Streamline B2b Sales in Legal Agreements with Signnow

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this episode of the show is brought to you from the salesman.org hubspot studio coming up on today's episode of the salesman podcast a contract is um it's basically a memorialization of the relationship that you're trying to cultivate with that other party or person there's two there's two quick little things i want to mention there too typically legal and marketing are like i mean they're enemies inside a company because marketing is always trying to do something and legal's like why did you say that why did you do that hello sales nation my name is wilbar and i'm the host of the salesman pockets the world's most downloaded b2b cell show in today's episode we have christina scalera you can find it over at thecontractshop.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 them on behalf of the organization that you work for well christina shares that that isn't always the case and christina also shares an experience that you've probably been through i've been through i give you some anecdotes in this episode of contracts that we've gone through recently that go to a marketing team a hr team whoever you're selling into and then they 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 christina explains exactly what happens when they go off to legal and how you can speed up that process so you get more deals done faster everything that we talk about as always is available in the show notes of this episode over at salesman.org and so with that said let's jump right into it christina welcome to the salesman podcast yeah thank you for having me will you mother welcome i'm glad to have you on and i think you're gonna offer an incredible service to the audience today we're gonna talk about contracts the basics of them what what is a contract we're going to ask i'm going to start with a few questions like that but the reason why 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 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 and just because of habits i sign things all the time i know when i was in medical device sales i would sign contracts on the organization's behalf all of the time and i would never read them analytics i'm assuming i'm expecting someone else from the organization uh 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 right really good question i come at contracts from the same angle that most of you guys do with sales which is a contract is um it's basically a memorialization of the relationship that you're trying to cultivate with that other party or person so i think at its core that's what we're talking about is the same thing that you are dealing with every day in sales is a relationship and just to answer your question about what's enforceable to have a legally valid contract you only need three things so it doesn't matter how this is conveyed it can be through action it can be on the back of a napkin you just need someone to make some sort of offer hey i would like to hire you and you have to have some sort of acceptance so for example that person's like yes that sounds great i uh i would love to take this job on this sounds like a great opportunity and then there has to be something that each side of that agreement loses so for example the traditional arrangement is the person who's providing services is losing their time and then the person who is hiring the service based consultant or whatever that looks like they're losing money in in exchange for that time so they're both losing something of value to them and that's what's legally called consideration so offer acceptance consideration you have all three of those it doesn't matter if um if it's action based such as i'm like hey will would you like to paint my house and you say nothing to me you don't text me back you don't email me you just show up on monday you start painting my house that's considered an acceptance so you don't even have to have a written contract to technically have a legally enforceable agreement which is why i think written contracts are so important because obviously there's a lot more that can be conveyed even on the back of a napkin than just you showing up to paint my house is that something you're doing at the moment is that top of the freudian slip is that top of mind for you no that's actually the example they use in law school okay but yeah i don't even um have a house to paint so i live in the city i'll be painting your windows in where you live right um so right so with that said then there's a ton to go here because one of the i want to i want to cover what it is and we'll formalize it and who's responsible for this in a second but you just let you just leaned on a really important point and we talk about communication all the time in sales to get a deal done you've everyone's got to agree to negotiating the negotiation training that we teach a lot of it's just make everything logical take the emotion out of it and get everything written down on paper and we we're almost sliding bits of paper across the table so that everyone very literally agrees on what's written on the page and it seems like contracts are are no exception to this right do we are we leaving ourselves open to interpretation to issues to people coming back and complaining later on buyer's remorse all these things that can kick us in the ass of sales people if we don't do our job appropriately up front if we don't get a written contract if we lean on verbal contracts or if we try and just invoice someone and not write anything down at all yeah i mean that's really dependent on the situation like typical lawyer answer right but the the main thing to think about there and i think what you're really asking is like when do you actually need a written contract and the two situations