Bridging the Gap: How Legal Training Can Empower Sales to Close Deals Faster
Deals can easily be derailed when certain issues, which should have been resolved earlier, come up at the contract negotiation stage. This is entirely avoidable if you provide Sales with targeted training.
Legal and Sales
There’s typically a clear divide between Sales work and Legal work. For the most part, Sales counts on Legal to do their thing and they’re quite happy not to dig into the weeds.
On the surface, that makes sense. We’re specialists in our respective fields and logic dictates that if everyone focuses on what they’re good at, we’re all making optimal use of our time.
There’s a lot to be said for that but, in my experience, if you can provide your Sales team with nuggets of knowledge on specific topics, it can really have an impact on your deal cycles.
Training
The key is to a) identify the issues which consistently come up (and cause delays) in your negotiations, b) break them down and c) convert them into digestible content that your Sales team can understand and use in their discussions with your customers.
Doing this allows Sales to sharpen their radars and be on the look-out for the problematic topics. Then, when raised by your customer, the Sales Rep is in an ideal position… Instead of saying “I’ll have to check that with Legal and get back to you”, they can provide an initial – solid – response.
Impact
What does this do?
· It puts the issue on the table at a point when there are a number of other issues under discussion, and everyone is in “issue resolution mode” instead of “closing mode”
· It notifies your customer of your position on critical matters and eliminates any ambiguity which may muddy the waters
· It prevents wasting the time it would have taken to “check with Legal”
· It allows you to frame the discussion about the issue early on to make sure that it goes down the right path, instead of having to course-correct later on, at a time when your deal may be more vulnerable
Example
To use a very simple example which I have seen many times, it’s not uncommon to receive a mark-up of a DPA which includes the position that personal data must remain in Europe. If you are a U.S. SaaS provider, that is likely to be a challenge and there is clearly a discussion to be had with the customer to explain the realities of your company and what you do to protect that data. However, that’s a conversation you want to have early on in your deal cycle. The last thing you want is to involve a customer DPO, who doesn’t have the same business motivations as you (or their own purchasing team), getting involved in your deal 3 days before the end of the quarter. That is, of course, entirely avoidable if your Sales Rep shares that nugget of GDPR knowledge earlier on in the deal cycle.
Credibility
Beyond this, giving Sales key knowledge points does something else: it gives your Sales Rep credibility as it shows a deeper level of understanding of the issues which are relevant to your customer and that in turn allows your customer to position your product appropriately with the relevant stakeholders internally (like a DPO in the example above), at the appropriate time, helping them in their purchasing efforts.
Empowering your Sales team
The effectiveness of this type of training all rests on one key thing: securing buy-in from leadership. Without it, you’re unlikely to get the level of engagement needed to really make a difference.
In summary, if you can develop tailored training – relevant to your product and organisation – and provide specific knowledge points to your Sales team, you are empowering them to devise more efficient sales cycles. Let’s be clear, this isn’t about training them to do legal work, it’s about fine-tuning the sales cycle in ways which will ultimately accelerate it.
I’ve developed and delivered these trainings for years, and I’ve seen the impact it has. If that sounds like something your company could benefit from, let’s chat.
