks from revenue blockers into a faster, more reliable way to close deals.

What is a contract bottleneck?

A contract bottleneck is any point in the contract lifecycle where inefficient processes create delays that slow deal closure. These bottlenecks prevent sales teams from moving agreements through the pipeline at optimal speed.

• Waiting for contract counterparties to review and sign the agreement

• Long delays in the legal department

• Manual contracts that are difficult to store

• Ineffective presentation method for contracts

• Lack of insights into the contract process

Each of these delays forces sales teams to spend time chasing signatures instead of pursuing new opportunities. Eliminating contract bottlenecks allows your team to focus on revenue-generating activities like building relationships and closing deals.

The right software addresses these problems systematically, turning contract processes from revenue blockers into a strength for your business.

The business impact of contract bottlenecks

Here’s what these bottlenecks actually cost your business. Every day a deal sits in legal review or waits for a signature is a day you’re not booking that revenue. It frustrates your sales team, who just want to close the deal, and it can make your company look slow and disorganized to customers. When you multiply that delay across dozens or hundreds of contracts, you’re looking at a significant financial impact; in fact, research shows that poor contract management can cause an erosion of value equal to nine percent of annual revenue. Fixing these bottlenecks isn’t just about making legal’s life easier—it’s about helping the entire business move faster and close more deals.

1. Waiting for counterparties to sign

Waiting for counterparty signatures creates the most significant delays in contract management. This bottleneck occurs when redlining requires multiple email exchanges and document versions scattered across different computers.

These signature delays can extend contract cycles from days to weeks or even months. Without centralized tracking, sales teams lose visibility into where agreements stand in the approval process.

The lack of coordination means deals stall while stakeholders search for the latest contract version or wait for responses to redline requests.

The solution is bringing your counterparty into a collaborative environment where both sides can work together efficiently. You can invite your counterparty to collaborate with you on a shared platform to reduce the time spent negotiating by 43% or more.

• Giving the counterparty the same tools you have access to

• Keeping your contracts and data secure

• Aligning with your internal team and the counterparty in a central location

• Using a chronological activity feed that gives all relevant actions and details surrounding the agreement

• Permitting the counterparty to invite their team members to get the deal done faster

2. Long review times by legal

Legal review delays occur when departments lack efficient processes for drafting, negotiating, and approving contracts, with the average cycle time for contract approval being twice as long for average companies compared to best-in-class performers (30.5 days vs. 15.2 days). Sales teams need faster turnaround to close deals, while legal teams must thoroughly review each agreement to protect company interests.

Manual contract processes create the foundation for these delays. When legal teams work with unorganized documents and disconnected systems, they spend excessive time on routine reviews instead of focusing on high-risk agreements. This is a significant drain on resources, as data from The 2025 Contracting Benchmark Report shows legal is involved in 75% of contracts in the business services sector alone.

Unsophisticated signature methods and scattered document storage compound these problems. Legal teams waste time locating current contract versions and tracking approval status across multiple stakeholders.

Better contract organization that lets legal quickly identify and find contracts can reduce this turnaround time significantly. A sales team can avoid this bottleneck by creating an operating procedure with legal to encourage them to organize contracts by sale or value.

Collaboration software

Beyond better organization, the right contract lifecycle management (CLM) collaboration tools can help eliminate or reduce this common contract bottleneck. Contract collaboration software helps legal teams manage contract redlining and revision all in one place. Legal can edit, track changes, and comment on contracts in a single platform to create more visibility into the contracts.

Internal comments and @mentions let you loop in the sales team and legal colleagues and get opinions in seconds. Old methods required saving a new version of the contract, attaching it to an email, and waiting for a separate response. That does not have to be the case.

3. Manually managed contracts

Manual contract management slows down your business by requiring sales team members to make individual document changes, route them to legal, and wait for approval on each modification. These inefficiencies directly impact financial performance, with The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide reporting that organizations typically lose five to nine percent of annual revenue due to poor contract management.

PDF contracts stored on personal computers or in email inboxes create additional delays. Legal teams must review entire agreements because terms aren’t standardized, making it impossible to focus on only the changed elements.

Automated contracts eliminate these inefficiencies by standardizing approved language. Legal teams can focus their review time on modified terms rather than re-examining previously approved clauses. This targeted approach reduces contract approval time significantly while maintaining legal protection.

• Create no-code capabilities for contract automation to eliminate delays

• Use digitally native solutions to get contracts approved faster

• Self-service many contracts to reduce employee time spent on individual contracts

• Provide easy-to-use signature methods for counterparty approval to reduce negotiation time

• Accept/reject changes in an editing platform to reduce how long it takes to get an acceptance

• Use Word/DOCX native documents for seamless negotiation with your counterparties to get agreements signed faster

4. Unsophisticated storage

Contract storage methods create bottlenecks when teams can’t quickly locate agreements or extract key information, a problem so pervasive that one study found 80% of procurement functions are not fully aware of their own competitive terms and contract structures. Physical filing cabinets and basic cloud storage make it difficult to find specific contracts or analyze contract data across your portfolio.

