Name: Pitch to approval: Building a business case for CLM
Uploaded: 2025-01-23T18:10:44.954Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Pitch to approval: Building a business case for CLM

Transcript for "Pitch to approval: Building a business case for CLM": Excited to have you here, and I'm very excited to have a couple of different wonderful guest speakers with me. Matt Latham with AmeriSure and Heather Drouin with BISSELL. Thank you both for, agreeing to to chat with us today. I'm gonna let hand it over to Matt and, let you introduce yourself. Thank you. My name is Matt Latham. I am the purchasing manager at AmeriSure Mutual Insurance Company. I've been doing procurement for 30 years now and contract management for roughly the same in industries ranging from vaccine manufacturing to Japanese auto parts. So I've been in, financial services now for almost 7 years. So looking forward to having the conversation today. That's great. Heather. Hi. I'm Heather Drouin. I am commercial counsel for BISSELL Home Care. I've been with BISSELL about 10 years, and prior to that, I was in, private practice handling everything from criminal law to family law to zoning to appeals. But I've been primarily practicing on records management and contracts management for the last 10 years. Wow. Wonderful. Well, thank you both. My name is Allison Hart. I'm a product marketing manager here at Agiloft. And, yes. So today, we're gonna be taking these 2 very different angles. We've got an angle from legal, an angle from procurement. Also, as you will find out, there was 2 different approaches, to CLM. There was the, you know, everything at once versus, you know, smaller efforts chunks 1 at a time. So we're gonna talk really about, the challenges that both, both companies faced, how they addressed, and the components, that they needed in their very different, business cases that they built, in order to get a CLM. And we're also gonna talk about the impacts that were were result from accomplishing, the goal of acquiring a contract life cycle management platform. So first, we're gonna hear from, from Heather. And, Heather, take it away and tell us about, you know, what kind of challenges you were facing before you realized, you know, maybe CLIM is the direction we need to go and and why I need to start building this business case. Sure. Like I said, I've been with this for about 10 years. In the 1st 5 years, we we managed contracts, manually through several different systems. And they all did their own function, but it became clear that we needed something that combined everything in one. For for example, we had one of our systems was no longer gonna be supported by IT, and we could replace just that system. But the other ones were using Outlook and Excel, and it was a very manual system. And we were a growing company in the pandemic, and we needed something that was a better organization for us. We've spent, we did contract triage 3 days a week for a half hour and everybody on the contracts team met, and we talked about every single contract, the status it was in, what the next steps were, where it would go next, points to consider. And it it was necessary because everything was on a spreadsheet, but it was a really a time waste for our whole team and a global team. Team. So people were meeting in the evenings from Japan or in late afternoons from Europe. It it was really, burdensome for everybody. Wow. We didn't have a great way to keep track of auto renewals, other dates, other obligations in the contract, or even the contracts themselves. We had a repository, but there was nothing that really captured all the contracts. So sometimes they would be on physically on people's desks or in their email or in a file or in a SharePoint. And it just wasn't possible for the whole contracts team to have visibility to the contracts that we had, let alone the whole company. And then on our spreadsheet, it was limited what we could report on. We could only report on what we captured. The more we captured, the more work it was. So we were we were limited in a longer term view of what we actually had. Wow. That is those those meetings sound brutal. You know? They were. I know it was it was painful, and they were early morning meetings for us. So that was it was work. That that is yeah. I can I I bet there's a lot of people online here with us that that could probably relate to that? And spreadsheets and email, that is still still out there, still out there being used. So wonderful. That sounds like, some really important challenges. Now we're gonna go over to Matt. And, Matt, tell us about the challenges you were facing. Sure. We came at it from a different direction. So we pulled together a cross functional team in 2018, and this team included legal, procurement, internal audit, finance, project management, and data security. And we wanted to to find a way to strengthen the business owners' connection to the agreements that they put in place to do their business. And our process was not at all dissimilar from what Heather was describing in that we had file folders in legal, and the only metadata that we were able to capture was in the the title or the the the naming convention of the PDF in the folder that we were putting it in. So once it got in there, though, the business owner, anytime they wanted to take a look at it, would would either look in their email, and who knows if the whatever was in their back and forth emails was the the final version of the agreement. Or they'd ask legal for it, and that puts additional pressures on a pretty small legal administration team that was working on it. So we thought, well, if there was a process or a tool that we could use to make it so that the business owner always had access to their agreement and only the business owner had access to the agreement, so the privacy would still help. And something that could notify them of key dates or milestones or measurements, that would really help us, reduce the risk of the entire contracting process and let the business owner know that they they really are involved in the entire life cycle of the agreement all the way through and past termination. So that level of transparency combined with the ability to use notifications to ensure that that important milestones were met, were were really what brought us to CLM. Great. Okay. Yeah. The transparency is is incredibly important with everybody's trying to find the one thing and then, you know, who has it? It's it's always trying to trying to chase trying to chase the for the cats there. So great. Let's let's take a shift now and talk about the business plan and and how you know, kind of the components and how you put the thought process together. Heather, let's start with you and talk about your business case. Sure. We started the process of looking for a CLM. Coincidentally, on the first day we were