I discovered this sitting in a Fortune 500 conference room, watching their “transformation success story” unravel in real-time.

“Show me how you actually sent your last contract,” I asked their procurement director.

She minimized the $2M CLM system they'd just finished implementing. Opened Outlook. Attached a Word doc. Hit send.

“But what about your new system?” I asked.

“Oh, that's for Legal. We use email.”

That's when it hit me: We weren’t losing to competitors. We were losing to the reply button.

The uncomfortable truth nobody admits

According to World Commerce & Contracting, companies lose 9.2 percent of their bottom line annually to poor contract management. For a $100M company, that’s $9.2 million vanishing into the contract void every year.

Here’s the crazy part: 90 percent of those contracts require zero negotiation. They're standard templates. NDAs. Simple service agreements. Documents that could be managed by a sticky note, let alone sophisticated software.

Yet companies keep buying million-dollar CLM platforms. Six-month implementations. Armies of consultants. Change management workshops.

And after all that, adoption hovers around 10 percent.

I watched one enterprise client spend $1M on implementation, $200K on training, and achieve this remarkable outcome: Their sales team created a shared Gmail account to “manage contracts more efficiently.”

The CLM system? It sent notification emails about contracts that were already signed.

Email has been around since 1971. That’s a 53-year head start. Your users have sent approximately 37,000 emails in their career. They’ve used your software for... what, a week?

You’re not competing against technology. You're competing against muscle memory.

Why email keeps winning (even when it shouldn’t)

Let me walk you through the actual clicks required to send a contract.

Via email:

1. Attach document

2. Hit send

Via our CLM (before we learned better):

1. Log into system

2. Navigate to contracts

3. Click "Create New"

4. Select template

5. Fill in metadata

6. Upload document

7. Add recipient

8. Configure permissions

9. Set approval workflow

10. Add optional message

11. Review settings

12. Click send

We called it “comprehensive.” Users called it something else.

The brutal truth? Email isn't winning because it's better. It's winning because it's there.

Your user opens email 74 times per day (according to our usage data). They open your SaaS product 0.3 times per day. Where do you think contracts get sent?

“But email doesn’t have version control!” we’d protest. “No audit trails! No compliance tracking!”

You know what email does have? The send button they've clicked 50,000 times.

The feature that beats every feature

I recently stopped using our own CLM's dashboard. Haven't logged in for three months. Instead, I ask ChatGPT to pull the data I need.

The entire dashboard economy, those beautiful charts we all obsess over, is about to collapse.

But here’s what this really means: Software is finally learning to live where we live, instead of forcing us to live where it lives.

The best feature isn't AI-powered risk detection. It's not automated workflows. It's not even e-signatures.

The best feature is not requiring your user to change their behavior.

We learned this the hard way. Version 2.0 of Concord had 47 features. Our power users loved it. Our average users? They used exactly four:

• Upload

• Send

• Sign

• Search

So we did something that horrified our sales team. We removed 31 features. Not hidden. Not “archived.” Deleted.

Customer response? “Thank God. Now I can actually find things.”

Our support tickets dropped 67 percent. Usage increased 248 percent.

We weren't making the product worse. We were making it invisible.

Real-world evidence (with actual numbers)

Don't take my word for it. Here's what happened when companies stopped fighting email:

Yates Construction managed 15 regional divisions generating thousands of contracts. Their solution? Work WITH email, not against it. Result: $15,000 monthly savings in administrative overhead. As Jenny McMullen, their Corporate Contract Administrator, told us: “Subcontractors won't work without signed contracts. Concord gets our projects moving because it works with how we already communicate.”

Vecna Robotics saved 10 hours per week through automated data entry, but the key was meeting users where they were. Michael Bearman, their Chief Legal Officer, explained: “I just hit 'create document' because the AI handles everything else. No new workflows to learn.”

Denison University processes 4,000 agreements annually across 850 staff members. They tried forcing a new workflow. Failed. Then integrated with existing email patterns. Steve Storck, their Purchasing Manager, said: “We eliminated the scanning, printing, photographing circus. Now it just works through email like everything else.”

Pima Community College manages 20 percent of their operating budget through contracts. Julie Dell’Aglio, Executive Director, noted the breakthrough: “The discussion happens right where it always has, in email. But now it's captured and tracked automatically.”

