Common Contract Management Challenges Growing Companies Face

Key Takeaways

• Poor contract management leads to delays, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
• Marketing leaders should prioritize visibility, standardization, and ownership in contract processes.
• Early investment in centralized tools and workflows prevents future bottlenecks.
• Cross-functional collaboration is critical for contract execution and compliance.
• Automation and dashboards streamline tracking and reduce risk.

Table of Contents

• Why Marketing Teams Should Care About Contract Management
• Top Contract Management Challenges for Growing Companies
• What Happens If You Ignore These Problems?
• Best Practices for Building a Scalable Contract Management Approach
• Final Thoughts
• FAQ

Why Marketing Teams Should Care About Contract Management

Before diving into the challenges, let’s answer the core question: why should a senior marketing leader care?

Because bad contract management drains time, increases risk, and can derail initiatives. Consider how these real-world examples impact your day-to-day:

• Your campaign launch is delayed because a creative agency’s contract expired, and no one renewed it.
• You face unexpected costs because of automatic renewals on martech tools you no longer use.
• A vendor underdelivers, but you realize too late that the contract didn’t include the performance clauses you thought it did.
• Your team spends days digging through inboxes and shared drives just to find a signed agreement from a year ago.

Every one of these scenarios translates to inefficiency, risk, and lost revenue.

Top Contract Management Challenges for Growing Companies

1. Decentralized Contract Storage

One of the earliest signs your contract management is becoming unsustainable is when documents live in too many places:

• Some are in someone’s inbox.
• Some are sitting in marketing folders on Google Drive.
• Others were shared over Slack and forgotten.
• And a few printed copies are in someone’s desk drawer… somewhere.

What happens then? Contracts go missing. Important clauses are overlooked. Renewal periods come and go without any notice. In short, you lose control.

Solution
Move contracts into a centralized contract repository. Ideally, this is part of a proper contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, but even a shared, version-controlled drive with consistent naming conventions and tagging is a step in the right direction.

Focus on visibility: Can you instantly pull up any active marketing vendor contract? Can you see termination dates, obligations, and contacts without a deep search?

2. Lack of Standardized Processes

In fast-growing companies, everyone’s just trying to get work done. That often means teams handle contracts differently:

• The events team has their go-to freelance graphic designer with an old agreement.
• The media team signs NDAs with new vendors over email, no legal review.
• A junior marketer licenses a stock image service using their own credit card and personal terms.

Sound familiar? Without standardized processes, contracts are made, sent, signed, and stored in inconsistent ways, making risk management nearly impossible.

Solution
Implement standardized contract workflows with clear ownership. This includes:

• Who drafts contracts (legal, marketing ops, procurement?)
• Who reviews and approves them?
• What templates must be used?
• Where are final copies stored?
• How are renewals and expirations tracked?

Even if you’re not ready for full automation, documenting your processes and training teams on them builds consistency and reduces mistakes.

This is why many companies adopt tools like the Onex CMS, which streamlines approvals, centralizes documents, and ensures every stakeholder from marketing to legal follows a unified process.

3. Slow Contract Turnaround Times

When growth hits hard, speed becomes everything. But contracts often become chokepoints stuck in legal review, awaiting signatures, or bouncing between teams for redlines.

Marketing opportunities can be lost because:

• An agency engagement wasn’t signed in time.
• Influencer agreements took too long to finalize.
• A new martech tool got delayed because legal was backlogged.

Solution
Streamline your approval flows. Here’s how:

• Use contract templates for high-frequency agreements like freelancers, influencers, agencies, and SaaS tools.
• Invest in eSignature tools (like DocuSign or Adobe Sign) to speed up execution.
• Establish clear SLAs across departments (e.g., legal must review within three business days).

If possible, implement a CLM system to automate workflows and push reminders to approvers. Even low-code automation tools like Zapier or Slack integrations can help speed things up for smaller teams.

4. No Visibility into Contract Timelines and Obligations

When you’re managing a dozen different vendors thanks to a rapidly expanding marketing program, keeping track of all your contractual commitments becomes difficult.

Here are a few signs of poor visibility:

• Someone realizes a tool auto-renewed for another year without evaluation.
• A vendor quietly underperforms because no one is enforcing the agreed-upon KPIs.
• You commit to ad placement costs without realizing there’s a minimum spend clause from an older contract. spend management software for financial visibility

Solution
Create contract dashboards that provide ongoing visibility into:

• Renewal and termination dates.
• Payment schedules.
• SLA and KPI commitments.
• Out-clauses and penalties.

