Implementing Contract Playbooks

💡 NOTE: This article is based on a session at Juro's Scale Up GC 2023 conference, you can find an online re-run of that session here if you'd prefer to watch/listen to this material. The link will ask you to register and then give you access to the recording.

Contents 🚀

Introduction
Why use a contract playbook?
Designing a contract playbook
1. The design process
2. Components of an effective playbook
Seeing a contract playbook in action
Implementing your contract playbook
1. Embedding it into your tools and processes
2. Providing training and raising awareness
Enhancing your contract playbook
Summary - what we've learnt

Introduction 👋

Building contract playbooks for our customers has provided us with some very valuable insights into the best practices around building, deploying and iterating a playbook tailored to your business needs.

Naturally, there are lots of different opinions about how best to approach these processes, so if you have any thoughts of your own please don't hesitate to reach out to the Juro team.

Why use a contract playbook? 📖

Below are just a few of the ways that using a contract playbook can help you to close more deals faster without increasing your risk or overheads. We'd love to hear yours!

Improves collaboration 🤝

This refers both to collaboration with the teams across your business and with your counterparts in a negotiation. In both instances, a contract playbook is a good springboard to a smoother contract management flow.

Mitigates risk ☣️

Taking a considered, formalised approach to the same questions that arise time and again means you're better equipped to identify and manage the risks that appear in your contracting processes.

Delights your customers 🤩

One of the first topics in any sales-oriented interaction is contract terms: if that process is painful and difficult to navigate, your discussions with a new customer can start off on the wrong footing. Alternatively, if you can offer a process that's quick, informed and rooted in data, you immediately pave the way for a positive and productive business relationship with your new customers.

Designing a contract playbook 🎨

There are two key pillars to designing a contract playbook:

the design process, and;
the components that you'll end up with.

The design process ✏️

Your design process should be grounded in the below points to ensure you get the most from your contract playbook going forward:

Understanding your Business Objectives 🏢

The best way to start your contract playbook design process is by confirming what your business objectives are. Ask yourself: where are you in your corporate lifecycle?

Are you a fledgling start-up where demonstrating the viability of your product and getting revenue and renewals is most important? Or, are you slightly further along in your journey: a more advanced, regulated business where you're focusing on the key points of risk when agreeing on terms with your customer? If you understand which one you are, then you know where you're going with the terms of your contract playbook.

Understanding your risk appetite 🙅

There's a tendency for some companies to be very reactive and deal with questions on a day-by-day basis. You shouldn't do this with a contract playbook.

Playbooks let you take a step back and assess whether the risk appetite you have across all of your customers is the right one. This will again depend on what kind of business you're doing. Are you tightly regulated, VC-backed, PE-backed? Are you a listed company? All of these are factors in trying to work out what the right risk is for your business at the right time.

Collaborating with stakeholders ☎️

If the design process becomes a legal-driven, legally-executed process, you may not get that crucial buy-in from other people in your business to adopt and use the playbook later.

That's not the same as saying you have to have a perfect playbook coming out of this; it just needs to be collaborative. If people feel included and like they've bought into the process, they're much more likely to effectively adopt the playbook later.

Components of an effective playbook 🌟

So when you've laid out the framework of your contract playbook, what components should you expect to see in the finished product? Below are a few essentials for a starting guide:

Standard contract clauses 📝

Here, you'll set out your standard position on items in the contracts that the playbook is governing.

Negotiation guidelines 🤼

These will lay out how stakeholders should negotiate your standard clauses; the do's and don't in this process and what an impactful negotiation process looks like.

Exception handling 🤷‍♂️

Accept that your playbook will not be infallible. There will be things that it can't cover; situations that come up that you don't or can't anticipate. Exception handling should be in place to ensure there is a sensible escalation process in those circumstances.

Seeing a contract playbook in action 🛸

We've put together a simple playbook Contract Hacks Limited: a fictional company that produces widgets for rocket ships. Below is a snapshot from the starting point of their Sales Contract Playbook, which has the three components outlined above.

As you'll see, it has standard contract clauses, it's got drafting, there's a preferred position with a short form and long form, and there's a fallback position with the drafting you'd adopt if you can't achieve your preferred position.

It's also got negotiation guidelines in the notes section to the left and in the "How to use the playbook" section at the top. There's also an explanation of why certain points are preferred or required. Finally, it has exception handling, which covers how to deal with situations that aren't covered by the playbook.

These three things together, documented in a playbook and then rolled out in the right way, can be really effective.

You can download and view an expanded copy of this example playbook here.

