ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Contract Lifecycle Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
That many enterprises have already begun or are in the process of digital modernization is a testament to the rapid rise of digital products and services, new direct online engagement
With sales models extending beyond one-time transactions, the revenue is spread over the lifetime of the engagement rather than received as an upfront lump sum. This requires sustained customer engagement beyond the break-even point for a profitable business model. Such sustained engagement can also be referred to as the customer lifecycle and, in this case, the processes and people supported by technology to ensure that a provider is doing all it can to encourage the customer to engage with the seller. Often starting at the quote stage of a qualified sales engagement, the revenue lifecycle follows the buyer’s journey through contract negotiation and agreement, provisioning and fulfillment as required, invoicing, payment, contract or renewal and potential amendments to the initial order or additions in terms of new products and services.
ISG Research defines revenue lifecycle management as a unified platform approach that connects customer-facing teams to boost revenue and margin through consistent, long-term customer engagement. We define contract lifecycle management (CLM) applications as those that support CLM activities within the revenue lifecycle. This includes supporting “sell-side" contracts; managing digitized clauses and contracts libraries; offering clause and risk analytics; supporting the loading and ingestion of legacy contracts; allowing for manager approvals and workflows; and enabling comprehensive insight, analytics and reporting.
More broadly, revenue lifecycle management can start with an initial quotation and move through contract negotiations to fulfillment and invoicing and on to renewal and expansion. Individual applications that could be used as part of this process are Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), contract lifecycle management (CLM), billing, revenue recognition and revenue lifecycle platform services. We define CLM in the context of this revenue lifecycle management buyers guide as an application that supports “sell-side" contracts, manages digitized clauses and contracts libraries, offers clause and risk analytics, supports the loading and ingestion of legacy contracts, and managers approvals and workflows and enables comprehensive insight, analytics and reporting.
The quote-to-cash activity touches many different internal processes, and issues are common as data and information are handed from one team to another. A true revenue lifecycle management system manages digital documents, digitizing and storing important terms within the document. This minimizes errors and increases transparency to those involved with the customer at every point in the lifecycle.
Digitized billing schedules and calendars identify key events and trigger automatic activity such as renewal outreach. Digitized terms reduce input requirements as key data persists in the relevant platform data store. Analysis of repeated steps within the overall process can identify areas for improvement—for example, noting that a particular type of contract for a specific customer type requires responses from the customer’s legal counsel. In fact, all areas of the process are open to analysis if the overall process is represented within the revenue lifecycle management platform.
Analytics can help better understand the ideal or expected intervals between processes or where characteristics of a customer, region or product require longer or additional steps. In this way, revenue lifecycle management can be continually analyzed and improved to benefit the customer experience and ultimately contribute to sustained customer engagement.
The revenue lifecycle management process has clearly defined activities spread across different departments and teams. These activities are executed across many industries
Despite the business imperative, we assert that through 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will still be using manual processes to integrate quotes and contracts, leading to billing and delivery errors and poor customer experience.
In addition to the overall Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, we have also published sub guides covering the individual components of the revenue lifecycle. In a typical business-to-business sale, whether for a new transaction, an upsell/cross-sell or a renewal, contact negotiations follow the general agreement as to what is being bought, at what price and under what terms and conditions, including delivery and performance obligations. As part of this Buyers Guide, we are focusing on “sell-side” CLM, i.e., capabilities that specifically support the selling process as opposed to purchasing.
We chose CLM products that digitize the contract terms as opposed to purely dealing with a digital document. Digitizing the terms also includes digitizing the clauses to enable analysis of possible risks or identification of potentially problematic terms, leading to the ability to construct contracts with minimal need for legal approval. One of the key capabilities of a CLM system is to provide more standardization. Often, the contract negotiation process can significantly impact sales velocity and, potentially, the deal itself, regardless of its size or complexity. Typically, an enterprise will have a deal desk to review deals and a legal department that must review all contracts on the basis that most contracts are exceptions. Reviews are often conducted using documents that are emailed between internal and external parties and can result in whoever shouts loudest getting the attention of the legal department. Standardized contracts reduce the number of exceptions that require active involvement from legal.
For business-to-business sales, a contract such as a master service agreement or a framework contract will be in place prior to individual quotes or may be necessary before a sale or renewal. In addition, many enterprises have existing legacy contracts stored as digital files like a .pdf or even a printed or hand-annotated document. CLM systems should be able to ingest these legacy contracts to better understand obligations and protect against exposure. This is especially important for customers acquired through mergers and acquisitions activity, as the enterprise acquiring the customer must understand the contractual obligations and establish a proactive outreach plan to rationalize contract terms.
CLM also enables digital document signing by all parties for efficient workflow and approvals. Smart approvals can route automatically based on an analysis of the changes in the contract to ensure rapid progress without sacrificing guardrails and compliance with company policy.
This guide also evaluates the role of artificial intelligence in CLM offerings. How is AI used to extract terms from ingested legacy files? How does it aid in understanding risk across contracts? Can AI be used to help write individual clauses? We also assessed whether search and user interactions were enhanced using AI-assisted text interfaces. And we gauged how providers use analytics to evaluate clause performance and enhance standardized processes to minimize redlining back-and-forth by aligning clauses with customer needs by industry and location.
Although revenue lifecycle management is a relatively new term, the need for such an approach has been around far longer. As hybrid pricing models extend into the broader economy, many existing systems enterprises use can’t accommodate the challenges of more complex pricing and revenue models. More importantly, applications typically in use are not platforms that support rapid change and innovation. The danger is that, by not transforming processes and systems to support the revenue lifecycle of customers, there exists the potential for mistakes across teams as one group hands over to another.
Maintaining sustained engagement with customers means meeting expectations for responsiveness and accuracy. Using a current revenue lifecycle management system enables a set of prerequisites that ensure updates to business models necessary for competitiveness are not held back by process or technology. Whether you are looking for a single supplier or a series of applications that work with a core platform, this Buyers Guide will help identify providers for consideration.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Contract Lifecycle Management evaluates software providers and products in key areas that support the CLM aspects of the customer's revenue lifecycle. This Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities that facilitate using an integrated and extensible platform to help orchestrate activities across sales, finance, legal and operations. In addition, the data and data model should be accessible using a set of standard reporting and analytic methods. The revenue lifecycle management platform supports these distinct activities with applications for CLM.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of contract lifecycle management as we define it: Conga, ContractPodAi, Docusign, Icertis, Ironclad, LawVu, LinkSquares, Malbek, PandaDoc, SAP, Sirion, SpotDraft, Workday and Zoho.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of contract lifecycle management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating contract lifecycle management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Contract Lifecycle Management in 2025 finds Conga first on the list, followed by Docusign and Zoho.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle contract lifecycle management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our contract lifecycle management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.