S1 E3-Part 1:
Five Questions to Ask Yourself Before Choosing a CLM Solution

Your contracts are still sitting in silos, teams are still chasing information.

Why?

Because most companies ask the wrong questions.

So most companies don’t choose the wrong CLM, they simply compare features instead of asking what really matters.

So in this episode I want to walk through 5 questions you should ask when evaluating a CLN platform.

These 5 questions will help you focus on what really matters to your business.

So what problem are you actually trying to solve?
Before you talk to single vendor, start here.

What is the real business problem your organization wants to fix?

Contracting slows companies down in different ways.

For some organizations, the biggest issue is cycle time.

It takes too long to get agreement signed.

For others, the problem is visibility.

Once contracts are signed, people may lose track of what their commitments are.

Sometimes the issue is risk, like mis renewals or poorly tracked obligations.

And sometimes it’s simply that too many teams depend on legal for information they should be able to access themselves.

So instead of starting with a 200 line RFP, start by defining 3 to 5 outcomes you want to CLM system to deliver.

For example, reducing cycle time from 90 days to 30, improving visibility into your supplier commitments, or preventing revenue leakage from MIS renewals.

These outcomes should guide every vendor conversation you have.

If you don’t define the problem first, every platform will look good.

The second question you should ask is what does your contract landscape actually look like?
So this is a question many companies underestimate.

Where are your contracts today?
In reality, contracts rarely live in a single system.

They’re often scattered across shared drives, SharePoint folders, procurement systems, email threads, and personal archives.

Over time, this creates a fragmented contract landscape.
We’re finding a single agreement can take hours.

Large organizations frequently discover their contract data is spread across dozens of different systems.

So when evaluating a CLM platform, it’s important to focus on not just managing new contracts, but on what happens to your existing agreements.
Firstly, can the platform easily integrate with existing systems where contracts are currently stored?

Next, can the platform ingest legacy contracts?

Next, can it extract key data from those agreements automatically?

And lastly, once those contracts are inside the system, can teams easily search and understand them?
Your CLM should turn contracts from static documents into structured accessible information.

A system of record that you can trust.

The 3rd question you need to ask is will people actually use the system?
Adoption is where many CLM initiatives succeed or fail.

Contracts may be legal artifacts, but they involve procurement teams negotiating supplier agreements, sales teams working with customer contracts, finance teams tracking pricing and payment terms.

In fact, WCC estimates that nearly 25% of employees in an enterprise interact with contracts in some way.

So when evaluating CLM platforms, you must ask, will people actually want to use this system?

Does it work with tools your teams already rely on like Word, Outlook, Salesforce, Arriba, Oracle?

Can procurement or sales team generate contracts from the systems where they work or does every request still need to go through legal?

The more a CLM platform enables self service with any structure controls, the more valuable it becomes across the organization.

So these 3 questions can get you started.

In the next episode, we will conclude with 2 more key questions, so don’t forget to tune in.

See you then.