Paper Process

The Paper Process is the part of the deal that happens after the customer has decided to buy you and before you can book it. Legal redlines. Procurement onboarding. The security questionnaire with 214 questions. Data processing agreements. Signature authority, which in some companies means one person and in others means three people in two countries. It is the P that turned MEDDICC into MEDDPICC, and it earned its letter because of how many deals it has quietly killed on the last day of a quarter.

The question it answers: once they say yes, what has to be signed, by whom, and how long does that take?

The mistake is to start asking about it when the verbal is in. By then the clock is already running and you have nothing left to negotiate with. Legal does not care about your quarter end. Procurement has a 30 day onboarding cycle it will not shorten because you asked nicely. The seller who discovers in the last week of March that the customer’s standard terms need a 45 day review has not been unlucky. They have been unprepared.

How I use it. I map the Paper Process in discovery, in the same conversation as the Decision Process, and I treat the two as one timeline. Who owns legal review, what their standard terms look like, whether they have bought from a vendor like us before and how long that took. Then every step goes on the Mutual Action Plan with a date and an owner on their side. If the close date in the CRM lands before the Paper Process can physically finish, the close date is wrong, and I would rather know that in month one than on the last day of the quarter.