all home from the pandemic. It wasn't planned that way, but it happened that way. We had a new general counsel. He'd only been with us, I think, a month at that time, time. And he came from a company that had a CLM, and he saw the value in it and in using technology. And he saw how we were handling contracts and thought it was a ridiculous use of our time. So he really championed the use of better technology, putting everything into into 1 bucket rather than in these 4 systems, having everything together. We started with the Gartner Magic Quadrant, looked at our options. We had a team. I think there were about 5 of us and we divvied it up. We each took a handful of them to dig deeper into, to ask questions. And we had a spreadsheet with some objective criteria on it that we all could mark with space for some of the extra stuff that we liked or didn't like. We met weekly to talk about what we liked, and we eliminated some of them, 1 by 1 till we're down to about 4 of them. And at that point, we sat through demos of each of them, some more than one demo, several demos, sometimes to compare them to each other. We would go back and say, hey. We talked to so and so, and they had this. Can you do this? Are you working on this? Because we didn't know yet what features we really would use and like. It all looks shiny and fun and interesting, but we we stuck to our spreadsheet and it really helped narrow it down to one option. We had to consider the cost savings. We couldn't add headcount, and we had leaders that said you have contract life cycle management. You have things that do all these functions. Why do you need something new? Why are we going to spend money when we need something new? We had to show how it would save money. It's not gonna make money necessarily. We're a cost center. So we we had to show how we could save money. We weren't going to add headcount. We could move things more quickly. Sales contracts could move more quickly. Less redundancy. We were typing things into a spreadsheet, then we were typing it into a contract approval form. And we were typing it into an email back and forth. We type the same things over and over again. And when you do that, data gets messed up. It's a game of telephone, and it's not a great use of time to use somebody with a college degree to just type things in a spreadsheet. Yeah. We we needed a way that we could all collaborate. We had, subject matter experts on a contract, where I might be the contract manager, but we had someone in privacy that needed to chime in or someone on IT or finance. And we were doing that all by email. We would have to forward them the email and hope it came back to us and follow-up on it after one of those triage meetings. And then the privacy person might not know what the finance person said, and it was not a great way to communicate. So we needed something better. And, reporting and audit trails, we needed to know, you know, timelines on a contract. How long were our our, reviews taking? How many approvers did we have? How many contracts have we even looked at this month, you know, this this week, this year, by person, by department, and we didn't have the means to do that. So those were our priorities in our spreadsheet. We also consider the implementation cost, the cost of licenses, the upfront costs, and then what would maintenance be? Would we have someone at this will be able to maintain this? Would we need an administrator? Are there updates we'd have to consider? And we we had a contracts administrator, but we needed them to be able to do more than just put things in a spreadsheet. And we weren't going to add another person, So we needed to know how their time would be spent in the system. Mhmm. What support there was for that person? Yeah. Absolute there there are so many nuggets in there of of what you just said. So important to have a champion, have someone that that is, you know, going to, run the mountain for you. Yeah. Outside sources, understanding, you know, it's not just it's not just 1 or 2 people going along. I don't work with these folks. You know, outside sources get buy in from a lot of different areas. Also, if I can even read my notes here. Yeah. I can't even read my notes. So we're gonna be just but so so many good nuggets and and understanding all the hidden costs. That's the other one I was gonna talk about. Yeah. Understand it you know, not just the cost of okay. I purchased it. Great. Good to go. But like you were saying, the headcount, who who's gonna run this? Can who can who can manipulate this? Who can change a report? Mhmm. And and also the metrics within that reporting. If you don't have access to all the data, and don't know where it is, how are you supposed to, you know, understand the impacts of everything that you are doing? As you're saying, you know, you need to to make things more efficient and quicker and and get to sales, quick quickly as well. So a lot of good nuggets there. Alright. Alright. Matt, are you ready to talk about AmeriShure and and and how you kind of built your business case here? Certainly. So, and I wanna build a little bit on what you said about having a champion. I think you can also do it if you have a group of aligned voices from very different departments all saying the same thing at once to leadership, which is the approach that we took on. So so our we we decided that this this cross functional team would be the champion, and speak speak up functional team would be the champion, and speak speak up to leadership about how we all we all interact with this tool or or we're we're we're all this we we will all interact with this proposed tool, and this is why we think it's successful. So before we even sat down and decided that CLM was what we were looking for, we sat and realized what what are the aspects of any solution that would have to be addressed, as part of what we're doing. And from that, then we very similarly went out to, the Magic Quadrant and other and other places to say, hey. If we're best bang for the buck. And that's when CLM came back as we said something that you should consider. Once we decided to do that, we took that list of components that we put together of a solution and tried to find, okay, well, if CLM is an option, how many of these do they check the box on? How many would a good CLM solution check the box on? And it was and what what what we also recognized too was, the best way to make this pitch is to explain that we're gonna start small and grow. You don't have to solve everything that was on your checklist all at once because that can be anytime you start talking about all of these different elements of the solution you're trying to create, people will start thinking about all the resources or or manufacturing in their head the number of resources it would take to do a thing. And that and, like, well, we had we have too many initiatives