CLMs need to grow into their role as enterprise platforms
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems have evolved far beyond their origins as a legal department tool. As companies seek greater visibility into revenue, spend, risk, and operational performance, contracts have become a critical source of business intelligence. CLMs are increasingly being tasked with serving as enterprise platforms under the office of the CFO, where they bring together revenue, spend, and back-office operations.
With this shift, companies need to realize the value of their CLM investments. Too many of these platforms remain disconnected from the broader data ecosystem and will need improvements to function as a true enterprise system. Companies can take three primary paths to improving their CLMs: Continuous improvement, targeted remediation, or AI-enabled transformation. The right path for each company will depend on its current state—but every company will benefit from starting now.
Approach 1: Continuous improvement for CLM
Contract lifecycle management is rarely a set-it-and-forget-it investment. As business processes evolve, your CLM configuration needs to evolve with them. Continuous improvement is about asking the right questions at the right time, and making deliberate, targeted adjustments that improve user adoption across sales, procurement, and IT. Building adoption and competency with your CLM will support a better, more integrated system with more complete data.
Sales
Many organizations begin their CLM journey by building guardrails, such as delegations of authority, approval levels, and automated routing to legal. Over time, to grow user adoption and reduce likely workarounds, the goal should shift toward mechanisms that place more trust in your sales team. Legal may still need visibility into certain contract types, but designing workflows to be modular and flexible (and deeply integrated with core systems like Salesforce) makes them more scalable and user-friendly. A useful litmus test: if your sellers require multiple trainings to operate the system, it’s probably overbuilt. For large enterprises in particular, UX for sales should be a paramount feature.
Procurement
On the buy side, continuous improvement means centralizing the buying process and reducing risk through greater visibility. A streamlined intake process is one of the highest-value places to start. Companies can rely on both out-of-the-box and custom integrations with intake & orchestration, P2P suites, risk assessments, and onboarding platforms that funnel requests into the right buying motion for global procurement organizations—reducing manual effort and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
IT
For IT, the most effective continuous improvement is driven by end-user feedback. Establishing a clear process to capture requests, respond quickly, and communicate change has a measurable impact on user acceptance and satisfaction. Governance doesn’t have to be burdensome. It just has to be consistent.
Approach 2: CLM remediation
Remediation and continuous improvement share the same destination, but they start from very different places. Continuous improvement asks what can be made better. Remediation happens when adoption becomes unlikely—when change management has stalled, visibility into the underlying process has collapsed, and users have found workarounds that take them outside the system altogether.
Sales
One of the most common sales remediations involves the relationship between legal and the sales team. The core question: Is there a self-service motion that allows a seller to easily execute and onboard a client through a standard contracting process? If the answer from your sales team is widely no, it’s time to build more self-service contracting opportunities. Ideally, these workflows don’t require legal involvement beyond knowing the contract originated in the CLM, as your CLM can enforce the proper contracting protocols from the contract’s initiation.
Procurement
Procurement remediations often start with well-intentioned CLM systems that have broken down over time. Systems often require excessive manual data entry, leaving contracting disconnected from the broader requisition and supplier-onboarding process. The fix usually involves building or optimizing an integration, creating a more streamlined intake through forms or a company intranet, or establishing a cross-reference with a business spend management or intake and orchestration system to reconnect the buying motion end-to-end.
IT
IT remediation most commonly arises during software renewal cycles, when the organization needs to justify its spending. Being proactive about what needs to be fixed, whether that’s a poor user experience, gaps in administrator training, or an overly complex build, puts you in a better position to maximize your CLM’s value to your organization. Practical examples include template consolidation, workflow simplification, and leveraging out-of-the-box admin tools to put the system truly in the administrator's hands. Simplification is key: You should be able to look at a value stream map of your workflow and understand exactly how it works.
Approach 3: AI transformation for your CLM
AI has been broadly reshaping enterprise software over the past few years, and next-generation LLM capabilities sent a wave through the Legal SaaS market. These new systems raise serious questions about the long-term value of point solutions built around automating rote legal activities.
While some CLM vendors have approached AI as an isolated feature set rather than a connected capability, AI works best when data can be orchestrated end-to-end, with proper intake, human-in-the-loop validation, and the ability to leverage multiple AI investments in concert. If your organization has already committed to platforms like Gemini, Copilot, Snowflake, or Databricks, your CLM strategy should be maximizing those justified investments, not working around them. Layering multiple points of AI validation ultimately creates less work and more accurate outcomes for the humans who remain in the loop.
Sales
The most compelling sales application is enablement. Sellers can surface the contractual data they need where they already work, without diving into the depths of a CLM. These terms will vary from industry to industry. For a manufacturing team, employees will need minimum order quantities. An emerging technology company may need SOW spend tracking. Services firms will need to see their SLA obligations. Whatever data a company needs, a more advanced CLM can unify unstructured contractual data with structured operational data. By bringing this data together in a platform like Snowflake or Salesforce Data Cloud, companies can propagate it directly into the dashboards sellers use every day.
With the right integrations with Salesforce and Snowflake, contract intelligence can become a natural part of the broader AI-enabled sales workflow rather than a separate system sellers have to consult. Even if that data is assembled from an ERP and a CLM and processed through a data warehouse, what matters is that it surfaces front and center in the seller’s system of record.
Procurement
On the buy side, AI can create the visibility that procurement organizations have historically lacked. Pre-execution, AI-assisted playbooks and risk assessment tools help procurement teams work smarter before a contract is signed, embedding institutional knowledge into the process rather than leaving it isolated in someone’s personal memory.
However, post-execution is where a vast opportunity lies. By combining generative and discriminative AI, companies can extract key terms from executed contracts and convert them into structured data, making that information portable to the systems procurement leaders already work in. When renewal dates, spend commitments, and auto-renewal clauses are visible and actionable, procurement teams can focus on managing vendor relationships rather than managing documents. In other words, AI can allow contract administrators to serve as strategic advisors.
IT
The two questions we hear most from IT are: “How will AI within our CLM actually help my team?”, and “How do we differentiate between what the leading vendors offer?” The Gartner Magic Quadrant CLM leaders we work with (and others we repeatedly evaluate) all have genuine strengths, and all have room to grow. We evaluate them through two lenses: pre-execution and post-execution.
Pre-execution, AI-assisted playbooks are a strong efficiency play. They take tribal knowledge out of your legal team’s heads and make it accessible to the broader organization, delivering a meaningful improvement in how contracts are negotiated and reviewed at scale.
But as mentioned previously, post-execution is where we see the greatest long-term value, and where we believe the market is still underinvesting. Extracted contract data should be as visible and portable as possible through integrations with other enterprise systems, and usable across the organization on a go-forward basis. When CLM data isn’t buried in a point solution but actively propagated throughout the enterprise, the system stops being a repository and starts being a source of strategic intelligence. That’s the clearest measure of whether an AI investment within or connected to CLM is actually working.
Unlocking the Full Value of CLM
The future of CLM lies in its ability to connect people, processes, and data across the enterprise. Organizations that invest in improving their contract management capabilities have an opportunity to transform contracts from static documents into actionable sources of insight. When contract data is integrated into the systems where your teams already work, CLM becomes a driver of efficiency, visibility, and better decision-making across the organization.
This transformation has the potential to deliver significant business value—from accelerating revenue generation and reducing procurement risk to improving operational agility and maximizing the return on technology investments. If you're evaluating the next phase of your CLM strategy, Spaulding Ridge can help. Contact our team to learn how we help organizations modernize, optimize, and unlock greater value from their contract lifecycle management investments.