An Ironclad Repository solves these problems by centralizing all agreements in a searchable system. This centralized approach provides immediate access to contract information and eliminates time spent hunting through scattered files.

• Intuitive search, including structured and full-text search

• Process metrics and data reporting

• Answer questions about contracts in seconds (for example, what is the renewal date?)

• Analyze contract metadata and metrics stored in the system

5. Poor contract presentation

Poor contract presentation creates bottlenecks when companies send lengthy PDF contracts via email and expect rapid counterparty responses. This approach overwhelms recipients and typically results in delayed signatures.

Long, complex contracts discourage quick review and approval. Counterparties often delay responding to agreements that appear time-consuming to review, especially when standard terms could be simplified or referenced separately.

This presentation bottleneck directly impacts revenue by extending deal cycles and reducing the number of contracts your team can process simultaneously.

Here’s how to fix it: use short and sweet contracts that link out to your standard terms. This works for disclosure agreements, terms of service, privacy policies, and many other agreements. Most of these contracts contain standard terms that are not negotiated. Instead of presenting all of these terms in one long contract, a link to those terms lets a counterparty access the agreements whenever they need to read them on their own time.

Reviewing and approving these terms may take too long, creating a bottleneck for your company. The solution is to organize your contracts and automate standard term agreements. Doing so can empower your sales team to get quick approvals that let them focus on generating new deals, new business, and new revenue. You can present agreements in a way that makes it easy for counterparties to sign and accept the contract through tools like:

• Clickwrap agreements

• Embedded contracts

• Public workflows

6. Lack of insights into contracts

Limited contract visibility prevents sales teams from accessing the data they need to improve their workflows and grow the business. Sales professionals typically only receive updates from legal teams rather than having direct access to contract status and performance metrics.

This information gap means sales teams miss opportunities to identify bottlenecks, track deal progress, and improve their approach based on contract data. Without visibility into signing delays and approval status, salespeople cannot proactively address issues that slow deal closure, a challenge compounded by research showing over 75% of contracts did not include a complete set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking.

Essential contract information includes signing dates, approval bottlenecks, negotiation timelines, and deal status updates that help sales teams forecast accurately and improve their workflow.

• Contract turnaround time

• Corrections and redlining

• Review and approval metrics

• Performance indicators

• Efficiency and performance metrics

Eliminate contract bottlenecks for your sales team

The right contract lifecycle management platform can reduce or eliminate common contract bottlenecks your sales team faces daily. These bottlenecks are often the result of delays in legal, legacy contracts, or difficult-to-use contract storage methods. You can get a clearer view of your contracts with an activity feed and improve how you store and manage them.

Collaborate effectively with counterparties and automate your contracts to save time and money. Let your sales team do what it does best. You do not have to continue with an inefficient and costly process that creates contract bottlenecks.

Ready to see how Ironclad can help your sales team move faster? Request a demo today to learn how our contract lifecycle management platform can eliminate your bottlenecks and help you close deals sooner.

Frequently asked questions about contract bottlenecks

What is an example of a contract bottleneck?

A classic example is when a sales rep sends a standard sales agreement to a customer, but the legal team has to manually review every single line, even though 95% of the language is pre-approved. This review process can take days, holding up the deal and frustrating both the sales rep and the customer. The bottleneck is the manual, repetitive review of standard terms.

What does a bottleneck mean in business?

In business, a bottleneck is any point in a process where the flow of work gets stuck or slows down, causing delays for everything that comes after it. Think of it like a traffic jam on a highway—even if the road is clear ahead, that one congested spot slows everyone down. In contracting, this could be a single person who has to approve everything or an outdated manual process.

What are common problems that occur in contract situations?

Beyond just bottlenecks, common problems include using outdated templates, losing track of contract versions in email chains, missing key renewal or termination dates, and having no visibility into where a contract is in the approval process. These issues often lead to increased risk, lost revenue, and strained business relationships, which is why 65% of companies report that implementing formal contract management helps them better manage risk, with one study finding it improved their enterprises’ exposure to financial and legal risk.

How do you measure contract bottlenecks?

You can measure bottlenecks by tracking key metrics like contract turnaround time (how long it takes from request to signature), the time spent in each stage (like legal review or negotiation), and the number of contract versions or redlines. By measuring these, you can pinpoint exactly where the delays are happening and see if your changes are actually making things faster.

• Contract turnaround time

• The time contracts spend in each stage (such as legal review or negotiation)

• The number of contract versions or redlines required before signature

• The percentage of contracts that miss target close dates due to process delays

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.