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It's halfway through the month.
You just got the verbal agreement that your buyer wants to sign by month's end.
We're coming to President's Club baby!!!!!!!!!
Week 2: You send the contract.
Week 3: You ask for an update. They say "it's going well."
Week 4: You get the contract back on the last day of the month.
You open the contract thinking your deal's about to get done...
10 pages of redlines from their legal team.
Legal review is the single biggest cause of deal slips in sales. Sellers get happy ears when they hear that their prospect WANTS to close by the end of the month, but the reality is that your prospect might not actually know HOW to get a contract signed in time.
So let's breakdown how to use Redline Deadlines to cut your legal review in half:
- Break the legal process into baby steps
- Work backwards and set Redline Deadlines for each step
- Pre-set the legal-to-legal call
Let's roll.
1: Break The Legal Process Into Baby Steps
You need to chunk down the big task of "signing the contract" into smaller pieces to make it more digestible.
In general the flow is as follows:
- First cuts: Their legal team's initial review of your entire contract.
- Second (third, fourth, fifth) cuts: The ongoing back & forth between legal teams.
- The legal-to-legal call: The final call to hash out the final sticking points.
- Contract signed: The final signature and fully executed contract.
The most challenging piece is always getting first cuts back. It's not like it takes that long to review a contract, it's that legal teams have a contract queue and will always prioritize the contracts that their sellers are selling first.
From there, the number of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and "Nth" cuts (and how long those cuts take) really depend on the size of your deal cycle and the industry you're in.
Mid-market sales in HR Tech? You might get away with 2-3 cuts in a few weeks.
Enterprise sales in GovTech? Good luck closing your deal in the next 6 months!
This is why it's critical to know your legal process and work backwards.
2: Work Backwards and Set Redline Deadlines For Each Step
Now that you've divided your legal process into baby steps, it's time to walk your prospect backwards from the contract signature date to what they need to do today.
Set Redline Deadlines for each baby step of the process. At Pave, my most accelerated 7-day redline schedule for mid-market deals would look like this:
- Day 0: Send contract
- Day 3: First cuts back (we return in 24 hours)
- Day 5: Second cuts back
- Day 6: Legal-to-Legal Call
- Day 7: Contract Signed
This is the most critical piece of the legal process -- if you just say "we need to get the contract signed by day 7" -- you CANNOT assume that your champion actually knows what it takes to get the contract signed in 7 days.
Map this out with them live and send this in a bullet-point email right after the call.
Again, this is a best-case-scenario and varies greatly based on your deal size and even prospect-to-prospect because some legal teams are way more conservative than others.
This is why it's critical to test your champion well before legal review kicks off: "When you've bought things like this in the past, how long does it usually take legal to prioritize the initial review of our contract?"
If they don't know, make them ask someone who does.
3: Pre-Set The Legal-to-Legal Call
So you're holding your buyer accountable, but you might say "Hey Armand, that's great, but the buyer doesn't control the legal team". You're right.
Hold your champion's legal team accountable to their deadlines by pre-scheduling the legal-to-legal call ahead of time. This accomplishes two things:
- It creates a deadline to get first cuts prioritized quickly (which is the hardest part)
- It accelerates the back-end of legal review
There's nothing more aggravating than seeing lawyers argue over ONE term... ONE comment at a time... ONE day at a time... when your deal has to close in 72 hours.
Get them to do all that remaining back-and-forth live on a call.
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While you can't control every part of the legal process, throwing a contract over the fence is a sure recipe for disaster.
If you liked this, we put together a free guide on 5 Ways to Accelerate Vendor Review with our good friends at PandaDoc. Check it out.
