Streamline Your Sales Contracting With Ironclad

The start of the new year is an opportunity for reflection: what do we want to carry with us? What do we want to eliminate? What can we make better?

If you’re wondering how you can improve your sales contracting, you’re not alone. I recently sat down with Ironclad’s very own Senior Manager of Deal Desk, Nick Thompson, about all things commercial contracts and how he uses Ironclad to streamline the process. After a wide ranging discussion, here are my top 3 takeaways for you. 

Design for adoption by meeting users where they are. 

You can build a perfect process, but if no one follows it, it’s all for nothing. Nick’s advice is to meet users where they are by working within the tools they already use. By leveraging a deep integration between your existing CRM/CPQ (we use Salesforce) and your CLM, you’re allowing reps to operate out of a familiar space, and you can help them reduce manual, duplicative data entry by pulling as much information from Salesforce as possible. This benefits teams beyond sales, too. Have you ever invoiced a customer the wrong amount? A CLM like Ironclad will allow you to ensure that the terms you agree to in the final version of the contract sync back to your organization-wide systems of record (CRM, ERP, etc.).

The job is never really done; an iterative approach based on quarter-over-quarter learnings is key.

Businesses (especially in the era of AI) are constantly changing, and these changes almost always have an impact on your contracts. Whether you’re selling a new product, responding to shifting compliance regulations, or entering a new market, you need to be able to take an iterative approach to contracting. Nick recommends you take a programmatic approach to this continual improvement. At the start of every new quarter, meet with leaders across Sales, Finance, Legal, Product, and Ops to look at the objective data, and then talk about the subjective experience–where do our customers and reps experience friction? What approvers did you involve often and why? What do you want to make easier, faster, and less manual? Thanks to Ironclad’s no-code Workflow Designer, Nick can immediately take action on these conversations and update our workflows to reflect what we learned, whether that’s automating a common approval or enabling a new special term for the reps to use.

Measure and socialize metrics that matter.

Measuring the impact of your Deal Desk program is a critical step. This allows you to understand how effective your process is and uncover your next area of improvement as we discussed above. Beyond that, it gives you a chance to educate the rest of the organization about the value you’re driving–maybe even (gasp!) helping you snag additional headcount in the new year.

As the ultimate Ironclad power users, we use reporting a ton across our business, but here are a few metrics we are always look at together:

1. Percent of deals without Deal Desk involvement

While it may seem counterintuitive, Nick’s goal is to automate himself out of the process–touching as few deals as possible. By measuring the amount of “no touch” deals (those executed without either Deal Desk or Legal involvement) we can determine if our Order Form/ESA Workflow covers the standard majority of our deals that we want to make as easy to close as possible.

2. Average sales price (ASP) of deals with Deal Desk involvement

Similarly, if the Average Sales Price of the deals that have Deal Desk involvement is going up, Nick knows his team is continuing to work on more complex, upmarket deals. This also signals that when we’re closing our smaller, simpler deals, we’re closing them in a way that’s healthy for our business, both in terms of the terms they contain and the effort it takes to get them done.

3. Redline rate

Our Senior Legal Counsel Michael Ohta wrote a great guide on reducing your redline rate, which we’ve done by 43% year-over-year. We keep pushing ourselves on this metric, and we find opportunities to improve it every quarter by making our terms as customer friendly as possible. Even some of our largest customers accept our terms as-is. Our default approach is to link out to this agreement with our Legal Center product, which changes a customer’s perception of the agreement. We also instituted a “no negotiation” threshold based on contract value. These strategies, combined with enablement to ensure our sales team is well versed on what’s in our Enterprise Service Agreement (and why), has made a massive impact for our team.

If you’d like to learn more about best practices to drive optimal sales contracting, please reach out to our team! We’d love to chat with you.