In order to increase your organization’s potential revenue, it is incredibly important to be able to close deals quickly. However, organizations often run into delays due to conflict and lack of collaboration between the sales team and the legal team. Sometimes things also break down when different people unknowing begin working on two different versions of the same agreement.
It’s important that you make it easy for all of the relevant stakeholders to collaborate during the drafting and reviewing of contracts.
While sales staff members understandably push for contracts to be completed as quickly as possible, the legal team needs the time to accurately and effectively review contract details. Closing deals is a major factor in maximizing potential revenue; however, you can’t afford to cut corners when reviewing contracts.
So, how do you improve workflow and collaboration without cutting corners? Consider implementing these strategies to help your sales and legal team members work together more efficiently.
Storage and Version Control
One of the easiest and most efficient ways to improve workflow is to store and organize documents in a manner that lets both sales and legal find them when needed.
Rummaging through file cabinets to find contracts is very inefficient and can cause excessive time to be wasted. Instead, contracts should be stored and edited in a single place. This allows legal to make changes to contracts without having to send updated versions to sales staff. Meanwhile, members of the sales can easily check and manage contracts without disturbing anyone in the legal department.
Using a digital contract management system is a great way to store and organize contracts so that any authorized personnel can be easily manage them.
Contract management software can also eliminate the problem of having multiple versions of the same document in the file. Instead, everyone always sees the most current version and authorized personnel can review the audit trail to see who made what changes to the document.
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Coordination
Contract reviews require that both sales and legal team members are always on the same page. If either party notices something incorrect or a detail that might present risks, they should be able to contact the other party to clear things up.
It’s also important that contract-related communications all be kept with the draft contract. This is cumbersome if you are using Excel or your email service as a contract management system. But, if you have a cloud-based contract management system, everything from the sales team notes to emails to the draft contract are kept in one place and are easy for anyone to find with the click of a button.
Accessibility
When it comes to collaboration between two departments, accessibility should be the number one priority. As sales and legal staff members need to have access to the same contracts for different purposes, they should be able to quickly and easily access contracts and any supporting documents.
Taking steps like tagging contracts with keywords and organizing them based on contract type can make searching for contracts much easier for everyone.
These three steps seem very simple. However, they can make an incredible difference in improving collaboration between your sales and legal departments. Implementing these procedures will help speed up the contract review process and allow you to begin serving your customers sooner.