Notice the pattern? Nobody mentions loving the software. They talk about time saved, projects moving, things “just working.”

The paradox of product development

Internal analytics revealed something painful: 90 percent of our users engaged with only 20 percent of features.

We had two choices:

1. Force users to adopt more features

2. Accept reality and optimize for it

Most companies choose option 1. They create “feature adoption campaigns.” Mandatory training. Gamification. Anything to justify the development cost.

We chose option 2. We killed:

• Advanced permission matrices (3 percent usage)

• Custom field builders (7 percent usage)

• Workflow designer (11 percent usage)

• Report builder (8 percent usage)

• Template versioning (4 percent usage)

Each removal felt like admitting defeat. Our engineers had spent months on these features. Our sales team used them in demos.

But here's what happened:

• Time to first value: 4 days to 6 hours

• Support tickets: Down 67 percent

• User activation: Up 340 percent

• Feature usage depth: Up 180 percent

By having fewer features, people used more features. The paradox of choice in action.

Where contracts are actually heading

In 10 years, humans won’t negotiate contracts. Computers will negotiate with computers based on parameters we set. Your procurement AI will talk to their sales AI, and contracts will generate, negotiate, and execute automatically.

But that’s 10 years away. What about now?

The answer isn't forcing people into new systems. It’s enhancing the system they refuse to leave: email.

Imagine contracts that:

• Generate from email requests

• Negotiate through email replies

• Sign via email response

• Track without leaving inbox

• Alert through email (not another dashboard)

At Concord, we’ve rebuilt everything around this principle. Our AI lives right in your contract docs. Because that’s where you live.

How to actually work WITH email (not against it)

Here's the tactical playbook we use with every new customer:

Step 1: Map the current email contract flow

• Screenshot every email in a typical contract chain

• Count the forwards, CCs, and replies

• Note where documents get lost

• Identify the “reply all” disasters

• Find the “which version is final?” moments

Step 2: Identify the 2-3 highest-friction points Don't fix everything. Fix the moments that make people scream. Usually:

• Version confusion

• Signature collection

• Finding old contracts

Step 3: Build bridges, not new roads

Email-first notifications: Don't send users to your platform. Send the contract to them. Embedded preview. One-click actions. No login required.

Reply-to-sign: Customer replies “approved” to sign. That's it. Legal validity maintained, zero behavior change required.

Invisible tracking: CC your system on contract emails. It reads, extracts, and organizes automatically. Users don't change anything.

Natural language search: “Find the Acme contract from last March” sent to contracts@[company].com returns the document. No portal. No query builder.

Step 4: Measure email metrics, not dashboard logins

• Email response time to contracts

• Contracts completed without portal login

• Natural language requests processed

• Support tickets (should plummet)

Step 5: Start with your most email-dependent use case Usually NDAs or simple service agreements. High volume, low complexity, maximum email addiction.

Success metric: If someone needs training, you've failed.

The lesson that changed everything

Your competition isn't other software. Your competition is:

• Excel spreadsheets running since 1997

• Email threads containing institutional knowledge

• Word documents that “just work”

• Sharon from Legal who knows where everything is

• The reply button

These aren’t inferior solutions. They're incumbent solutions with decades of organizational antibodies protecting them.

The graveyard of B2B software is full of products that were “better than email.” They had superior features. Better security. Cleaner interfaces.

They’re all dead.

Email is still here.

Stop asking “How can we build something better?” Start asking “How can we build something people will actually use?”

Because the best software in the world is worthless if it requires Sharon from Legal to change how she's worked for 20 years.

The question that changes everything

What ingrained behavior is your product trying to change?

If your answer includes any of these words (workflow, process, system, platform, portal) you're fighting a losing battle.

Try this experiment: Remove your three most complex features. The ones you demo but nobody uses. The ones that require documentation.

Watch what happens to adoption.

At Concord, we learned this lesson through painful trial and error. We now help companies achieve 300-450 percent ROI not by replacing email, but by embracing it. Our customers report saving thousands per month while actually reducing the features they use.

If you're curious how to stop fighting email and start leveraging it, we've documented our complete email-first implementation playbook. No dashboard required. We'll send it to your inbox.

Because that’s where you'll actually read it.