Gong Centralizes Contract Management for Enhanced Efficiency and Risk Mitigation

Company overview

Gong provides a Revenue AI platform that helps revenue teams improve productivity, increase forecast accuracy, and drive growth by deeply understanding customer interactions and market signals. Gong works with over 4,500 organizations to turn customer interaction data into actionable insights and revenue-driving workflows, delivering the insights and automations global enterprises need to power their go-to-market teams.

“Gong provides revenue teams and commercial organizations with real-time insights into what’s going on with their deals, what’s going on with their customer accounts and interactions,” explains Gabriella Hoffmann, Legal Counsel at Gong. “We’ve found that CRMs have a lot of dated info and rely heavily on manual entry. Gong’s AI and automatic data capture has really taken away all of the manual input that’s needed to get those real-time insights.”

The challenge: Scattered documents and limited visibility

Before implementing Ironclad, Gong struggled with contract management processes that were highly manual and inefficient. Documents were scattered across multiple systems that didn’t speak to each other, making it difficult to locate agreements when needed and nearly impossible to generate reliable insights.

“We would get asked by our CFO, ‘Hey, I’m trying to gauge risk and I need to know how many agreements have this type of provision or this type of liability,’” recalls Hoffmann. “There was no way for us to do that without manually pulling and reviewing each one of our agreements.”

The legal and procurement teams faced several key challenges:

1. No single source of truth: Legal and procurement contracts were scattered across multiple systems
2. Limited search capabilities: Finding contracts required searching Google Drive and team emails
3. Poor data extraction: Inability to pull insights or generate accurate reports
4. System integration issues: Different teams like Sales, Procurement, and Legal used separate tools that didn’t communicate with each other 
5. Scaling constraints: As the company continued to grow, document access became more critical and time pressing.

Process management and oversight, particularly in procurement, was also a big challenge. 

The solution: Implementing Ironclad as the central CLM platform

After evaluating several contract management solutions, Gong selected Ironclad. The platform’s integration capabilities, particularly with Zip (Gong’s procurement system), were decisive factors in their choice.

Key features that stood out during their evaluation:

1. Zip integration: Seamless connection with Gong’s procurement system
2. API capabilities: Ability to build custom integrations that worked with their Salesforce setup
3. Smart Import: Automatic scanning of documents to extract key data
4. Search functionality: User-friendly interface that enabled both legal and non-legal teams to find documents easily

Implementation process

Gong set up four main workflows in Ironclad:

• Ad hoc legal and InfoSec
• Partners
• Proof of concepts
• Standard vendor contracts

The integration with Zip, which handles a significant portion of Gong’s contracts, was remarkably straightforward. “That process was very easy for us,” says MacKay. “The implementation team at Ironclad gave us a pretty simple workflow. And we’ve basically been using that ever since…we just map the fields on the integration and press go.”

For the Salesforce integration, Gong built a custom connection rather than using the managed package, allowing them to tailor the solution to how their sales team uses Salesforce. “We didn’t want to shift sales rep behavior, so building out our own integration through Ironclad’s API allowed us to implement Ironclad without changing how our commercial organization operates,” explained Hoffmann.

Results: From four systems to one reliable source

Implementing Ironclad has transformed Gong’s contract management processes, delivering significant improvements in efficiency, visibility, and risk management. The company now processes approximately 10,000 contracts annually through the system.

Operational improvements

1. Centralized repository: “Before, our teams had to search in four different places to try to find an agreement. And now it’s one,” says Hoffmann. 
2. Enhanced data reliability: MacKay emphasizes, “Having one repository is way more reliable because we know that it’s the definitive single source of truth.” 
3. Risk mitigation: “The whole point [of the Zip integration] is nothing should get signed unless all these approval steps are completed. And Ironclad is part of that system and that process that can’t be broken,” explains Hoffmann. “We know the document, once it’s signed, once it’s approved, will get into Ironclad.” 
4. Better reporting:  “We can pull really great reports, and confidently provide accurate data to our C-suite,” notes Hoffmann. 

Practical applications

Ironclad has enabled Gong to respond effectively to various business needs:

• Risk assessment: When a company leader requests information about specific provisions, commercials or liabilities, users can easily search for relevant terms and generate accurate reports. 
• Marketing collaborations: “Marketing wants a whole list of all customers that have case study commitments…we’re actually able to do that,” says Hoffmann. “It might be a case study. It might be a press release. It might be a testimonial…and we’re pretty easily able to pull that.” 
• Contract value analysis: The platform allows Gong to track how many contracts exceed certain value thresholds, providing insights into customer spending patterns that they communicate back to the business. 

A user-friendly solution for legal teams

Beyond functionality, Gong values Ironclad’s intuitive user interface, which helps overcome resistance to new technology.

“Lawyers in particular can be pretty resistant to change,” observes Hoffmann. “Our whole team has found the interface to be really user friendly with Ironclad. I feel like I could add anyone to the system, non-lawyer or lawyer, and they could figure out how to use it and how to find things.”

For a relatively small legal team of seven attorneys supporting a growing company, this ease of use has been critical to successful adoption and continued value creation.

Overall, Gong’s implementation of Ironclad has transformed their contract management from a fragmented, manual process to a streamlined, centralized system. By establishing a single source of truth for all contracts and enabling powerful search and reporting capabilities, Ironclad has helped Gong mitigate risk, improve data quality, and free their legal team to focus on higher-value work.