5 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your CLM

State-of-the-art contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology has come a long way in making a difference for enterprise businesses. But is your current CLM solution up to snuff? Here’s what to look for so you can uplevel the streamlining of your contract review, drive revenue generation, and future-proof your portfolio and business.

In any typical workday, week, quarter, and fiscal year, the average Fortune 1000 company may handle several tens of thousands of contracts.

That means that — spanning your enterprise, and pulling in colleagues from Sales, Procurement, and Finance — each contract will need to be negotiated, reviewed, and executed. Then, when that part of the process is complete, with signatures on the proverbial dotted lines, the lifecycle management of that contract begins, including monitoring for regulatory compliance and “re”-review at renewal time.

Now, repeat that process… perhaps 25,000 (or more) times!

This very real scenario — which commands at least half, and as much as 70%, of legal professionals’ time — is what makes end-to-end CLM solutions essential. Whereas manual contract management can cause roadblocks and revenue leakage, the most cutting-edge CLM tools transform the contracting process’s speed and spending, from capture and creation through post-execution management, all while harnessing critical insights and diminishing risk.

Could your CLM use an overhaul? Here are five signs:

1. “It’s a challenge to find our contracts.”

To elevate efficiency and drive revenue, you need to know where every contract is. However, manual tools like spreadsheets, network shares, and legacy technology solutions tend to be unwieldy and jam up workflows.

The newest CLM tools with built-in version control and readily searchable repositories serve as a single source of truth, eliminating precious hours of searching for crucial information and helping business operations regain control of all contracts — leading to a 50%+ improvement in productivity and 24% reduction in the average sales cycle length.

2. “There isn’t enough visibility into our portfolio.”

Contracts are the nucleus of every business cell, defining any value exchanged. Without insight into obligations and terms, there can be revenue leakage of more than 9% annually.

For this reason, legal ops, procurement teams, and portfolio managers require visibility to discover and assess risk before it disrupts business. How to do this when elements of risk may be hidden deep within contracts? Introduce CLM with a risk analysis dashboard to provide visibility and initiate proactive contract management. By assessing contracts for varying degrees of risk based on developed playbooks and calculating a risk score, your team will have thorough and profound oversight of your contract portfolio.

3. “We’re not getting the value we wanted.”

Your CLM solution may have initially provided some shiny bells and whistles, but if it’s begun to feel subpar, the most state-of-the-art way to achieve greater value is by integrating CLM with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to escalate the contract review and management process.

When powered by AI, today’s CLM solutions can redline a contract in two minutes or less and have been proven to reduce end-to-end NDA processing time by a remarkable 70%. A clause usage dashboard can offer an insight-centric approach to contract generation, and the best contract management platforms also have intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that help your company get up and running in less than 30 days.

Of course, the value of vanguard technologies isn’t always realized instantaneously — but integrated systems do deliver on their promise for both scaling and sustaining material growth with the potential of slashing overall business costs by up to 90%.

4. “We’ve missed renewal deadlines.”

Staying up-to-speed on contract renewals can feel like a formidable task — but not remaining on top of deadlines can be deleterious, seriously impacting customer retention rates.

Intelligent CLM is equipped with real-time obligation tracking to manage and measure not only all emerging legal requirements and compliance-related tasks, but also intermittent event-driven obligations, such as renewal dates, expirations, cycle times, and even pricing changes. This way, your team will never overlook or miss an important date again.

5. “We could use better cross-functional collaboration.”

Legal operations doesn’t operate in a silo. To achieve goals with the most successful outcomes, connection and collaboration with Sales, Procurement, and other functions are vital — making the ability for all departments to view, track, redline, and approve documents an absolute necessity as well.

With the latest CLM, all departments can manage contracts in conjunction, with edits synchronized across platforms to secure version control and eradicate duplicate entry. When combined with system integrations, CLM also allows departments to synchronize data and create compliance contracts, NDAs, and MSAs, catapulting accuracy and efficiency and eliminating siloed contract management.

Taking control with innovation

There has been a definitive evolution in the execution and efficiency of contract management. If you nodded in agreement with any of the above statements, the message is clear: It’s time to upgrade your CLM.

In doing so, you can eliminate inefficiencies, enhance insights, and provide deeper visibility into your contract portfolio. Not only that, but the time saved can be funneled into Legal serving as a trusted advisor, corporate role model, and creating an impact where it matters most: building relationships, developing strategy, and skyrocketing the material growth of your business.

Learn how Onit’s next-generation CLM solutions and AI-powered innovations meet you where you work with end-to-end automation of the contract management process to cultivate partnerships, elevate efficiency, and ignite revenue growth for enterprise-wide success.