While a deal is in flight, both parties have their eyes on the contract.
Once the deal is done, attention fades. Newly born contracts are promptly left to die, discarded across cluttered inboxes or moth-eaten folder systems.
This is the most dangerous time. Everyone is optimistic. Nobody is thinking about the renewal coming up next year. Nobody considers that the deal owner will leave the company in six months. Nobody is looking for that horribly named contract in its horribly named folder.
But all of those things will happen. And when they do, you'll be caught with your pants down. And on fire. You’ll wish you had a process that took care of them when the contract was signed.
The process shouldn’t depend on several individuals proactively doing the right thing. That’s too brittle. It should be automatic and central so that every new contract magically ends up in one agreed-upon, organised place. Then you can do all the fun stuff like capturing data points and calculating key dates.
The one integration that really matters is therefore the one that connects your e-signature tool to your contract database.