i always tell people you need something written down and really fully developing what your responsibilities and obligations are for each side in that agreement the two situations are when the relationship matters so i see a lot of people that enter into business with someone in their family maybe a sister or a parent or something they're like well they're they have to love me they're family well that's also where things start to go south so we want to make sure that we have a contract to essentially act as a scapegoat if something goes wrong because remember if it's a written contract people can point back to that and say that's what you agreed to like you didn't you didn't agree necessarily to the situation that like whatever bungle we got in but you agreed to the terms of this agreement or this contract and so we're going to lean on that because you said yes to this and then the other situation where it helps a lot is anytime there's any kind of transference of money because there's just too much that can go wrong there's too much he said she said that could happen if you don't actually write down where that money is coming from where it's going how any kind of incoming money will be split up if that's appropriate for the arrangement so anytime it has to do with relationships or money there should be some sort of pretty well-documented arrangement in the form of a contract and and this is gonna seem like a stupid question but i'll flesh it out with an anecdote here who's responsible for all of this now from my perspective when we're doing ad sales on the podcast typically i will do some kind of we call it a partnership agreement or sponsorship agreement send it over it just lists exactly what they're going to get we both sign it and i stay in control of that relationship now when i'm doing larger deals like we've just done a massive deal with hubspot crm organization they did everything and they would not budge on things and there was stuff in the contract that i was like well it'd be great if we could just twist and turn and like nope legal says this this and this so whose responsibility is it especially in the b2b space to to have that i guess start the conversation and then provide the paperwork typically it falls on the person who's providing the service not the person who's paying so that that makes sense in some of the situations you talked about it's it would be very strange for a consultant to expect someone to show up to this the arrangement with their own client contract ready that being said i do see more and more of that nowadays just because i think people are worried about protecting their own interests if they're the client to that relationship and they want to make sure that obviously everything that they're interested in protecting whether that's money or the relationship or their time those things are all important so they'll show up sometimes with a contract to the situation in the situation that you talked about with hubspot it's very common for people to see with these larger companies like maybe you've ever signed a lease agreement with a big leasing agency right it's like a multinational corporation that has like an apartment building and that's the one that just comes to mind because those are the ones that you see where they say like absolutely not we're not changing anything kind of like what your experience was it sounds like and there's two things that i've done to get around that first is everything is negotiable i think you know that um but the second is to reinforce that negotiation with some sort of benefit to the other side so if you can ever bring your reasoning for changing a provision it can really help to go a long way because a lot of times yeah like it's easy to toss it back and be like well legal says this or legal says this is like absolute terms but if you can actually show how something that you would like to change in one of these contracts they throw at you how it would benefit them too that can also help to go a long way just to have legal take a second look at that and to show them that this is something that is going to help both of you and that's why it should be changed to whatever you're insisting on and then i think there's some other changes that companies try to get away with that are not always what i would consider ethical so for example and of course i'm not gonna give legal advice on the podcast because i don't know everybody who's listening their particular situation but what i will say is there's typically in like hold harmless right like you sign an agreement it's like i agree to defend indemnify defend and hold harmless this company um that word defend is really problematic and that's like something that is always top of mind for me when i see these like iron-clad big corporate agreements i always ask to get that removed because i don't know what that corporation's doing i'm not going to agree to defend them and so that's there's like certain little sticking points and contracts that i've found even big corporations will take out if it's like a little word like that or again if you can frame it as a benefit for them sure so you mentioned something really valuable for the audience here uh christina and i won't name the organization but it's not hubspot and they're probably sponsoring this episode of the show now we've we've done an even bigger deal with these guys right and i just just guess this point paints them in a bit of a bad light um which it shouldn't because it's just business and i found that there was one thing in this contract and this is the contract out to get a friend to look over and he agreed he came back said look don't sign this until this isn't this changed so i went back to this brand and i said hey i can't sign this until this and this they said well they use this this is what i want