In SaaS contract management, speed to revenue is everything.
A deal that is 95% done but sitting in contract review is still worth zero.
For many SaaS businesses, the largest obstacles are not customer objections — they are internal bottlenecks.
Here are four issues that we see slow down contracts from closing and some practical steps to overcome them.
Internal misalignment between Sales, Legal and Finance
Deals often stall not because of customer objections, but because your own teams are not aligned on what is acceptable internally.
Sales thinks the contract is ready. Legal flags a risk. Finance raises late objections to payment terms or commercial structure.
The customer waits while you resolve internal debates and momentum evaporates.
Fix suggestions
Set out and delegate clear authority for specific approvals and deviations.
If a liability cap set at 50% of ARR is acceptable, don’t make your team send it to the CFO every time.
Use short weekly Sales-Legal-Finance check-ins across your live deals, so issues surface early.
In our experience, the simple act of setting clear boundaries and escalation points in advance can cut contract turnaround times by 30–40%.
SaaS contract templates that invite pushback
Many SaaS companies still use contract templates inherited from an earlier stage — often long, legalistic and out of step with market norms.
Clauses like no liability whatsoever, aggressive SLAs (or no SLAs) and auto-renewal traps are almost guaranteed to be redlined.
The more pages your lawyers and the customer’s lawyers have to work through, the longer it takes.
Fix suggestions
Streamline your contract templates to focus on what matters most. Use plain English wherever possible.
Benchmark your key terms against market standards in SaaS deals for your target segment.
We’ve seen mid-market SaaS vendors cut average negotiation cycles in half by softening two or three ‘always-contested’ clauses and offering acceptable compromise positions upfront.
Process inefficiency and visibility gaps
Even after a deal is “agreed in principle”, the internal process can be painfully slow.
Deal teams pass redlines around by email. There’s no central tracker. E-signature is an afterthought.
Executives often complain that they don’t know where a contract is stuck, or how long it will take for somebody to unstick it.
Fix suggestions
Use a shared contract dashboard that shows live status and next actions. Bake in e-signature from day one.
Set internal SLAs for review and stick to them.
Where we’ve implemented this, leadership suddenly had visibility into bottlenecks — and could remove them in real time.
No playbook for counterparty SaaS contracts
When the customer insists on using their own paper, many SaaS teams often have little choice but to approach it like a brand-new document.
Without a gamed out playbook, you get inconsistency, extra risk and avoidable delays.
It can be especially costly for multi-deal, multi-jurisdiction customers.
Fix suggestions
Build a counterparty paper playbook. Decide in advance what’s negotiable, what’s a hard no and your standard fallbacks.
Playbooks don’t just speed up negotiations — they ensures consistency across your portfolio.
In one case, a client went from 40+ days to 18 days average turnaround on customer paper just by codifying their core positions in a central playbook and sharing it across their team.
About Clearlake
Clearlake is a regulated UK law firm specialising in fixed-fee, lawyer-led contract management for fast-growing B2B SaaS companies.
We handle the commercial contracts that matter most to SaaS businesses — including MSAs, SOWs, DPAs and AI-related terms — with speed, clarity, and expert judgement.
Our team includes senior lawyers from top-tier firms who understand the real-world complexity of SaaS contracting — from liability caps and service credits to regulatory obligations around data, information security and AI use.
We offer fast, end-to-end contract support under English law and internationally, with clear pricing and no hourly billing — so your team can close faster, stay compliant and scale without legal friction.
To learn more or book a discovery call now…
