Perverse but logical

Sales contracts can be defined by the time and effort to get them signed. I divide them into 3 categories: No Touch, Lo Touch and Hi Touch.

Any company selling B2B and wishing to improve the efficiency of its Sales Contracting Process will be looking to move contracts from Hi Touch to Lo Touch, and from Lo Touch to No Touch.

But at No Touch strange things – from a legal perspective – start to happen.

If you look at a typical B2B company operating No Touch contracts (Hubspot is a good example), the complexity of the legal documentation escalates radically.

If you want to understand the Hubspot contract, you have to navigate through multiple documents, each adding an additional layer of complexity. The average Hubspot buyer doesn’t have the time, let alone the desire, to make sense of the multiple layers.

Contrast this with Hi Touch. If you know someone is going to read through your contract before signing it, you have an incentive to make it manageable, easy to understand, and sensible.

There’s an inverse relationship between the price of what’s being bought and the complexity of the contract. It’s a perverse, but logical, result.

And the moral is:

No Touch contracts – you can be as complicated and confusing as you like. 

Hi Touch contracts: make it manageable, easy to understand, and uncomplicated

10 December 2024