Many of our customers have moved to us from less powerful (and harder to use!) contract “repositories”. Several have moved to us from an end-to-end contract management system or used us in combination.
The reason?
End-to-end systems work great… until you need to do something that sits outside their world. Like when a counterparty insists on using their own set of terms and their own process. The party with more leverage is more likely to get their way, and you’re doing it their way because the deal is important to you. It also happens with one-off contracts that don’t have a pre-ordained workflow and template. In both of these examples, we’re probably talking about your most important contracts.
Now that you’ve left the walled garden of your CLM, the data isn’t going to flow neatly through to their afterthought repository by the end of it.
You’re left with a CLM for your everyday contracts, and you’re back to square one for the ones that really matter and need the most oversight. Same thing goes for the repository or database that crumbles once you exceed a certain level of contract complexity or uniqueness.
Plan for the most complexity to expect to see in any of your contracts before you invest in a solution. Not just the everyday scenarios.