Tips for Improving Sales Performance

Key takeaways:

• Implement contract lifecycle management (CLM) software to eliminate manual bottlenecks that cost companies an average of 9.2% of annual revenue, including delays from waiting for signatures, lengthy legal reviews, and poor contract storage.

• Track key performance metrics like time to contract closure (industry average 35 days), contract cycle time at each stage, and contract compliance rate to identify specific bottlenecks and build business cases for process improvements.

• Utilize digital contract repositories and real-time activity feeds to eliminate the up to two hours sales reps spend searching for individual agreements and gain immediate visibility into contract status without email follow-ups.

• Deploy self-service contract workflows and simplified signature methods like clickwrap agreements to enable counterparties to complete and sign standard agreements in minutes without sales or legal involvement.

Sales contract performance measures how efficiently your contracts move from creation to signature and how effectively they support revenue goals. Strong contract performance means faster deal cycles, fewer bottlenecks, and more closed deals.

Many sales teams struggle with contract performance without realizing it. Deals stall at the contract stage after verbal agreements. Sales reps waste hours tracking down signatures or waiting for legal reviews.

The frustration is real, but the solution is clearer than most teams realize. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software eliminates manual bottlenecks by automating workflows, centralizing contract data, and giving you visibility into exactly where deals are getting stuck. You can improve sales contract performance by updating how you handle contracts from creation through renewal.

What sales contract performance means (and why it affects your bottom line)

When you hear “sales contract performance,” you probably think about closing deals faster. That’s a big part of it, but it’s not the whole story. True performance is about more than just speed. It’s about the quality of the agreement, the risk you’re taking on, and the value you’re actually getting from the deal once it’s signed.

Poor performance isn’t just a sales problem; it’s a business problem. World Commerce & Contracting research shows it costs companies 9.2% of annual revenue on average, as revenue gets delayed, legal teams are stuck reviewing low-risk agreements, and you’re leaving money on the table because of unfavorable terms you didn’t have time to negotiate properly.

Improving performance means creating a contracting process that’s not just faster, but smarter and safer for the entire business.

Think about what’s top of mind for your organization this year. Are deals stalling at the contract stage? Is legal overwhelmed with routine reviews? Are you losing visibility into where agreements stand? These are all symptoms of contract performance issues—and they’re all fixable.

Key elements of a high-performing sales contract

Before you can fix your process, you need to know what a good sales contract looks like. It’s not about having a mountain of legal text; it’s about clarity. A high-performing contract is one that everyone can understand and act on without confusion. It should clearly define:

• Parties involved: Who is agreeing to what?

• Scope of work: What products or services will be delivered?

• Payment terms: How much will be paid, and when?

• Term and termination: How long does the agreement last, and how can it be ended?

• Liability and indemnification: Who is responsible if something goes wrong?

• Confidentiality: What information needs to be protected?

When these elements are clear and standardized, you spend less time negotiating the basics and more time closing the deal. The goal is to remove ambiguity so both parties can move forward with confidence.

Contract bottlenecks that limit performance

Contract bottlenecks are inefficiencies in your contract lifecycle that slow down deal velocity and force you to focus on administrative work instead of revenue-generating activities. These bottlenecks show up as delays, manual handoffs, and unclear ownership throughout the contracting process.

Most sales teams don’t realize how much their systems are limiting performance. Tracking contracts and getting them signed shouldn’t be complicated, but outdated workflows make it feel that way.

You can identify and eliminate common contract bottlenecks like:

• Waiting for counterparty signatures: Waiting on a client to sign can be frustrating and time-consuming. Many delays are caused by inefficient negotiations and multiple back-and-forths between the parties. Complex manual signature methods cause others.

• Long reviews by legal: Legal departments often take a while to get contracts approved. And non-automated contracts require lengthy manual review, which slows you down and keeps you from focusing on new deals. But standardizing this process pays off—according to the 2026 Contracting Benchmark Report, reducing legal involvement by just 10% on 1,000 monthly contracts can free up roughly $480,000 annually in legal capacity.

