Closing The Gap: How Sales and Legal Teams Win Together

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today, joining us from DocuSign, he is the enterprise, uh, customer success manager there, uh, Matthew Rinkert. Matthew, thank you so much for, for jumping on the show with us today. Yeah, my pleasure. And, uh, and before we, we jump into, uh, uh, flip things over to Pepe to give us a little bit more information on what we're gonna be chatting about today, uh, we were hoping you could give the listeners just a bit more information on your background. You know, how did you, how did you end up in, uh, in the CLM space? Yeah, a kind of a windy road like most of people go into CLM, but you know, that kind of high level is originally from the Bay Area, which is kind of the epicenter of the tech scene.

0:57Um, really initially I cut my teeth with legal management technology and data privacy years ago, and so that's where I really understood, like, the intersectionality and how legal folks can empower business users. And then fast-forward, I moved up to Seattle a few years ago and worked for a CLM startup based here, and that led myself to DocuSign. And so I really just think that, believe it or not, I, I think that, uh, legal and business should always be working together, and why I'm really fixated and really excited about what CLM is now and what it's become, and excited about this conversation. We've been talking a lot lately, well, at least in our previous 10, 15 episodes between this kind of relationship, love-hate relationship between- Mm-hmm... legal and the commercial team, especially with procurement. And we've been focusing a lot with procurement- Yep... because as you know, it's like those are, like, uh, most common champions on the CLM project inside the enterprises. Absolutely.

1:52But this time w- we wanna flip it to the other side with sales. Mm-hmm. Yep. Right? Then we want to focus this discussion with you, Matthew, on what's, like, this relationship and how we can use CLM to make it way better and especially, like, you know, how can legal and sales team overcome, you know, these traditional silos to foster a closer collaboration and drive faster deal closure? There's been... I mean, if, if you go to LinkedIn, you, you can see, like, lot of memes if you follow- Yep. ... people i- in the legal space when- Yep... you know, when legal receive a request from sales on a Friday, and they need it for yesterday. Yep. You know, this is, like, the story of every day. And so I'm very curious, Matthew, like, what's your e- experience in this, and, and how ha- ha- have you been helping sales teams and legal team to help them to close deals faster? Absolutely. And, and maybe we can take a step back to, like, pre-CLM, 'cause I was a seller, you know, pre-CLM, so I can talk about how painful that was. And then, you know, like, even CSMs typically own renewals, so- Right...

3:00we really do like the memes. We all like Alex Hsu, you know, coming in the videos and talking about sales meets legal. So, uh, you know, once upon a time when I was a seller, account management, you know, this was all via email. You know, this was done via Word documents back and forth, even sometimes paper, God forbid. And so I remember the bottlenecks just in that era was, you know, I had a general counsel, the one, probably the first general counsel that really helped me understand the intersectionality and how legal can partner with the sellers and business, business counterparts. And so what he would do, he would have us put kind of the deal size on the email subject line and then who it was, and so that would hopefully bump it up to kind of the top of his list. You know, there's not necessarily any SLAs per se, maybe high-level ones, and I had no idea where it was. So I'll just give you a brief example of those, that world where I was negotiating, uh, with him with a huge, uh, China-based company.

3:57Can't name them, but really prevalent now, and they were trying to expand into Western markets. You know, they saw that these Western markets were key to their success, not only mobile and web as well. And so that being said, is there was a lot of, like, kind of jurisdictional laws that we had to be privy to, kind of the APEC framework, and also just in general making sure that we were protecting ourselves as a tech startup, especially in data privacy. And so this was a scenario where there was a lot of back and forth of the contract via email, via, like, me literally going into his office at certain times and discussing the strategy, a lot of bottlenecks, and then he actually had left for another opportunity. And so it was almost back at, I wouldn't say square one, but square one and a half. And, and the other gentleman on his team really took it. He didn't know about the red line history. He didn't know about the kind of late-night conversations we had with him on the West Coast, uh, with their early mornings in China. And so it was back to square one. He had to understand the red line.

4:53You know, he didn't see kind of the versioning, and by the way, I didn't do a good job of really keeping the versioning under control. And so that's where I kind of led to CLM, is understanding, like, not only CLM for the end user, like a seller like I was formerly or a CSM, but legal and partnering with that workflow. 'Cause as you understood my, I guess my example there, I had no idea what the workflow was. I didn't necessarily know if it was with the client. I had to, like, go into my, my inbox, look at sent. I didn't know how much time it was unless I just added up kind of the, the dirty math in my email inbox. Okay, it's been with him seven days, no reminders. Um, there was no, like, key attributes we were fixating on. And so if you look at now, I think what I like about the intersectionality of sales meets legal is that you have a workflow. In most CLMs, you can see where it is. You can see where that document's been. You can easily see that version control, and then you can agree on specific attributes that maybe legal wants to see, and the business users as well, so you can talk the same language, single pane of glass.