to ask you do people use our legal said this and legal said that as an excuse is can that be bs can that be people scapegoating the legal team as a reason for not uh kind of moving forward things because what happened in the end was i just said i'm not doing it the deal's done we're walking out of here and then we've been within a couple days they came back and the contract was more appropriately written and it wasn't even a big deal it was just the fact that they refused to change one thing so i was like hey this this sets the tone of the relationship moving forward and now that there's a little bit of leeway everyone's happy so do uh whether it's a a purchasing team or a procurement team executives whoever is on the other end of these contracts that salespeople are trying to negotiate do they just fob everything off onto the legal team do they bs that the legal team says that things can't be changed when maybe they can uh i i don't know for sure because i don't work in these companies but i would imagine that there is some of that happening i used to work in house at a big uh you know international toy company it's a privately held company but we used to work on licensing agreements all the time and that was that was the whole point of my position there is to negotiate the um like what was going to be included in those licensing agreements with our vendors and things like that so i can tell you that any legitimate company that's running even if they're privately held they're not publicly traded and that kind of thing even at that level they're still employing some sort of legal team whether that's in-house like the one i was in or out you know outside counsel is what it's called when they hire the firm or some combination of both typically that's actually how we ran and what the in-house counsel like their whole job is to make these small tweaks and changes and you know it might take a little bit longer so if there is a time sensitive deal that can obviously affect this which is also why it's important for you to approach someone with changes and understanding like some reasoning behind why those changes are important because it helps to push that through if the lawyer sees this is just you know semantics and i can change this and this this makes sense great but if you're making if you're putting all the work back on that legal team of course you're not going to get as great of a result as you were hoping for because you're asking them now to do extra work on top of whatever else they have and they're taking time out of their schedule which already is full of other things that they're working on so they're less likely to get to it in a timely manner so i i don't know for sure if other companies are doing this but i can say that you know that was definitely the scapegoat excuse that the company i worked for would sometimes just throw out and be like you know we got to send this to legal and that would dissuade some people from um asking for certain things because obviously that would take more time that would be potentially more cost you know more costly for them with their lawyers and their team because typically they had a lawyer themselves even if they were a small company so yeah i don't know how it works for everybody i think it's going to be different for everyone but that there's no doubt that that's happening at some level for some people so just make it as advantageous to yourself by uh just assuming that they're going to come back and say no and you know just like in sales overcoming that objection and giving them a good reason to go forward with the result that you would like to see instead for sure so i want to get into um later on in the show how salespeople can really help the legal team what they can do to to make their jobs easier and to smooth over these deals but before that and i don't want to sound like we're just piling on top of uh people like your ex your old career and people in these organizations but sometimes it does feel like christina that things go into this black hole of legal they're in there for two weeks and then randomly they get popped back out now when i deal with a marketing team i deal with a sales team i deal with um even the cfo finance insurance direct finance um it seems to be it's easier to communicate it's easier to understand what's happening it's clearly because there's multiple levels of um expertise that go in in the legal space that someone who's perhaps listening to the show myself included aren't familiar with so what is actually happening what happens when i say i like these changes to the contract and it goes off to this this legal bubble whether that's in-house or or out of house what's actually happening and not that we're complaining that it takes so long we're just trying to understand i i want to get from you the context of why it can take a few weeks to make these changes yeah for sure so from my experience and again it's going to be different at different companies but what would happen with us is we would typically get like you would email the marketing team who's the person you're you know you have a point of contact there you're working with them and you email them back the changes and they would email it to the legal team which would be in my case uh i think there were three of us lawyers and three or four lawyers there and then a couple assistants and some paralegals and so what would happen is the assistance would go through that inbox every day which was getting you know hundreds of emails a day whether that was marketing or not just from the marketing department but you know newsletters things like that on top of any kind of request and the assistance would flag what's important as high priority and then they would flag medium low priority and typically requests like this get flagged as low priority