Kevin Miller, CEO of LegalSifter, reminds SaaS leaders that prospects simply do not have the time to talk to your sales people to determine if your company or product might be a good fit. The sales process today is much different. Prospects now expect to qualify you based on their own research, and do not have the patience for you to qualify them.
B2B buyers are nearly 60% through their buying process before meeting a sales rep. That is why it is so critical to create a convenient way for them to collect information about your company and products. The more information you can provide, the better! And video is becoming more and more important.
Connect:
Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and check out his website LegalSifter.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: Hey Kevin. Greg Dickinson glad you could join me on the podcast today. How you doing?
Kevin Miller: I'm doing great. Greg, thank you so much for having me.
Greg Dickinson: I'm looking forward to it known you for a long time. And before we get started with, you know, kind of your observations of the convenience economy, tell the audience about you and legal shifter.
Kevin Miller: Well, my name is Kevin Miller and I serve as the CEO of legal sifter, and we make contracts easier with AI and expertise. You know, contracts are the most important document in global commerce and they are universally a pain for everybody. They're a pain to negotiate and they're a pain to keep track of after you sign them, and we have two flagship products to help solve that problem. The first one is called legal sifter. It reads contracts and gives advice so that when you are receiving a draft contract from the other party, you are uploaded to legal sifter, and in a minute or two, it will tell you how to think about those terms and conditions, what's missing what's there and give you in context help written by us or a law firm or even, you know, bringing your corporate playbook to life inside of this document. And users who use this product, which is used just like a grammar check only is checking the terms and conditions of the document, save anywhere between 20 and 80% of the time, It normally takes them to review and negotiate a contract, as well as they get to a better outcome, they signed something that's a little bit safer, a little bit less risky, and more favorable to their interests. And so in the not too distant future, everybody's going to read these complex documents with the help of AI and we've got a product that does that now. That's called legal sifter and that solves that problem of they're hard to negotiate. Once you sign the contract, they're really hard to keep track of, and we have a product called sifter concierge. You know, we just talked to a lot of clients over the years and it turns out they buy or build contract Lifecycle Management databases, there's 200 of them out there to store all their contracts. But it's like they buy a physical library and all their books are on the floor. It can't keep those those contracts organized. It can't keep the Mac married up from amendments to parents and keep all the dates straight and keep all of the alerts, and reports straight. And then what happens is people don't end up using those databases because they don't have confidence. So we created sister concierge, which is a contract Librarian service, you send us your contracts, we use AI and attorneys and paralegals to extract the right data. And we load your contracts into a contract Lifecycle Management Software database. If you need one, we'll provide one to you. And we'll keep everything organized we're your contract librarian and then you don't ever have to worry about missing a date or making sure that the data you're looking at is correct. And these are the two problems that most organizations face, they just can't negotiate things quickly, they can't afford their outside counsel, and they're worried about signing something they shouldn't. And then once they sign something, they can't keep track of it. And our two products help with that.
Greg Dickinson: Outstanding, outstanding, you know, that's why I want to talk to you, Kevin, because at the end of the day, right, you're going after a market and it's the world we live in, right, this idea of convenience and I realize there's lots of intelligence behind what you're doing but you make quote unquote, something easier. It's a funny quote, I heard the other day someone told me they said, "Hey, if you don't think convenience is important, why the heck is McDonald's putting kiosks in the restaurants right?" Because even drive thru and even you know, fast food wasn't convenient enough. So that's the path you're on to help the audience Kevin, who do you sell to? Who do you market and sell your products to?
