How to Know if You’re Ready for a Successful CLM Implementation

Key takeaways:

• Start your implementation with a single, focused contract type or use case rather than attempting to automate all workflows simultaneously, as this approach creates quick wins that build momentum and increases your chances of success.
• Prepare your existing contracts and processes before implementing any software by standardizing templates, documenting workflows, cleaning up terminology, and determining business-critical data, because technology will only automate whatever chaos already exists in your current system.
• Secure an executive sponsor and create a comprehensive stakeholder map early in the planning process, identifying who will interact with contracts, when, and how the system will benefit them, to prevent implementation roadblocks and ensure adoption.
• Allocate dedicated time for your team to learn the platform after kickoff, as it takes organizations an average of six months to launch their first ten workflows, and attempting to squeeze implementation between other responsibilities significantly delays time to value.

Contracting teams face a double-edged problem. Contracting is often treated as a cost center, yet implementing a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool to fix it is its own challenge—one that stops a lot of teams before they even get started.

The stakes are high. The 2021 EY Law Survey revealed that a majority of business leaders experience revenue interruption because of contracting issues. Contracts touch every part of the business—as much as 60–80% of all B2B deals are governed by them—and when the process is disorganized, the whole organization slows down with it.

The good news is that teams that implement a CLM see real, measurable results—often within months. Consider these outcomes from successful implementations:

• Signifyd now reviews contracts 85 times faster
• Qualia cut average contract time from 20 days to less than five
• Rippling uploads legacy contracts 40-50% faster while capturing 2-3 times more contract data

But getting there takes work. Gartner predicts that almost half of first-time CLM implementations will fail to deliver expected benefits—not because the technology doesn’t work, but because teams underestimate what’s involved in making it stick.

The complexities of implementing a CLM can deter organizations from trying one for the first time. They can also prevent teams from moving to a new solution. But understanding these challenges upfront dramatically improves your odds of success. This guide will walk you through how to know when you’re ready, what typically goes wrong, and how to set yourself up to actually get there.

What is CLM implementation?

Let’s start with the basics. CLM implementation is the whole process of getting a contract lifecycle management system set up and running in your company. It’s not just about flipping a switch on new software. It’s about figuring out your current contract process, deciding what you want to improve, choosing the right tool, and then actually getting your team to use it.

Think of it as moving from a messy kitchen with ingredients scattered everywhere to a fully organized one where everything has a place and you have recipes to follow. It involves planning, data migration, workflow setup, training, and getting people on board with a new way of working.

Why CLM implementation matters for your business

Faster deal cycles and fewer bottlenecks

Sales teams hate waiting on legal. When you automate standard agreements and give them self-service tools, they can move faster without creating risk. The 2026 Contracting Benchmark Report found that mid-market organizations with focused implementations completed contracts 13% faster year over year, dropping their average execution time from 36 to 32 days. Deals that used to take weeks can get done in days, or even hours. That means more revenue, faster.

Better visibility and reduced risk

Where are all your contracts? What risks are hiding in them? Without a CLM, it’s almost impossible to know—contract data is typically fragmented across numerous systems. Implementation brings all your agreements into one place, making them searchable. You can finally get a handle on your obligations, track renewals, and ensure compliance without having to read every single document manually.

Doing more without adding headcount

Let’s be real, legal and ops teams are almost always understaffed—59% of CLOs report increased workload year over year. A CLM automates the repetitive, low-value work that eats up your day. Instead of chasing signatures or reviewing the same NDA for the tenth time, your team can focus on strategic work that actually requires their expertise. You scale your impact without scaling your payroll.

Signs you’re ready for a CLM

Getting approval and adoption of any software is challenging, particularly if multiple teams and departments use it. So it’s understandable if you want to ensure a CLM is your organization’s best bet.

Generally, there are two scenarios where you might consider a new CLM:

1. Your team has never had a CLM and wants to centralize your contracts and speed up the contracting process
2. You’ve outgrown your current CLM and you’re interested in a new one

Here are signs you might fall in one of those categories.

A first-time CLM can benefit you if:

• Your company is growing quickly. Your workload is scaling but you can’t hire more help. A CLM automates tasks so you can manage more with the same team size.
• There’s a due diligence event coming up. IPOs and M&A require organized contracts. A central repository lets you easily find information and contracts to move due diligence faster.
• Your teams are doing repetitive work. Simple manual tasks add up. Even accessing a template saved to your desktop creates hours of lost time and potential errors.
• You don’t have insight into agreements. Contracts can help you understand what works and what needs improvement. You need data visibility to make that happen. If you can’t at a moment’s notice produce a report of where all inflight contracts are or surface details of your executed contracts, then you’re ready for CLM. It’s not just about saving time; it’s a sign that you don’t have eyes or control over some of your most critical business documents, which is a risk to the entire organization.
• Your legal department is a cost center instead of a revenue driver. Legal teams can get a rep as being the place where deals go to stop. With a CLM, however, your team can empower decision-making across the board. For example, we use our own platform to understand how long it takes to turn a contract on our paper vs. counterparty paper, plus how likely a deal is to close and when based on redline edits. That information is vital for sales forecasting and reporting to the CFO.
• The legal team is spending too much time on low-level tasks. Your legal team didn’t go through law school with the hopes of reviewing and processing identical NDAs every day. A CLM automates standard agreements to free up legal time to review impactful decisions and dedicate attention to satisfying work.

