Summize Talks: Why CLM Solutions Are Crucial for Enterprise Businesses

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Transcript

Why is it now important? Well, if you look at other areas of a business, any corporate, look at sales, look at marketing, you wouldn't be able to imagine a sales team operating without a functioning CRM, or sales enablement software nowadays. Like marketing for example, you wouldn't expect them to be working without a lead gen tool. Legal's really been left behind, even behind the likes of purchasing procurement, in that all they've really had is Microsoft Office, or the Google Suite, to use for their legal matters. I think a lot of businesses are starting to see the huge return on investment benefits in CLM software. And as the whole global economic situation gets worse, things get tighter, budgets get more constrained, deals need to close and they need to close faster. Everybody's working, to work on a quarterly annual forecast, that needs to happen.

So there's a few things you can do there, whether it's a case of speeding up that deal cycle and what you can do throughout the contracting process to speed up, or whether it's just a case of your commercial team being more enabled in their conversations with legal, to work together as better business partners. But the solution isn't getting more lawyers, because nobody has enough budget to be able to afford that amount more staff. So we are looking toward software in order to make those changes with automation and build efficiencies, and thus drive revenue.

We, quite a few years ago... Well, quite a few years ago, shortly after the pandemic, focused very much on the virtual office. Because we found that customers were saying, "Great contract review." AI being involved to look through a document is really key, but where we're losing a lot of time is being able to talk to sales, and the rest of the business adopting a tool. So we looked at how the world had changed over COVID, and that everybody was now living their lives in a Microsoft Teams or a Slack environment. So how could that be utilized really? And we've found huge success with customers by going to the place that they already are, which even pre-COVID was one of the codes that we live by with our Microsoft Word integration. And we've found that we can really generate not only incredible return on investment efficiency-wise, but also adoption towards a new tool, within commercial, just by going to a place where a user already is, in Microsoft Teams.

Before, it is very much about collaboration, rather than about the contract. The contract is important of course, but understanding why and what needs to be done around that matter or that task is equally important, if not more so. And that's where we specialize.

Enterprises are very big. They're very big. They deal with a lot of contracts. It's all about volume really. We look at enterprise businesses every day and they deal with so many contracts and so many different areas of business. They're normally multinationals. And so they'll be contracting in different ways with maybe even different legal teams in different regions. So if you let everybody work with autonomy, with their own processes, you lose efficiencies, especially when you're doing global business, and maybe three regions within the company need to collaborate on the same transaction. What a CLM tool will normally do is pull all of these regions together and give a unified process, normally based around an element of standardization. So you're contracting in the same way no matter which region you are in. And that's vitally important in an enterprise to be efficient.