This is the first blog of a six-part series: Quick wins in contract management.
I joined Pramata as a potential customer years ago, solving contract management issues on the other side of the house. And I have been through some big deployments, making my share of mistakes along the way. So whether you work on managing your contracts with Pramata or with another solution, I think you’ll find value in how we approach fixing the most critical challenges companies face.
When companies think about improving contract management, they often worry about how long it will take to make lasting, impactful changes. That’s understandable because many organizations know they don’t have the right technologies but have no idea where to start.
“…Leaders are looking for investment in technology, prioritizing their resources that align with the business strategy. But still, fewer than half believe they have the right tools and processes to achieve this strategy.” — Scott Curtis, VP of Service & Delivery, Deloitte
Let me give you the right starting point: leveraging your existing contracts with the right tool and insights brings faster value than you expect. Though starting with this seemingly “simple” area of focus may feel counterintuitive, getting control of your contracts first will help with broader business buy-in, arm your business with essential insights, and bring faster ROI.
Current contract management landscape
How are people managing their contracts today? We polled about a thousand technology companies focused on legal and sales operations. A third of people have a CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management System) or contract repository in place. Everyone else has cobbled together something using homegrown systems, shared drives, and CRM attachments. Despite these investments, organizations still struggle to find the correct information and contracts, with poor data quality a common problem. Those challenges get in the way of fast, effective decision-making. So, we will zero in on overcoming these challenges throughout the series.
Where to start: Get control of your signed contracts
During a recent webinar, Scott Curtis, VP of Services & Delivery at Deloitte, shared some great insights into the untapped wins organizations get when they start by gaining control of their signed contracts.
- Improving current state: It’s easier to successfully deploy a useful, broadly adopted contract repository.
- Broadly beneficial: Nearly every function needs contract information to do their job.
- High visibility & ROI: Can tie into priority renewals, value leakage, and compliance initiatives to gain support.
- Faster deployments: Solving pre-signature is very much a process and policy design initiative and can take 6-12 months before it’s ready to implement.
- Reducing effort: Advances in AI technology reduce the manual burden on the client.
Unfortunately, this approach is often contradictory to what we see in today’s contract landscape. Instead, people think, “Hey, we’re going to transform and drive value from our contracts…let’s just start at where a contract begins and work from there.”
So, for this series, I’ll share some practical and actionable tips and dig in a little more on how you can drive value from your signed contracts quickly and efficiently.
5 Key Tips
So how do you get control and drive value from your signed contracts? Make a real impact? And move fast? That’s what we’ll zero in on throughout this blog series. I’ll be sharing five key tips that I’ve gathered over the past 12 years of helping our clients with these same challenges:
Tip #1: Solve contract access and visibility first
Tip #2: Think beyond legal for the biggest ROI
Tip #3: Impact →User → Use Case → Data
Tip #4: Set strategic focus, update Execs weekly, relentlessly prioritize
Tip #5: Dig Deeper on Contract AI
I hope you’ll find this blog series helpful as you think through the contract management challenges and initiatives in your organization. In my next post, we’ll explore our first tip: Solve contract access and visibility first, but if you want to learn more about all of our tips to faster value, you can watch this webinar, Quick Wins in Contract Management.