because it's very little risk to the company who you're working with for them not to get back to you right like you either do the deal or you don't with them they haven't lost out on a lot versus like high priority is something that is actively in litigation and you know has deadlines that if they're missed there could be millions of dollars worth of fines our toys are spontaneously combusting that's that's a priority for you right yeah i don't think we ever had that happen but uh we did have some pretty pretty uh gnarly litigation going on at one point um but yeah so i think that's what's happening is it just gets marked low priority and then things start getting piled on top of it so just like anything else you have to be really diligent about staying on top of it and i mean i'm shameless like i would if i needed to get in touch with someone i would go on linkedin and i would find out who was in the legal department because lawyers love telling you they're lawyers so go find them on linkedin and find a different way to contact them i mean it's no skin off your back especially if you're like hey i have this important thing it's not going to take that much time you know and actually in in that situation i would be looking for like the legal assistant to that lawyer because you know they're going to be the ones who want to help you if if you're scratching their back or like if you're just able to frame it in a way that helps them to see how important this is uh potentially to that legal department even if it's not that important or if they just like you right like you see they have you know a star wars hat on or something and you connect over that so there's lots of different ways that you can be creative um that was that was actually what i did in law school is i to get internships i figured out this was before linkedin but i figured out who the general counsels were of these companies and so like i almost got an internship at neiman marcus in dallas um and i it ended up not working out but i still had like a great two-hour phone call with the general counsel of that company just giving me advice on my career because this is like the back door approach that i took to write letters to people and just kind of explain why i wanted to help them and then they they wanted to help me out genuinely in return so getting creative like that is definitely not off limits and i know that you guys know linkedin so and let me ask you this christian is this is again a weird question to to ask perhaps but is that appropriate if if you were an assistant paralegal whoever perhaps um within the hierarchy below the the main person that we'd like to deal with would you feel uncomfortable if a a salesperson and we're not talking about a used car sales person they're trying to flog your random stuff we're talking about people doing large deal sizes complex deals where there are multiple stakeholders in the organization would that be would that get people's backs up would that um would that be just a normal thing is that is that common to happen no i don't think it's common i i would suggest it as an extreme measure sure if you know you followed up via email and things like that and they're not getting back to you but i would say also the only hesitation that legal department would ever have in getting back to you via that extracurricular means is they're worried that you have your own attorney so they can't talk to you if you're represented they um they need to talk to your attorney so where there's you know attorneys involved typically we favor wherever this is the uk the us we want those attorneys to talk to each other the parties are allowed to talk to each other too this is an act of litigation so it's not like that big of a deal for them to talk to you um but typically you know they're gonna look out for that so that would be a good like you know not a red herring but what would you call like i don't know like a normal herring like this is something that you want to plant in the email where you're saying i'm not represented and i'm you know i haven't gotten an answer and i'm looking for this is there any way you can help me this is what i'd like to do for you in exchange so yeah that was that would be i would never even have considered that and some of the organizations i've worked for one medical advice company was a public company they definitely had a massive legal team because they were going through some shenanigans when i worked for them at the at the c level and um the audience don't know who this is it was olympus when i worked for them there was all kinds of shenanigans with the the japanese mafia being involved and all kinds of stuff so oh i don't know anything about that we were interesting yeah so as our deals going in and out of probably within our own internal legal team were probably marked unimportant at that point um so yeah so that's probably that's not an unreasonable example because this we've got stakeholders both sides right we can just evidently prove that we've got our customers legal team we've got our own legal team and i've had the same experience the black box of legal it just absorbs the thing and it's probably because as i said it's just not a priority for it's priority for us it's not a priority for them in that moment i think that's really valuable to give us context to understand that so we've all said there's god there's two there's two quick little things i want to mention there too typically legal and marketing are like i mean they're enemies inside a company because marketing is always trying to do something and legal's like why did you say that why did you do that so sometimes there can be some internal tension there and then the second thing i would also say is just like anything else in sales try to find one person that can be your point person so if