In the summer of 2018, I found myself unemployed and dreaming of what would become Marshfield Consulting. As I began to sketch out plans for the business, I reviewed start-up playbooks, talked to other founders, and I even attended a bootcamp.  Researching how to start and run a company through those methods helped me identify a number of known areas to address. For example, I knew I needed to be prepared to handle complex HR issues, so I acquired an HRIS platform. I anticipated the demands of finance, billing, and payments, and invested in the necessary technology and human resources. I was ready to implement best practices in Sales, so I set up a CRM and equipped it with top-notch tools to manage our pipeline and customer contacts. I prepared for these and other known challenges, confident in my ability to navigate them.

What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the sheer volume of Contract Management required to operate and grow the business. It almost seems ironic now, given what we do, that I was caught off guard by this. As a founder, you find yourself naturally filling in the gaps. I found myself personally involved in activities around signing, creating, reviewing, and approving all contracts including Sales, Vendor, Employment, Partnership, and every other odd and end from Catering to Equipment. With what turned out to be an active and steady heartbeat of CLM activities, along with everything else on my plate as a founder, having defined a CLM strategy and implemented a dedicated toolkit to manage our process has been crucial.  

It’s been an evolution, but today we generate contracts using well groomed data from our CRM with the click of a few buttons, we route contracts amongst ourselves for review through an auditable workflow, we have implemented approval rules for signing using a configurable set of variables, we share agreements with our clients for redlining or signature depending on the situation using our CLM tool to orchestrate those activities, we maintain a repository of contracts that notifies us proactively of expirations and renewals, and we have single location to look to see where all the in-flight contracts are in the process and which may require a nudge. Without these tools and processes we’ve implemented for ourselves around CLM, the burden would be significantly heavier today and it is clear that Contract Management has been and remains a core element of our business – much like HR, Sales, or Finance.  

Our journey and success with CLM is not unique and in just a few short years, Marshfield Consulting has assisted over 100 clients with their CLM challenges, spanning industries such as Health and Life Sciences, Technology, Financial Services, Education, Nonprofit, Real Estate, Telecommunications, and Government sectors. We’ve seen CLM successfully deployed across various company sizes and verticals, including our own and feel strongly that CLM should be recognized as a critical business function with a dedicated toolkit.  We should give our Contracts Users across Legal, Sales, Procurement, and HR powerful CLM tools just like we give our accountants ERP/Accounting tools and we give our sales teams CRM tools. We should do this, but often CLM remains overlooked and underserved within the enterprise.

At Marshfield Consulting, we aim to change that. With our decades of experience and after thousands of conversations across hundreds of clients and projects, we’ve identified 10 CLM Pillars we see included as part of every CLM process where mastery is essential for any organization looking to optimize their contract management. These 10 pillars represent a way of thinking about your CLM process, a way to decompose the end-to-end process into smaller, addressable areas and they represent not just a current state of how you to do things, but also a future state where best practices have been applied and CLM processes are running optimally. Most importantly, the 10 pillars of the Marshfield Method represent a way to frame the conversation and a way to bring CLM out of the shadows and into the forefront of strategic business operations.