Fever-Tree is a premium drinks business. Fifteen months ago, Alex and his team wanted to move away from using SharePoint to manage their contracts. They ran a tender, trialled Nomio, and then chose a bigger contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool because the “all-in-one” promise felt too good to pass up.
Nine months later, they still did not have a viable tool. They switched to Nomio and quickly landed a system people could trust and use.
Here’s what happened:
“We ran a tender and went with a bigger CLM tool.”
“We first spoke to Nomio 15 months ago. Our contract management system was a combination of SharePoint and Microsoft out-of-the-box. We'd had some good wins but also some challenges with expiries, renewals, and visibility overall.”
“We ran a tender and went with a bigger CLM tool. Really, we came into it looking for a contract repository, but I think the opportunity to get a CLM seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down, especially while I had sign-off internally.”
“It was the lure of the promised land. We can be a three-person legal function that has a tool where everyone is self-serving everything, even on difficult matters, and everything is at our fingertips. We can be a legal team of the future this year. This is amazing.”
“A CLM does 10 times as much, but it's only 2.5x the cost. If you're a numbers person, that's easy money.”
“We aimed for the stars with a CLM, and we didn’t even land on the moon. We crash-landed.”
“Then the reality hits of how long is this going to take to set up? What does it actually look like? We assumed that it would be easier than it was.”
“The reality became clear. We then had to go back after we'd signed off on the project's budget and say, ‘I actually need the same amount again for implementation.’ And it's not happening now. We got to 4 out of 10 pretty quickly, but the delta to then get to even 7 or 8 out of 10, there wasn't even a route for us to do that.”
“If I could go back to where I was 15 months ago, what advice would I give? Focus very hard on what you're trying to solve for. We came in looking for a contract repository, and then we were dazzled by the idea of having an all-singing, all-dancing CLM. We weren't ready for that.”
“The biggest mistake we made was at the trial. Is it viable in a trial stage? Because if not, if you're thinking, oh, I can see where this is going to go directionally, that's very different to I could use this right now.”
“We never really completed the implementation.”
“We basically didn't have a great experience with the CLM tool we went with. Were we over-promised and then under-deliver against? Probably, or at least I think we weren't clear internally exactly what was required.”
“The implementation was hard. We didn't have an army of tech people internally who could suddenly drop everything and help us with months and months of implementation. We had a situation nine months in where we didn't have a viable tool, and we were struggling with traction with the partner to get to where we needed to.”
“We actually were not that impressed with the data extraction. They said, ‘Here's all the data points we've extracted,’ of which there were absolutely loads. Pushing 100, and a lot of them were just irrelevant or marked as N/A. It was quite unruly.”
“I remember Nomio saying the first time I spoke to them about the importance of data hygiene. At the time, I remember thinking ‘you're probably overstating this’. Now I'm a convert.”
“Nomio solved the problem for us very neatly.”
“I just don't know if I trust this CLM, and I don't know how that gets solved. With the CLM, we crash-landed a quarter of the way there, versus going for Nomio, where it was very quickly apparent what it could do. It solved the problem for us very neatly. It was cost-effective for us.”
“We redid a trial with Nomio this year. Nomio uploaded 10 of my contracts for me, and 36 hours later, they were ready. I've got a trial login, I'm playing with it straight away. I know exactly what it's going to look like. I can see exactly what the base-level use case is and what value I can get from it. That was very clear.”
“I just told my team, 'Let's review a handful of contracts and verify the data points.’ It took us 15 minutes each, and ‘Oh, look, it's all worked, and Nomio did it in no time at all.’”
“We sent you all our contracts. They were up within a handful of working days.”
“With Nomio, everything has been very quick. We can open up to other people in the business, and people have been very engaged. As we were working through the implementation, there was very clear communication. ‘We'll do this, we need this from you. This is when it will happen.’”
“In our past world with a CLM, it felt like it was a non-virtuous circle where we were decelerating, not accelerating.”
“The design is so nice. The user experience is excellent. It's very simple. Someone smart has thought about this to make it simple. And that, I think, is a way that is like the beauty of Nomio.”
“I haven’t found a bum note with Nomio yet.”
“If you can't trust what the tool says, then you can't use the tool.”
“We've got the first dozen data points sorted, which frankly are the most relevant ones, the ones that are going to stop us crashing the car. And then we're looking to build on that over time with other key stuff.”
“And now we're having this conversation because I messaged you two days ago to say wow twice in about three working hours across last night and this morning, Nomio has saved me a material amount of time. It's making my job easier. I've shown it to colleagues who are impressed with it.”
“Our COO was like, ‘Oh, wow, is this a new tool? This looks neat. I'm glad we got this.’ To be honest, twice this week Nomio made me look good.”
