Embrace customer relationships, trust and collaboration: add online contract negotiation capabilities into your CRM

“In our rapidly changing and highly competitive legal and business environments, earning trust is more important than ever — especially during contract negotiations as that may be the first opportunity for parties to work with each other. ” 
– Dennis Garcia – Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation 

The best deals are based on collaboration, one could argue without being left alone with the opinion. When there are two or more business partners who can together deliver something bigger than the sum of their individual contributions, everyone can get their share of the bigger success. They may or may not work in the same company. Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak or Andy Grove (Intel) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). 

Start building trust already when negotiating 

Good collaboration requires a clear agreement over targets and roles. They are ideally set in a negotiated contract, which sets a foundation that each party can trust.  

In other words, it all boils down to the quality of the relationship – also in a buyer-seller setting. In a recent study by G2 and PandaDoc, 71% of buyers thought the relationship with the sales rep influenced their recent purchase. In return, 82% of sellers say the relationship between the buyer and the sales rep is important when closing deals. 

Keep close contact all the time 

How can one build a good relationship already when bargaining about the terms of a deal, with all related caution on both sides? 

The answer is, keep close contact. Make yourself available to discuss and develop ideas whenever the other party wants it. Make the negotiation process as easy and transparent as possible. Answer any questions clearly and quickly as soon as possible – and keep track of all communication. 

Online solutions can help a lot  

It is all about communication and these days more and more about communication between teams of experts who work apart from each other (they would even without COVID-19). To enable good remote communication, having an online document collaboration solution embedded into your CRM is a way to go. 

With its workflow, it automatically notifies users on status changes, alerts participants when their task is due and, finally, takes care of collecting electronic signatures.  

Documill’s contract collaboration solution for Salesforce fultfills all these requirements. Crucially, it provides a workspace in which all people can collaborate on sales documents: redline the contract terms and discuss them. All in real time, embedded in Salesforce – the clear CRM market leader. 

“Collaboration is about trust. Trust is about transparency, reachability and capability to communicate.
All these are enabled by Documill’s contract collaboration solution. Just remember to add trustworthiness yourself.”
– Mika Könnölä, CEO, Documill Ltd