Partnerships and Contracts: How to Navigate the Legal Jungle
Formalizing partnerships with contracts can be a pain. Turn the legal process into an advantage with these tips from Sylvain Mlodyszewski and Joseph Stoker.
Nearbound GTM—involving partners in every part of the buyer journey—is gaining momentum. But formalizing partnerships with contracts can be a pain, and often sucks the momentum out of the relationship.
What if you could turn the legal process into an advantage, rather than something to dread?
There isn’t a perfect template, since every company is different, but there is a process and key points to be considered. If you follow this, your life will be a lot easier!
Make friends with legal
Partner pros need to leave any baggage they may have with Legal in the past and find a way to turn them into your best friend.
The first step is to assess your existing partnership agreements. Once you have identified the gaps and drafted a couple of ideas, the next step is to go and pitch your idea to your legal team.
Make sure that you pitch the idea in a scalable way, this means that the revamped contracts can be used as a blueprint to develop and roll out contracts for the sales teams.
How to structure partner contracts
Making a contract is more than just writing fancy legal terms in a 30-page-long document, it’s about making everything comprehensible and the most functional way possible. It’s all about legal design.
Legal design and structure
Traditional contracts are usually designed only for lawyers to understand them, but a good contract needs to be understood by anyone reading it. The key to making that mindset shift is to have a design and human-focused approach.
The legal design approach prioritizes legal information and enhances its accessibility through a visual framework for reading. Rather than replacing legal texts, legal design makes them easier to read and emphasizes key points.
Revamping your contract involves 3 steps:
- Identify the pain
- Give your ideas a clear structure
- Test and run
The process starts with identifying the pain. The pain usually stems from a lack of understanding of the different conditions and not having transparent contracts that describe how the partner relationship should look.
“You should use contracts as a tool rather than as a burden.” - Sylvain Mlodyszewski, Partnerships Director at Ultimate
