Why "Legal" Always Holds Up Sales Contracts | Salesman Podcast

Christina Scalera is the founder of The Contract Shop. On this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Christina explains – Whether salespeople should be signing contracts on behalf of the company they work for Why legal is always slow to come back to salespeople How to speed up contract negotiations Resources: * TheContractShop.com * Christina on LinkedIn Transcript   Will Barron: This episode of the show is brought to you from the Sales Man at HubSpot Studio. Coming up on today's episode of the Sales Man podcast.   Christina Scalera: A contract is it's basically a materialisation of the relationship that you're trying to cultivate with that other party or person. There's two quick little things I want to mention there too. Typically, legal and marketing are, I mean, they're enemies inside a company because marketing's always trying to do something. And legal's like, why did you say that? Why did you do that?   Will Barron: Hello Salivation, my name is Will Barron. I'm the host of the salesman podcast, the worlds most downloaded B2B sale show, and today's episode. We have Christina Scalera. You can find it over to thecontract.shop.com and contracts are exactly what we're talking about in this episode. You're probably signing them all the time. You're probably not even reading them. And you probably don't think you're liable because you assume that you're signing on behalf of the organisation that you work for. Well, Christina shares that, that isn't always the case. And Christina also shares an experience that you probably have been through. I've been through, I give some anecdotes in this episode of contracts that we've gone through recently that go to a marketing team or HR team, whoever you're selling into, and then the bop off to legal and they don't come back for six months and then they come back completely different to what you expected in the first place.   Will Barron: Christina explains exactly what happens when they got to legal and how you can speed up that process. You get more deals done, faster. Everything that we talk about as always is available in the show notes for this episode [email protected]. So with that said, let's jump right into it. Christina, welcome to the salesman podcast.   Christina Scalera: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Will.   Will Barron: You're more than welcome. I'm glad to have you on. And I think you're going to offer an incredible service to the audience today. We're going to talk about contracts, the basics of them. What is a contract we're going to start with a few questions like that, but the reason why it is, that I've just done a and, we'll talk about this in a second, I've just signed a whole bunch of contracts, I had to have a little bit of help with it.   What is a Contract? · [02:15]   Will Barron: Loads of stuff would have passed me by and I would have signed a contract that would not have been as useful as what it was in the end, just because of habits. I signed things all the time. I know when I was in medical device sales, I would signed contracts on the organization's behalf all of the time. And I'd never read them. I know I'm assuming I'm expecting someone else within the organisation has done that work for me, but that isn't always the case. So we'll get into all that good stuff in a second. But first, Christina, is there a definition of what a contract is? Can it just be two people agreeing something on a napkin and signing it? What needs to be in a contract for it to be, I guess, useful and also enforceable as well.   “A contract is basically a memorialization of the relationship that you're trying to cultivate...