Contract lifecycle management (CLM) benefits

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software benefits businesses by automating contract processes, improving visibility into agreements and reducing contract risk. CLM software like Summize helps legal and business teams create, review, approve, manage and analyze contracts more efficiently, leading to faster negotiations improved compliance and better decision-making.

What is contract lifecycle management?

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is the complete management of the end-to-end contract lifecycle. It manages each stage of the lifecycle from request to expiry to ensure contract compliance and maximize the value of the contract.

Today, contract lifecycle management tools are designed to standardise processes across the business, implementing specific workflows and guardrails around individual stages of the contract lifecycle.

What are the stages of contract lifecycle management?

Contracts touch almost every corner of a business. Contract lifecycle management tools are designed to automate and accelerate contracts throughout their lifecycle, so that everyone in the business can benefit.

Even though every contract and business may have a different process, typically most contracts go through the following six stages:

1. Creation: During the contract creation stage (also known as contract drafting or authoring), parties gather the required information and documents to define an agreement’s clauses, T&Cs and critical dates.
2. Negotiation: Following the creation stage, the parties enter negotiations to reach an agreement on the terms and conditions. This stage can involve multiple back-and-forth conversations between parties, with many rounds of contract reviews and contract redlining.
3. Approval: All parties agree and sign the contract.
4. Execution: After the contract has been signed, the agreement is legally binding and the parties must adhere to the terms.
5. Management and renewal: A contract is then stored and managed until its renewal or termination date.
6. Reporting and analytics: An often forgotten stage of the contract lifecycle, the reporting and analytics stage is vital for companies to spot trends, risks and opportunities.

Explore the full contract lifecycle management process in even more detail, with business examples and solutions to help enhance each stage, in our guide The Contract Lifecycle Management Process.

What are the benefits of CLM?

We've already touched on some of the benefits of contract lifecycle management, but there are many more that can be advantageous to the whole business.

CLM benefits at a glance

Reduced risk

CLM tools powered by AI technology break down contractual information into easy-to-read summaries, highlighting risk and including comments, red flags and notes. Features like this help streamline business decisions, reduce risk and avoid costly delays. CLM software reduces contract risk by centralizing agreements, standardizing contract processes and providing visibility into key clauses obligations and renewal dates. With all contract information accessible in one place, legal teams can identify potential risks earlier, improve compliance and prevent missed contractual commitments.

With Summize's AI functionality, legal teams have the power to review, analyze and redline contracts in no time. Without leaving Microsoft Word and guided by your playbooks, view instant red flags and receive a redlined contract along with suggested amendments in as little as 60 seconds.

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AI contract review can take as little as 30 seconds, compared to 92 minutes for a human - and it reduces the risk of errors that might occur with manual processing.

Faster and improved revenue generation

According to research by EY, 59% of business development professionals say contracting inefficiencies result in lost opportunities. CLM accelerates contract processes by automating repetitive tasks such as contract requests, approvals, reviews and workflows. By reducing manual administration and improving collaboration between legal and business teams, CLM helps organizations shorten contract cycles and move agreements forward faster.

With Summize, sales teams can easily create their own contracts in under two minutes, without needing legal intervention. This not only reduces the legal team's backlog but also empowers the sales team to create contracts independently, helping them accelerate their sales cycles and close deals faster.

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Standardized contracts

Manual contracting processes are prone to human error, such as your sales team using an outdated template or a team member mistakenly entering the wrong contract details. CLM standardizes contract processes by using approved templates, clause libraries, automated workflows and defined approval steps. This makes sure teams follow consistent approaches when creating and reviewing contracts, reducing errors, improving governance and creating a more predictable contracting process.

With Summize's CLM, contract creation happens in your familiar business tools (such as Outlook, Teams and Salesforce). Users create contracts from a library of pre-approved templates, therefore eliminating access to outdated versions. Combined with field-mapping, which pulls contract data straight from the likes of emails and CRM deal and opportunity data, CLM will greatly reduce the chance of human error in your business.

Uncovered data

CLM unlocks valuable contract insights by transforming agreements from static documents into structured, searchable data. By analyzing contract terms, obligations, dates and trends, businesses can make better decisions, identify opportunities and improve contract performance over time.

Summize’s CLM contract analysis functionality makes the data inside contracts usable and useful. This gives businesses a single source of truth, helping them identify missed revenue opportunities, renewal dates and much more.

Enhanced business efficiency

As a business grows, so does the volume and complexity of its contracts. According to our Legal Disruptors report, 81% of in-house legal professionals' basic contract tasks dominate their daily workload.

CLM software from Summize takes away a lot of the manual burdens, for both legal and non-legal users:

• Contract creation: Master templates and pre-defined fields makes contract generation a two minute job
• Contract negotiation: AI contract reviews reduce manual tasks by 85%
• Contract approvals: Summize integrates into popular e-signature tools and automatically sends the signed contract to your repository. This process reduces the manual administration
• Contract management: Storing all your contracts in Summize’s secure and central repository avoids needing to search around multiple folders for the information you require
• Contract reporting: Make reporting quick and actually useful with Summize’s data and insights at your disposal.

Improved internal collaboration

CLM solutions improve collaboration amongst legal and non-legal teams.

Before adopting CLM software, legal teams are often seen as bottlenecks, delaying sales cycles and hindering business growth. CLM improves collaboration by connecting legal teams with business stakeholders through shared workflows, real-time contract visibility and integrations with everyday business tools. This allows teams to collaborate on contracts more efficiently while making sure legal stays in control.

Businesses using Summize’s CLM software empower their sales teams to manage their own contract processes, within the confidence of legal’s guardrails. This reduces the legal team's backlog while enabling the sales team to accelerate their deal cycles.

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Start seeing your CLM benefits with Summize

Many CLM solutions will appear to have the same benefits, but how these benefits are achieved is important.

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At Summize, our Customer Success and Implementation teams prioritize your success, ensuring you quickly experience the benefits of your CLM solution, and setting you up for long-term value. Find out more about our approach to Customer Success here.

Begin your Summize journey today and start seeing your CLM benefits in no time. Book a demo with our expert team to get started.