Kevin Miller: There's largely two groups of people that we sell to first are attorneys attorneys, either at attorneys and paralegals anyone in the legal department at a corporation or at law firms. About 80-85 percent of our companies are organizations, corporations, or small and local governments or larger governments or nonprofits. And then 15 20% are law firms. So we do spend a lot of time with the legal profession, because our point of view is that they need AI and AI plus an attorney is, uh, is better than either by itself. I don't trust our algorithms by themselves, but I really don't trust attorneys by themselves because people make mistakes. And just like an airline pilot has, you know, automatic pilot and just like we drive around town with Google Maps, I want to make sure our attorneys have the latest and greatest algorithms to help them do their job and be better, faster and frankly, cheaper attorneys. And so that's our first constituent, the second constituents all where most contracts are negotiated. Non lawyers so procurement, marketing, sales, leadership, operations, finance, IT. We spend a healthy amount of our time with all those people who had the task of reviewing contracts, but they just can't afford to send that contract internally or externally to an attorney, because attorneys can't, they're always too busy or they're always trying to write. So that's what we sell to.
Greg Dickinson: Okay. So, you know, Kevin, you've been a saw you and I have known each other for a long time. I know you've been in the software industry. So for those constituents, right, lawyers and the internal right organizations, do they think that do you think or have you seen they want to learn or investigator research, you know, your products, other products differently, more on their own? Then perhaps five or 10 years ago? Are you seeing a change there and in the quote, unquote, the behavior of how people right buyers want to learn about your product?
Kevin Miller: Yes, and I think this is particularly true for our business. So in both cases, you know, we're selling two products that the world is learning about, you know, it's not a natural act for people to send their contracts to a contract librarian service to keep them organized. It's not a natural act for organizations to have their contract draft contracts reviewed by AI before they negotiate them. Even though in every contract negotiation in the world, at least somebody is on another party's paper. And this is the only solution that can do that quickly, you know, an AI, an AI tool that has expertise in it. You know, these are not natural rhythms inside of operations today, because these are new to the world ideas new to the world products, and we've been doing it for a couple of years, we've got a healthy group of clients and we're growing like wheat. So what it means is we have spend a lot of time educating the market about what we do. Well, when you when you have that kind of product in particular, you know, and then you do go with the chain, you identify that over the last 5, 10, 15 years, just that many more people are researching their decision making and their and all of the products that are out there to solve their particular problem before they get to you. You know, I read a stat the other day that said 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles versus an advertisement or versus talking to somebody live. And, you know, people want to be educated with rich information that is exactly what they need in exactly the format they need, that they can actually drive as opposed to what some advertisement or some or what some salesperson wants to drive to them. They want to be in control of that education journey. And they're walking into us when they call in to us and they are way more educated than they ever were, you know, 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Greg Dickinson: Great. Great. Yeah. So you were asked so I think you would agree then that that in your business, right? The the opt ins, right, the people that want to sign up for a demo, the people that want to sign up for a webinar, right? Those people are dwindling, right. The people as you just stated, would prefer right self service. Their own at their time and their convenience. Right? Maybe it's early morning, maybe it's late night, maybe it's weekends, as opposed to, hey, we got to opt in and then have Kevin Miller's team, schedule me a demo or schedule the webinar. Do you see that trend? Right?
Kevin Miller: Absolutely. I'm the same way as a buyer. I was the for this, this small company, I was the chief operating officer of a couple hundred million dollar business. And just like today, and then, a lot of salespeople are trying to get ahold of myself or my peers, and they're trying to, you know, sell us stuff to make our businesses better. And frankly, we just don't have the time to do that. And we would prefer to, you know, navigate information that's provided to us in a self service way to qualify whether or not this is even a solution we would possibly consider before we get on the phone with somebody before we actually try the product. We need it we can do it we expect as consume as business consumers, and I I'm one of those people who buy stuff, I expect to pre qualify whether or not your solution is going to solve my problem without ever speaking to you without ever touching your product, then and only then do I actually want to talk to you.
