Contracts and Making Sales Easier - Part 1
Sales are hard. That’s one of the immutable facts of business life.
But what if a B2B business could make its sales easier? Or, if not actually easy, at least less hard?
To begin with, some definitions.
Sales is the process of taking a customer from State A) indifference, to State B) customer decides to buy.
The Sales Contracting Process (SCP) is the process of taking the customer from State B) customer decides to buy, to State C) customer signs the contract (irrespective of whether signing takes the form of clicking, docusign, or wet ink).
Those are my usual definitions, but for the purpose of this piece I would like to define Sales as the process of taking a customer from State A) indifference, to State C) actually signing the contract – i.e. include SCP as part of Sales. Which makes sense: signed contracts are the end object of B2B Sales, revenue only arrives from signed contracts, and bringing in revenue is the primary purpose of Sales.
If that’s the case, then there are two (and only two!) contract-related ways of making Sales easier.
Making it easier for the Customer to decide to sign the contract.
Making it easier for the Sales team to bring the Customer to the point that the Customer decides to sign the contract – i.e. some kind of Sales Enablement.
So far, so self-evident, you might think. But if it’s so self-evident, why is contract negotiation often such a painful process?