“By doing that early in the process, you have time to make legal, help you build a strategy throughout the buy cycle. And these are things that you can do today.” – Anand Aidasani in today’s Tip 1503
Do you make legal your copilot?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Anand Aidasani. Anand is the Chief Revenue Officer of LexCheck and has over 20 years of experience in sales, product, GTM strategy, and finance. Here he is:
Anand Aidasani: Hello, Daily Sales Tips listeners. This is Anand Aidasani with a tip for you that you can take and hopefully speed your sales. One of the hardest things to do in a sales process is to close when legal debt is involved. You lose momentum, deals get a little bit stickier, friction is introduced into the process, and things can go sideways. Or they can take just too long and things change in your organization. Your sponsor gets promoted, the organization cuts budget, some other tool comes out. All of these things create risk in your sales cycle. 9% of all revenue is lost to legal. So how do we make this problem into an asset for us? And what we’re going to do is make legal your copilot. Here’s why you should do this.
First of all, there’s pressure, especially in economic times like the ones we’re entering now, that you need to have three or six times your pipeline coverage to hit your quota. Now, we all know that when this comes down, it’s very difficult to have high-quality pipeline that is truly real. We’re all under pressure to maybe put deals into our pipeline that aren’t as real. However, if you actually use the legal process, specifically start with an NDA, you might actually make things work in your favor.
Here’s why.
First of all, Gartner reports that buying decisions are being pushed to the lowest level of users. These users may not have the authority to buy. They may not have the experience to buy either. However, if they can get an NDA in place, you have strong signal that they have authority or have access to someone who does. So that puts the A in your band process, which I still believe is one of the best qualification processes around.
The second reason you want to do this, and NDAs give you better discovery. Good discovery reveals prospects’ internal pain, problems, and solutions they’re considering. There will be some sensitive items that they will not want to share without an NDA. If you’re good at discovery, odds are by the second call, you’re having a discussion that someone will stop and say, Do we have an NDA in place? So if you can get ahead of that and use that early in your first or second meeting, you could stop losing momentum and maybe catch something you wouldn’t have caught otherwise because that person who disappears because there’s no NDA in place may not be in your next call. So why not grab the intelligence when you’re with them?
Second thing is, NDAs reduce the risk of information being used inappropriately and it lets your prospects open up. That’s another reason discovery is better with a legal document in place such as an NDA.
Now, you want to build rapport with legal. Your side and the other side. If you’re a large company, odds are you’re not going to get the same legal person on every deal. There’s usually a room full of lawyers who are assigned deals as they come in. So you want to get that person assigned early and someone who builds a rapport with the other side’s legal party. If you do this well, you’re going to actually build a nice relationship at the beginning using documents like NDAs, which are low-risk. They’re usually documents that don’t have tension involved, and it allows you and your lawyer to build a relationship with the other side’s lawyer, which you’re going to need later in the cycle when documents get a little bit stickier and issues get a little bit thornier. So let’s get ahead of them now.
Number three, navigating procurement. By getting an NDA in place or any trial agreement even, it usually kicks off the vendor setup process. Now, what this means is later in the sales cycle when you win your deal, you’re not going to lose time setting something up because it’s already done. There’s another advantage here. If your solution is tied with another person’s solution but you’re already set up with the procurement team as a vendor, guess who’s going to win?
Finally, the fifth reason and the most important one that allows all of this to be practically achievable is today we as business people have tools that allow us to do legal self-service. Commercial contracts are really business agreements. They’re supposed to represent what we want as sellers and buyers to happen in a contract that makes it secure, makes it official. The complexity of documents is hard today. However, tools exist to let you navigate that complexity a little bit earlier. There are also ways that you can actually automate the NDA process almost entirely. By doing that early in the process, you have time to make legal, help you build a strategy throughout the buy cycle. And these are things that you can do today. Thank you very much for listening. I hope this tip has been helpful to you.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Anand and schedule a demo with LexCheck, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1503. Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!