5:59And I think the other thing as well is that, you know, as we Move into AI as well, what do you need to surface? What do the end users need to surface as a seller? What do they care about? Really quick, grab that information, provide a summation, and same thing on the legal. And I think the core tenets of CLM is to get to the deal quicker, I think you mentioned, Pepe, on the outset. And so you don't wanna see those bottlenecks that even occurred 10 years or even in a lot of organizations today. So I would say the net-net is you want a more expeditious and collaborative partnership in CLM with legal and sellers. Right. And, and that's un- understandable, right? Because if you think it from the buyer side, of course legal team will like to be a little bit more involved because they would need to protect the budget of the company- Yep... and they need to be sure- Yep... that they are receiving what their vendor promised to deliver. Yep. While on the sale side, usually the contract templates, i- are shorter- Yep... right? Because they, they just want a quick win, right? Yep.

7:02Just, like, close the deal. And this is very interesting because I think, I mean, we all know that CLM is, might be... Well, right now with AI, that can be a little bit on a discussion, but still CLM- Yeah... is one of the most, uh, looked for technologies for the legal departments a- at least. Yep. And yeah, I, I understand. There are, like, certain tricks that legal used to do or the sales team used to do to put, to put on the subject line so the legal team could see that email, or maybe put in the subject lines on mayor caps, you know? Yep. So, so that they can see it with priority, highest priority. But besides that kind of, you know, the back and forward during the negotiation process, how do you think technology can help them, not just with the communication between legal- Yeah... and commercial de- department, but also with those workflows, right? Yep. Like approvals or any- Yep... other type of workflows that need to, you know, be in place for any kind of corporation. Yeah. It...

8:04Well, actually I'll, I kind of hit on a couple different points, and that's a great question, Pepe. So I think a couple things is that you have clauses, and so a lot of people, you know, it's an afterthought, especially if you're a commercial team or seller. But what I like about all CLMs is that you have the ability to, legal can bless certain clauses. And so to expedite maybe lower dollar value contracts or maybe ones that are not as risky, maybe it's like a renewal, maybe you've already done business with the said client, empower the commercial team to insert agreed upon language or agreed upon clauses, versus back in the day, you know, it was a back and forth. And then legal oftentimes thinks there might not be a pattern of clauses. Typically there actually are. And so then that way you empower the legal team to get those contracts out quicker, order forms, even sales or MSAs in some case. And then the legal team is really tasked with the high-level strategy. You know, really what they're paid for is to be that SME or that thought leader when it comes to legal. Maybe it's a data privacy issue, maybe it's a, could be a damaging commercial consideration.

9:10But if it's a very high dollar, maybe you're willing to take the give to get. And so that's one thing I like about clauses, the empowerment. I think the other thing is too, a lot of CLMs have collaboration tools as well, so within the document itself, maybe through the life cycle journey. And I think the biggest thing you hit on too is you can have risk scorecards. And so maybe, you know, the commercial team ingests that based on certain attributes. Right away it's a red flag, you know, based on what's been trained, uh, you know, from the outset, and it automatically is routed to a said legal team. Maybe it's the legal team that deals with data privacy matters. Maybe if it's a healthcare vendor, someone who knows HIPAA quite well, or maybe it's something where oftentimes you have to have certain amount of insurances, insurance, maybe you actually increase that cap. It's ushered to the right legal team depending on the side of the organization, and also it's sh- treated right away. I mean, you don't even have to, like, noodle on it as a commercial folk.

10:07You know it needs to be routed, or maybe right away it needs to be diverted to, uh, finance for even consideration or you can have integrations with kind of Dun & Bradstreet. Is this company solvent that you're even gonna enter into business as well? And with Salesforce we can talk about that too, the integrations there where, you know, you can actually get rich data as a commercial team and then incorporate that with the rich data, the legal team as well. Yeah, and I, I just... I love this, this talk track and this kind of avenue that we're going down because so often, you know, I mean, our listeners are, are in-house, right? And, and we always cater- Yep... towards them and, and the procurement teams, right? Those are the, the folks that are always listening. But I, you know, I really was excited about, about this conversation because I wanted to get a seller's perspective or, or from the sales team's perspective, right? Those commercial teams. And it, and it's definitely things that, you know, that we see as well, right, in our day-to-day when, when we're- Yep... working with our internal legal teams. So I, I think there were some great takeaways there.

