In this feature,
WebsitePlanet hears from
Chief Marketing Officer of SirionLabs, Hiro Notaney. With more than 20 years leading technology marketing in Silicon Valley and more than five in contract management, Hiro Notaney has a thorough knowledge of the Procurement space. Hiro blends innovation, customer success and product excellence to provide best-fit CLM solutions. As CMO of SirionLabs, he is responsible for company’s global marketing, content and customer outreach initiatives. He plays a key part in guiding global customers to contract smarter through end-to-end contract management solutions that help them increase efficiencies and save costs.
Please give us a bit of background on SirionLabs and the solutions you provide to customers.
Sirion was launched in 2014 as a post-signature contract compliance solution but has grown to become a leading full lifecycle CLM platform. Our AI-powered CLM platform now provides some of the world’s leading businesses – such as Vodafone, Chemours, Morgan Stanley and Unilever – with a powerful tool for unlocking the real value of their commercial contracts. Our market position as the leading full-function, end-to-end CLM solution is evidenced by the fact that Sirion ranked above all CLM providers in three out of five use cases – including the full lifecycle use case – in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Contract Life Cycle Management report.
How does contract lifecycle management work? And what are some of the aspects that people may not be aware of?
CLM software proactively manages contracts from contract setup through authoring, negotiation and post-signature stages. For our customers, it serves as the primary mechanism to create, execute and manage their contractual relationships with counterparties, which is why it has become such a strategic investment for large enterprises.
Since every commercial transaction is defined with contracts, a CLM system acts as a single source of truth for an enterprise, digitizing and housing hundreds of thousands of contracts in a centralized repository. CLM automates processes and streamlines each step during a contract’s lifecycle. Companies that use CLM gain a wide variety of significant benefits, such as reducing revenue leakage, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and mitigating risk.
What are some of the top reasons to use contract management software?
Enterprise technology that reduces uncertainty, mitigates risk and impacts the bottom line in a demonstrable way is highly desirable for leadership teams across the board. World Contracting & Commerce estimates that poor contract management can cost companies as much as 9% of revenue.
During the economic downturn, many companies are investing in IT and automation to cut costs and maximize revenue. Better contract management practices are a good place to start providing added value to sales, legal, procurement, finance and other key business functions.
The benefits of CLM can make a significant impact with virtually every key function across an enterprise. For legal teams, CLM reduces legal approval cycles and unlocks contract intelligence to minimize risk and ensure compliance. Procurement professionals significantly reduce quote-to-contract time through self-service contract creation and AI-guided legal review. Sales teams can collect post-signature contract performance insights that can be used to negotiate better deals and drive future sales. In all these cases, CLM reduces errors and saves time and resources that can be re-invested into other strategic initiatives.
What sets you apart from your competitors?
Among the many things that differentiate Sirion in the marketplace are our state-of-the-industry AI , our easy-to-use, highly configurable platform and our unrivaled customer support. The conventional approach to CLM has been to start with a repository, then add workflows, negotiation capabilities and integrations with enterprise systems followed by analytics. Only after that have other CLM vendors started thinking about contract performance management. Sirion is unique among CLM vendors in that we started out with an AI model to build extensive performance management capabilities across the complete contract lifecycle. Our focus on contract performance yields major benefits for our customers. For example, a leading investment bank saved $8.8M with the Sirion platform by identifying suppliers’ non-compliance with contractual and financial obligations. Our CLM system is also designed to deliver significant improvements to operational efficiency. In fact, our AI-led self-service contracting cuts customers’ first draft turnaround time by 90%.
What are some of the trends or technologies that you find particularly interesting these days?
From a C-level perspective, technology has moved from being an enabler to being central to companies’ strategies. Success is now dependent to a large part on how well a company executes its technology strategy — so technology leaders have a much larger and more strategic role to play. Key to executing a successful technology strategy is user adoption, and that relies in part on the ability of new applications to integrate with existing technology ecosystems. In addition, people are now accustomed to software that is intuitive, easy to use and works across all their devices. This makes user-friendly interfaces essential.
As a business leader how do you prepare for an AI-centric world?
For years, there were fears that AI may eliminate certain jobs, but in fact, AI is empowering the workforce by adding value to jobs and increasing productivity. Business leaders today realize the significant ROI gained from deploying AI to eliminate the tedious, simple tasks that consume countless hours of their teams’ time. Automation frees up employees to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive the business forward. Leveraging AI enables enterprises to significantly reduce the resources devoted to manual processes, and reallocate those resources to higher-value functions that lead to better outcomes across the enterprise.