Greg Dickinson: Yes. And that's where, you know, we see some of the companies that are thinking about the future saying that if that's gonna happen, right, you can argue all day long if you want to with the percentage right but but but every analyst everyone's come back zero to 50% 60% 70% of the quote unquote buyers journey is on their own right. And they're, they're doing things on their own. You need to be able to figure out a way as a business that's going to grow to how do you embrace that? How do you get away to give them that convenience? We call it so you gain control, right? Where are they doing their research? Just, you know, I joke around all the time. And there's an old commercial, I'm telling my age here that used to say, you know, it's 10pm you know, your children are I've kind of said it's, you know, it's 10pm you knew who your buyers are right, where are they researching at 10 o'clock at night if you don't provide them a digital kandla Digital way to learn about legal sifter, then you're you're letting your your you're losing the control because it could be researching reading those articles you talked about from a competitor or from a blog site or from an analyst, right? That that may not be right what you want them to learn about your organization. So,
Kevin Miller: Yeah, there's another there's another stat out there that says from Accenture that most b2b buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying process before the first meeting with a representative.
Greg Dickinson: Yep, exactly. Yeah, I heard a guy the other day that said that. I asked him about the sales cycle was Greg here, I'm gonna be honest with you. It really is no longer sales cycle. It's a buying cycle that meets a sales cycle eventually further down, and you need to combine those two things. They shouldn't be adversarial. They shouldn't be separate. They should be together conducive. So let's move on to another another kind of little further down the funnel. Kevin, you know, back, you know, wasn't too long ago, 10 or 15 years ago when when software was sold. It was sold to the IT department right and you designated one or two quote unquote, you know, designated contacts that could get support or would take care of the of the onboarding, right, maybe at a train the trainer program, we kind of kind of see a change there. There's a lot more quote unquote, business users that you sell to that are quote unquote, users. Right? Do you see the same with your business? I mean, especially even though legal is, you know, kind of very specialized. I, I'm thinking that in your business, there's more people that need to do an NDA or need to do a contract or need to, you know, review something that that necessarily doesn't have to be a legal department. They get legal department involved, but they want to do they need to do more on their own. So there's quote unquote, more users you need to support is that accurate?
Kevin Miller: That's accurate. Most contracts on this planet are negotiated without the help of an attorney. And you know, that in our little in our little world, means that in any given day, we're going to be approached by a paralegal finance person. And operations person, a lawyer, a CEO of a mid mid sized business. There, it's all over the board, because contracts are owned all over the place
Greg Dickinson: Right.
Kevin Miller: And one of the things that they're consistently happy about is that they don't have to call IT to buy our stuff. And frankly, when we get IT on on the phone, they are happy that because they're already way over work, they're happy that we don't require any IT intervention to buy our products. And so I think, as many many SaaS products have proven over the last five to 10 years, the more you can create a wizard like setup process for your clients that doesn't require them to go through it. It makes the client happy and us and you get closer to the user in the buying experience. And it certainly makes IT happy because I've never met an IT department that didn't have enough to do and so you know, for us You know, we're we're not having to loop through IT as much. In fact, we loop through IT usually better for us, ironically, because it's pretty rare. And they're excited to look at our product because they also have challenges with contracts. But, you know, for us, it's oftentimes the champion is it can be the user, and that and that, and that champ, that user can sponsor us into a sale without having to look through IT. So it's, it's critical that we provide, you know, the buying information that they need, as if they were making 100% of the decisions, right, you know, is this is this Are we going to qualify on their cybersecurity review? Is everything encrypted at rest? How can they sign up more users, etc, all the questions that might be spread out amongst a bunch of different functions, you know, we're having one conversation and going through all of them. And that's, that's the other thing is more, more companies are empowering more people to make these buying decisions because they don't have to live through IT.
Greg Dickinson: Right? Yeah. So and so good news, bad news, right, as you just explained it. I'm wondering how legal sifter right is, is adapting to the fact that more users means how do we onboard? How do we upsell? What about renewals? What about support? What about training? Right? Are you are you using? Are you looking at technology looking at ways to quote unquote, self service and automate that end of the business? Because, gosh, if you had, you know, 1000 users at a company, that's a that's a lot of people you have to support right and just curious as to have you have you adapted or changed in that area to this new paradigm of the convenience economy and how it's, you know, kind of, that's what you're not only your buyers expect that convenience and that easy in that wizard but now you have customers that expect, you know, I started researching a great book that said that, you know, 80% of all people would prefer to solve their own problem or get their own question answered without having to you know, they don't wake up in the morning and say, Boy, I can't wait to enter a ticket today or make a phone call to support they have a job to do and if their software confuses them they or causes an issue they want to get that resolved expeditiously? Are you have you had a change? Are you doing new things, different things, innovative things to adapt with that?
