Deal desk
Sales closed it three weeks ago. Legal still has it.
The deal is won. The redline is not. Revenue that belonged in this quarter lands in the next one, and nobody can say exactly why.
Contract cycle time is a revenue metric that most companies do not measure and every CRO feels. It is also one of the few places where a legal spend pays for itself in a way you can point at.
The delay is rarely one big problem. It is a redline that took six days because the reviewer had other work, a question nobody wanted to escalate, a security addendum that sat unread, and three rounds of back-and-forth on a liability cap that could have been settled in the first round if someone had authority to settle it.
2.3Vendor shall maintain 99.9% uptime, measured monthly, excluding scheduled maintenance notified 48 hours in advance. Failure to meet the SLA shall entitle Customer to terminate immediately and receive a full refund of all fees paid.Failure to meet the SLA in any month entitles Customer to the service credits in Exhibit B; three consecutive months of failure entitle Customer to terminate for cause.
The metric
Days in legal, per deal.
Sales tracks pipeline in days. Legal does not track anything in days. So the number nobody owns is the number that quietly slips every quarter. We report it per deal, every month, so you can see it moving.
What changes
A desk your sales team can actually use.
48-hour redlines
Every round, not just the first. Predictable turnaround is worth more to a sales cycle than fast-sometimes.
Pre-approved positions
Your playbook defines what sales can agree to without asking. Most deals then never touch an escalation path at all.
We take the counterparty call
Your AE should not be relaying legal positions between two lawyers. We speak to their counsel directly and report back in commercial terms.
Security and privacy addenda
DPAs, SCCs, security schedules and vendor questionnaires — the attachments that quietly add two weeks to enterprise deals.
One channel
A shared Slack channel where an AE can ask “can we agree to this” and get an answer the same day.
Cycle time reported
We track days-in-legal per deal so you can see whether it is actually improving, instead of assuming.
We will not approve terms because a quarter is closing. If a position creates real exposure, the attorney will say so and it goes to you as a commercial decision. A desk that rubber-stamps under deadline pressure is worse than a slow one — you would just be buying delay insurance against a much larger bill later.
Next step
Put a number on it first.
Tell us your average days-in-legal and your typical deal size on a twenty-minute call. That usually settles whether this is worth doing before anyone talks about price.