“It was the wild west,” Sam Lee, Director of Legal at Outreach, said when asked how they were managing contracts before Lexion. “Our contracts were nowhere and everywhere all at once.”
Sam is not alone in his experience. It’s a problem we’ve heard many times from customers. Contracting typically lives with legal teams, who are stalwarts of tradition and regulation and sometimes slow to adopt new technology.
Outreach, however, is on the cutting edge of sales execution software, so they’re big believers in using technology to close deals faster. The legal team also prides itself on being a good partner to sales—hopping on calls to negotiate, giving detailed responses, and looping in stakeholders.
This commitment to sales and legal alignment is why Sam and his team chose Lexion: To create “one repo to rule them all” and ultimately, to enable processes that close deals faster.
Losing time in fishing expeditions
Before Lexion, sales reps were instructed to attach signed contracts, order forms, and MSAs to the account opportunity in Salesforce. While this did happen often, it didn’t happen every time, and it was Sam’s team who was called in to help.
“We didn’t always know where the contract lived. We had known places to look if AEs followed the correct process, but we didn’t have consistent visibility.”
From fielding requests about a contract’s location to actually taking the time to track them down, Sam’s team members were losing 1-2 hours of their day. Sam called it “a fishing expedition.”
In addition to the lack of visibility and wasted time, reporting “at any level” was a major challenge for the legal team before Lexion. When asked about a provision, for example, Sam and his team would come up with “anecdotal observations of trends. We might say ‘Oh, I think we’ve seen 3 or 4 customers negotiate this provision.’ But we didn’t really know at any level of accuracy.”
With new compliance projects and a growing customer count, Sam could easily spend “weekends upon weekends” caught up in contracts.
One repo to rule them all
Now that Outreach uses Lexion to store and navigate its tens of thousands of contracts, they're able to spend half as much time contract 'fishing.'
“Lexion is the engine that drives contract reporting accuracy and excellence for us. It’s the single source of truth for all signed contracts. One repo to rule them all!"
In addition to the major time-savings the Outreach team has gained, Lexion is providing the following benefits.
CRM + CLM integration
Now, when a customer signs a contract, it “ends up where it needs to be.” With Lexion’s Salesforce integration, Outreach’s back office teams can look quickly to see whether there is a signed contract for that opp in the deal review stage.
“If they see it, they move the opp to closed won. That’s something that did not exist before.”
Gone are the days of tracking down a contract in email, Slack, or some other software. For both the sales team and the legal team, if the agreement doesn’t exist in Lexion, "for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist. That type of reliability eliminates early variables when locating a contract."
Sales team adoption
As time passed, Sam noticed that his team was getting fewer and fewer questions to track down contracts for the sales team. He knows this is because they’re using Lexion.
“Sales folks are doing their own due diligence first, and Lexion helps them find what they're looking for. They don’t even notice there’s a new software—they’re just in there using it.”
Accurate and automated reporting
One of Sam’s favorite features of Lexion is the intuitive, full-text search function built on AI and OCR technology.
“We don't need to go through hoops to create the report. You just type in the search terms and the report is created."
Using the “robust Lexion search tool,” Sam’s team is able to provide high levels of accuracy as to how many customers have a certain clause in their agreements. It also helps the contract team prove they’re an effective sales and strategic partner: “Our reports help show how contracts affect strategy moving forward.”
A cross-functional contracts solution
From closing deals faster to streamlining reports to cutting down wasted time, Lexion adds up to major ROI for Sam’s team.
The greatest value, according to Sam, however, is the benefit to the cross-functional org: “Other teams find the importance that we see in contract reporting accuracy.”
Even the Outreach marketing team wants to start using Lexion to improve reporting for their marketing insights (logo rights, press releases, etc).
“Lexion was built for legal teams, but more people are using it and want to use it. Because it plays well with our other tools and systems, it’s loved by cross-functional teams as well.”
