“I love [Talewind] across the board… our clients have loved it. Between the automation time saved, the risk reduction created, and the amount of hours regained, it's worth its weight in gold.”
Nathan Kievman, Clearlight Founder
The Challenges Inherent in Proposals, Contracts, & SOWs
Before switching to Talewind, the Clearlight team, like many sales teams, was doing everything they could to be successful while working within the confines of the traditional sales process. They adopted the popular web-based proposal software Qwilr, streamlining and automating proposal and contract creation wherever they could. They did their best to minimize errors. They accepted that these processes took time, and that occasional delays (and the resulting lost sales) were inevitable.
Looking back, however, Clearlight Founder Nathan Kievman says no one wanted to admit the system was fundamentally broken despite the fact that they still spent hours creating proposals and battling errors. Without much thought, his team simply adjusted to what they thought was the reality: The sales process is, by nature, inefficient.
“We didn’t know there was a problem. We were just doing what we thought was required to do proposals and contracts.”
But when Talewind came into his frame of vision, that perception quickly changed. It presented an entirely new way of thinking about the sales process—one that would turn the traditional mindset on its head. After investigating further, it became clear that what were previously considered acceptable bumps in the road were actually glaring sales obstacles —and that they no longer had to be tolerated.
Costly Errors
To generate contracts and proposals, members of the Clearlight sales team would edit a variety of base templates. But as part of that process, sometimes the sales team would forget to include a paragraph, or leave something in that wasn’t desirable for a particular deal. For example, “if we're in Europe,” says Nathan, “we have to do GDPR compliance. And if we're not, we don't. But sometimes GDPR mistakenly gets added to U.S. contracts, and then we've got this weird contract that is overly restrictive.”
All too often, Nathan found that errors like these were creating unwanted commitments. In some cases, he even had to offer refunds to address contractual errors. Worst of all, he was worried about looking unprofessional.
“You want to have surety as an executive that the contracts being used are the approved contracts and they're not old templates that got pulled up. Maybe the sales team couldn't find [the right one] and they were being pressed for time.”
“How you show up on the front end is how they think you're going to show up on the back end. So the cleaner, tighter, more professional you are, the better.”
Inefficient Use Of Time
Prior to working with Talewind, Clearlight was generating about 10 to 20 proposals in any given month, approximately a third of which turned into contracts.
Between preparing, reorganizing, reviewing, editing, re-reviewing, and sending, each proposal took anywhere from five to 10 hours to create. “If you apply all that time to 10 or 15 accounts, all of a sudden you're spending some pretty good time on a monthly basis on just proposals. Contracts were another four to five hours on top of that. That’s a lot of dollars in people's time that we could be using to do something more effective.”
Reduced Close Rates and Lost Deals
It wasn’t uncommon for Nathan and other sales reps to wait days for in-house approval of new proposals and contracts. At the time, he had an entire compliance department as well as a legal team that had to sign off on every contract.
But the delays introduced uncertainty. “The more time they have to think about [the deal],” Nathan says, “the greater the prospect of losing it.” Plus, the delays in the contract phase created a chain reaction, pushing back start dates as well. “That amounts to a week and a half or two weeks’ worth of cash flow potentially lost.”
The Solution: Use Talewind To Create A Sales Process That Works Better For Everyone
When Nathan saw what Talewind could do he realized that his current process was broken. What had once been viewed as a normal way to operate was actually introducing unnecessary problems. And the problems were all fixable by switching to Talewind.
Improvements at a Glance
After implementing Talewind in place of Qwilr:
Contractual errors have been virtually eliminated.
Talewind’s unique method of automatic document generation requires sales teams to carefully think through the important elements of proposals ONLY ONCE—during the platform’s initial setup—rather than every single time a new document is being generated. This makes it difficult for new errors to be introduced.
“Protecting just one contract [from errors] could save me a couple hundred thousand dollars. It doesn't even make sense not to eliminate that error possibility.”
Nathan’s sales team spends more time selling rather than drafting documents.
Whereas it once took five to 10 hours to create a proposal with Qwilr, with Talewind it takes 15 minutes or less. Instead of manually opening documents and arranging and editing them in a WYSIWYG tool, Talewind’s automation happens behind the scenes. Now, the Clearlight sales team simply answers some custom, deal-specific questions to create a proposal, and entire sections appear or disappear in the document based on their answers.
They’re closing deals faster.
Nathan doesn’t have to worry about waiting for approval from the legal department because proposals and contracts have already been pre-approved in Talewind. Once while he was away at a conference, he was able to generate a contract in 15 minutes on his phone from the lobby. “Before I’d have to wait days. Now, I could just log into Talewind, answer a few questions, press a button, get a link, and send it to him. The client was like, wow, that was pretty awesome!”
“The time savings is great because when somebody's ready to buy, they're ready to buy.”
They’re creating a “WOW” sales experience.
With the Talewind platform, Clearlight can enhance every buying experience with a digital showroom. Tailored to each individual deal, digital showrooms allow them to house every deal-specific resource, document, and conversation in one central place online, making it easy for buyers to explore and evaluate Clearlight’s offering.
Specifically, Nathan noticed a boost in the number of people that watched their testimonials after placing them in the digital showroom. The testimonials also appear on their company website, but “people never really watch those testimonials. But because they’re in the showroom, they end up watching all four of them and spend a couple of hours just listening to our testimonials. Most people love it and think it’s a really cool experience.”
“Our clients have loved it. The showroom is a nice talking point, and gets the dialogue going on how professional we must be on the other end.”
Talewind: A Full-service Sales Platform AND Partner
Not only is the Talewind platform itself transformative, but so is our client relationship model. It’s only possible to build a completely automated workflow for clients if we understand your specific documents and content—and commit to being there for you to make changes on the platform as those things evolve.
During the onboarding phase, Talewind worked closely with Clearlight’s Head of Sales to understand the essence of their contracts and what their SOWs were trying to achieve.
“[Talewind] ultimately came up with three variations of each… and created integrated custom questions that, if someone answered ‘no,’ those questions just disappeared from the contract. And if they were answered at all, new sections would appear. It was really cool how they did it. But what was required in order for that to happen is that they needed to first understand what we were doing, which was great.”
What does our version of total automation look like? To generate a new proposal, Clearlight now just fills out a form on their phone and a custom proposal tailored to a specific prospect is generated in minutes. That's not possible with Qwilr, PandaDoc, or Proposify.
To make sure our platform always works for you, every Talewind license includes the initial implementation and ongoing support. Whatever prompts a change in your documentation needs over time—new legal requirements, a new logo, a merger or acquisition, the addition of channel partners, or anything else—we’ll adjust the platform to align perfectly. Our platform wraps around your process, not the other way around.
“We closed down Qwilr,” says Nathan. “We don't use it at all anymore. It was a great tool for looking pretty and so forth, but it was still very generic.
“When we started working with Talewind, they didn’t charge us until we were ready to use the platform and move forward. So all the [setup] didn’t cost us anything. They were there to help make sure it was a great experience, that the interface was perfect for what we needed. Once we started using it, then they started billing. What a great, great way to build a relationship, and a great way for us to have confidence that the platform is good for us before we had to commit. I just really appreciate the whole process… I can't speak highly enough of the Talewind platform.”
