Like enterprise tools, the growth of contract management has been sudden and explosive. But that is not where the similarities end (or even begin.)

In 2006, Workday Human Capital Management served a very niche audience of HR and Finance professionals looking to track and adjust company resources. ~34 major updates and a blistering IPO later, Workday is a $60 billion tool that helps virtually every employee seek training, mark leaves, track finances, and resolve any issues that may impede their work.

The key? Understanding their own use-cases better. Workday was never in the business of employee analytics or resource allocation. It was in the business of employee enablement.

It is the same question that contract management platforms must ask themselves. Are they building exclusively for lawyers to process agreements faster? Or are they building to remove friction and accelerate businesses?

But to answer that question they must first identify - who can derive value from what they do?

Who is contract management really for? And why should you care?

Contracts are assets that every team in the business should care about. Every transaction/condition - whether initiated by your sales team, HR team, or any other team is documented and governed through contracts.

And while lawyers are involved in the drafting and editing process, they do not always have a high degree of involvement in most agreements (e.g. sales or employment agreements). Is it really necessary then, that lawyers are held accountable for contracting?

On the other hand, dependence on the legal team for contracts also holds your business teams back. They typically have minimal oversight in the process of editing the contract until lawyers actually send them back. The result - multiple teams working on the same project with maximum dependability and the least amount of visibility.

That’s what contract management resolves. Let’s say your sales team needs to remove set-up costs from the sales contract for a lucrative potential customer. Typically they would reach out to legal and wait for the changes. But with a contract management software, they could create the contract, make these statutory edits and send it out - all by themselves.

The result - what could require multiple rounds of follow-ups and checking ins is essentially made self-serve.

Contract management is challenging the notion that lawyers need to be involved in administrative tasks like these. And in turn, they make contracts democratic.

At the end of the day, therefore, the contract process can be owned end-to-end by anyone. And hence contract management is for everyone in the business.

Also read: 8 Top Contract Management Software Platforms

So, what is the value proposition?

For contract management, the value is (or needs to be) simple - making contracts self-serving for all teams, while simplifying organization-wide access to information.

When other teams are involved in the contract management process, they don’t only work faster, they are also enabled to dig for work-defining information from the contracts at will.

This means finding out the deal value for a particular customer is much easier, as is finding out the agreement expiry dates for your contractual employees, or tracking how much money was spent on freelancers for the quarter.

Cooperation is good, integration - better

For finance teams, reaching out to HR would definitely get the answer to - “how much did the company spend on the hiring budget this quarter?” But, it would also increase dependency and make it time-consuming.

On the other hand, contract management platforms like SpotDraft can immediately go through existing employee agreements and find the total expenditures in virtually minutes. Without having to interrupt anyone else’s work.

Today’s contract management tools are betting heavily on integrating with other SaaS tools being used by your organization. Some tools like SpotDraft provide custom API integrations that let the contract management platform exchange data with virtually any other tool.

This means no more emails, document sharing, and faster knowledge transfer across any two (or more) teams. In the blink of an eye.

How to implement contract management, then?

Contract management can give you the best results if you take away the unnecessary restriction of it being legal tech.

When you do the bulk repetitive tasks of selecting templates, initiating everyday contracts, or even inventorizing them from the legal team, you don’t only save them time. You also empower every team within the business to initiate and close client discussions end-to-end with minimal need for external intervention.

Instead of a top-down legal first implementation, therefore, contract management needs to be imbibed laterally. This ensures that there is also equal access to knowledge, greater accountability into key operations (by the ability to track a diverse set of agreements), and an accelerated business.