• Poor contract storage: Many companies still store contracts in legacy servers, Excel spreadsheets, or even physical file cabinets. This makes it challenging to find the agreement you need when you need it. You also lose out on helpful contract metadata and metrics that a more advanced system can provide.

• Lack of insights: Many salespeople have no access to contract metrics that can provide beneficial information, including turnaround times and efficiency metrics. Without them, you have to analyze your agreements manually—or not at all.

• Manually updated contracts: Manually updating contracts is time-consuming, which means slower sales velocity and more time spent managing paperwork. Self-service contracts and automated workflows give you the tools you need to reduce or eliminate this common bottleneck.

Contract performance metrics worth tracking

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you feel like contracts are slow but can’t prove it, you’ll have a hard time getting buy-in to fix the problem. Tracking a few key metrics will show you exactly where the friction is and help you make a business case for change.

Time to contract closure

This is the total time from when a contract is first generated to when it’s fully signed. The report found that the overall average time to execute an agreement is 35 days, though high-performing sales teams aim to keep their cycles well under that mark. A long closure time can signal bottlenecks in negotiation, legal review, or signature collection. Tracking this helps you pinpoint exactly which stage is slowing down your deals.

Contract compliance rate

How many of your contracts are created using standard, pre-approved templates versus one-off agreements? A low compliance rate means your sales team is likely going rogue, creating more work for legal and increasing risk. A high rate shows your process is standardized and scalable.

Contract cycle time

This metric breaks down the time spent at each stage of the contract lifecycle (drafting, review, approval, signature). It’s more granular than time to closure and helps you identify specific slowdowns. For example, you might find that legal review is fast, but internal business approvals are where deals stall. In fact, The Legal AI Handbook notes that agreements with non-standard terms—like custom confidentiality clauses—can take three times longer to approve than standard templates.

Increase bandwidth by improving your contract lifecycle

Even the best sales reps have a ceiling on what they can accomplish when contracts keep pulling their attention away from selling. Searching for agreements, chasing signatures, and waiting on approvals eat into time that should be going toward new opportunities. Here’s how to take that time back.

Lost time tracking down contracts

When your contracts live in email threads, Excel spreadsheets, or scattered folders, every question becomes a scavenger hunt—and that drains productivity fast.

Once a deal is signed, you need immediate access to its terms and conditions. This ensures you can fulfill obligations and answer customer questions quickly. Easy contract access also protects enforceability and supports positive customer relationships.

The same World Commerce & Contracting research found sales reps spend up to two hours searching a single agreement when questions arise. They sort through spreadsheets, dig through email, or hunt through filing cabinets.

Even cloud storage becomes a bottleneck when it’s poorly organized or hard to search.

A digital contract repository significantly simplifies this process by capturing and securing agreements in a single location. It tracks vital information in the document to make it easy to find and even grants access to search and filtering systems to help you identify a single contract or multiple contracts that meet specific characteristics. This saves you time searching for an agreement so you can answer questions instantly. Now you can focus your efforts on new deals and driving your sales numbers.

Use an activity feed to know the status of your contract

An activity feed shows you real-time updates on every contract in your pipeline. This single view eliminates the need to check email threads, ping colleagues, or wonder where a deal stands.

Tracking contract progress is essential but historically time-consuming. Modern CLM software solves this with activity feeds that display live updates as contracts move through workflows. You can see exactly where each contract is and communicate with other participants through comments and @mentions.

The activity feed gives you information like:

• Workflow submitter documents

• Downloaded documents

• Updated documents

• Approvals added and collected

• @mentions or comments by other workflow participants

• Signature requests and accepted contracts

A dashboard makes it easy to access and view these workflows so you always know exactly what’s happening with a given contract. Unlike legacy systems, CLM software surfaces this information automatically and in seconds—so you can get your answer and get back to closing deals.