If you don’t have access to CLM software, a well-maintained spreadsheet tracker is still a powerful stopgap solution.

Bonus tip: Assign a contract owner (typically the person who initiated it) to ensure accountability for compliance and performance tracking.

5. Manual Data Entry and Tracking

As you manage more contracts, pulling insights manually becomes time-consuming and error-prone.

Imagine needing answers to questions like:

• How many contracts are currently active with agencies?
• What is our total monthly spending on martech services?
• Which contracts contain exclusivity clauses?

Solution
Start extracting contract metadata into structured formats. This might include:

• Dates (start, end, renewal)
• Payment terms
• Clauses (IP ownership, exclusivity, termination)
• Contact info

With a CLM tool, much of this can be automated using AI-based clause recognition. If you’re still in manual mode, block regular time every quarter to clean and update your contract data in your central tracker.

6. Poor Collaboration Between Departments

Contracts aren’t just a legal responsibility. Marketing, finance, legal, IT many departments touch contract workflows.

But how smoothly do those handoffs happen in your company?

Common disconnects include:

• Legal department is being looped in too late.
• Finance department is not approving high-budget contracts.
• IT department is not reviewing tech vendor agreements for data privacy concerns.
• Marketing department is unsure who to contact for contract status updates.

Solution
Promote cross-functional alignment by assigning clear contract roles:

• Legal department handles terms and risk.
• Finance department approves budgets.
• Marketing department owns vendor selection and performance management.
• IT department ensures compliance with tools and software.

Use collaboration tools like shared project boards (Asana, Trello, etc.) to track progress, status, and blockers. Consider regular internal check-ins if the volume is high enough to warrant it.

7. Legal Bottlenecks from Growing Volume

In early growth, legal can handle a handful of contracts per week. But as sales, partnerships, and marketing initiatives ramp up, that volume can double or triple, and internal legal struggles to keep up.

Solution
Free up legal’s time by adopting tiered contracting models. For example:

• Use pre-approved templates for low-risk agreements (e.g., influencer engagements under $10k).
• Implement “legal light” reviews for renewals or extensions of existing agreements.
• Allow trained business unit leads to self-serve templates and submit minimal input for legal checks.

Over time, CLM tools can also help by auto-tagging risk areas and streamlining decisions on whether a contract needs full review.

What Happens If You Ignore These Problems?

The risks aren’t hypothetical. Without proper contract management, here’s what growing companies often deal with:

• Missed revenue due to delayed vendor onboarding.
• Legal disputes over unclear or outdated terms.
• Damaged vendor relationships due to poor compliance management.
• Wasted spend on unused subscriptions or underperforming partners.
• Brand reputation risks due to contractual failures.

The cumulative impact? Slower growth, more risk, and time diverted from strategic initiatives.

Best Practices for Building a Scalable Contract Management Approach

To wrap up, here are a few takeaways you can apply today:

1. Implement a central contract repository – Start with what you have, but aim for a scalable solution like a CLM system.
2. Standardize templates and workflows – Develop contract playbooks for common scenarios.
3. Create a dashboard or tracker – Even a spreadsheet works to start. Track deadlines, commitments, and obligated deliverables.
4. Automate where possible – E-signature tools, reminders, and workflow triggers can shave days off the process.
5. Assign ownership – Make sure every contract has a named person responsible for follow-up and compliance.
6. Invest in alignment – Set regular communication touchpoints between legal, finance, and business teams around contracts.

Final Thought

As your company grows, so do the risks and complexities that come with every new agreement. The earlier you get a handle on your contract management practices, the smoother your growth path becomes. Marketing leaders, especially those making major budgetary decisions, are key players in this shift.

By approaching contract management proactively rather than reactively, you position your marketing department not just as a driver of creative campaigns but as a trusted strategic partner in company-wide operations.

Smart contract governance drives smoother growth. Ensure the right partner is guiding yours. If you’re ready to streamline your contract processes, connect with Osource Global today.

FAQ

Why is contract management important for marketing teams?
Missed, delayed, or poorly drafted contracts can directly impact marketing execution, budgets, and vendor performance.

What’s the first step to improving contract management?
Centralize your contract storage with clear naming conventions and metadata tagging to boost visibility and access.

Do I need expensive software to improve contract management?
Not initially. A well-structured spreadsheet and agreed processes can go a long way until you’re ready to invest in tools like CLM systems.

Who should own contracts in the business?
Ideally, the business unit that initiates the contract (e.g., marketing) owns follow-up, while legal retains governance responsibilities.