you do happen to get someone on the phone early on or a brand approaches you try to get somebody on your team like that you have as a contact and not just legal at you know company.com um so those are just two other quick little things that is interesting you mentioned uh legal and marketing being get loggerheads right and i i can assume that sales is less of a pain in the ass because you can pass it down to that individual said it as opposed to it's printed on a website that 20 000 people a day are seeing because i know sales and marketing are often at loggerheads because marketing won't sell people to say stuff that is seemingly untrue or or nonsensical or you know a real human would not say a lot of the stuff that marketing try and get real human sales people to say so do you have any any thoughts or experience on on that dynamic because it seems like marketing is just a pain in the ass for everyone yeah i know right well my dad was in sales at pubsico and you know he i'll deny it although i'm recorded now but he uh he always used to say like it's so annoying we make all the money marketing just spends it yeah yeah i don't know how it is at other companies but what i will say is that i think um you know it it really depends on who is in charge of that marketing department because i remember um there was this amazing woman ann mckergie who was in charge of mark she's actually the one who came up with the um what is it called this the uh super bowl like what is it the commercial thing where you know someone wins a million dollars for coming up with the best super bowl commercial she's the one who came up with that idea and so like when she was in charge i know it was it was like a much better dynamic and they loved each other but um but yeah i think that's not the norm i think most most companies are at and you know fighting with marketing whether it's legal who's like you can't say this on packaging we're literally going to get sued or if it's sales who you know maybe has the sentiment that marketing's spending all the money that they're making um so i'm not sure how it works in most companies i can only speak to the ones that i've i've been inside or have seen inside a little bit but um yeah i definitely think that they're it that's something that's underrated that we just take for granted but there are more nuanced things happening here than just you know oh legal won't get back to you yeah and and this is perhaps some of the problem and it's a communication issue of if i'm dealing with someone in marketing this unnamed company that probably sponsored the show at this moment uh the uh that isn't hubspot the i'm dealing with someone in the marketing i'm dealing with the vp of marketing at a massive organization and i feel like and you're you're making this clear for me now that there is other things at play but everything budget done budget hundreds of thousand dollars done no problem sign off on it it's there um uh what else marketing collateral okay there's a team of four people working on it right now it's going to be with you next week all of these amazing video assets branding assets social media assets done but the contract the the the vp is like well i don't know stuff to do with me and then just palms it off and says again it says it goes into this black hole of legal but now as you're describing it it seems like marketing could be some of the issue here which it makes total sense so with that then said with that said then christina what can sales people do so you mentioned this idea of um giving it exchange giving value if you want things to be done quicker um or just getting the person to like you a little bit so they'll do you a favor is there anything tactical that sales people can do or is there anything less tactical there's anything genuinely useful that sales people can do and just deal makers it could be a sales person it could be an executive trying to get a contract signed is there anything that we can do again both i guess internally and externally to make your job easier to make the legal job easier so legal goes oh it's will we really enjoy working with this dude we'll just get it done um he's made f and seamless he's given us this and this and it's a joy to work with him is there anything that we can do there might not be anything but is there any leverage points that we have to be able to help legal to make things easier on their side yeah i mean i i feel like i've covered a lot of it um i mean short of taking them out for lunch or something like lawyers love to eat out you know get out of the office for an hour every day so um yeah i i don't know necessarily that there's anything else that i would add to that conversation but i just want to encourage people to continue to be creative about this if this is something that they're really like there's a deal that's very important to them right like you would almost treat it like a client um just to to seal that deal and make sure that obviously it's not a one-sided agreement which we can get into the the legality of that because sometimes those one-sided agreements are well oftentimes they're not enforceable so there's not anything i would add to that conversation per se just continue to get after them maybe come up with a system for yourself if you're not a very organized person i think it helps to have some sort of calendar reminder or like sales docketing system to see where you're at in the process with all these different brand deals and things like that that you might be trying to close um so those are all really helpful tools to have in your arsenal which you're probably already using in some other way with your business and your b2b sales for shop it seems like we should almost be adding when we've got long-standing contracts uh contracts are changing regularly or being renewed regularly