Custom Contracts vs Templates: Which Is Right For Your Business?

Many companies allow unquestioned assumptions to negatively impact their bottom line, and one assumption that is often a culprit is the idea that template contracts won’t work for any given business.

And you know what they say about what happens when we assume...

"The thing is, automating even a small part of a time-consuming internal process can lead to unexpectedly abundant savings at scale." 

Enter contract templates.

Beyond the basic value of automation, using contract templates specifically creates considerable value for small and medium-sized businesses who are more likely to see efficiency translate into actual dollars in a shorter period of time.

Unless you are providing completely unique solutions every time, your business can likely get away with using template contracts. And once you nail down your common parameters, your life will get easier. That’s because templated contracts are faster (they won't slow down the sales process) and less manual (less room for errors). 

Let’s break down the benefits of contract templates versus custom contracts. See if adopting templates into your contract management solution is worth your while.

1) Contract templates empower a broader group.

With templates, you don’t need to limit creating contracts to a small, highly trained team (and pay them to generate new contracts every time). Rather, anyone you choose in your organization can easily create a contract without having to redo what’s already worked for you in the past. On the flip side, when you’re constantly creating custom contracts, only a handful of highly skilled team members will likely ever be able to handle the work of writing contracts.  

2) Use contract templates to reduce errors.

Manual work is always an invitation for small errors that can cause big headaches— even a little typo can create major problems with contracts! And when every contract is custom (aka relying mostly on manual entry), you increase the likelihood of someone making a mistake. 

Contract templates still give you some flexibility to mix and match elements to each client, the key difference being that each element is more likely to be correct! 

3) Contract templates improve close rate.

With contract templates you can close more deals and close them faster! Awesome platforms like HubSpot offer free templates that you can leverage to optimize your sales process. These and other templated contracts provide a stable environment where you can:

• Measure results from your contracts.
• Make changes as needed
• Track metrics to see what impact those changes have on your close rate.

If you use contract templates, you can learn from both your mistakes and your gains from solid information. Whereas when every contract is custom written, it’s very hard to aggregate data for making decisions about changing standard contract terms. 

4) Stop reinventing the wheel (over and over again).

Custom contracts might seem to offer a lot of flexibility, but in reality the risks and inefficiencies almost always outweigh the advantages of this approach. Leveraging contract templates, even highly customizable ones, can help you improve your performance on several fronts— close rate, margin, and efficiency. Instead of reinventing the wheel every time you land a new client or project, you’ll not only save time and money, but figure out how to get even more of it. 

Contract templates are the way to go!

Unless your business requires completely unique contracts with every single client (not uber-common in the professional services sector), contract templates are the way to go. And PSOhub offers a way to create contract templates that can streamline these benefits while eliminating or reducing many contract management pain points. 

For businesses offering unique services, such as a digital marketing agency or architectural firm, contract templates will help you get back to what you do best—
Delivering awesome results for your clients!