11:03And, you know, one of the questions that I wanted to ask was how as an account rep or a sales manager, because you know that the sales team has a larger budget, right, to go out there and, and look at- Yes... uh, at applications. So, you know, if somebody's listening to this podcast, they're on the sales team, and they're like, "Man, this is gonna help me close deals faster," how do you go to the team and bring this up so that maybe some of your budget gets thrown into the mix a little bit so that you can start to evaluate, you know, some of the, the Cadillacs of, of CLMs out there? Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I also think that, you know, CLM did kinda start with the legal team in mind, and it's really branched out from there. You know, I think the legal team, they always have a very low budget in my experience, and they're usually doing more with less. They're usually a very small constituency within the organization. So I think to your point, Marc, that maybe sales should take some ownership.

11:57You know, having been a seller, you know, Salesforce is kind of the source of truth for many years now, going on 20 plus, and then you have, like, the prospecting tools. So why not CLM, right? I think we had talked in a other call, Marc, that I actually think CLM could become part of the fabric or kind of muscle memory of a salesperson, and this is why. You know, in most good CLM tools, whether it's- Small, medium business, medium mid-market to enterprise, this could be part of your 101. So I think we had discussed this. I think that why not? You know, if I'm gonna forecast with my manager, you know, my former self or even sales folks today, usually they open up the Salesforce or maybe they use a prospecting tool like Outreach, and they'll say, "Okay, these are where I am in the conversation. I predict this one to close." Well, why not weave in contractual data from CLM and say, "No, this has been sent out"? And maybe historically you can see this client is maybe within seven days, they typically, you know, are able to send it back executed.

12:55Or just you've seen it open multiple times, you're seeing like who it's at at the client side, it's actually at the finance stage versus maybe the initial pass. So I think you can be more predictive with CLM, in my experience. And then, you know, updating to today, you have that rich data from Salesforce to pull from, whether it's like CPQ data or whether it's just, you know, the specific terms you need to bring in, and so it's less error-prone to like yesteryear as well. And you can also push a lot of this data into Salesforce. So if the seller never wants to meet Salesforce, great. You push that reporting data in there and you kind of meet them where they are. It's, it's kind of two trains of thought. But I, I think that we're moving into an evolutionary thing where a lot of other teams are seeing the value in contract, and whether it's a procurement team trying to get the best deal, negotiate, or it's a sales team to get the maximum revenue quicker, I think CLM can be just as important as a CRM or ERP for the said, said teams. Yeah, that's very interesting because, uh, you know, it's one of the main problems for big corporations that they use a lot of different softwares is that they- Yeah... work as silos. Yep.

14:03And the integration part is very useful so data can just flow between each other. Because like if you see the CRM, like Salesforce- Yeah... and then your CLM just for contracts- Yep... you might not be using 40% of the data that, that- 100%... you have there, right? Yep. Mm-hmm. Because if you think about it, like what do you do on Salesforce? You look for leads, then you do the follow-ups. Yep. You'll be working a lot just to close the deal. Yep. And if you see the contract, that's just like the tip of the iceberg- Yep... because you already spent a lot of time, especially if you're into B2B sales, right? Because it's a whole process. And of course, I understand Alex's, uh, memes because it's, it gotta be frustrating for a, for a sales team that after spending months to close a deal- Yep... it will take another couple of months just to close out the final version of the contract. Oh, yeah.

14:55But at the same time, if you can see like the terms and conditions for all of your active contracts, and you can- Yep... use that data- Yep... during the, you know, the commercial relationship, the once, like the posting interface, which is like the most- Yeah... important part of a contract, and use- Agreed... that information for your sales team when they're- Yeah... looking for leads or they're, they're like closing deals or doing- Yeah... the quotes, I mean, this is, this is gonna help you. And the ROI for, for implementing a CLM system i- is a no-brainer if you're thinking like that. Yeah. I think you actually hit... I, I think it can't be understated, 'cause a lot of sellers, you know, if it's a publicly traded company that they're going after, then look at the SEC filings or 10-K and kind of reading between the lines. And to your point, post signature, there's such rich data there. So like if you're, let's say you're attached to a vertical, like maybe s- consumer packaged goods, for example.

