Jason M. Lemkin explains how to cut sales friction: compress contracts to one page with terms online, and enforce a one-turn negotiation rule. After one round of pushback, accept the customer's changes or walk. Whoever has leverage uses their paper.
Hi SAS for Community. So I just got back from speaking.
Into Salesforce Accelerate event with a bunch of great CEOs and we talked about cloud and growth and all these things.
But you know what the one topic.
Among these hundreds of founders that really resonated and took off was contracts.
Their frustration with customer contracts, the red lines, the back and forth, our paper.
Their paper, how long it took.
And I said a few things about taking friction out of the sales process.
And it just lit up the room. And I wanted to talk about it here.
And let's just start with two ideas on how to take take pain out.
Of your customer contracting process.
The first one is the one page and one turn rule, which means at least try.
It's a construct.
Try to get this 28 page contract.
You got back from your big stuffy law firm down to one page. Work with your sales team, your legal team and everyone.
Enforce them and lock them in your.
Conference room or at WeWork and say until this contract is one page, no one's leaving.
You may only get to two. You may have to reference terms and conditions on your website. There may be a lot of debate, but I know you can get it to 2, so at least try 1. So that's the one page. The second half is the one turn rule. When your customers do comment on your contract and the shorter it is, the fewer comments you will get. But even with the one page contract, sometimes you get comments force legal and.
Everyone to agree to one turn.
In other words, you can push back once, but then you've just got to.
Agree to what the customer wants if at all possible.
So one turn, not four turns, not red lights in their box, your box, that's it. One turn rule and try to enforce it. And the other point is their paper, our paper. A lot of founders are like, oh, we get so close on a big deal and then the customer forces us to use their paper, their terms and conditions. Tough luck. You know, in big enterprise deals, the company with the biggest leverage gets to use their paper. So suck it up and again, force legal and the team to have a one turn rule. I don't want a thousand comments on their paper. Give me one turn, one set of comments and then we got to live.
With what we get back one turn.
Because your goal is to take friction out of the sales process, not added at the end.