going on already. We couldn't we we couldn't possibly take this on. So it was important for us to identify the 2 or 3 quick hit, clicks quick wins we could get from, in this case, a CLM solution, and then explain, hey. And down the road, we will be able to do x, y, and z as the resources come available. Then and this is before we we made any kind of selection and looked at making sure that, it was expandable, but not only just expandable, but expandable with existing resources. So if if if I can make one really key point, it's that don't it the the biggest pitfall I think people can fall into is overwhelming the decision makers with the 100 things you're gonna do better with this new solution, because all they'll think of is a 120 IT people, you need to pull it off. That's great. On a couple of the key wins that that you can get quickly with a solution. And again, when we're talking about, you know, getting differing opinions, we certainly went to Gartner. Gartner is very important in the financial services space. But we also knew that we wanted to start small. And because of that, we could look for articles about, hey. Who are the up and comers in the industry or who are people that that are who are what are CLM solutions that are growing with you, like like that that can with and grow. So we even went to, like, PC Magazine and looked for who were the the the top 10 entry, top 10, you know, configure user configurable solutions, things that that you could sell with a low resource gain. And then ultimately, when we made the evaluations, what was key for us is to make sure that all of our potential business partners because that's what a CLM is, is a potential long term business partner, someone you want to grow with you. When looking for that, make sure they know exactly what you want on day 1 because so many of them will send a lot of your demo showing your things that you're not even ready to think about, let alone put into place. So provide as detailed a script you can on the exact use cases you have, the exact features and functionality that you need, and just be upfront with them and say, you're gonna hurt yourself if you show me a bunch of a bunch of features that I don't have. I will I will set up a special technology road map meeting where we can discuss the future. But for those initial meetings really structured around what you've already defined as your bang for the buck on day 1, That way, if there are decision makers in the room, again, they don't feel overwhelmed, and they see that whatever solution you select is actually solving the the the short term problem. Alright. Is it a lot of a lot of good stuff. A lot of good stuff. Alright. Well, let's talk about, impacts now. Now that we've we've, you know, we've gone through the difficulties that you both were facing, how you went about it, Matt, I love the fact that you you gave you know, like I said in the beginning, we were talking about the different approaches. You know, you don't necessarily have to have that champion. You can have the the collective voices all singing the singing the same tune here, making sure that that it's understood what you need. And all the dip and and I love how you how you said, you know, you're going for the different the smaller chunks. Yes. The analysts are absolutely fabulous, but not everybody has access to the analysts. So how where else are you gonna look? There's some, you know, great sites out there. As you said, the articles, different places that you can look. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of different, I know that there's different, organizations, for not only for procurement, but for legal, obviously. There's tons of choices out there, and they and and all your colleagues, and what maybe their solutions are, what's working best for them. Those are always great places to go to for for understanding as well. And the demonstrations, you know, coming from a vendor, you know, you always love those demonstrations. So but, yeah, and make it make sure that it's a it it's what you want to see. Mhmm. It's not, you know, what what is it out of the box? Here's everything we can throw you at you. It's just like, no. It's it's specifically these are the problems I need to solve. Show me what solves that problem. Right? So, that's always that's always good good information as well. Alright. So let's go. I certainly think there's still I certainly think there's still value in looking at the technology road map because like I said, it especially when you start small, it's important to have a partner that is always thinking about the next feature, the next change in contract management. The you know, we we selected ours in 2018, which was, you know, at the infancy, infancy, infancy of AI and and what it was doing in the contract review space. So, you know, have I think it's important as part of your building a business case journey to consider the road map, but I think it's worth its own conversation separate from the basic functionality demos that you wanna have pretty early on in your process. Well, that actually brings up a a good question. So, of course, AI, and and you said, you know, infancy then, and it's it's definitely gained a lot of traction. You know, I know that we have a lot of a AI capabilities within our platform. And and how important, you know, how important is that to either of you, especially looking forward because it's still, you know, it's it's still proving itself out, but there is a lot of proof points out there as of now. So, Heather, how important is AI looking into the future or what you're trying to are you using it at all now? Yeah. We are using it now. We have implemented AI within Agiloft. When we were looking at solutions, you know, it might have been a a fun thing that we had, you know, quick talks on, but it really wasn't a focus when we were first looking. We were looking for a solution that could grow, that worked for us in the time, but also look to have a future. And it looked like it was flexible enough to incorporate new technology like AI. And we we've just started using it. So and we've had AgileFT for 3 three and a half, almost 4 years now. And so it did take us some time to get ready to use it. I'm kind of glad it wasn't around when we first started. What about another distraction, I think? It because it it looks so promising, but we had to get our ducks in a row first before we were ready to to implement it. Well, tell us about what what's the use case. You don't have to say how it's, you know, I mean, just tell us how how are you using it. Yeah. We're we're using it. Now we ask our requesters to give us a contract description, because we really have been trying to push the contracts back to the business owner. They need to understand, what they're contracting for. And some of them really struggle with those details. We have a prompt that writes