15:49And to your point, you can see historical contracts and like how they were negotiated, what type of language got it, you know, quicker, or, you know, maybe you can lead with the type of personas that were in that workflow as well, you know, what got it done. You always want to, and going back, you also want to be multi-threaded, multi-touch in a sales, uh, cycle anymore. And so you can see who is touching these other contracts and then executed, and maybe provide the application to, and that new prospect. So yeah, I think that's something that is not talked about a lot. And I think in general, like, people are fearful of contracts historically, uh, whether it's sellers or whether it's procurement, but I think CLM really kind of democratizes contracts for everybody. And, uh, I think the other thing, and this might be a little bit controversial, but you had mentioned in-house counsel. I also think that CLM, oftentimes sellers will rely on some kind of external counsel, maybe more mid-market enterprise, and I think that becomes your intellectual property too, 'cause once that is executed, same thing, post signature, you have that contract that was kind of weighed in by an external counsel, and that becomes your IP, and maybe you don't need to farm it out to external counsel in the future for that specific issue.

17:01And so again, quicker contract, 'cause you can recycle some of that language. Or just polish your playbooks. Yep, exactly. That's another important thing. Yep, yep. Like you want to close business, you try to make your commercial department, uh, you know, self-contracting as possible. Yep, absolutely, 100%. What about your experience? We already cover a lot of the, on how we can improve the, how can sales team and legal team can work together. But let's talk about like some of your, some of the pitfalls that you have encountered when you try to align their objectives. Like what do you think is like top two or top three pitfalls so people that are looking for a CLM can avoid, uh, during, during this process? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it also kind of spans out to other adjacent teams as well.

17:52I think one of the biggest pitfalls, and having been a seller, there was a lot of software thrust at me when I was a seller, and even today, like one could argue there's even at Koho you probably have a myriad of different software, and for you, you get to choose, but still there's a learning curve, there's change management. So I think one of the biggest pitfalls is not communicating the why of CLM for any department, specifically commercial. If I'm a seller, to your point, I'm prospecting, I just want to get the deal done. So how do you surface that- The key thing with the CLM that'll help them sell quicker, bigger deals, more rich data. So again, bubble that up. It needs to be communication at kind of the higher level management. So management needs to be bought in as well, but then understand, like, the impact of the end user and individual contributor. And then I think, like, how can they use this data? Like, is there reporting that they can surface and incorporate into, like, their one-on-ones, their daily activities kind of thing?

18:48And then make sure, I think the other thing, it's a little easier for s- uh, sales teams, but a lot of times there's not the consideration of the center of excellence, like who will own this? The good thing about the sales side is that largely you can grab talent or fractional, uh, bandwidth from a Salesforce team or a biz ops team, but that needs to be communicated from the outset that just like an outreach tool, Salesforce or Sprinklr and any other sales software, somebody needs to own it from a COE perspective. And so if a end user has an issue, especially the first 30, 60, 90 days, who can they reach to internally to help make sure that they understand the software and then any troubleshooting or workarounds? And then I would say a good repositu- repository of, like, trainings, job aids, that kind of thing. So maybe I hit on four or five key ones, but I think all three of us has seen the pitfalls and, you know, I'm curious, like, if you agree about those pitfalls, whether it's sales, procurement, or any adjacent team.

19:46Yeah, I think, you know, I think you touched on something, right? And it's not just CLM, it's any software that a team- Yep... is purchasing, right? Y- you need to, one, uh, folks need to be excited about it, they need to understand why they need to use it, and they need to understand how to use it. Yep. And if you can, if you can touch on all those points and get people excited to use a new application, get them to understand how to use it and know why they're using it, I mean, that, that's kind of the trifecta, uh, user adoption, right? Yep. And, and that's the biggest downfall of, of any, any software application is the user's just not using it, right? Going back to their old ways and, and trying to work around it. Yep. Yeah, 100%. And I, you know, it's interesting, I had a commercial team once where they took a little bit of a draconian approach, but if any contract was outside the system, it wasn't honored. So again, you know, maybe that sometimes you need that tough reinforcement, but I think to your point, you want to keep it in the system. Um, not just for the sellers, but the whole business can be better.

20:42And I think the last one too is that CLM, because it's fairly nascent, even five, seven years in of being popular, I, I think that people need to realize that it should be on the same pedestal, in my opinion, as a CRM, as a ERP moving forward. And so to your point, Marc, you need to plan accordingly. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the times they cannot just see that. And what, just following what Marc just said, it's, you gotta get them excited- Yeah... from, from the beginning. That's- Mm-hmm... one of the things that we've been working a lot with all our implementations, just like bring everybody- Yeah... from the beginning. Because we've seen with earlier implementation, they just told the procurement team or, or the sales team, "Hey, this is our CRM. You want to req- to request a contract, this is-" Yep... "the software." And then they're- Yep... they're, they're just like, "Again? Do we need to do another-" Yeah... "training? You know, we've been doing fine. Wasn't the CLM just for, for legal? Why, why-" Yeah...