it seems like uh sales nation everyone listen we should be adding if we can legal contacts into the crm keeping them in the loop of things and even if we are low priority at least having a line of communication to see where we're at with things now this is clearly not going to be legal advice from yourself because you're not studying the case and and um massively subjective but this is a dynamic that i've always not i've not really understood to be great if you could explain it to the best of your ability if i'm representing an organization maybe it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise whatever it is or it's a small medium-sized company and we do a deal and i've experienced this i'm putting my name down a lot of the time on this i'm not i'm signing i guess on behalf of an organization so it might be say employee yada yada sales person business development individual am i roping myself in legally to anything here by using my own signature on a a b2b contract where these are two separate legal entities and i'm kind of in the midst of things yeah i think it depends if it's your name comma the company that you're representing and your position there at the company um or it even says representative of company then it's still the company that is the one who's liable for performing anything in that contract you're just the actual physical person right because we don't have robots signing contracts yet um i think we're getting closer with blockchain but anyway um so you're the actual physical person who that company has vetted and put forth as their representative and they're trusting you to do whatever it is that you've agreed to do with them so for example if you've agreed to read the contract and make sure to flag anything that they need to know about and then you don't do that and you sign it i don't think you're necessarily going to be in trouble as far as that that the the other party to that contract is invol is um is concerned but you know for your own company that you're representing they might have some major issues with that and they might ask you why you didn't do the job that you were assigned to do and obviously there's repercussions for that so as far as yeah i mean to answer your question as far as that goes i think it would be i'd be more concerned about the company i'm representing and doing a good job on be on their behalf then for example the other side of that agreement so very literally practically for the audience we should be looking for those words on the contract of uh representative of or the company name just you're not signing your own you're not signing your own name and nothing else on there that's important right yeah and especially for your small business owners who are listening this is the number one mistake i see everybody goes out they get their llc or you know whatever it's called in your respective countries and you know like my company name my official company name let's just call it christina scalera llc and instead of signing on behalf of my company you're right they sign as a personal entity so i just signed my name and then that's it so the more proper way to sign in order to be signing as my company to make my company liable for performing the services or paying or whatever it is that i've agreed to do is to sign christina scalara comma owner or principal or whatever your position is representative of uh christina scalera llc and so i'm a really big stickler about that if someone sends me a contract to me personally i always make sure that they actually put you know the party like this agreement is signed by blah blah blah and christina scalera llc because typically they will send it to you personally and it's kind of a pain in the butt because you have to send it back and say like hey can you change this whatever but in the long run if anything were to happen my company has insurance for the actions of my company i don't have personal insurance for the actions of my company um and so that's why that's important that is i sorry this that alone is worth the admission to this episode christina in this i've worked for well i said multi-billion dollar medical device companies i've signed all kinds of things i've never read i've never bought the organization after the fact and again medical device companies the the the lawsuits here could be in the millions we're not faffing around at this point so that is incredibly valuable for the audience and something i need to go look at some contracts i've signed recently and just doubled down and and make sure that's the case and with you can always make an amendment sure sure and with that then we'll wrap up with this christina what happens if this what happens if uh s does hit the fan a little bit with this do we go running to our own legal team are they there to protect us or are they there to protect the company that we work for and we're we're out of luck how does this work if we do sign something we sign a contract it goes it goes belly up and seemingly we're wrapped up and on the line for some of this yeah i'm glad you asked this a lot of ceos of big companies don't even know this or they're just in denial but the legal team that works in-house or council that's hired to protect that company all of those lawyers they're working for the company so the client is actually the corporation not the individual people in that corporation so for example if a ceo like if the ceo of enron tells their lawyers or their legal team that they want to do something you know to shred the books or something the legal team it's their job to protect that company and say this is actually illegal we don't want the company who is the real client here getting in trouble we have to report the ceo to you know the proper authorities and a lot of people don't know that so yeah the the company even