The Workflow
The Workflow is Contracts 365's monthly newsletter, offering timely insights on contract efficiency, automation, and AI-powered CLM. To help you harness the power of contracts, every day.
If Everything Is Important…Nothing Is Important.
Why Success Criteria Matters
In contract management, it’s easy to say you want everything:
- Faster approvals
- Reduced compliance issues
- Cost savings
- Improved tracking of renewals and expirations
- Efficiency
- User adoption
- World peace!
While we love ambition, here’s the problem: If everything is important, nothing is important. And when success isn’t clearly defined, it becomes impossible to measure progress, and even harder to prove return on investment. You end up with a lot of activity, a lot of opinions, and not a lot of clarity.
That’s why, this quarter, we’re focusing on Success Criteria.
Success Criteria = Your ROI Receipts
Success criteria are the measurable outcomes that define what you’re trying to achieve with Contracts 365. They help you focus on what matters most for your organization—and give you a way to track progress quarter over quarter.
Instead of: “The process feels better.”
You get: “Cycle time dropped 22% and renewals have increased 5%.”
What We’ll Be Doing in Your Next Quarterly ROC
During your quarterly Return on Contracts 365 (ROC) meeting, we’ll work together to:
- Confirm or refine your success criteria
- Update your Collaboration Site so your criteria is clearly documented
- Measure results quarter over quarter to track progress and ROI
- Make sure the platform is aligned with outcomes, not just “features we turned on once”
The goal is to ensure Contracts 365 isn’t just “implemented,” it’s actively delivering value you can see and report on.
How to Prep for Your Quarterly ROC
To make the most of your upcoming ROC meeting, we recommend spending a few minutes ahead of time thinking through what success should look like for your team.
This doesn’t need to be a full-on strategy session—it’s more like showing up with a short list of what you want to measure so we can spend the meeting focused on how to achieve those outcomes.
Before the ROC, come prepared with:
- Your top 3–5 priorities for what you want Contracts 365 to improve
- A baseline (current state)—even an estimate is fine
- A target goal for what you want to achieve by the next quarter
- A way to measure it (time, count, percentage, compliance rate, etc.)
If you’re stuck, don’t worry—that’s exactly what we’ll work through together. But having a first pass ready helps us move faster and get to the good part: results.
And remember, the best success criteria are SMART, meaning they’re:
- Specific: Clear and focused (not “improve contracting”)
- Measurable: You can track it with data
- Achievable: Realistic for your team and timeline
- Relevant: Tied to business value
- Time-bound: Has a deadline or review cycle (typically quarterly)
If your success criteria doesn’t include a measurement and a timeframe, it’s not success criteria; it’s a nice intention. And we love intentions, but ROI prefers math.
We look forward to seeing you at your ROI and helping you define—and achieve—your success criteria!
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