contract description that gives us some highlights. And sometimes it's just a can this be terminated easily and what is the start and end date? It's a few facts that we can start with. And those contract descriptions are what approvers end up seeing. So it helps us write something professional that approvers can read easily. Wonderful. Yeah. That does make a lot easier, instead of digging through and coming up and writing your stuff. It's just like, bing, bang, boom. There it is. It's easy. Done. Next. You know, it it really does take a a lift, and and it's something new that you can edit too. You know? It's like, it's Right. You know? Mhmm. Yeah. So so you have to have that personal touch too. It helps our administrator see the contract quickly and know who it should go to, what, red flags are there before it even gets to an attorney to review it. So it's really helped her. That is wonderful. That's great to hear. So yay us. Okay, Matt. Let's Yeah. Can so to build on that a little bit yeah. So when to think about the context of what we're discussing today about the CLM business case, I think anyone making a CLM business case going forward from today, you know, both, you know, Heather and I made our pitches some time ago. I think AI is gonna be a critical component. Yeah. If for no other reason than your decision makers are probably going to have a preconceived notion of what AI is going to do or what AI can do in this space. So I think there's value in having a conversation with at least a couple of the key decision makers to say, okay. What what do you think AI does, or how do you how would you think AI would be applied in this space, or what have you heard from your colleagues? And and just make make sure that you have a good bedrock underneath you of what the preconceptions are of AI. That and that can really form a list of questions then that you go back to your your potential partners when you're doing those initial reviews and say, here. Here's what we think it can do. Are we right? Right? Are we or is this is this just is this table stakes or scratching the surface, or are we talking about things that that really your tool is gonna need to grow into as time goes on? So and I I think I think in general, the advice is always good of, hey. Whenever you're talking about a solution, see if there's any, decision maker assumptions that are being made behind the scenes that would color how they would look at your proposal as you bring it in. But for something like AI that creates a very visceral and emotional response in times. Right? It's I think it's important to know from your legal team how they would like to see it used, what they've heard from their colleagues, from the business, what their preconceptions are around AI. And then, honestly, make sure you talk to your IT security folks and make sure that, you know, if you have, an AI subcommittee or if you have technical people that are focused on, what are quick quick AI adoption options versus ones that need a a village to approve, that that that you've established that ahead of time. It it really will speed your decision when you're when you're pitching your CLM business case. I think it'll really speed your position to explain, here's what AI can do. Honestly, here's what it can do, and here's where we could start using it using whatever partner that you choose. Yeah. No. Very, very good points because there is a lot of, I think misconceptions still out there of what it can and cannot do. So getting that upfront and having proof points and showing it and and, like I said, the demonstrations, then it all just makes a little clear for everyone. Right? Communication is the key there. So wonderful. Well, that was that's very interesting because, you know, AI is just right there with everybody, right now. So well, let's let's get back on track and talk about impact. Heather, tell us about so so you got the you built the business case and now you have CLM. Tell us about the impact. Sure. We our team has not grown at all. In fact, I think we've we've lost one person maybe, and we we're better able to use our resources, instead of people filling out spreadsheets and forwarding emails and searching in Outlook. I spent so many hours searching Outlook for the latest contract and putting in a folder and, and I'm sure our administrator spent, you know, 30 hours a week filling in fields in a spreadsheet. It was it was silly. So we're we're better able to use our resources that we have. Our our administrator now is starting to review, nondisclosure agreements. She even we just met this morning. She talked about using AI to help her review nondisclosure agreements and how that would be a better use of her time. And it it definitely is. Also, I love where I work. I'm not looking for other work, but if I were to interview somewhere else, one of my first questions would be is do you have a CLM? And if they don't, I would pass. I'm not ready to go backwards in my career. And my I might brain is better used reviewing contracts and reducing risk, instead of searching for them and filling in spreadsheets. So I I like doing something more impactful, and I think everybody on our team is happy to be able to do that. Also this morning, we just talked about report generation. We had somebody asking a one particular contract took a while to approve over over Thanksgiving. They thought there were too many approvers, and it took too long. And we were able to show that was an outlier, that it it was that wasn't normally the case. We could show normally how long our contracts take to approve, how many approvers they have in on average. So we're not trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist because we have objective data that we can show somebody and, they take it for what it's worth. We report on how long it takes us to turn around contracts individually, and we have goals to keep our time down. So we we can see those. We get that feedback. And our our contract throughput, we we require everybody to use Agilent for every single contract. And we started that from day 1. I don't know if we went back we if we would do it that way again, but it worked. I know some companies do it department by department. We had a team member that was going on maternity leave right when we started Agiloft. So I said, okay, everybody. You gotta put in Agiloft. I can't be fielding all of your emails anymore. We added several companies, and I think how would I manage 3 more companies contracts without the system? And the fact that we had it, it was up and running and working smoothly when we added the new companies made a big difference. So, you know, right from they get a a draft of our proposal all the way through termination, renewal the next time. I can go back and see my approval notes from 2 years ago. Why did I approve this? Did I ask for anything different next time? What