CLM implementation: is your business ready?

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) can solve many of the challenges associated with managing contracts – but it isn’t a plug-and-play solution. Every business operates differently, with its own processes, priorities and ways of working.

As every set-up is unique, it requires the right preparation, time and management from your team. Without the right preparation? It can expose gaps in your processes, data and internal alignment, and those gaps can slow or even derail rollout.

In fact, that’s often the reason that half of all CLM implementations can end up stalling or sometimes even failing.  

The more useful question is often “are we ready to implement a CLM successfully?” – which is exactly the question this guide is here to answer.

How do you know if you need a CLM in the first place?

Contracts often cause delays across the business – 57% of major companies say inefficiency contracting has led to revenue loss and missed opportunities – and legal teams are usually closest to the pressure of manual, repetitive work.  

When those challenges start showing up across sales, procurement and legal, from slowing deal cycles to limited visibility over contract status and obligations, it’s usually a sign your current process isn’t working.

Remember that readiness isn’t just about pain points, it’s about whether your organization is set up to fix them. If processes are unclear, templates are inconsistent or ownership sits entirely with legal, a CLM will expose those gaps quickly.

A useful test: if you can’t clearly explain how a contract moves from request to signature today, it’s worth addressing that before introducing new technology.

Summize customer Foth Companies recently went through their own CLM implementation and shared what worked – and what they’d do differently. Watch the full session here or read on for a practical breakdown of the steps that make the biggest difference.

How do you prepare for your CLM implementation? ‍

Define what success looks like

Some CLM projects struggle because the primary use case isn’t clearly defined upfront. Without clarity on what you’re actually trying to solve first, it’s easy for your scope to expand and for delivery to slow down.

Rather than trying to tackle everything at once, focus on the primary problem you want CLM to solve, for example:

• Reducing average contract turnaround time

• Increasing self-service for low-risk agreements (such as NDAs)

• Improving visibility into contract obligations or renewal dates

• Reducing time spent on repetitive review work

It’s also important to prioritize those use cases when it comes to implementation, so that you can start to value as soon as possible.

Define your primary use case and your first success milestone to try and create early momentum. Not sure how to determine your first success milestone? Learn which CLM KPIs might be useful to you in our full article.

Secure cross-functional alignment early

Contracts don’t sit with legal alone. Sales, procurement, finance, operations and your executive leadership all interact with them, and they all have different priorities. That makes CLM as much a change management exercise as it is a technology project.

Start by identifying every team that interacts with contracts and map out:

• Where they engage in the process

• What slows them down

• What a better experience would look like

Involving these stakeholders early improves the quality of your implementation, because it means you’re designing workflows that reflect how the business actually operates, rather than how you assume it operates.

Plus, it makes adoption significantly easier. Teams are far more likely to use a system they’ve had input into, especially if they can see how it benefits them directly. Read more about securing cross-departmental buy-in here. ‍

Do some housekeeping: getting your current process into a workable state

CLM is only as effective as the process it’s built on. If your current approach is inconsistent or unclear, technology will amplify those issues rather than solve them.  

Crucially, this doesn’t mean everything needs to be perfect! It just means it needs to be understood. In practice, this means getting specific about:

• Workflows – map how contracts move through your business today. Identify where bottlenecks occur, what approval routes exist and where manual work is slowing things down.

• Contracts – understand what contracts you have and where they live. Decide on which contracts should sit in your CLM repository, identify final versions and assess which templates are actually in use.

• Clauses – map out your final positions and start to build a library of which clauses matter to each contract.

This is often where you’ll uncover hidden complexities. A CLM isn’t a shortcut around poor drafting or inconsistent clauses – if your templates are causing friction now, they’ll carry on causing it post-implementation.

“You can end up in a cycle where you go and buy something without really knowing why and without analyzing that process first. If you don’t know the right process for doing things, you can’t automate that process in a way that’s effective.”
– Lily Schurra, Senior Commercial Counsel & Summize Legal Disruptor

Set up clear ownership and expectations for your project

Without clear ownership and structure, even well-prepared CLM implementation projects can stall.

Start by appointing a dedicated project owner who can be accountable for keeping things moving. Without this, decisions can slow down and progress can become dependent on a number of different people with different needs.

Once you have your project owner, be realistic about timings, deadlines and business-wide expectations. If you’re not sure how to map out the project, ask the question in your CLM demos and the various providers will be able to determine what a realistic timelines looks like.

Post-implementation: training, rollout and adoption

Post-implementation tasks can often be an afterthought, but they’re vital to your overall success.

Start with the tool’s roll-out. Many successful teams begin with a defined pilot group or start using their CLM software for the more routine, low-risk contracts (e.g. NDAs) before putting all their agreements through the system. This creates space to test, refine and build internal advocates before scaling.

Adoption is where a lot of value is either realized or lost when it comes to CLM. Good training and a structured rollout helps teams see that the process is easier and the benefits are clear. We find that one of the best ways to drive this is to position CLM in terms of individual impact…

• Sales teams can move faster with fewer blockers

• Procurement gets clearer approval pathways

• Legal reduces repetitive work and gains better visibility

Remember to remind your colleagues during training and rollout why the business has implemented a CLM and how it can benefit them. In our experience, teams that treat CLM as a business-wide change, rather than “just a legal tool”, tend to see significantly stronger adoption.  

Try the Summize approach to implementation

CLM projects may sound like a heavy lift, but success is much easier when you’ve put in the groundwork and partnered with a CLM vendor who provides plenty of structure and support.  

At Summize, our CLM implementation approach focuses on understanding your processes and priorities upfront, so you’re not forcing new technology onto broken workflows. From there, we don’t try and solve everything at once - we prioritize a single use case so you can start seeing value early (often within four weeks!).

“Summize has helped us build that trust between our team and the rest of the company. I think the fact you can see how many people are consistently using the software and navigate things more independently has built so much trust.”
– Lee Dorman, Contracts Administrator, Convey

If you’re exploring CLM, a demo isn’t just a product walkthrough – it’s a chance to map your use case, see how your processes could work in practice and understand what implementation would realistically look like for your team.