Kevin Miller: Well, because of the reality that, you know, 15 years ago, you might have an internal training coming out of IT or somewhere else to train everybody on their software. And today, everybody expects to be to be able to guide their own training. We have a heavy reliance on an increasing reliance on video, both in the in the marketing process, and we're trying to generate leads in the sales process. We're trying to generate, you know, from an opportunity and actual sale, and then in the training and onboarding process of new and existing users. And, you know, that's really, really important to us. So you know, we do use Omedym and we're excited about that tool that you guys bring in particular, we are big on intercom. So we use, you know, that tool for chat for articles and also video. And then and then we also have, you know some of our own videos going out the door to supplement our training on a regular basis because people, you know, our users are all over the world. Yeah, it's hard enough, just get them on the phone together, much less, you know, can you deliver the content that they need in the format they need and the timeline they need? We just can't do that by calling a conference call, you know, eight in the morning or eight at night, and hoping that you're going to deliver a beautiful training experience. People learn in so many different ways or multiple learning styles. Yeah, so by providing and investing in video, and then giving people the power to navigate that video in two minute, four minute 10 minutes soundbites at their pace, on their schedule, no dramatically improves the probability that we're going to get people to A) use the product correctly and that the product will ultimately stick and, and and be and they'll become long term long term customers.
Greg Dickinson: Beautiful. Beautiful. All right last question for you. There's a we do a we follow a lot of research by a gentleman by the name of Brent Adamson at Gartner. And he they did a survey last year and it said that that this the company you only get 17% of the buyer slash customers time. Right? And that's down to 6% of they're looking at three providers during the buying cycle. Would you agree with that? Have you seen a much different you know, amount of time that your customer facing organizations get to spend the gay Luda a little bit to in a moment ago but just wanted to confirm that or kind of have a conversation about that real quick and and then we'll wrap up.
Kevin Miller: You mean for clients who are already using the product or potential?
Greg Dickinson: potential more it's more than the buying end to buy?
Kevin Miller: Yeah, yeah. We i think you know, we haven't studied it in our opportunities, but I could compare it to past lives. It's unequivocally true that when you do get the buyer into a conversation, you know, you may only have a couple meetings an hour or two make that that sale, because they're going to do all the work that they would normally do with you on the phone, they're going to do outside of that conversation with you, using video using a demo using your website. They're they're going to make the decision, typically, without a lot of conversations with you. And and so it just puts a lot of pressure to get that right. And it's much easier to have that conversation. If a person comes in educated and since they want to drive. They want to drive that process themselves. They want to be in control, putting more content and their hands is critical for the future success of our business. And so, you know, video is a big strategy for us. We're going to be investing in the web in a big way over the next six months period as we try to drive more content and more user driven buying, you know, flows on the web because our clients are speaking with their clicks, not with their words.
Greg Dickinson: Gotcha. Whoo, good quote. Kevin. Listen, you you've built a great company and it hats off to you for that and I appreciate you spending a few minutes here on that give means economy podcast and you know, I'm sure that our listeners will gain a lot of information if they want to get in touch with you what they heard today was interesting to them. How would they reach Kevin Miller?
Kevin Miller: Legalsifter.com first and foremost inquiry at legalsifter.com or they can come straight to me at Kevin ke vi n at legalsifter.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Greg Dickinson: I'm sure you'll get some. Kevin, thanks for your time. I appreciate it and enjoy the rest of your day.
Kevin Miller: Thanks, Greg.