I’ve spent most of my career in enterprise software.

A big part of selling and renewing software into the enterprise is ensuring that you’re delivering measurable value to as wide of a population as possible.

One way to measure this value is through seat adoption.

*How many individual users have access and are using your platform?*

Sales and CS teams typically get compensated against this type of adoption. Investors obsess over it.

Another arguably better way to measure this value is not through product adoption, but through impact. Or what comes out of the adoption.

  • How is the platform improving our business (revenue, risk, efficiency)?
  • What actionable insights are we learning about our business through this platform?
  • What data driven story can we tell to our CEO/CFO to justify the on-going cost of this software?

Typically this impact is delivered through dashboards, executive reporting, quarterly business reviews, etc.

One very surprising learning from our CLM research is how few expectations there are for impact (and dashboards) in this market.

We hear:

“It’s better than it was before.”

“We can find contracts faster.”

“It organized our contracts.”

“Sales can self serve now.”

These statements represent real value, to be clear.

But it’s not enterprise value. It’s legal operations value. And it's largely unmeasured.

And maybe that’s enough for CLM.

But when you consider that CLM software licensing fees are typically in the $50K to $150K range, it does beg the question whether we should be pushing toward a more meaningful metric of value.

‍

Back to all posts