Why Being a New CLM Solution Provider Is Actually a Good Thing

Remember when disks were floppy? Remember when phones had cords? Remember when you had to “dial up” to get online? Clearly, new is much better. We may love to apply the term “antique” to certain charming period pieces -- cars, furniture, home accessories -- and bask in the glow of nostalgic memories, but when it comes to technology, “vintage” is not necessarily a virtue.

Technology continues to advance at a dizzying pace with the goal of making life easier and more streamlined, but in the business world, a fascinating disconnect has rendered many software solutions outdated almost as quickly as they have been chosen. While companies have embraced technology solutions to solve various business problems, once the solution was selected, companies were then stuck with a relatively static system. Maintenance and upgrades were time-consuming and expensive. Practically, this has meant that the end users have not been able to fully enjoy evolving with the enhanced capabilities of a solution in real time due to the lag in upgrades.

Until now

As Malbek has emerged into the CLM space, we’ve fielded lots of questions about being a new vendor among established giants. We’ve been asked repeatedly what makes us different and why an organization should consider a newer solution provider. It’s a fair question, and, rather than shy away from it, we want to embrace where we are in our own evolution and share why being the new kid in town is actually to our advantage.

We are nimble and can add innovative functionality at lightning speed

Just the way technology progresses today in the consumer world at rapid speed, at Malbek we are able to incorporate important new capabilities into our solution very quickly. In fact, in a short duration, we were able to build the most critical features. In some cases, as we received feedback from our prospects, customers or partners, we built features overnight to meet important deadlines. The Malbek team is talented, motivated, and full of doers. We think out of the box to bring you more capabilities out of the box – no expensive customizations needed.  We don’t have to wait around for endless planning meetings to approve changes or slow development cycles to make something amazing happen. We want to get the very best contract management features into our customers hands as quickly as possible, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

We are laser-focused on customer satisfaction and success

Lots of companies say they are focused on customer success, but talk is cheap. We know from experience that many CLM providers are not able to give ALL of their customers the attention they want or deserve. Some clients may be given preferential treatment based on internal targets and industry focus, and while that may occur for good reason, at Malbek we believe each customer is the most important. We only have one focus, and that is you, the customer.  And because of point #1 (being agile developers of an amazing solution), we continue to delight the industry professionals we serve without playing favorites. We are happy when you are happy!

Our solution architecture is built with the latest cloud technology in its DNA

That sounds like a lot of techy mumbo jumbo, but stay with me. This is actually really, really important! You know how many CLM vendors roll out changes only once in a while? You know that feeling when you see their other clients already benefiting from some new features in the upgraded version, while you continue to use a workaround that makes the process clunky on a prior version because you cannot upgrade yet? There is one simple reason for that. Many of those vendors didn’t start out their CLM application as a native cloud solution, so fixing defects or building new features is not simple. Upgrading to a newer version is even more difficult and costly.  At Malbek, our solution began its life in the cloud, and cloud technology is in our DNA. We have the benefit of a team made up of incredibly bright talent who understand all that techy, cloud stuff and so, from a practical standpoint, you get to benefit from the latest technological advancements as they happen. With our solution, you are always on the latest version and receive benefit from new features, faster.

Caution: New does NOT mean inexperienced

One point of clarification -- being new does not mean we are inexperienced. Our core team has decades of experience in the CLM space. We have seen the problems customers struggle with. We have also seen the ways that many of the older CLM solutions have attempted and failed to keep up with and meaningfully address the changing needs of the market. That is why we founded Malbek. We knew there was a better way and we are making it happen.

Older CLM solutions come with a lot of baggage -- dealing with older product versions still being supported across the client base, tiptoeing around the politics of customer hierarchy and technical debts that may never go away. We know we are the new kid in town, but we are proud of that! If you’d like to see how Malbek is so strikingly different from anything you’ve ever encountered to manage your contracts, click here and request a demo.