Accelerate Revenue by Connecting Pricing and Contracts

We talked about how contracts can slow you down. It’s the most important document or asset in your business. And a lot of people say it’s not just about what’s in them—it’s how you manage them.

Contracts are one asset that touches every corner of your organization. But in many companies, they’re the least visible, least governed, and least optimized. That’s why contract lifecycle management—or CLM—matters.

And when I ask people about CLM, I always bring them back to the “where, what, when, who, and how.”

Where are your contracts located? You’d be surprised how many people even in 2026 still have contracts in physical file cabinets in offices somewhere. Some have them on desktops. Some are sitting in SharePoint or Google Drive. And sometimes different teams have them in completely different systems.

What’s in them? What are the terms you agreed to? What are the prices?

When do you need action based on what you signed? Are there obligations you need to fulfill? Renewal dates you need to track? When do you need to reach out to a customer, prospect, or vendor to renegotiate?

What needs to change based on regulations, compliance, or law changes? And to speak to the current global climate—tariffs are changing daily, wars are impacting supply chains, and the way we do business is changing constantly depending on industry and geography. If you don’t know what’s in your contracts or aren’t being alerted when something changes, you can fall behind or even incur penalties.

Who needs access and interaction with those contracts? Who approves them? Who reviews them? Who acts on them?

And how risky and compliant are those contracts?

CLM transforms contracts from static documents into dynamic, data-rich assets that drive speed, compliance, and risk reduction across the business.

We’re going to move into a poll.

What percent of organizations report losing deals due to slow approvals?

This comes from a Conga study where we surveyed over 1,200 commerce leaders across the full commerce lifecycle.

Go ahead and lock in your answers.

The correct answer is 45% of organizations report losing deals due to slow approvals.

That was actually one of the more surprising findings—many people assume it’s closer to 10% or 25%, but nearly half of deals are slowed or lost due to approval delays.

So why are contracts difficult to manage?

First, manual contracting slows everything down. A lot of teams are still working contract by contract in Microsoft Word. Legal is often manually writing or editing clauses, changing terms, or updating dates.

No one owns the full process, and these manual steps slow everything down.

Second, teams are flying blind. Contracts live in inboxes, shared drives, outdated systems, CRMs, procurement tools, and legal platforms. Because they’re scattered, no one knows what’s been signed, what’s pending, or what’s expiring.

Third, compliance becomes reactive instead of built in. Without embedded playbooks, standards, or guardrails, audit readiness becomes a scramble instead of a standard.

Fourth, legal can’t scale. As contract volume grows—whether through business growth or seasonality—legal is expected to review, approve, or draft everything. That becomes impossible without automation.

And finally, obligation management is almost always an afterthought. Renewals get missed, termination windows are forgotten, supplier SLAs slip through the cracks. All of this costs money—and sometimes a lot of money.

So when you look at all of these issues together, it becomes clear: the problem isn’t the contracts themselves. It’s how we manage them.

That’s where CLM comes in.

CLM is contract lifecycle management. It manages a contract from the moment someone needs it all the way through renewal or termination.

Modern CLM is much more than workflow automation. It brings structure, automation, and intelligence into every stage of the lifecycle.

And we walk through this in a clockwise fashion across nine steps.

Store: A centralized repository where every contract lives in one place—active, expired, pending, or archived. This creates visibility, eliminates duplication, and forms the foundation for governance and reporting.

Request: Business users can initiate contracts through a guided self-service experience instead of emailing legal.

Drafting: Once approved, CLM assembles a first draft using templates, clause libraries, and playbooks. This ensures consistent language, correct data, and reduces legal workload.

Negotiation: This is where contracts often get messy—redlines, multiple versions, email threads. CLM introduces version control, side-by-side comparison, and increasingly AI-powered suggestions.

Approval: Contracts are automatically routed to the right people based on rules, thresholds, deal size, geography, or contract type. No guessing or chasing approvals.

Signature: Electronic signature tools allow contracts to be signed securely from any device without leaving the workflow.

Post-signature / obligations: This is where most companies struggle. CLM tracks obligations, SLAs, milestones, pricing terms, and renewal dates, and turns them into actionable tasks and alerts.

Compliance: Centralized storage and audit trails provide full traceability, making compliance proactive instead of reactive.

Amendment & renewal: Automated workflows handle renewals, amendments, upsells, cross-sells, and terminations—preventing revenue leakage and last-minute surprises.

We asked earlier which steps cause the most delays. Most people point to negotiation, renewals, or amendments—and that’s consistent across industries.

Even though all nine steps matter, customers consistently tell us a few capabilities drive the most value. So I want to focus on six key areas.

Centralized repository

This is the foundation of CLM. Every contract lives in one place—sales, supplier, partner agreements, NDAs, everything.

You get immediate visibility into status and content. You can search across clauses, dates, pricing, obligations, and counterparties.