Use data to improve your sales strategy

Good salespeople analyze their performance. The problem is that most contract systems make this harder than it needs to be—data is buried, review is manual, and the insights you actually need are either hard to find or don’t exist at all. An effective contract lifecycle management system changes that.

Get access to critical data

Quick access to contract data drives better sales performance. When you can instantly see turnaround times, negotiation patterns, and key dates, you make smarter decisions about future deals.

Most sales teams don’t have this access. They’re limited to what legal tells them about contract status. They wait days for answers to simple questions because legal teams are buried in reviews.

You need immediate access to essential contract data that shapes your sales strategy. This includes information like:

• Contract turnaround time: Knowing how long deals take from beginning to end gives you essential information. It lets you know if the time spent is worth your effort. It also allows you to identify and fix key contract bottlenecks, which increases your efficiency and helps you close more deals.

• Performance indicators: You can gain key insights into how your deal performed, including its total cost and profitability. This helps inform your decisions for the future by focusing on what has been successful in the past.

• Corrections and redlining: Automated systems track what a counterparty negotiated and changed. If you notice specific terms are always a problem, it may be time to modify or remove them to reduce negotiation time. This helps improve sales performance by speeding up acceptance of the deals you create.

• Important dates: The CLM system can automatically track important contract dates like renewal dates, expirations, and fulfillment dates. It can even create automatic reminders to help you meet your obligations without the need to constantly re-check agreements.

Forecast your pipeline targets

Pipeline generation forecasting predicts how many opportunities you need to create to hit revenue targets. Accurate forecasting depends on knowing your average sales cycle length and contract turnaround time.

Contract metadata and metrics provide the critical information you need to forecast reliably. When you know how long contracts typically take to close, you can work backwards to determine how many deals you need in your pipeline. You spend less time on administrative tasks and more time pursuing new opportunities.

The length of your sales cycle is the most important metric for pipeline forecasting. Faster contract turnaround means shorter sales cycles and more deals closed per quarter. CLM software reduces bottlenecks and surfaces the data you need to make these strategic decisions.

Close more deals with the right tools

Self-service contracts let counterparties generate and sign agreements without sales or legal involvement. These public workflows deliver contracts as URLs that recipients can complete and sign in minutes.

Here’s how it works: the counterparty clicks a link, fills out required fields, and accepts the agreement in one click. This eliminates back-and-forth negotiation for standard terms and reduces the effort needed to get contracts signed.

Self-service contracts speed up your entire process and free up time to pursue new deals. You don’t waste hours chasing signatures or coordinating between teams anymore.

Make signing easier with effective signature methods

Easy signature methods remove friction from the final step of contract acceptance. When counterparties can sign from any device without downloading software or creating accounts, they complete agreements faster.

The right signature method directly impacts how quickly deals close. Complicated signing processes create delays and sometimes lose deals entirely. Easy and effective signature methods include:

• Clickwrap agreements:
  Clickwrap signatures are a one-click acceptance method that lets the counterparty sign by clicking “I agree” or “Agree” instead of a lengthy process.

• Embedded signing: API or embedded signing makes it easy for counterparties to sign a sales agreement.

• Electronic signatures: An eSignature is a digital signature most similar to a pen-and-paper contract. However, you can easily send the contract and get a signed agreement when you make this process easy for your clients.

Improve sales contract performance with the right system

Improving sales contract performance starts with eliminating the bottlenecks that slow your deals down. Manual tracking, scattered contract storage, and complicated signing processes all create friction that costs you closed deals.

CLM software removes that friction. Activity feeds give you real-time visibility into contract status. Digital repositories make agreements instantly searchable. Automated workflows eliminate manual handoffs and speed approvals.

The metrics you gain from centralized contract data help you make smarter decisions about your sales strategy. You can see exactly where deals slow down and fix those bottlenecks systematically.

Modern sales teams close more deals because they’ve modernized how they handle contracts. If you want to see how Ironclad’s AI CLM software can help you close deals faster and improve your contract performance, request a demo today.

Frequently asked questions about improving sales contract performance

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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.