We got frustrated with legal process management
After a decade of running finance, revenue operations and legal processes in the B2B space we realized two things.
- Legal contracts are a source of truth for customer data
- Early stage companies suffer from slow processes
Meet the CEO
Scott Whitaker has over fifteen years of experience building out tech companies from a financial and operations perspective. Having successfully built and exited in the Ed-Tech space and then worked across the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and South Korea there was one thing that was continually frustrating him.
Contracts we just frustrating to deal with. No one, absolutely no one wanted to deal with them. Legal teams were thrown contracts hours before end of month sales goal deadlines, things were lost in the back and forward or simply stalled because the right people weren’t there to make the commercial decisions to get things over the line.
In the end he got frustrated looking for a tool that would work for small businesses so started building one himself.
Hours spent reviewing contracts with legal?
We can’t remember how many hours we spent with legal ensuring their redlines were use case appropriate and having them raise commercial decisions for approval in meetings and on calls.
It was not fun. So we wanted to build a better way with a tool specifically built to help teams collaborate with legal while unlocking the data in contracts.
Legal should raise commercial decisions
If you’re meeting with your legal team as a decision maker and they are reviewing every change with you then there is a lot of wasted time.
Sales teams should outline use cases
To review and redline contracts faster and more effectively one of the most useful things you can do is outline customer use cases for contracts.
Data shouldn’t be trapped in PDF contracts
Most early stage companies file a contract once it’s been signed. The data gets trapped in PDF’s and may differ from what’s in your CRM.
There should be a structured source of truth
At the end of the day your contracts are the most reliable source of truth. Extracting & structuring this data will make your legal ops a key business driver.
We’ve built enterprise B2B companies from seed to unicorn
The Contract Sent team has built and scaled teams in USA, Europe, UK, Asia and Australia focusing on putting in place legal operations and scaling processes. The biggest learning was to start early and get legal process management in place that feeds data back into the business.
The first twenty customers can be handled manually
When you’re getting started things are all about closing deals. Your first twenty customers are an amazing achievement and just getting those contracts signed is a great start to getting your company off the ground. Your naming convention of ‘final final.V2’ will have worked for now but it’s time to get organized.
Above that your business will struggle with contract data
As you grow you’ll find that unless you’re tracking the data that is trapped in your contracts you’ll start to face growing pains. Understanding when to recognize revenue, having a reminder for early renewal motions or simply finding data for your potential investors starts to get difficult. Time to chat with Contract Sent.
Where we implemented contract data
So you’ve started to pull out the data stuck in your PDFs, so what next? There are a lot of areas in your business to put this data to work and a strong tool for legal process management will help this
01
Sales
Commissions & Renewals
02
Finance
Reporting
03
Legal
Reducing Risk
Want to learn more about how to use your data?
We’re data geeks at heart and would love to chat to you about what issues you’re facing and how Contract Sent can help.
Office
New York, New York
Hours
Mon-Fri: 8am – 5pm
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Ready to get your contract data in order?
Get reliable data out of your contracts and structured today.