21:39"are we going to use this new software?" But when you give them some quick wins- Yep... like there's one that I always use, like, for, for demos, right? Uh, which is very simple. Expiration dates. For the sales team, that's important because if- Mm-hmm... if a contract with a customer i- it's expiring- Yeah... in the following 90 days, then you can just notify them and start calling them. "Hey," you know, just try to keep that account and so they can renew that contract and, and you don't lose that client. Mm-hmm. That's a big one. You know? Yeah. It, it's, it's very simple. Maybe people will, will think, "Okay, we don't need a CLM for that." Okay, so why you don't have any notification when a contract is- Yeah... coming to its expiration date? Yeah. This is gonna help you to, you know, reach your goals, milestones, or whatever and, and this is a, a good way on, on how to make them excited to use this new system. Mm-hmm. And I think the... Yeah, and actually following on that, you just triggered a thought, is the most rudimentary of contracts are NDAs. And so any time you engage with a new prospect, you have to sign a NDA.

22:46So a quick win is historically maybe back and forth and you just put a boilerplate, non-editable, like, hopefully it's your paper. And same thing, like, you can expeditiously send it through CLM and get that conversation going. And then you can be more at, more at liberty to talk about, you know, kind of behind the curtain of what your product does and doesn't do. And then likewise, the prospect can talk about their pain points and talk about their ecosystem today. Yeah. I mean, as a, as a salesperson, right, that's something that, that you could definitely bring up to, uh, if any sales people are listening, you can bring that up to your boss, right? "Hey, we, we can fill out our own NDAs. We don't have to wait for legal to approve this, right? It's our, it's our terms, but, uh, you know, they didn't redline it. Why, you know, why can't we just sign this ourselves, right?" And if it's a- Yeah... a pre-approved template, that's, uh, you know, a, a quick win, uh, as well with these CLM tools. Yeah. Go ahead, Pepe. Yeah, and it's a pain for everybody, especially NDA. It's like it's not even a customer- Yeah... or a vendor from the- Mm-hmm... procurement side. Like, you can just use a template and send it for a signature.

23:46Yep. I've been working lately with a bank, and when I saw, like, the workflow for NDAs, I'm like- Yeah, yeah... "Really?" Yeah, yeah. You need... I mean, and I asked him, like, "How long do you take just to get this signed and start sharing information?" Like, three, four weeks, and I'm like- Yeah... "That's insane." Yeah, yeah. You know, we... It, it could only take... I mean, it could take minutes, but- 300, yeah... being realistic- Yeah... I mean, two, three days- Yep... to sign it, that's fine. Yep. And that's like 1000% more efficient than you've been doing lately, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And then there's this concept of- I think you've both seen the, uh, one NDA. So there's kind of like this approach that some people are thinking like a universal NDA. Uh, and I think that's an interesting concept. I, you know, I haven't seen too many clients utilize it, but again, if it's a rudimentary contract, let's all agree on this thing and kind of one set template or templates and, you know, then it's all blessed from both sides of the partnership.

24:48Yeah. We, um... I actually, funny enough, I, I saw my first one the other day. Oh, okay. Uh, and I was like, "Wow, this is great." I was like, "We don't, we don't need to review this. We're good to go." Yeah, 'cause that was agreed on, right? Yeah. Like you both agree. Yeah. And that's, uh... Yeah, interesting. Offline, I, I want to learn about that a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, you, I think you brought up something else, right? I mean, I, we could go on. On these types of topics, we could go on forever. Uh, but we do like to, to try to keep these brief and, you know, like we said- Yeah... we wanted to keep this targeted source, source this towards the sales team, and I think we've done a good job of that. Yeah. So Matthew, I think we're gonna, we're gonna wrap up here. So really appreciate you coming on. If folks want to connect with you, learn more about, you know, you or the, or the, uh, the team over at DocuSign, where, where's the best place to do that? Yeah. So I'm very active on LinkedIn, so Matthew Rinker on LinkedIn, and then you can also reach DocuSign. We have a very prevalent presence on the web and also LinkedIn as well. And, you know, I really appreciated the chat. I think we covered all the dynamics that a legal needs sales on this call. Yeah. I think this was great. This was definitely a different perspective and, uh, and one I hope some new listeners appreciate.

25:52So, uh, thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. Thank you. Have a good one. Thank you, guys. Bye. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool. Whether your project is buy or sell side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove for years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting.com.