did I consider? What were what were issues that came up the first time we negotiate this? It's the first thing I do when I look at a contract renewal now. Let's go look at the previous record. So it's really been helpful to have that. And the workload transparency we have on our home page, everybody has access to Agilev, and they can see our workload, up to real time. It it changes in real time, how many are in each status. So people can see what we're working on, how busy we are, where things might be stuck in the pipeline. And it's available to the whole company to see. So there's no secrets. We're not preparing reports to send individually to people to say, look what we're doing. We're busy. Everybody in the company can see it. And they can see we we don't have anything private in our CLM. Everything is open to everybody else. I know some companies keep things separate with permissions or things, but we really like having everybody see everything that's in there. And nobody's complained about that. It's worked pretty well. We don't have, you know, anything with salary in it or or, PII with those kind of things in there. But the company's contracts, for the most part, are all in Agiloft. Well, I I love the fact that you can like you're saying, you can go back from 2 years ago and say, what did I what was my comment there? You know, everything you know, and everybody's working from the single source of truth. They've all got the same data looking at the same thing. Nobody's pulled a contract out and and and keeping things over here. Why would they? Yep. And so just having the same data source, I know it sounds kinda element elementary, but, I mean, that's a that's a struggle for a lot of folks, having it all in one place and and working from the same data. So it's been great. Great. I'm glad it has been so successful for you. And, you said something interesting too before, with the AI. It it it sparked my memory again. And and how you, really, you were solving for your problem that day, but you also wanted to make sure that you were solving for future problems. Like, I wanted it to be flexible. I wanted it to grow and, you know, being and and seeing, you know and and, Matt, you mentioned the road map and making sure that there were visions of of what it is you're going to do and what what's planned. So, just another important aspect when when looking at different CLMs, when we You know, we we didn't really get distracted by the the shiny fun things. I know there was a solution that had an app, and we thought, oh, that would be so cool if we had an app and everybody would be on their phones. That that wasn't going to happen. We thought about it a little bit. It wasn't a priority for us, and so we really need to focus on our core needs at the moment. Exactly. But but also have something that's gonna grow with you that you know that can can handle the larger things as it comes down the road. So We customized it quite a bit, and I and we've talked since then. If we did it again, we would do it out of the box and then work on customizing it later. But but our solution could do that. It you know, what we chose would have worked out of the box. It work work to customize it at any point. So, being able to customize it was a priority. Yeah. And and the customization is kinda it's almost it it's almost crazy how much customization you can do. I know as a marketer, we go in there and they're like, well, can we put a little note here? It's like, well, not everybody has that because everybody's is different. You know? Yeah. Exactly. It's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You can make it make it your own make it your own and and solve your problems. So alright. Wonderful. Okay. Let's talk about AmeriSure, Matt, and and the impact, CLM has had for you. So for us, again, because we were coming at this, you know, it was really business focused on making on providing a tool to our business owners. And in fact, if I would do anything different about how I implement it, it would be to, spend more time with my legal team and a little less worrying about the business. But hindsight being what it is. Right? But for us, it was really crucial that the business owner understood every aspect of this process. We you can get yourself in a rut of, you know, key business leaders just throwing contracts over the wall. Right? It's like, well, it's a contract. Therefore, I'm scared of it. So I'm just gonna give it to attorneys, and they'll just they'll they'll solve everything. Right? And not realize that the business owner so many terms in a contract, the business owner not only has a stake in making sure to find upfront, but they're the ones that'll track it throughout the life cycle of the contract. Right? They're the ones that'll know what the service levels are and how they're being tracked on a particular piece of software. Or they're the ones that'll know that a particular milestone or timing on a statement of work is really important, and legal's only gonna be able to tell you, hey. Did you look at this? Because you should care about this way more than I do. So so we really wanted to break that idea of contracts are a legal document that lives in legal. A contract is a business document that our friends in legal help us interpret and understand and help us minimize the risk. But it's the business owner that that really drives everything all the way through the process, including and and what's really important for us on a reduction of risk standpoint is, when you look at all the various data breaches that happen out there and get reported, a lot of them are with vendors that companies have stopped using a long time ago. The the the target data breach comes to mind. So termination clauses in a contract, including getting certificates of of destruction for any confidential information you might have shared, That again is a business function. The business is the one that has the relationship with the vendor. And so something great that the CLM can do for you when you think about the impact of it is we talked about the notifications before, but that's not just at renewal. You know, we use it right now at the at termination that when a contract let's say it auto terminates, your CLM can provide a notice to your business owner saying, hey. If you shared confidential information, make sure you get a certificate of destruction. A template can exist in the CLM that they can provide to the vendor to get that, and it can flow right back into the contract record. We even make the business owner press a to to to roll it. There's we have 2 different expired statuses. 