Most businesses spend a lot of energy optimizing their pricing, configuring their products, and perfecting the quote. But there's a step in the commercial process that often gets less attention—and it's the one that actually determines whether you can recognize revenue, fulfill your obligations, and grow the relationship with your customers. It's the contract.
In a recent Conga webinar, CLM expert Brad Brochocki walked through why contract lifecycle management has become one of the most important investments a business can make, and what it actually looks like to get it right. Here's what stood out.
It's easy to think of contracts as a legal formality — something that happens at the end of the sales process before the real work begins. But as Brad put it, contracts govern every revenue and spend channel in a company. Sales agreements, renewals, licenses, supplier relationships, outsourcing arrangements — every dollar that flows in or out of a business is tied to a contract somewhere. They define risk, compliance, and accountability. And they connect almost every team: sales, legal, procurement, finance, operations, and even HR.
Despite all of that, contracts tend to be the least visible, least governed, and least optimized asset in most organizations. Many companies still manage them out of physical file cabinets, desktop folders, or scattered SharePoint drives — with no central view of what's been signed, what's expiring, or what obligations are coming due.
According to Conga's own research across more than 1,200 commerce leaders, 45% of organizations report losing deals due to slow contract approvals. And when asked how many deals move smoothly across teams from start to close, the answer was just 7%.
The reasons are familiar: manual processes that move contract by contract, legal teams stretched too thin, approvals that go to the wrong people or get lost in inboxes, and no single place to see where anything stands. The result is longer sales cycles, more last-minute negotiation, and revenue that takes longer to recognize than it should.
Contract lifecycle management is the system that takes contracts from static documents to dynamic, data-rich assets that drive speed, compliance, and risk reduction across a business. Brad walked through nine stages of the contract lifecycle — from storing and requesting contracts, through drafting, negotiation, approval, and signature, all the way to obligation management, compliance, and renewal — and highlighted six capabilities that his customers consistently point to as most transformative.
A centralized repository is the foundation. When every contract, active, expired, or pending, lives in one searchable place, teams gain immediate visibility into what's been signed, what's coming up, and what needs attention. It also becomes the foundation for everything else, including AI — because AI can't analyze what it can't find.
Dynamic contract creation removes the reliance on outdated Word templates and version confusion. With CLM, legal teams can build approved templates and clause libraries on the back end, and sales teams can generate contracts on demand from their CRM without ever touching the underlying legal language. Legal stops being a bottleneck and starts being a guardrail.
Automated approval workflows route contracts to the right people based on deal size, contract type, risk score, or geography — without anyone having to chase down signatures or guess who needs to be involved. Every approval, comment, and revision is captured in an audit trail.
Obligation management is what Brad called the most overlooked capability in contracting. Most financial leakage doesn't happen during negotiation. It happens after the contract is signed — in missed renewal windows, forgotten SLAs, and price review dates that slip past unnoticed. CLM makes those obligations trackable, assigns ownership, and sends notifications before anything falls through.
AI is showing up in every CLM roadmap right now, and it genuinely adds value in the right places — surfacing renewal dates, flagging risky clauses, recommending language deviations, and analyzing contract trends across a portfolio. But Brad was clear about where the line should be: AI works well as a copilot, not as the author. Fully automated contract generation without a human in the loop introduces risk that most businesses aren't comfortable with, and for good reason. One missed word in a legal contract can create significant exposure. The right approach is AI-assisted, human-approved.
When Southwest Airlines announced in late 2024 that they would move from open seating to assigned seats — ending a policy they'd held for 50 years — it set off a chain reaction across their entire business. Partnerships changed. Pricing models changed. Contract structures changed. And a team of four people was responsible for updating fifteen contract templates, thousands of agreements already in circulation, and every new corporate travel agreement going forward.
With Conga CLM already in place, they were able to make those changes on the back end without disrupting the flow of how their salespeople worked. Account managers could still go into Salesforce, generate a corporate travel agreement on demand, and send it for signature — and the contract that came out reflected the latest approved language, fare structures, and terms. The team didn't get buried. They became the heroes of one of the most significant business transformations in the company's history.
The connection between pricing and contracting is more direct than most teams realize. Optimizing a price is only valuable if that price makes it into a contract accurately, gets signed quickly, and is then tracked and enforced through the life of the agreement. When pricing, CPQ, and CLM work together as a connected system, the full commerce chain closes — and businesses can move faster, reduce risk, and grow customer relationships with confidence.
Watch the full webinar on demand to go deeper on any of these topics.
Contract lifecycle management is the end-to-end system for managing contracts from creation through execution, fulfillment, and renewal. CLM takes contracts from static documents to dynamic, data-rich assets that drive speed, compliance, and risk reduction across a business — spanning nine stages including storing and requesting contracts, drafting, negotiation, approval, signature, obligation management, compliance, and renewal. It matters because contracts govern every revenue and spend channel in a company — sales agreements, renewals, licenses, supplier relationships, and outsourcing arrangements — meaning every dollar that flows in or out of a business is tied to a contract somewhere.
The cost is measurable and significant. According to Conga research across more than 1,200 commerce leaders, 45% of organizations report losing deals due to slow contract approvals, and when asked how many deals move smoothly across teams from start to close, the answer was just 7%. The root causes are familiar: manual processes that move contract by contract, legal teams stretched too thin, approvals that go to the wrong people or get lost in inboxes, and no single place to see where anything stands — resulting in longer sales cycles, more last-minute negotiation, and revenue that takes longer to recognize than it should.
The article identifies six capabilities that deliver the most consistent business value:
Centralized repository — when every contract, active, expired, or pending, lives in one searchable place, teams gain immediate visibility into what's been signed, what's coming up, and what needs attention. It also becomes the foundation for AI — because AI can't analyze what it can't find.
Dynamic contract creation — legal teams build approved templates and clause libraries on the back end, and sales teams can generate contracts on demand from their CRM without ever touching the underlying legal language, so legal stops being a bottleneck and starts being a guardrail.
Automated approval workflows — routing contracts to the right people based on deal size, contract type, risk score, or geography, with a full audit trail of every approval, comment, and revision.
Obligation management — the most overlooked CLM capability: most financial leakage doesn't happen during negotiation, it happens after the contract is signed, in missed renewal windows, forgotten SLAs, and price review dates that slip past unnoticed.
Contracts define risk, compliance, and accountability and connect almost every team: sales, legal, procurement, finance, operations, and even HR. Without a managed system, many companies still manage contracts out of physical file cabinets, desktop folders, or scattered SharePoint drives — with no central view of what's been signed, what's expiring, or what obligations are coming due. CLM addresses this by making obligations trackable, assigning ownership, and sending notifications before deadlines pass. Automated approval workflows also ensure the right stakeholders review every contract, with a complete audit trail capturing every change — reducing the exposure that comes from ad hoc, inbox-based review processes.
AI adds genuine value in CLM — but with important boundaries. AI works well for surfacing renewal dates, flagging risky clauses, recommending language deviations, and analyzing contract trends across a portfolio. But the right approach is AI-assisted, human-approved: fully automated contract generation without a human in the loop introduces risk that most businesses aren't comfortable with, and for good reason — one missed word in a legal contract can create significant exposure. The best CLM implementations treat AI as a copilot that accelerates review and surfaces insights, while keeping human judgment in the final approval loop.
