Legal industry analyst Ari Kaplan speaks with Hiro Notaney, the chief marketing officer at contract management software platform SirionLabs, about the real value of contract performance management.
Ari Kapan
Tell us about your background and your role at SirionLabs.
Hiro Notaney
As CMO of Sirion, I am responsible for our brand and market presence, which involves engaging our key stakeholders, customers, employees, and partners, as well as generating interest in and demand for our products. Prior to Sirion, I led marketing at Agiloft, another software company in the contract management space, but started my career in the airline industry. I made the jump into tech a couple of decades ago, and since then, I’ve worked at Oracle and Deloitte, among other mid size public companies, pre-IPO businesses, and startups.
Ari Kaplan
What are the advantages of leveraging contract management software in the modern practice of law?
Hiro Notaney
We have found that the general counsel and leaders in the law department are primarily concerned with risk, regulatory compliance, and identifying who is responsible when things don’t go as planned. They deploy contract management software to mitigate their risk. It also saves the legal team from hours and hours of unnecessary contract review. Given that modern commerce runs on contracts, including NDAs, sales agreements, and vendor contracts, many of which are intricate. A system that can highlight specific provisions that legal professionals need to review drives tremendous efficiency.
Ari Kaplan
How does the growth of the contract management sector reflect changes in how law firms and law departments manage their agreements?
Hiro Notaney
Legal departments are increasingly leveraging technology beyond standard word processing and the pandemic accelerated 10 years of digital transformation into two. When people were initially forced to work from home, many organizations realized that they stored important documents in too many places, including on individual laptops or in physical filing cabinets. In an effort to address this risk, law department leaders have been focusing on digitizing their legal documents and making them more accessible. From e-signatures to document review, legal teams are deploying new tools to support their efforts.
Ari Kaplan
Given the increased competition, how can a marketing leader in this area distinguish its brand?
Hiro Notaney
Ultimately, it helps to have real value that differentiates your product from the competition because then marketing is about communicating it to an interested audience in a way that resonates. One of our key differentiators, for example, is measuring contract performance against contractual commitment. Basically, we ensure that our users are getting what they are owed in their contracts. The conventional approach to contract lifecycle management has been to start with a contract repository, then add workflows, negotiation capability, integrations with enterprise systems, and analytics. Only after that does a standard software vendor in this sector start thinking about contract performance management, which is really where the value lies. We are unique among CLM vendors because we started our journey building extensive performance management capabilities. For instance, our software automates monitoring obligations in a contract and tracks compliance, using data to validate performance against incoming invoices. If there are any discrepancies, our users can seek compensation for the agreed upon amounts, which generates hard-dollar savings. A leading investment bank using Sirion Labs saved close to $10 million in supplier non-compliance payments and an airline using the software identified $8 million in revenue opportunities through effective delivery of required in their customer contracts. Supporting this stage of the contracting process has been a real differentiator for us in the marketplace.
Ari Kaplan
You’ve led marketing for several companies. How has the development of a marketing strategy changed?
Hiro Notaney
One of the big changes I have seen over the course of my career is the effectiveness of being authentic versus hype-ing. Whether it’s in the language we use on our social media channels, or generally being straightforward and collaborative, it is just good business to be trustworthy, which is why customer experience is the foundation of marketing today. Happy customers will share their experience and so will those who are unhappy. As a foundational element of your reputation, you should stay engaged with your customers so you know who’s happy and what to fix of one is unhappy. We have a customer event coming up for the first time since the pandemic started and it is called Engage.
Ari Kaplan
How do you see contract management evolving?
Hiro Notaney
I see contract management evolving with more maturity at all levels, from authoring, negotiation, clause analysis, and risk analysis, which will all eventually be automated. I also see the rise of contract performance management, which is often related to the maturity of an organization’s CLM system. For large enterprises, the real value is less in the efficiency savings contract management tools offer in authoring, negotiation, and workflow acceleration. Rather, it is about ensuring that users are receiving the value they are owed in their contracts, which is our vision for the future of contract management.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspectives, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology at http://www.ReinventingProfessionals.com.
Listen to his conversation with Hiro Notaney here: