Taking a small break from introducing you to the present state of CLM, we want to cast our net a little bit wider this week and look into… the future.
With the help of Agiloft CSO Prashant Dubey, here are five predictions about the future of CLM and the future of CLM in the workplace!
1: The General Counsel Evolves
CLM already provides incredibly strong analytical tools and helps reduce the amount of time spent on pouring through contracts, and it is almost a certainty that these two aspects will get better and more efficient update after update. We see this contributing to a bit of a role change for General Counsels as less of their time is taken up by contract busywork.
To us, the future of CLM will evolve General Counsels from legal specialists to a broader strategic role. Contract Management will help General Counsels move further from risk identification to active risk management; and from managing contracts to proactively utilising contract insights to fuel better, more informed strategic decision making. With the continued upwards trend in CLM adoption, we see the role of the General Counsel expanding into an even more key position within companies as their legal knowledge is utilised further to prioritise analysing contract data rather than the contracts themselves.
2: Procurement Leaders Leading Procurement
We are already seeing large procurement organisations take control of the procurement process through the use of CLM. We have no reason to believe that this will do anything other than expand rapidly.
Procurement is an area that finds itself particularly benefitted from CLM solutions – we have seen bottlenecks removes, a proactive move towards organisations taking control of their own contracts, and major initiatives launched to create global centres of contracting excellence. With more CLM being adopted, we expect to see a lot more of this accelerating far beyond the progress we’ve already seen – the accelerated contracting cycle has already benefitted procurement organisations by increasing the overall organisational agility and ability to solve specialised issues, and we are excited to see how much further this will go in the future.
3: Self-Serving Sales Solutions
The more you use CLM, the better and more useful the CLM becomes, and this is primarily due to three key things: data, data, and data.
As the relationship with the software progresses, the more data (and more useful data) will be available to draw from which will in turn monumentally increase the efficiency of the contracting process. Simply by spending more time with it we can see a clear future benefit to Sales, in particular, who will be able to access a comprehensive database of contracts to see which contracts are actually unique, and which ones are the same thing you have signed with partners a hundred times.
Having oversight on all the contracts the company uses on one customisable, no-code platform allows Legal to make sure that all the contracts, edits, provisions, and fall-back provisions are a-ok, which, in-turn, allows Sales to move confidently through negotiation processes without Legal needing to be looking over their shoulder the whole time.
4: Eye-Catching Contract Clarity
Despite our love for them, and despite our enthusiasm, contracts are often terminally uninteresting. Contract data? Even more so – positively soporific stuff.
However, we firmly believe that this does not need to be the case. In the future, what Agiloft and SaaSam are striving towards is the ability to actively show-off contract data in an exciting way. Visualisation, real-time updates, GPS-esque information tracking to show hotspots, coldspots, regular activity, graphs, data points – all powered by Agiloft CLM.
We want to change your relationship with contracts from dealing with flat numbers and impenetrable documents to dealing with cutting-edge tools that tell you exactly what you need to know to make strategic, data-driven decisions. Our dedication to a user-friendly platform is already here, but what we want to show you in the future is a way to look at and analyse a whole world made of contracts, and for you to be able to see the patterns and new forms of decision-making that emerge from that.
5: The Revenue Review
We want to help you protect and enhance revenue in the long-term. This is a goal that CLM already achieves, but the larger companies get, the more complex contracts become, the more revenue slips through the gaps and becomes lost to time.
The World Commerce and Contracting reports that the average company saves up to 9.2% of revenue a year, and larger companies stand to save up-to 15% a year with CLM. 9.2% is a huge amount to save on a yearly basis, and in troubled economic times could be the difference between a company succeeding and failing. Future-proofing your contract management system is a way to help future-proof your organisation – the revenue saved is now revenue that can go towards expansion, research, development etc. and we think that all starts with a CLM solution that helps you plug those initial holes.
We live in interesting times, and we think that the savings, the analytics, and agility that an Agiloft CLM solution can bring you is worth it to make sudden sea-changes – whether they happen in a month or in five years - a little bit less shocking, and a little bit easier to manage.
If you want to walk bravely into the future with us, please reach out at: soultions@saasamgroup.com to get in touch and start taking a small step (or a giant leap) into the world of contract lifecycle management!
Original article by Prashant Dubrey (https://www.agiloft.com/pdfs/5-predictions-for-clm-2023-infographic.pdf) additional words by C. Redpath.