A newer CLM solution can benefit you if:

• You’ve reached the limit of available features. As your contract processes evolve, your tools might need to as well. Finding a new CLM will help if you feel restricted by your current features or account limits. For example, does your current CLM make it easy to collaborate internally and externally? Single-click contract acceptance, compatibility with various document sources, and integrations with third-party apps all make it easier to work together.
• You can can’t easily make changes to contracts. If you can’t update contract terms and approvals on your own, you have an opportunity to save a lot of back-and-forth time with a CLM with easy edits.
• There’s low adoption because the tool isn’t intuitive. Mary O’Carroll, legal operations legend and former CLOC president, believes that “the real value of the CLM is data. If there’s no adoption, there’s no data. Or there’s garbage data. A great repository is mute if nobody is using the thing.” It doesn’t matter how great the tool looks on paper if it’s difficult to use.
• There isn’t a robust repository that helps you learn and improve. Suppose your current CLM has strong adoption but is just a digital dumping ground. In that case, it could be time for a change. 71% of companies don’t systematically track contractual obligations, which can cause serious liabilities. A dynamic repository that lets you find answers quickly and receive alerts to stay on top of renewals and responsibilities can transform your process.

Why CLM implementations fail

You’ve probably heard the horror stories—Gartner says almost half of first-time CLM projects don’t deliver. It’s not because the software is bad. It’s usually because of people and process problems.

Teams get excited about the tech but forget about the human side of things. They don’t get buy-in from leadership, they try to automate everything at once, or they pick a tool that’s too complicated for anyone to actually use. The result? An expensive piece of software that nobody uses, and you’re right back to managing contracts in email and shared drives. But it doesn’t have to be a resource drain—according to Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership for CLM, 88% of our customers require no additional professional services to manage their platform.

Here’s what typically goes wrong:

• No executive sponsor. Without someone with influence championing the project, it’s easy for implementation to stall when competing priorities emerge.
• Trying to do too much at once. Rolling out every contract type and workflow simultaneously is a recipe for overwhelm. The most successful teams start small and expand.
• Underestimating change management. People are creatures of habit. If you don’t invest in training and communication, they’ll find workarounds that bypass your shiny new system.
• Messy data and processes. Tech won’t fix a broken process—it’ll just automate the chaos. You need clean inputs to get clean outputs.

The good news? These pitfalls are avoidable with the right preparation.

Download the 2026 CLM buyer’s guide

How to prepare for a new CLM

Deploying any new software is a large task, but you can drastically improve your chances of success by doing the proper prep work and following the advice from experts and fellow contracting teams below.

Prepare your existing contracts and processes

Preparing your inputs is the first step to preparing for your new CLM. This groundwork determines whether your implementation succeeds or struggles.

Tech won’t solve every problem. You must be ready to use the tool to the best of your ability. To do this, you need to:

1. Ensure you have a single approved template for contracts
2. Review contracting processes so everyone is on the same page, and document it so you can quickly transfer it to an automated CLM workflow
3. Look for document redundancies and clear out repetitive, obsolete, and trivial records
4. Clean up your terminology and taxonomy to standardize data
5. Determine what record types are business critical and what data is important to stakeholders
6. Evaluate your data retention policy

Choose a starting goal

No matter the size of your ambitions, you should start your CLM implementation strategically small. Starting small creates quick wins that build momentum.

“Trying to do an end-to-end rollout managing every contract type and pleasing everyone at once is hard. Instead, focus on one group, roll something out there, please them, delight them, get them super happy, and then you can get to the next stage and the next group that you want to roll out to,” Mary O’Carroll shared.

Three proven approaches can guide your starting point: low-hanging fruit, highest-impact contracts, or contract centralization.

The easiest option prioritizes your most-used, simple agreement, like an NDA. Alternatively, you could follow the footsteps of the FabFitFun team, as Katie Young, the brand’s legal administrative manager, shared:

Starting with their highest-impact contract type and rebuilding the workflow around it paid off—FabFitFun reduced the number of their Master Purchasing Agreements (MPA) that required negotiation from 98% down to 1%.

The New York Times took a different approach by getting all of their contracts into one centralized repository. During their internal research leading up to implementing a CLM, Lyndsay Cain, director of legal operations, said a primary pain point was that teams couldn’t find the contracts they needed to reference and were unsure of their obligations. Because contract visibility was the issue stakeholders cared most about, that’s where they focused first—starting with centralization rather than trying to automate everything at once. An attainable, focused change like building a repository was also easier to get buy-in for across a large organization. Now, the legal team can easily search and analyze agreements.

Identify stakeholders

Identifying stakeholders early prevents implementation roadblocks later. Andrew Bartels, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, shared in a webinar about the effect of CLM(https://ironcladapp.wpengine.com/resources/webinars/how-clm-delivers-insights-and-strategic-value), “Contracts are the core of the relationship you have with customers and buyers. So that means they matter to legal, procurement, and sales. It’s also worth noting that other stakeholders are also interested, like CFOs.”

Create a stakeholder map before implementation begins. Write out who they are, their role, when they’ll interact with a contract, and how it will help them. This list tells you exactly who you need to get on board.

Create a project plan

Once you’ve done the prep work for your CLM implementation, it’s time to get to work. Creating a checklist of action items keeps you focused on high-priority tasks. Think stakeholders to onboard, legacy data to input, and workflows to build.

One thing teams consistently underestimate: how much dedicated time the platform actually requires upfront. The benchmark report reveals that across industries, it takes organizations an average of about six months (178 days) to launch their first 10 workflows. You’ll need to set aside hours specifically to learn the system and build out your processes—not squeeze it in between other work.

Ready to move forward?

If you’re ready to deploy a new CLM for your organization, request a demo today.

Frequently asked questions about CLM implementation

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.