1 before they've reclaimed confidential information, and one that they've done afterward to make sure that keeping an eye on that reduction. Milestones or or yearly reviews or what have you. Really, it'll help the business owner understand everything from the the first negotiation all the way to termination. Or as, Heather pointed out, renewal too. As a purchasing person, having access to everything I negotiated 3 years ago as part of that renewal is huge. Because if I had to give something away, but after 3 years of a relationship, I realized I need to have it back, It's all stored in that contract record, and it makes foraged and focused renewal process when you have access to all those previous versions and all that previous data. And it helps you remind the business owner too when they say, hey. Why does my why why aren't they meeting this con or this this requirement of the contract? And you remind them that they they agreed to give that up at some point in the previous contract, so that can certainly help. In terms of duplicate work, that you know, a CLM can really help focus your process so that it doesn't bounce back and forth between different groups at different times. The way we have it designed now is that our business review is completed before it gets to the attorneys. So that and and they know that. Right? It's transparent to them if we've added business red lines prior to adding to our attorneys. The way you're wording it will not get you what you're asking for, and they can provide advice along those lines, because and instead of having to say, okay. I've done these things. Now you guys look at it. Now let me look at what you guys put in there and sending it back and forth. A CLM can really help folk everyone's doing their expert best one time. And that and that comes also with standardization. Right? It lets you have a single process by which every contract flows. Like Heather, we decided to put nearly every single we had that adoption rate from about month 4, that people were stopping going around the system and just sending things to legal. Obviously, it requires everyone in the process to to punt the the business owner back into play when they get a little out of the the standardized process. But it makes it so much easier if everyone knows, okay. My first step is to talk when I get a contract from a vendor, I talk with my business colleagues, I bring in my friends in procurement, and we talk through the business work roles. Then we're gonna put it into Agiloft and the and I route off to the attorneys to take a look at. And that whole back and forth process, having it be standard for every single contract keeps people from trying to find ways around the system, and it reinforces the value proposition of your CLM as a whole because then everyone knows we have a process. It's not arcane. It's not confusing. There's training documentation for it with very simple workflows in your system that everyone's gonna use for everything. That is great. Sounds like to me, those business owners should be, you know, slipping you some money under the table for making their life easier. So Well, some do, and the ones that we're really enjoying not being responsible out around a little bit, you know, when they were used to just well, it's a contract. I don't understand any of this. I'm like, okay. Well, let's talk about the parts you do understand. You do know what service level agreement is. You know what an uptime on a software is. You know what a deliverable is. Right? And all legal is gonna help us with is, hey. Do we own the deliverable when it's done? Let's make sure to write that in the contract. That sort of thing. So it took it took not as long as I expected, but also, as I mentioned earlier, we also launched it very small. So because of that, I wasn't making them swallow an entire pig all at once. We just got to bite the apple first. Exactly. And they probably saw you know, the other business owners saw where you implemented it first. It's like, oh, look. They're they're reaping the benefits. You know? It's like, when is it my turn? So that that is that's great. That is great. Well, and configuration. Go ahead. Yeah. You you spoke of configuration earlier too. And I think that's an important piece for for not only for creating your business case, but for long term success is finding a partner that lets you do your own stuff. Right? For the for large part, it what really helps with business owner impact and adoption is knowing that if they if they see something that's doesn't sit right, that the business can make that change without without having to fill out a bunch of IT tickets to do it or without having to go back to the vendor to have it fixed, when they can see their suggestions fixed in real time, it it's it's huge for the adoption, is to for for people to know that it, you know, it is our system. We we launched stock. We launched almost completely out of the box. We didn't do a lot of customizations, and then we built our own customizations along the way. So when it's certainly, I think, a critical piece of the business case to talk about how you how you get from a to b to c and really think about the resources and the extra cost that might be. And there are there there will be partners out there for you that'll have be fully on the spectrum between you can do everything yourself or you need to to to book the vendor to do that for you for everything. Find one that's in your comfort zone with your with with what you have the resources that came on. Exactly. Exactly. And there's there's a couple of things we hear quite a bit. You know, the fact I've talked about, you know, the malleability. You know, we we can really be the solution for whatever your problem is. We're not gonna force you into boxes of, like, well, this is our solution. Beg or leave it. You know, that is not that's not how we do things. We we really listen and and and also the fact that you can like you were saying, you can make the changes. You don't, you know, you don't have to go to I your IT department or Agiloft. It's like it's it's something that that the user themselves can go in and the admins can fix easily themselves. It's very intuitive and very, user friendly. So that's it it really lessens the time and the cost and everything for everybody. So that's good stuff. So wonderful. Both of your, journeys have been so interesting. Just before we get to the q and a, I did wanna say I know that they, Jennifer mentioned at the beginning that that you can download the assets. So, we have provided with you, a toolkit for building your own business case for our CLM in general, includes an overall guide, an implementation checklist, system requirements, and also, email templates for the different stakeholders. And it's very generic. It it's just whatever you can do. You know? It provides you help to build your business case for CLM. So we've got a couple of different questions. Alright. Matt, why don't we start with you? What advice would you give to someone just starting their CLM journey? The right team of people that are gonna that are going to interact with your