Optimize Your Pre-Sales NDA Process to Delight Sales and Legal Teams

Co-authored with Robin Moore, Founder & CEO - Playbird.

Creating an efficient pre-sales NDA process will delight your Sales team and increase your reputation (“Our Legal team is fast!”). It will also free up your legal team to do more interesting work.

Based on our experience leading and advising commercial legal teams, we’ve compiled a list of ways to optimize your pre-sales NDA process (with pros and cons for each).

1. Use a click-through agreement.

Having your AEs send a link to a click-through NDA can speed things up and remove the NDA entirely from your Legal team’s queue.

Pros: Speed; no lawyer time needed.

Cons: Setting up (and paying) a vendor to make it happen (DocuSign and IronClad are two vendors that people mention here).

2. Create a short, market-friendly pre-sales NDA.

Instead of using a standard and one-size-fits-all NDA, you can create a shorter, less robust NDA that matches the low-risk nature of the pre-sales information shared. We put together an example 1-page pre-sales NDA here.

Pros: Easier for prospects to review and accept.

Cons: Can result in extensive redlines from the paranoid prospects. 

3. Establish Clear Policies for the NDA “form battle” (aka “our paper vs. customer paper”)

Sales teams use NDAs as a necessary and frequent part of the sales cycle. If you don’t have clear policies for Sales on how to respond to “customer paper”, you’ll get a lot of friction between Sales and Legal, and slower NDA cycles. Here are three options for policies:

A. Readily Agree to Use a Prospect’s NDA. When prospects ask to use their own NDA, you could tell your AEs to capitulate.

Pros: Less friction with the prospect; happier Sales team.

Cons: Takes more resources to review (but see below regarding using AI)

B. Never Agree to Use a Prospect’s NDA. Some Legal teams take this approach. We have never done it because our Sales teams didn’t like it and, ultimately, we viewed part of our job as making the Sales team happy.

Pros: Less work for Legal.

Cons: More friction in the Sales process; grumpier Sales team.

C. Use a Prospect’s NDA if they Insist (e.g., Push for Your NDA at Least Once or Twice). We’ve seen the most harmony among Sales and Legal here.

Pros: Increases the odds of using your form without alienating those prospects that won’t.

Cons: Creates some friction, especially with large, slow-moving enterprise buyers; it requires your Sales team to push back on prospective customers.

4. Use AI Review Tools to Streamline the Work.

AI review tools are very good at reviewing and suggesting edits to NDAs (this likely stems from the fact that there are many NDAs in an LLM’s training data).

Pros: Faster review.

Cons: It costs some money (but will ultimately save you money if you choose the right tool).

5. Outsourcing the Whole Thing to a Third Party.

Pros: Fastest review.

Cons: Provider-dependent, might not fit within your workflow and might over-negotiate.

Need help with contracts or contract processes? Juan is the principal attorney and legal ops consultant @ Opp Law (https://www.opp-law.com/). He can help you close fast and scale your legal processes.

Want to outsource your NDAs or purchase an AI review tool? Robin is the CEO and Founder of Playbird (https://www.playbird.app). Playbird offers AI contract review software and NDA outsourcing services.