Ironclad’s Head of Enterprise Architecture, Jim Farley sat down with the head of Salesforce’s Next Generation Contract Lifecycle Management Program at Salesforce and the Legal Operations Lead at Quora to talk about supercharging the sales contracting process.
In this session, Jim and his guests talk about the challenges and solutions of integrating contracting tools into the sales motion. Drawing on their decades of collective leadership experience, they share practical advice on how to bring sales and legal together to ultimately speed up your sales cycle.
Key takeaways
Personal connections matter. Storytelling is just the tip of the iceberg here. To get CLM adoption, it’s important to explain value to individual internal stakeholders and end users. If they’ve never heard of an NDA, for example, and what connection that contract has to their organization and its customers, explain it. Or if they are part of the sales organization, explain how a CLM integrated with their CRM will help close deals faster. Doing so transforms the implied value of the CLM from esoteric to widely understood and therefore adopted, so take the time to build the connection.
Use numbers as soon as they become available. Getting teams to adopt new tools is often difficult. As soon as you have metrics around the tool’s impact, whether that looks like how much faster you’ve closed a deal or how many more legal intake tickets you can get through in a day, share them. They’ll give your argument legs.
Give non-legal stakeholders a seat at the table. When rolling out a new CLM and designing its various workflows, make sure that the non-legal departments who will be using the tools have their voices heard and their specific pain points addressed by the CLM’s functionalities.
Expand your advice horizons. When looking at best practices around designing processes and workflows, turn not only to the official support that the CLM offers but also to its existing customers. They often have the best practical, hands-on, or out-of-the-box approaches to solving unique problems and can be powerful resources.
Always be checking (in). Making sure a newly adopted tool continues to drive success requires frequent check ins, especially as business needs evolve, often very rapidly. It’s key to check in with users and stakeholders to make sure that the initial processes that were set up still work. If they don’t, start adjusting.
