"At closing stage: I work across 10 softwares. Some teams are refusing to use Slack, others don't have access to Jira. It's actually harder to navigate the deal internally than it is to do so externally."
"Only one person in the team has hit quota this year. She was lucky as she got given an inbound lead of a former client we have a case-study with."
"We are asked to put the deal into "The Call" as soon as we have sent the contract. Most deals take several months to close past that point."
Have you got similar symptoms?
"I sand-bagged most of my deals into Q1. There was no way I could hit quota last year otherwise."
"My biggest deal slipped the week before Xmas. Procurement got involved and delayed the signature. I've moved the $300k deal out of my "Commit" number. We might be stuck there for 5 or 6 months."
"No break for me. The client signed on New Year's Eve. The whole team was working until late that evening. SKO next week."
"We've been through 68 rounds of negotiations. The prospect was adding comments on PDF documents, sending edits by email, reverting on older versions. Keeping track of everything was a nightmare"
"I have a Jira ticket with 85 comments and 16 viewers. This is just one piece of the closing puzzle. No way this deal lands this Quarter!"
Are you experiencing nightmares too?
"Sometimes I wonder if my legal team works for the same company as us. I've got no idea what they're up to."
"I chose Pre-sales over Sales because the end of the sales process looked too painful. I do my demos, help on the deals and I bounce. Good luck to our AEs to get the deals over the line."
"We have given an Up-sell/Cross-sell quota to our CSMs. Most of them don't have any commercial experience but everybody needs to chip in!"
"Most of our clients are re-negotiating their terms during their renewal. I've turned into an AE. I've got no idea what I'm doing."
Is it painful for you too?
"Our two lawyers were negotiating each other's terms thinking the red-lines came from the client. We wasted 3 weeks sorting it out. The client couldn't believe it."
"Most of our clients are requesting to modify our terms. No one just goes with the online terms anymore."
"Our leadership just deployed a CLM platform. The whole sales team hates it. Looks old, clunky and hard to adopt."
"We essentially take our deals out of our CRM and add them into a gsheet at the end of each Quarter... This is what we use to operate."
"We sent the contract back, and forget to delete our internal comments from the document... The buyer hated us."
Time for the remedy?
"When I got promoted into a closing role, I hadn't expected to be spending most of my time project managing deals over the line."
"We lose 25% of our deals during the legal phase."
"It was the very end of the quarter. There was no time to get our lawyers to review the contract so I went ahead and approved all the red-lines myself."
"Sometimes my CEO is required to pick up the phone to chase our Legal Counsel. It's the only way we have to make sure the work gets done."
"At the end of each quarter, we use a colour coded GSheet which moves between departments. There are about 70 lines which we manually update."
"I systematically remove the auto-renew clause and opt the client out of any marketing activities. Growth's problem."
"I spend 80% of my time in legal. I'm pretty much a project manager at this point"
"I had to Google who our CISO was to invite him on a client call."
Don't get yourself listed here!
"We use a mix of tools. Emails, Slack, Texts, Jira, G-Documents, Salesforce. Our legal teams only communicate through comments on tickets. They won't use Slack. Communications get lost all the time. "
"It can take us up to 2 weeks to revert on red-lines. That's 20% of our sales cycles spent waiting for updates from our own teams. Then another 3 days for approval on payment terms. Then 5 days for the indemnity threshold. Then 3 days to run credit checks."
"70% of the work starts once we get a verbal agreement."
"We don't allow any deals under $50k to change our terms during the last 3 weeks of the quarter. They approve the online terms or the deal slips to next Quarter"
"I only commit the deal when the final red-line has been approved and the PO sits on the signer's deck. I got burnt too many times by prospects in the past."
"I send the PO through Docusign straightaway. I just hope they sign it directly. That said, 99% of the time they come back with more questions and a set of red-lines sent by emails "
"I have been in legal negotiations with them for more than a year. 250 emails, 75 meetings, more than a 100 calls and they've finally signed. I had committed the deal 9 months ago!"
"We don't have a in-house legal team. The external lawyers we use charge by the hour and have a 72-hour SLA. They triple their rates if we need a quicker answer."
"We've got 40 sales reps over 3 time zones for 1 junior legal counsel. Quarterly targets. We physically can't cope with the volume of contracts. We need the revenue so we accept pretty much all red-lines on the last few days of the quarter."
"Our company is getting acquired. I have thousands of contracts I need to audit to list the terms that we have agreed on which could put the business at risk during the transition."
"I'm sitting next to my Legal Counsel until he gets the work done."
"We save all permutations of terms on a Google Sheet. That's what we've always done here. It's done ideal but it helps us move a little bit faster. "
"I can never find the documents I need in our shared folder so I have saved them all on my laptop to save time."