CLM, that could be legal administrators, that could be attorneys. For us, internal audit was a critical piece. Right? Because any processes that we that we built around compliance being in insurance, compliance is kind of a big thing for us. Make sure you get all the the critical people at the table to start with, and then just start at a 30,000 foot view as to what are we looking for. Like, what what problems are we trying to solve? What are areas that we wanna see improvement? What are what are some common pain points that the people in this room are running into as it relates to contracts? And and don't be afraid of of being, aspirational. Right? What is our what's our future ideal state? Is it a place where 60% of our contracts get an initial clause review by AI? Okay. Well, write that down. Right? That's something that you'll wanna be be looking at when you're talking about features and functionality. Is it you've got an up and coming attorney that's been doing, contracts 10 hours a day, every day since they got there, but you know they they wanna do something else. They wanna move into your compliance group. They wanna move into your your, in our case, like a a claims litigation group. Right? What what tools would you wanna provide those attorneys to give them that sort of ability to start taking on more and more and different work? Just just don't don't be afraid to about these sorts of systems and and these sorts of improvements, and then use that to kinda drive down to your must have. Great. Wonderful. Okay. Heather, how about you? What what advice would you give someone starting their CLM journey? I would say to think long and hard about the problems you're looking to solve. I I think if you asked a 100 people in your organization, you could come up with a 100 problems to solve. So really focus and make sure they're concrete. Write them down. You hold them close every time you see a demo. Tell the Pearson that's that's demoing the product to you, this is what we're trying to solve. You need to be able to answer these questions or solve these problems. So have a theme in what you're looking for and stick to it. You can get distracted by lots of different options and problems to solve. But but stick to your current problems, what you're solving, and then make sure it's a flexible option that could solve those 100 other problems that a 100 other people have. Yeah. Exactly. You solved 1 and it uncovers 4 others you didn't realize. Yeah. Right. So exactly. Wonderful. Heather, we've actually got a question specifically for you. When and how did you get your ducks in a row before or after CLM tool selection before and during implementation of Agileoft? Sure. We we started, like I said, March 13, 2020 is when we first, reached out to CLM providers to get questions answered. That took us a year, beep from that until go live was a year. So our ducks in a row, I would say that we we thought that we have them in a row. And we we did, in a sense when we started, we thought we're all set. We still have things. We think we could do this better. I wish we had done it this way. So it's it's a process. I don't think you're ever at one point, where you say now I have everything, every problem solved. Everything is good. There's always new solutions, new problems to solve. I I think it's kinda like when someone says, you know, you never know when it's the right time to have a baby. You know? You just gotta do it sometimes. Jump in with both feet. If you wait till everything's perfect, it'll never be perfect. I think, you know, like I said, we went live because a member on our team was on maternity leave. We probably could have stretched that out another 3 or 4 months to keep messing with the system. But we jumped in with both feet and kinda built the airplane as it was in the air. In a sense, everybody was patient with us as we did it. So before the the selection, we did know exactly what we wanted. We thought we were solving all the problems. Our our big problems were solved with our choice. But we keep, you know, getting our ducks back in a row all the time. Yeah. They do start running around on you, don't they? Yes. Now one one other thing I like to building that with too is is, don't forget the l in CLM. We started building the, business case. We were really focused on basically the review process. Right? That allow the initial, you know, efficiencies and endpoints and all of that. But you want a tool that is going to help you manage the entirety of the contract from beginning to end. So don't you know, when when when you're when you're sitting down writing out your your kinda punch list of business requirements, also think about what improvements you might wanna see in how we manage the life cycle of an agreement, whether it's, you know, auto renewals or whether it's termination clauses like I talked about earlier. I mean, heck, we're we're we're right now envisioning using ours in in combination with, midterm vendor scorecard. Right? And how can we track data on vendor performance within the life cycle of a contract by using our CLM to send out midpoint, vendor scorecards on on vendor performance. So so give give some give as much time to thinking about the middle of the you know, everything that happens after execution of the contract when looking for a CLM and make sure that they have the kind of contemplating the kind of features that you would wanna use to improve how your business manages the full life cycle of a contract. Yes. Very good points. Pre and post signature. Absolutely. Okay. We've got another general question. What were the key steps you took to drive user adoption and ensure a smooth transition? I I think, Matt, I think you've touched on this, but, you've got some more information. Sure. So be and I should give a little caveat to this is that we launched in 4 months. So from the time we signed our contract with Agiloft to the time we launched Agiloft, it was only 4 months. Now as I said earlier, part of that was because we use mostly out of the box configuration. But the other part too was I had to think about the OCM piece of it. The the fact that I was asking business owners now to take a much more active stake in the contracting process. So I had to really pick and choose what I thought was most important for our business owners. And so we launched Agiloc empty, and then we populated previous contracts as it became relevant to do so. Because what I wanted to make I thought I could alienate every one of my business owners is to send them a spreadsheet of 300 contracts that were assigned to them in that file those file folders that I had in my contracts system and say, one of these contracts need you to pull out these 18 pieces of metadata. Because remember, this is before AI too, where where I know there's AI tools that can do that for you now or or tools in even in Adobe that can do