Hi, I’m Foster. I’m Pramata’s General Counsel, and August 1, 2022 marks 60 days in the role. If you’re also General Counsel at your company, you may remember what your first month or two was like. Just a few words to describe that onboarding period might include: hectic, underwater, disorganized, and confused.
Often new GCs walk into an organization and are expected to hit the ground running, helping the revenue engine of the company keep moving, even while they’re still figuring out how contracts were done in the past. Without a modern, digital contract management solution these expectations are difficult (or impossible) to live up to.
Luckily at Pramata, I get to use Pramata! And what a difference it’s made to my first 60 days as a solo GC.
I’m in a unique position among both Pramata’s staff and customers, in that I’ve been both. Not only did I first get to know Pramata at my last company as we shopped for, and implemented, a contract management solution. But now, as Pramata’s General Counsel, I sit in the same position, facing the same challenges, as many of our customers. That is, managing hundreds or thousands of contracts that our business relies on.
Chances are, if you’re general counsel at a business, the contracts you’re responsible for are also vital to closing deals that bring in money for your organization. This is a tough job regardless, but the first couple of months can be brutal as you orient at the new company, get to know your new teammates, and wrap your head around each contract that’s been signed before you arrived. Not to mention, negotiations with current prospects the sales team is hungry to close and renegotiating contracts for upcoming renewals.
I can speak from experience that going through this process with a system like Pramata in place is night and day compared to what it’s like without it. Even though I was very familiar with the Pramata product, joining the company after spending five years as a superuser at my prior in-house post, I stepped into my new GC role without any prior knowledge of the contracts running the business. Here’s how having access to Pramata’s contract management solution has given me a huge boost in my first 60 days, which has translated to more sales, quicker renewals, and higher productivity across the company because no one’s had to wait for me to get up to speed on contracts.
How Pramata helped me quickly contract new deals
Using our digital contract management solution, I had access to every deal we’ve ever done, on day one, without spending any time or effort searching through physical or digital files and folders. With the push of a button, I was able to see reports on things like:
How often we’ve accepted certain contract terms
How many customers have the same specific terms as the one I’m currently working on
What our contract volume looks like on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis, which allows me to plan and manage my time
Having this data instantly available feels like having a superpower. It allowed me to instantly support new deals and negotiate contracts within the risk threshold established from a 360-degree view of past contract data.
How using Pramata made add-on deals easier
Having access to Pramata took away the panic in my first days and weeks each time an add-on with a current customer came through the door. When a deal for an add-on came in on their paper, I didn’t have to worry for a second. I could immediately view the last deal we did, and every deal we’ve ever done with this customer, thanks to the digital repository in Pramata. Without any effort, I could see what terms we agreed to before with this customer. And, same as with any new deal or add-on, I could search our entire customer-base’s contracts to see if any terms were out of the ordinary. This ability is a time saver and gives peace of mind particularly as a new GC who hasn’t seen every historic contract.
Using Pramata for contract amendments
Change is the only constant, am I right? When things change and our customers request an amendment to an agreement, it’s literally no sweat. Even in my first days and weeks at the company, if a salesperson requested an amendment, I could simply look up the account to reference a prior amendment and immediately know how to structure the next one. With everything digitized, organized, and available in seconds, I had a template and playbook for every customer. This enabled me to effortlessly amend agreements, keeping our sales process moving and helping the team drive revenue more efficiently.
How Pramata helps me be a better advisor to the business
Part of my job is to advise people across the organization when they have questions that fall into legal and contract territory. Having every deal we’ve ever done, every contract amendment ever made, and the terms of every contract in a digital, searchable, smart repository makes me look really good when people ask questions. I don’t spend time trying to find the data: it’s right there for me to access in Pramata. I can quickly evaluate it and get answers back to stakeholders so they can make decisions and keep driving revenue.
How Pramata saves me hours from constantly fielding and answering contract questions
People across your organization have questions about contracts ALL. THE. TIME. If you stop what you’re doing every time someone has a question, you soon find there aren’t any hours left in the day to focus on your actual work. This is where Pramata’s self-service capabilities for non-legal users make a huge impact.
At my prior company, we tracked over 1,000 interactions with Pramata from non-legal users (through our integrated CRM) each month. Each of those interactions represents a time when I’m not stopping to pull up a contract and send it to someone or answering straightforward questions about key contract terms. This amounted to hours of time back each month for our legal department, and I suspect the same is true internally at Pramata. I was really happy for this functionality, especially in my first two months, when I had so much to do and didn’t have to spend time answering questions our team could find for themselves.
Speaking of time, I spend exactly zero of it filing or organizing executed contracts. The Pramata solution does it all for me, automatically! You probably didn’t become GC to do administrative work, and now you don’t have to.
Pramata helps your legal team help the business from day one to day 60, and beyond
It’s only been two months since I joined Pramata as a solo GC, but I knew before I joined the company that my life would be easier in these first couple of months because we leverage our own solution.
A legal department operates best when it’s well-organized. With organization, legal can serve the rest of the business quickly, accurately, and efficiently. But getting organized usually takes time, especially when you’re bringing a new person on board. If we didn’t have Pramata, I can only guess how many hours I would’ve spent tracking down contracts, researching contract terms, and organizing files. It’s not work I want to be doing, and it’s not work your company wants their GC doing either.
As a longtime Pramata user at my previous company, I knew the benefits I’d reap by joining a company that had already invested in an intelligent, digital contract management solution. Instead of spending my first 60 days trying to wrap my head around the state of our contracts, I was able to spend that time getting to know my colleagues, our customers, our product solutions, and our industry. I also noticed how much time I wasn’t spending answering questions from others in the business because they could get what they needed from the Pramata solution as well.
Whether you’re preparing to bring on a new GC in the future or want to realize these benefits with your current teams (including legal, sales, finance, and others), you’ll see the ROI in the first months and far beyond. In my case, I’m already seeing a return on investment for the time I was free to spend doing what mattered in my first 60 days. An investment I was able to make because the company I joined had already invested in Pramata.