Leveraging Board Member Agreement Templates to Enhance Your Marketing Strategy
When the legal department of a company drafts a contractual document, they often receive feedback from other departments in the organization, but rarely are those employees armed with templates or guidance for providing that feedback or a collection of what that department might have requested. As you might expect, this usually makes for laborious and lengthy email strings, due to all the back and forth inherent in making sure everyone is on the same page. Inevitably, the process is so frustrating that it causes a delay somewhere in the revenue cycle of the business.
Cookie-cutter agreements, such as a standardized agreement for board members, help get time-consuming reviews out of legal’s queue, thus helping to streamline operations and improve the company’s revenue cycle. They also help ensure that each board member of the company has the same expectations and obligations vis-à-vis the company and its’ other board members, all within a single template that can be easily modified to fit various board members. For example, a company that uses the same cooperative board member agreement template for all of its’ independent contractors who hold board positions, and have the same obligations and restrictions going forward, such as non-competition agreements, will have fewer issues to address over time. Whereas, a company that fails to have a written agreement with each of its’ board members, or multiple versions of the same basic agreement template for different classes of directors, will inevitably have a much longer revenue cycle, with late fees and penalties that are incurred because of this lack of clarity and organization.
Having a set of well-structured, easy to understand templates that are fitted to the needs of the company will also help make marketing automation, lead management and other marketing strategies much more efficient and streamlined. In the case of board member agreements, for instance, a company could use a combination of a detailed job description and a board member agreement template to “unsilo” the company’s’ lead management processes. For example, suppose a Board Secretary sends requests for marketing materials developed by the marketing department to be sent out on behalf of the company to each of its’ Independent contractors in advance of a September board meeting. However, a couple of weeks later, it’s discovered that a lead management person within the marketing department who was supposed to send out the packet forgot to do so, and by the time that it’s sent out, a client has already signed on with a competing company. Now imagine trying to determine who at the company is responsible for monitoring the effectiveness of the meeting materials, and who failed to perform their assigned duties. Usually, because a huge amount of time has passed, the task of uncovering which department failed to get the job done, and which individual was responsible, becomes a Herculean effort that ends pointlessly, as all parties have forgotten what tasks they were assigned to do. Having a well-designed board member agreement template for directors who attend meetings also doubles as a job description and helps prevent exactly that outcome.
Having the right type of board member agreement template in place to streamline this process, as well as a set of clear and concise board guidelines for the individuals taking part in the company’s meetings, would allow marketing staff, including the Board Secretary mentioned above, who was supposed to send out the meeting packet in preparation of the September board meeting to see at a glance what they were required to do and when, so that a friendly reminder or two can be sent out, if necessary. This will help reduce the amount of time spent on tedious administrative issues business leaders find increasingly frustrating and time-consuming when their focus is on other revenue-generating tasks.
Overall, creating a customized board member agreement template and clearly outlining the shareholders and board members’ respective roles and responsibilities will improve the yield on your company’s marketing automation, lead management, customer engagement and other marketing strategies. Therefore, templates can help facilitate the implementation of new marketing technologies by improving the company’s lead management and customer relationship management (CRM) strategies, by providing a clear implementing framework for the implementation of each department’s new policies and procedures designed to improve the company’s revenue yield. Ultimately, the integration of well-structured, clear and legally-sound templates, like board members or independent contractors, into the organization’s marketing strategies can also reduce the overall costs of these new implementations and make improvements in customer and client service.
The above article may be reblogged, with attribution given to its author, but is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice. If you have a question or concerns about the law of board member agreements or any of the topics discussed in this article, you should contact an attorney immediately.