Implementing your contract playbook 🔨

A contract playbook sounds great in theory but is at its best in practice. So how do you meaningfully implement one into your business operations?

Step 1️⃣ : Embed it into your tools and processes 🏗️

With Juro, you can operationalise a contract playbook at the template level. Here are a few examples of how you'd use our smartfield and rules features to allow your contract playbook users to safely self-serve.

Using smartfields for clause capture and to determine contract language🔘

In the below video, you'll see two methods of linking contract language to

smartfields; directly and indirectly, using rules.

Directly linking contract language to smartfields is great for situations where you want the full clause captured in a structured manner for reporting.

Indirect linking is better for situations that warrant more user-friendly (and/or restricted) clause selection, or for situations where you want to capture/effect large areas of text or specific formatting.

Setting up fallback positions using smartfields 🚁

Using table views to analyse trends 📈

With Juro, you can also set up automatic escalation with our approval flow builder.

Default approvers added to your template will have oversight over the approval flow for all contracts created from a template. But you can also add conditional approvers, who will be looped into the flow if certain smartfield conditions are met.

Combined with a choice of three workspace permission levels it's possible to safely delegate responsibility with robust guardrails in place so that no unexpected or undesired terms are agreed to.

Below are some examples of how you can use Juro to ensure that issues are automatically escalated where appropriate.

Setting conditional approvers 👀

Permission-based exception handling 🔏

Step 2️⃣ : Provide training and raise awareness

Once you have a viable playbook in place and operationalised in Juro, it's vital to proactively train and enable the teams that'll be using these. There are several formats that we've seen work well for this - here are a couple:

Embed champions 🏆

Start by training up a few champions in the team you're working with. For Sales, this could be one or two reps and/or a sales manager, or even a dedicated enablement person.

This method works well where the goal is for the team to truly self-serve with little to no legal involvement. With dedicated embedded champions, team adoption is usually strong and questions can be proactively handled within the team. Be sure to flag or codify when an escalation should occur if there are still matters that'll need legal input.

Do a direct enablement sprint 🏃

Rather than training up a handful of champions, you'll almost be embedding yourself in the team with this method.

You'll provide training followed by direct support for a set period of time. During this, it's important to get into the trenches and work collaboratively with the team. As they become more comfortable and confident with executing the playbook with minimal support, you can reduce your involvement.

Coach those resistant to change 🏋️

Resistance levels will vary from organisation to organisation, and even from team to team. However, some individuals may take slightly longer to get used to the responsibility and freedom of self-serve and the new tool itself.

A lot of this friction can be headed off during the design stage of your playbook, by collaborating well with teams ahead of its implementation. That said, you should still plan for some ongoing coaching and provide ample support either directly or through an embedded champion.

Enhancing your contract playbook 💅

A contract playbook isn't a case of 'fire it and forget it'. It's a living document that will need to evolve with the business and its needs.

We think there are three steps to really get the most out of your contract playbook once you've deployed it.

Get data 📈

Choose metrics that matter to your team, business and sales cycle. Look at these and measure what's going on: you can't improve what you don't measure. Some popular metrics that we've seen with our customers include:
- Time to sign
- % of deals without legal: this is a real sign that your templated contract, assuming you have the right risk allocation, is an effective one. If you can now get through the process of selling without negotiating legals then you're doing well.
- Clauses negotiated and how: this is what we were capturing with the table demonstrated above. With it, we get live data showing when preferred, fallback, and custom clauses are being used.

Be accountable through KPIs 📏

Legal teams often agonise over what to measure when it comes to performance over a half, a quarter, or a year. Set KPIs that you really care about in your individual contract processes; then measure them, set targets and assess yourself against them.

Iterate, iterate, iterate 🏈

Treat your contract playbook as a living document and make tweaks or improvements where needed. You should leave enough time to see statistically significant trends in the data, and then be responsive to those trends.

The end of the quarter is not the best time to discover that your playbook is causing friction in the sales process. Don't wait if you see a risk emerging that can be avoided with the proper actions: iterate in real time.

Summary - what we've learnt about contract playbooks 🌃

Whether you're a one-person legal team, like Juro's, or whether you're an organisation with 100s of people, the fundamentals are the same: design your contract playbook, implement it effectively, and be adaptive to change when it's needed.

Before you know it, all of your contract-related processes will be running smoother than ever before.

Good luck! 🚀

💁‍♀️ As always, our Support Team is happy to help you with anything further if needed. Start a chat with us right here by clicking the Intercom button in the bottom-right-hand corner of this page.

Alternatively, you can email your query to support@juro.com 🚀