Leveraging Legal Frameworks in Revenue Operations: Understanding Access Easement Agreements
Staying with my theme of the past several posts of giving tips and tricks I have learned through years of being a lawyer, let’s talk about ‘access easement agreements.’ This is a legal agreement that grants to one party the right to go onto the land of another and access certain parts of the land. Huh you say? How can this be applicable to marketing automation and lead management at the revenue operations level? Let’s look at how an easement agreement works in Real Estate. Imagine there is a water main under the street in front of your house. The water main may not be owned by you, it could be owned by the city, or the utility company. Either way, the company which owns the water main needs a way to access the water main in the event of repairs or maintenance. Their easement agreement gives them the right to bring heavy machinery across your yard on a short section of your private property to dig out a section of the water main that is in need of repair or maintenance.
Now take that example of a legal agreement and apply it to lead management in your revenue operations function at your company. What has been missing, especially in companies that use KMS and Salesforce.com, is the ability of the different parts of the process to talk to each other. Often, sales people have a Direct Access in the CRM, but they can only access the customer record. They can’t access their own customer records, because there is no shared view for them to see their own data records. This is similar to how easement agreements work in Real Estate. The easement agreement between the water company and you, the homeowner, states that the water company has the right to bring heavy machinery across your yard, but you have to give them notice of where to enter. Without you having a system in place to tell the water company where to enter, the water company is free to go wherever they like.
So how does this relate to the marketing automation system in your company? Well, the example above of a water main beneath the street is analogous to your CRM. As long as the policies and procedures in your marketing automation system, your KMS and your CRM allow for clear communication between the systems, then within your CRM all parts of the system can accomplish their purposes in a seamless manner just as an easement agreement can give operators access to private property to maintain the rights, privileges and franchises in a manner that is not catastrophic to your backyard.
In another part of Real Estate, there are lawyers who prepare easement agreements between parties. These lawyers are specialists in their specific type of law. Likewise, the lawyers in your in-house function should know their specific type of law well enough to distinguish when they may need to call in an in-house specialist for a specific type of law. The key here in using easement agreements to help streamline your marketing automation processes in lead management is to listen to the different players involved in the process. Let’s say we have sales, legal, marketing and compliance. Now imagine that sales doesn’t know that something must go to legal first because it seems like another department (compliance) should review it first, which may need to change the document to comply with industry regulations.
If legal never gets the document in the order it is supposed to go to them, then legal will not have enough time to make any changes they need. When legal sends it back, compliance is already at its five o’clock happy hour, which sales knows they cannot interrupt. But, if sales knows that process 1, 2, 3, and 4 must happen in everyone’s department to make the contract 1-2-3-4 conceivably be completed, then they will follow that protocol as each person in each department knows what must happen when.
So how do you do this? First, have everyone who is involved in the process have a process flow outlined on paper so that everyone knows their part in the process and how to do their part in the process to avoid unnecessary problems. Then, streamline that process across the different departments so that the departments can easily communicate with each other and alert one another to any issues that may arise in the process. Next, make those communications easy and give them an acceptable time frame for a response in order to avoid bottlenecks, bottlenecks, bottlenecks in the workflow. Finally, send those communications to all parties who need to know those things so sales knows what is going on, compliance knows what is going on, legal knows what is going on, and all parties are in the loop.
Another tip from the law on how to prevent problems, unfortunately occurs because most people go into law. If you are going to enter an agreement with people that you do not know well, is someone like that going to follow this water pipe analogy protocol? Probably not. Therefore, one of the people entering the agreement should draft the agreement and after it is agreed to, monitor its implementation. Make sure that people follow the protocol that is provided for in the agreement and for implementation of the outcome to make sure it is done in a way that follows the procedures that are in writing.
Finally, if someone is in an environment where they are unsure of their own directives or their job assignments, show them how the easement agreements work in the legal market and have them build a customized process for a new initiative or a new procedure or a new type of contract so that the company can innovate in the revenue space as much as they are innovating in technology. If done appropriately, the database information should feed to lead management to close more deals.
For more information on easement agreements, you can visit the Wikipedia page on easements.