And it eliminates manual searching across inboxes and drives, turning contracts into usable business intelligence.

This is also critical for AI—because without centralized data, AI cannot deliver meaningful insight.

Dynamic contract creation

This is one of the biggest drivers of speed and consistency.

Instead of manually building documents, users generate contracts from templates, clause libraries, and guided playbooks.

Data is pulled from systems like Salesforce, Dynamics, or procurement tools and merged into structured documents.

Legal defines guardrails upfront so users can self-serve safely without introducing risk.

This removes version confusion and ensures everyone is using approved, up-to-date language.

Negotiation and redlining

This is one of the most painful stages in contracting.

Multiple versions, conflicting edits, and email chains slow everything down.

CLM introduces structured redlining, version control, side-by-side comparison, and full audit history.

AI adds value by flagging risky clauses, highlighting deviations from policy, and suggesting fallback language from approved libraries.

This reduces manual legal effort and speeds up alignment.

Approval automation

This is the heart of contract governance.

Instead of manually routing contracts, CLM automatically sends them to the right people based on rules.

Approvals can be based on deal size, risk score, geography, contract type, or counterparty.

Every approval, comment, and revision is tracked in an audit trail, making reporting and compliance much easier.

Obligation management and risk tracking

This is one of the most overlooked areas.

Contracts are promises—but most organizations don’t track whether those promises are actually delivered.

CLM identifies obligations, assigns owners, triggers alerts, and tracks milestones like renewals, SLAs, and pricing commitments.

It also enables risk scoring based on non-standard clauses or negotiated deviations.

This ensures promises are fulfilled and revenue leakage is reduced.

Reporting and compliance

With structured contracts, organizations gain visibility they’ve never had before.

They can analyze cycle times, bottlenecks, renewal exposure, pricing trends, and risk patterns across departments and regions.

Audit readiness becomes built in instead of reactive.

Contracts become a strategic dataset—not just documentation.

When you put it all together, CLM transforms contracts from static documents into dynamic assets that drive the business.

It improves speed, visibility, compliance, scalability, and deal value—especially when paired with CPQ and pricing systems.

But the real test of CLM isn’t when things are stable. It’s when everything changes.

Southwest Airlines example

Southwest Airlines is a great example.

In late 2024, they announced a major shift from open seating to assigned seating after decades of operating one way. This impacted not just customers, but also contracts, partner agreements, and data structures across the business.

They had to update templates, clauses, pricing models, loyalty structures, and corporate travel agreements at scale—while still continuing to operate and sell.

With CLM in place, they centralized contract logic and enabled self-service generation directly in Salesforce. Sales reps could select templates, generate contracts on demand, and automatically pull in the correct data.

A single backend change could cascade across thousands of contracts.

This allowed them to continue selling while transforming their business model at the same time.

Final takeaway: CLM is not just about efficiency—it’s about resilience during change.

It brings structure, speed, visibility, control, and intelligence to the entire contracting lifecycle.

And it turns contracts into a lever for growth.

Conclusion / next steps

So with that, here are a few next suggested steps for you.

If you are not currently a Conga customer, you can schedule a demo and we’d be happy to walk you through how this might work for your organization.

If you are already a customer and don’t have CLM, we recommend reaching out to your CSM to explore whether it’s a fit.

You’ll also see options to connect and get a demo with Conga in action.

And for Conga customers, there are additional resources available:

• Becoming a member of the Conga customer community is a great way to connect with other customers and learn how they’re using the platform. 
• There is also a Conga CLM user group to connect specifically around CLM use cases. 
• And there is an upcoming CLM user group virtual meetup on May 7th that customers can join. 

And that’s it—thank you everyone for joining, and we’re here if you have any questions.

Thanks so much. Bye.

CLM is software that manages the entire contract process from creation and negotiation through execution, compliance tracking, renewal, and termination. 

Contracts govern revenue, spending, obligations, risk, compliance, and vendor or customer relationships across the organization. 

Manual processes create delays, poor visibility, inconsistent compliance, legal bottlenecks, and missed obligations or renewals. 

CLM centralizes contracts, automates workflows, streamlines approvals, standardizes templates, improves reporting, and helps organizations manage obligations more effectively. 

AI helps analyze contracts, identify risk, recommend clauses, summarize agreements, surface insights, and accelerate reviews. 

The webinar recommends keeping humans involved in approvals and legal oversight while using AI as a supportive tool rather than a fully autonomous system. 

It is a single location where organizations store and manage all contracts for easier visibility, governance, reporting, and compliance. 

Organizations often lose revenue after contracts are signed because they miss renewals, pricing reviews, or service obligations. 

Automated workflows route contracts to the correct stakeholders based on business rules, reducing delays and creating audit trails. 

CLM provides structure, visibility, and governance when organizations face regulatory shifts, evolving business models, or market volatility.