When sales teams rush to close deals at the end-of-quarter, legal teams often face immense pressure. They must create, review, and approve a sudden inflow of contracts while managing frequent updates and urgent approval requests from sales. This huge workload can lead to miscommunication, delays, and frustration for both teams.
The key challenge is maintaining a delicate balance between speed and accuracy. Legal teams cannot compromise on reviewing critical contract terms without exposing the business to significant risks. However, doing all this manually often adds inefficiencies, creates bottlenecks, increases the likelihood of errors, and leaves both teams burnt out. Therefore, both teams must work together to streamline the process, enhance collaboration, and support overall business growth.
The solution to build a more robust sales and legal partnership
Here are four actionable strategies to establish an efficient contract review process that benefits everyone involved.
- Automated contract creation: Drafting contracts from scratch for every deal isn’t just time-consuming; it’s impractical during peak sales periods. Automating this process allows contracts to be generated using pre-approved templates, reducing the need for lengthy legal reviews and last-minute corrections.With integrated CRM and CLM systems, contracts can be automatically created when a deal reaches a specific stage. For example, when a deal status changes in your CRM, the system can instantly produce a standard contract pre-filled with all the necessary details. It empowers sales teams to create standard contracts quickly while collaborating with legal teams through simplified workflows. By adopting contract automation, both sales and legal teams can dedicate their time to strategic tasks, accelerating the sales cycle and ensuring high-quality outcomes.
- Fast-track approvals of low-risk contracts: Routine contracts, such as NDAs or terms of service agreements, often take up more time than they should, slowing down progress on high-value deals. While essential, these low-risk contracts can distract legal teams from focusing on critical agreements that drive business growth.By standardizing and automating the review and approval process, low-risk contracts can be fast-tracked more efficiently. Since these contracts often follow the same structure and have minimal variations, they can be processed with automated checks and fewer approvals, reducing the need for in-depth legal review.
- Integrating CRM and CLM: Relying on emails or spreadsheets for back-and-forth communication between sales and legal teams wastes valuable time and creates unnecessary friction. Instead, integrating tools like a CRM and a CLM system ensures consistent, easily accessible data for both teams. Sharing closely connected tools minimizes miscommunication and enables sales and legal teams to collaborate more effectively, helping them achieve their shared goal, i.e., closing deals quickly and efficiently. smartContract CLM works with leading CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, and more to automatically update deal and contract information in real-time. It removes the need for repetitive manual updates, ensuring both sales and legal teams always have accurate, up-to-date information at their fingertips.
- Faster reviews of complex contracts with AI integration: Legal teams often face significant challenges when reviewing complex contracts, which can slow down the sales process. By integrating AI tools like smartContract CLM , contract reviews can be automated and streamlined, allowing both sales and legal teams to work more efficiently.AI-powered platforms can quickly flag inconsistencies, identify risky clauses, and highlight potential issues that might go unnoticed. This speeds up the process without compromising accuracy. Legal teams can then focus their expertise on high-priority areas, such as negotiating critical terms, while AI handles the first-pass reviews. This creates a smoother, more effective partnership between sales and legal, helping both teams close deals faster and avoid delays in the contract review process.
Conclusion
A solid sales and legal partnership is the cornerstone of efficient deal closures and sustained business growth. By integrating tools like CRM and CLM systems, automating routine tasks, standardizing low-risk contracts, and adopting AI, your teams can streamline workflows and enhance collaboration.
This alignment minimizes bottlenecks, accelerates sales cycles, and boosts overall productivity, directly contributing to achieving quarterly goals and long-term success. Adopting technology ensures seamless communication and data sharing between teams, creating a unified platform for efficient operations. Using these strategies, your sales and legal teams can eliminate end-of-quarter pressures, focus on strategic priorities, and drive meaningful results for your organization.
