Contract Templates: Faster milestones and more celebrations

It’s no secret that we’re into celebrating our contracts and all the good that they represent as opposed to dreading the back-and-forth, determining which is actually the final version, missing deadlines, and everything else that previously plagued the typical contract management process. 

We talk a lot about the power in automating the various steps of this process but don’t give a fraction of the attention deserved to the backbone of what makes this run so seamlessly— templates.

How can contract templates help? 

Before we dive in, let’s do a quick review on templates. I like to think of templates as the creation molds for the contracts a business uses frequently. Templates make it so that people like me, who have little to zero legal or contractual knowledge, don’t need to try to create a contract from scratch. Many times businesses have templates for “standard agreements” they use for sales, NDAs, hiring new employees, bringing on a contractor, and so on. These contracts are templated so that certain pieces of data can and cannot be altered by whomever in the company is using it. 

A couple more real-life, common template examples you’d hear about:

Sales Agreement Templates 

Let’s say I’m an AE at Contractbook and received a verbal commit from a prospect. Instead of creating a sales agreement from scratch, I’d create a draft from our standard sales template. This way, everything is already in place and formatted the way I need it. All I need to do is handle the details for the prospect and what they’re buying—such as Company Name, Term, Package(s), Add-ons, Amount, Payment Terms, etc. And because I’m using a template, my sales manager and our finance or operation teams can be confident I’m only changing the contract within the confines of the template. Example: I can’t pull a fast one and add a discount that wasn’t pre-approved.

NDA Templates 

Nine times out of ten, the language of these bad boys isn’t going to change. Usually someone on the legal side of the house dictates the standard language for your company’s NDA and it pretty much remains constant regardless of whom you’re asking to sign. As such, an NDA template makes it easy for anyone at your company to generate an approved draft of this agreement and send it on its merry way. 

Employment Agreement Templates

The same principles apply here. I’m hiring someone for my team but don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get an internally approved employment contract into their hands.

Need some help with templates for your business? Check out our library! We have tons to get you inspired!

But why Contractbook templates?

Based on my refresher above, using templates can sound like a ‘best practice’, that might not need to involve any software. That’s 100% fair. And if you walk away from this blog post with why contract templates are valuable as your only takeaway, we won’t be disappointed! 

But there’s a reason we’ve dedicated our lives to this—there’s so much more when it comes to Contractbook templates. But for the sake of this post, we’re going to speak to speed and collaboration.

Contractbook templates + automations = speed

Templates are certain to speed up your contract workflow all by themselves. But when you pair those templates with automations and integrate with the other software your team is using, that’s when your team becomes truly efficient.

For example, you could set up a trigger to automatically send templates to Legal for approval once they’re created or updated. Or you could set it up so your entire team gets a notification once new templates are available to ensure full version control.