though it's not walking around breathing talking it is the client um when you have an in-house legal team or if a firm is retained to represent that company so you have to have your own because it seems like as a small business owner i understand some of this having a kind of limited liability company here in the uk but can you just to finally wrap up the here explain this idea of a company being an entity what is is are we is a company a person do they have rights and what does this look like when we're assigning agreements between entity to entity what what are what what is an entity in a kind of layman's terms sure i feel like uh this is this is like a trick question like a pop question for a law school test but essentially in its simplest terms an entity is a new person in the form in the eyes of the law so the law is going to treat it as someone that can be sued if they they can be a defendant it can be someone who owes taxes it can be someone who um you know can enter into these agreements it is someone who um you know obviously is a representative of lots of different uh interests and and things like that so in the eyes of the law you really are creating a new person um but you know with a huge asterisk there like there this is actually like something of legal debate is whether you know like a company who pollutes can be charged as a person instead of a company so this is this is a gross oversimplification i just want to like caveat that for the lawyer who's in the audience who's listening and you know he or she is like no that's not bad um but yes so in in the eyes of the law it is a new person who pays taxes separate and apart from you personally who has different rights and obligations and you know obviously has different interests potentially than even the owners of the company even if it's like a one-person company sure does that make sense that makes total sense and this is okay this is how i try and wrap my head around it off i now work for an an organization that i'm the sole director of so i own but it's not me but then that could be sued and i cup so it confuses me so i'm sure that would be useful for the audience to kind of wrap their heads around it the reason i ask you all sorry gum yeah one thing i would just want to say again i'm not telling anyone they need to do this this isn't legal advice but one of the best things i think you can do for yourself as a professional or as someone who owns a company is to look into purchasing professional liability insurance sometimes called errors and emissions and this is a really uh important but also can kind of be a little pricey so this isn't obviously for beginners but it's a really great insurance policy to have to protect you from anything that could happen as you are signing these agreements and then just to tack on to that cyber liability which is a very new form of insurance very inexpensive typically a couple hundred bucks or pounds a year so that that would be a great addition as well so these are two really cost effective ways for you to make sure that you're not messing up without even hiring a lawyer for sure that makes total sense and the reason i ask you all of this well a lot at the end of the show there christina is that i really want to drill down the point that and you said it perfectly the legal team has represented the company we find this with hr if there's issues internally hr team is there to protect the company your boss is there to protect the company yeah you're out on your own if you screw up and so that's why i think it's really important you've given us a ton of real actual uh actionable practical advice here to make sure that we're doing things correctly uh because you know can i just add one thing will of course you can okay sorry so you brought up a really good point and i just want to point this out where use the same things that lawyers are doing the company is there yes to protect its own interests but like you can totally lean on those departments that you just mentioned to cover your own butt so emailing them having that paper trail asking them if something is okay getting them to say yes that's okay or you know having the evidence that you emailed them five times and they never responded like these are all things that can help you so it doesn't take much effort i mean it's probably stuff that you're already doing but just having that email trail instead of you know phone calls or text messages that aren't as easy to trace can also help you too plus it might give you the answers you're looking for if you're able to get in touch with these departments for sure again i love it that paper trail incredibly important obviously hopefully it's more difficult to shred emails than it is to shred enron's uh paperwork in the background that was a long time ago i think so um so with that christina i really enjoyed the conversation i think you've added a ton of value to the audience tell us where we can find out more about you and everything that you're up to sure it's all on thecontractshop.com and that will give you everything that you need to know about contracts and running your small business amazing stuff well we'll link to that website some of your social media profiles all that good stuff oh in the show notes this episode over at salesman.org and with that christina two things i want to thank you for your insights and i also want to thank you for coming on to a b2b sales show to talk about something that you probably was like what the heck does he want to talk about with me i don't i'm not a b2b salesperson or expert in that space myself uh but this was incredibly valuable for the audience so i appreciate you taking that perhaps that little bit of leap of faith to join us and with that on one thank you for joining us on the salesman podcast thank you will it's been such an honor