Topic: Building your CLM business case

From want to need: How to convince your leaders to invest in a CLM solution

Are you dealing with contracts on a daily basis? Feeling the pain of manually managing them? Lamenting the time and cost involved in chasing lost documents? If problems like these sound familiar, then perhaps you’ve done some digging about how to fix them; and you’ve discovered an easy solution. 

The solution, of course, is contract lifecycle management (CLM) – the digital panacea to sales and operational teams’ manual woes when it comes to contract management. CLM solutions are changing the way organisations handle contracts, delivering huge time, cost and performance gains. 

While you know how transformational CLM solutions could be to your business, it can sometimes be hard to convince the holders of purse-strings to release funds to invest. Never fear. We’ve got you covered with a comprehensive new eBook that shows you how to build your business case for a CLM solution.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the eBook. If you’re in the process of building your case for investing in a CLM, then you’ll probably want to read it in full.

They snooze, you lose

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in presenting your business case is diving too deep into present-day detail. As Jeff Piper, senior director of Agreement Cloud strategy at DocuSign warned, “Getting mired in the details often puts senior leaders to sleep.”

Think about the most compelling benefits of the solution, and back these benefits up with headline-worthy facts and figures. Or, flip side, if there are huge risks of doing nothing – like, lost sales opportunities or employee attrition – use these as the hook to grab your leaders’ attention from the get-go. 

Get tangible proof

Build your business case around concrete business results that will resonate with your executive team. Consider how the CLM solution will help reduce costs or boost revenue, how it can mitigate risk or accelerate time to contract, or how it can transform the employee experience. And then get proof. Consult with stakeholders across the business to accurately measure current costs, missed revenue, time wasted, and so on. 

Common business outcomes you could weave into your business case include:

• Accelerating time to contract. By replacing a slow, manual process with an automated, digital one, you can minimise delays and seal deals weeks or months faster.
• Increasing workforce productivity. A recent study found that 68% of employees take at least 10 minutes to manually locate contracts. This is just one piece of evidence that you could use to show how much time could be saved – not to mention how much happier your employees would be – if they’re not spending their days playing hide-and-seek with paper-based contracts.
• Preventing contract value leakage. ‘Contract leakage’ is the difference between a contract’s expected and realised value. Leaks occur at various points of the contract lifecycle, often due to slow negotiations, fixing mistakes in the contract, and so on. CLM plugs the gaps and minimises leakage.
• Reducing hard costs. Tally up how much you spend on printing, paper, ink, postage and all the other costs involved in searching and filing paper-based contracts. With a CLM, you strike them all out.
• Enabling compliant self-service. Empower teams to become more self-sufficient by setting up clause libraries and pre-approved contract language so that everyone can quickly and easily create the contracts they need.

Remember, gaining executive buy-in isn’t easy. It’s the executive team’s job to scrutinise every decision carefully, which means you need to give them irrefutable, irresistible proof of the solution’s merits. Persistence will pay off, though, in the form of a shiny new CLM that transforms how you do business. 

Want to learn more?

For more tips and inspo on building your business case for a CLM solution, read the full eBook now. 

Or, for hard numbers to add into your own business case, check out this DocuSign whitepaper on the total economic impact of CLM solutions.