By Nancy Patel, General Manager of Commercial at Unison
Sales presentations are designed to impress. The slides are clean, the answers are confident and the product appears to handle every situation with ease. Reality often looks different once volume increases and real cases replace samples. Teams end up working around a tool that was supposed to simplify the job.
Contract lifecycle management, or CLM, software exists to help government contractors reduce risk, move faster and maintain visibility across the portfolio of contracts and subcontracts. That is the promise. In practice, some platforms struggle when asked to scale, produce useful data or connect with the systems that already run the business. The result is broken workflows, frustrated users and time lost to manual interventions.
If your team is in the process of buying a new CLM and you’re uneasy about trusting the sales pitch and marketing materials, you’re not alone. The good news is that the potential problems are recognizable and testable. This article explains what to examine, why it matters and which questions to ask to separate reliable capability from hopeful marketing.
Integration: Why Durable Connections Matter
For GovCon, a CLM that does not work directly with the finance and ERP stack creates risk. Integrations with systems such as Costpoint or Microsoft Dynamics cannot be a loose handshake. They must be dependable and demonstrable. When syncs fail, data fields do not map or reporting requires spreadsheet triage, the contracting process slows. Procurement stalls, transparency fades and the compliance burden grows.
These failures are costly because they force teams to rely on custom work, repeated vendor support or manual re-entry. None of that scales. A sustainable integration shows the end-to-end flow of real data, handles the specific fields your contracts require and holds up under pressure. Screenshots in a pitch deck are not enough. The test is whether your data can move through the system without side channels or recurring support tickets.
Good Data Results in Contract Intelligence
Workflows are essential, but the long-term value of a GovCon CLM is the data it captures and returns. A capable system stores and exposes structured information that supports audits, forecasting and decision-making. That includes contract vehicle, CLIN, option year, funding, clause references and mission partner details. It also provides metadata associated with templates and clause libraries.
Teams often discover late in an implementation that the platform struggles to extract or standardize basic contract data. Metadata goes missing. Clause libraries are hard to maintain. Templates drift across versions. Automation that initially appears straightforward becomes a patchwork of manual steps. A polished interface cannot compensate for a weak foundation. If the architecture and workflow design do not align with how GovCon contracts actually run, the tool will strain under routine workloads.
It is also common to see attention shift to surface features that look modern while the core data model remains inconsistent. Terms like “intelligence” or “insight” do not mean much if the inputs are incomplete or fragmented. The software produces a mirage of capabilities rather than trustworthy information when the underlying data is thin or disconnected.
The Oversell Pattern
Overpromising and underdelivering erode trust and create a gap between expectation and experience. In this space, the pattern is familiar. A vendor describes robust connectors, offers a high-level picture of the data model and fills holes with custom scripts or a roadmap of future features. What might qualify as growing pains in a commercial setting becomes more serious in a federal setting, where precision and traceability are essential. The risk shifts to your team when key fields are half-captured or syncs fail without warning.
What a Reliable GovCon CLM Should Deliver
Evaluate your platform against four practical criteria:
Direct and dependable integrations with ERP and finance: Connections should run without fragile patching. You should be able to see field mapping, run transactions through the flow and confirm that downstream systems receive what they need.
Core stability across users and contract types: Routine actions should not generate recurring support tickets. The platform should handle common and edge cases without failure or handholding from administrators.
Structured, usable data from day one: The system should capture required fields in a consistent format and make them available for reporting. If you only receive PDFs or placeholders, your team will spend time cleaning exports rather than analyzing the information.
Room to grow without a rebuild: As contract volume or complexity increases, the architecture should support new workloads without requiring the resetting of templates, workflows or integrations.
Questions to Ask Before You Commit Further
These questions help separate what the product does today from what it might do later. Request demonstrations that reflect your actual environment, not generic samples.
Can you show a live demo that uses our contract types?
Generic demos hide constraints. Use your clauses, templates and data to validate that workflows behave as expected.
How exactly does the integration with our ERP and finance stack work?
Ask to see the complete data path and field mappings. Request a sandbox or test run that moves real transactions, not just screenshots.
Will we have structured, report-ready data on day one?
Confirm how the system handles metadata, clause management and key fields at go-live. The answer should be specific and verifiable.
What functionality exists today and what remains on the roadmap?
Do not treat future plans as current capabilities. If a feature is currently unavailable and there is no clear date for its availability, plan as if it does not exist.
Can we speak with references that match our complexity?
Reference calls should reflect similar contract volume, types and technology environments. Cherry-picked success stories are not the goal. Comparable conditions are.
How to Evaluate Your Current Situation
You still have options if the platform you purchased has fallen short of expectations. Start with a focused review that measures the system against the same criteria you would use to buy it today.
Run an integration health check.
Trace the flow of a contract and its modifications through the CLM to the ERP and back. Document every manual touchpoint and every field that fails to map. The aim is to replace anecdote with observed behavior.
Test for data completeness and consistency.
Pick a representative set of contracts. Verify that core fields such as vehicle, CLIN, option year, funding, clauses and mission partner appear in the same format every time. Confirm that reporting tools can access those fields without export cleanup.
Assess workflow stability under load.
Choose everyday operations and run them at a higher volume. Look for timeouts, errors and steps that require side emails or spreadsheets. Stability is as important as any feature.
This review provides a baseline for discussing changes with your vendor and planning next steps. It also helps you decide whether the platform can meet your needs with adjustments or whether you should consider an alternative that better aligns with GovCon requirements.
Choosing Evidence Over Theatrics
Federal work depends on systems that perform under pressure. A reliable CLM does not run on promises or surface polish. It proves itself in your environment, with your contracts and with the systems that already run your business.
The path to a trustworthy, proven CLM doesn’t need to be overwhelming: Validate integrations with real data. Confirm that essential fields are captured and usable. Distinguish current capability from planned features. Speak with peers who operate at your level of complexity. If the product meets these checks, keep going and scale. If it does not, you have the information you need to make a change confidently.
GovCon contracting rewards clarity, traceability and dependable execution. Choose a platform that supports those outcomes and you will spend less time working around software and more time moving programs forward.
