Accelerate your sales deals

A Misdiagnosed Legal Delay

Slow deals are often blamed on legal, but most delays start long before a lawyer sees the document.

Here’s what I see across various SaaS businesses:

1. Misaligned incentives between teams

 Different parts of the organisation optimise for different outcomes- speed, accuracy, delivery quality, risk, revenue, relationships, or operational stability.

 None of those priorities are wrong on their own, but they don’t always move in the same direction.

2. Promises made with good intentions.

 Customers often arrive at the contract stage expecting integrations, timelines, and support levels that were never formally agreed internally. Small verbal commitments become large contractual complications.

3. Manual processes that can’t keep up.

 Quoting in spreadsheets, outdated templates, scattered emails, Slack threads, and ad-hoc approvals mean the deal loses clarity as it moves through the business. By the time legal sees it, half the context has evaporated.

4. Complicated pricing structures.

 Tiered pricing, usage elements, legacy plans, discounts, and “special cases” create friction when they’re not documented consistently. If pricing isn’t clear internally, it won’t be clear in the contract.

5. Customer pushback driven by uncertainty.

 Most redlines come from a lack of clarity, not disagreement. When scope, data flows, or responsibilities aren’t explained well, customers fill in the gaps themselves.

6. A sales process that moves faster than the information flow.

 Sales moves quickly. Legal works with what’s documented. Reconstructing what was promised, implied, or assumed takes time.

7. Legal being looped in too late.

When scope, pricing, and expectations are locked in, legal can only react rather than shape the deal. That’s when delays appear.

It’s rarely a genuine “legal delay.”

It’s usually unclear inputs, enthusiastic promises, manual processes, complicated pricing, and missing context.

Fix the alignment → the deal moves!

Legal just stops looking like the bottleneck.

## Accelerate Your Deals with Fewer Surprises