Streamlining SaaS Contract Negotiations

Enterprise SaaS contracts are time-consuming. To negotiate SaaS contracts, SaaS providers take a significant amount of effort from multiple people to negotiate. In some cases, larger enterprise buyers end up drafting their own MSA and software agreements, leading to negotiations that last weeks or even months.

While some product-led companies use click-through, most enterprise buyers require an in-depth review process that involves complex negotiations related to data privacy, intellectual property, and security.

Let’s review some of the pain points SaaS providers face when writing, reviewing, and signing their enterprise agreements.

Challenge 1: SaaS Agreements Affect Multiple Stakeholders

The fact that SaaS agreements tend to involve lots of stakeholders from different parts of the company further complicates the matter. Your SaaS contracts likely involve input from multiple members of various teams.

Legal counsel: Your in-house legal team ensures favorable terms and mitigates risks by thoroughly reviewing each contract.

Sales operations: If your business uses an integrated workflow with a CRM, your sales ops managers likely own the SaaS contracts flow process.

Salespeople: The salespeople and managers who are responsible for securing signatures from customers will want to move through the process fast.

Other approvers: It seems the larger the company, the more approvals are needed. In addition to members of the sales and legal teams, it’s not uncommon for companies to require approval from their product, finance, customer success, and other departments.

Customers: Arguably the most important signature of all! Your customers need to be satisfied with the contract before they sign it.

Challenge 2: Clunky Workflows Can Slow Down SaaS Contract Negotiation

When negotiating SaaS contracts, relying on outdated methods to fulfill SaaS contracts can slow down deals and create friction between the various stakeholders involved in the review and approval process.

Redlining in Word can be confusing and complicated, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders making revisions. We all know how easy it is for documents to get lost in email chains. Further, enterprise negotiations on client paper or heavy edits that are made to templates are complex and, often, confusing.

As tech-savvy organizations, many SaaS providers rely on multiple streams of communication. Things can slow down quickly when stakeholders need to chase down contracts that are spread out over Word, email, Slack, shared drives, PDF, and more. The longer it takes for your sales team to get the contract to the client, the more revenue you lose.

Challenge 3: High-Risk Issues are Difficult to Consistently Flag

When you use Word or PDFs for SaaS contracts, you don’t have an easy way to consistently flag high-risk issues. You may not even recognize that some high-risk matters (such as termination for convenience) are a regular occurrence. This results in wasting time reviewing the same problem repeatedly instead of changing the language in your templates.

Challenge 4: Siloed Knowledge Slows Down Negotiation Process

Even though it’s commonly used among teams and in customer data, Word is not an inherently collaborative tool for making revisions to documents. Individuals work separately on redlines using “track changes,” then send it to someone else. This can result in siloed knowledge between teams and individuals, which is especially problematic when ensuring the appropriate legal language is used consistently in each contract.

In some cases, the knowledge of particular negotiation terms is stuck in one silo (or even in one head). When only one team or person is able to provide the necessary negotiation terms to finalize a contract, it slows everyone down (especially if that person is not always up to date on their emails).

Challenge 5: Customer Data Security Needs Can Vary

SaaS customers are rightfully concerned with protecting their individual and company privacy as well as data ownership. They demand varying data privacy and security provisions, which you may or may not be able to provide with your current software.

It would be much easier (and less time-consuming) to use software fully equipped with high-end cybersecurity to protect everyone involved in SaaS contract negotiations and signings.

Challenge 6: Challenging Enterprise Contract Requirements

Some large companies forbid the use of contract red lining and require SaaS vendors to provide an amendment to their service agreements as part of the negotiation process. As a result, organizations are tasked with negotiating SaaS agreements via a form of amendment, which is often difficult to draft. In some cases, legal advice is required to generate legalese, exception tables, and the language necessary to generate an amendment to the service agreement.

Don’t settle for clunky, disorganized, and time-consuming negotiation software for your SaaS enterprise. Contract negotiation software from DocJuris can streamline your process for all stakeholders. Here are five proven benefits of using DocJuris contract collaboration software for your SaaS enterprise contracts.

Benefit 1: Instantly Provides Alternatives and Fallbacks

With integrated playbooks, DocJuris ensures that everyone involved in your contract review has quick access to legal terms, alternatives, and fallbacks in an instant. You can stop wasting time waiting on that one person who understands all the correct terms to have time to review the contract.

Benefit 2: Easy to Convert Other Forms of Documents

A lot of companies still rely on Word and PDF for sending documents. When you use DocJuris, you can still work with these types of documents with quick and easy conversion options. Our software even lets you open and redline locked Word documents.

Benefit 3: Seamless Integration

You don’t have to get rid of all your existing systems to use DocJuris! Our software seamlessly integrates into your existing CRM or CLM, allowing for efficient collaboration on the web using track changes.

Benefit 4: Quick Assessment

Our software offers a quick assessment of your documents and can flag potential risks that show up consistently. This speeds up the process of reviewing individual contracts so your sales team can close deals faster.

Benefit 5: Empower Your Teams

With collaboration software, everyone involved in your enterprise SaaS contract review and negotiation process will be empowered through each stage of the process, from your legal team reviewing the contract to your customer success team complying with post-signature obligations.

Benefit 6: Automate Amendments

With automation software, amendments can be generated automatically from redlines to meet customer requirements and quickly and safely prepare your positions to a SaaS vendor's customers.

Are you ready to say goodbye to slow, clunky processes that drag the closing process on for far too long? See how DocJuris can improve the process for your SaaS enterprise contracts for everyone, including your customers.

Create better contracts. Close deals faster. Keep your customers happy. It’s all possible with a simple switch to DocJuris software. Schedule a demo today to learn more.