that. But when I when we launched 2018, it was gonna be very much a manual effort. So what I wanted to focus on for adaptive purposes was, hey. Let's talk about how easy it's gonna be to put a contract into this system on day 1, not worry about all the metadata in the previous contracts. And so when you do it that way, when you launch it empty or when we launched it empty, then that gave the business owner then a pool of past contracts that they knew were still active that they could use to practice the the skills. But I didn't make them cram it in in the 3 weeks before go live. Right? I gave them the chance to spread it out over x amount of months to do that. So so my advice that's a weird way of saying something I probably could have said in 30. But my my my advice certainly would be, you know, make sure the business owner knows exactly what they need and but don't overwhelm them with all the things that are going to happen in the future. Focus on the benefits to the business owner and then those good behaviors early on in the process and see the benefits early on in the process, I would certainly recommend rather than trying to, again, try to feed them the entire thing all at once. Okay. Alright. Wonderful. Heather, what advice do you have for, user adoption, smooth transition? Yeah. I I I kinda guilted people into it. I said, I'm one person. You gotta do it, Angela. I'm not gonna do my email. So if you're if you're sending me an email, it's gonna go low on my priority. I really gotta work on on Agiloft. And if you need help, let me know, and it'll take 10 minutes for me to show you some highlights. And I'll I'll show you where there's videos and other resources. So I made myself available to teach them, as much as I could. I I really, it was a carrot or a stick kind of approach. I would reward people that used it if I you know, they were doing their best. I would reach out to them and say, hey. That was great contract description. That was super helpful. I'm gonna move this on to approvals today. I would tell them how their efforts helped their contract move to the next step, and really encourage them to use it. There's a new feature in Agile off the comments, and people have loved that feature in it because it's something new. It's, and it you know, they use the at symbol to mention somebody which is familiar to them. So when there's features like that that they can instantly see the benefit to them in, I see them adopting. I heard somebody in the hallway talking the other day. Hey. Did you see that in Angela? That's what we were hoping for. You know, the the word-of-mouth and, then somebody went back and, you know, tried it at their desk. Hey, I see that. That's fun. And so, just showing them how it benefits them. We initially thought of it as a benefit for the legal team, and we really took that viewpoint that it's gonna make our jobs easier. And it did. It it was wonderful. But now we've had to focus on how it can make their jobs easier and more make them more productive. That's great. I love I love the guilt. Just guiltedness. Yeah. But it's great that it's great that they're seeing the benefits, though. Yeah. The the app thing came out, last release, I believe it was. They're the one before that. So good. I'm glad they're making good use of it. Alright. I think we have we have about 5 minutes left. We have time for one more question for both of you. So what role did feedback from end users play in your approach to the, CLM implementation? Heather? Yeah. And like I said, we didn't focus as much on the business as we maybe should have. We we really kept it internal to our legal group and told people something exciting is coming. It's coming, and it'll change the way we do things. And then before we went live about 3 weeks, we reached out to our high high volume users and showed them the features. And and we just said this they gave us some feedback, but some things at that point were already set. So we said we'll make a list, and when we do updates, we will incorporate this. We can't do a we can do updates in real time all the time, but that wasn't practical. So we said we asked them to share their feedback. We kept it on a list. When we were able to make changes, we'd reach out to them and talk to them more about their concerns, and see what we could do to accommodate these concerns. I I think it's really funny from listening to both of you. Heather, you've said we should've talked to our business partners, and and that you're like, we should have talked to legal. Yeah. So legal and procurement and business all need to be be, holding hands with other stuff. So that's good good lesson. Alright. Matt, so what role did the feed what role did feedback from end users play in your approach for this implementation? It was the primary focus of our of our search. Right? We were looking at it from a risk perspective, and so getting an understanding from the business of, hey, we need to be we need to all hold ourselves more accountable to risk. What would you need to do that? Right? And so our business owners were a critical stakeholder. That's why we brought that that cross functional team, which now is down to really just internal audit, data security, legal, and procurement, but we brought in those extra groups like project management, like, and a member of our IT group, a member of our finance team, people who execute a lot of contracts and really pick their brains on, you know, what kind of what what what features would make it easier for you to engage in these agreements in a way that helps us mitigate risk piece. And on the sneaky side too, is that many of those many of the leaders of those groups would be part of the decision making process. And so having their direct reports and their feedback added some some easily understandable meat to the to the pitch for a CLM. When they saw that Casey we got a quote from Casey on there of something he wanted to improve, and Casey's boss is one of the people making the decision. You know, it's it it adds some reality around what we're asking to do. No one no one has money to buy dreams in business. Right? You need to buy practical tools. And so having having it in a language that a particular decision owner understands might seem like dirty pool, but it's it's certainly, I think, valuable in terms of getting that pitch sold. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, you both have brought so much to the table of understanding from different different directions of of how you built your business case for CLM, the impact it had, the challenges that, you know, it solved. And so I really wanna thank you both for taking the time and and the energy and and and really making this such an interesting conversation. Wanna thank everyone else for, attending today, and, hope you have, great holidays. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Bye bye.