Why a Clean Energy Finance Company Chose Leah Over Competitors After Implementation Challenges
A clean energy finance company, a 70-person clean energy and solar company, operates in a highly contract-intensive environment. Operating across energy efficiency, decarbonization, and renewable energy project financing, the company partners with large utilities like Constellation to deliver commercial solar deals and sustainability solutions.
Active users from a potential 20-30 employees who needed CLM access
Centralized visibility into contracts being executed across the organization
Contracts on third-party paper requiring 2 hours to 2 weeks for initial legal review
“Contracting has been a little bit of the Wild West. We had an ex-GCC general counsel trying to kick this off, then a rogue systems analyst who wasn't considering the stakeholders who actually live and breathe contracts every day.”
SVP of Product Development, A Clean Energy Finance Company
Challenge
A clean energy finance company, a 70-person clean energy and solar company, operates in a highly contract-intensive environment. Operating across energy efficiency, decarbonization, and renewable energy project financing, the company partners with large utilities like Constellation to deliver commercial solar deals and sustainability solutions.
Before their Leah re-implementation, contract management was chaotic. Documents were scattered across Google Drive, evault, and DocuSign with no central repository—what the team described as "a little bit of the Wild West." Sales teams operated independently for years, conducting negotiations without legal oversight using templates that became progressively modified and inconsistent. Legal leadership had no systematic way to track what agreements were being executed, forcing the company to rely heavily on expensive outside counsel rather than building internal capabilities.
The situation became more complicated by their first Leah implementation, which failed completely. Purchased approximately two years earlier, the system remained severely underutilized with only 2-3 active users out of a potential 20-30 employees who needed CLM access. A junior analyst had over-engineered the system without consulting the broader team, creating overly rigid workflows that were too complex for actual business needs. Zero training and change management meant employees didn't understand the tool. The repository functionality was completely non-functional for end users.
This failure created significant executive skepticism about committing to another contract term, with leadership demanding "this better work this time." The company maintained strict one-year contract policies, and the July 2024 renewal was at risk without concrete results.
Solution Search
When Jessica Marroquin was hired specifically for her extensive CLM systems expertise from previous startup environments, she faced an unusual challenge: a clean energy finance company had never established formal contract processes that could be translated into technical requirements. The company needed to simultaneously define their internal workflows while implementing software to support them.
Jessica's evaluation criteria centered on several critical requirements:
Seamless Salesforce Integration: With 60-70% of contracts flowing through Salesforce-based project development, the solution needed to enable one-click contract generation from opportunities without forcing sales teams to leave their primary tool. The sales-driven culture required minimal training burden and maximum workflow efficiency.
Flexible, Non-Linear Workflows: The previous implementation had failed partly because linear workflows blocked progress—rejecting an approval sent contracts back to the beginning rather than to a logical correction step. The company needed circular workflows allowing parallel work, ability to skip unnecessary stages, and appropriate routing when corrections were needed.
Complex Contract Relationship Management: the company manages sophisticated parent-child relationships—master loan agreements with dozens of associated loan schedules, MSAs with addendums, and SPV assignment agreements with intricate entity structures. The solution needed to systematically track and visualize these connections.
AI-Powered Capabilities: With 50% of contracts on third-party paper currently requiring 2 hours to 2 weeks for initial legal review, the company needed AI redlining to reduce legal bottlenecks and enable sales velocity.
Partner-Specific Template Logic: Working with recurring partners like Constellation required the ability to manage partner-specific contract variations while maintaining standardized core agreement structures through conditional logic.
Jessica conducted an exhaustive competitive evaluation, examining multiple CLM vendors including Conga and Agiloft. The company had every reason to switch—two years of paying for unused software, organizational skepticism, and a clean slate to start fresh with a different vendor.
“Contract lifecycle management is crucial business infrastructure for a clean energy finance company. We operate in a highly contract-intensive environment where we breathe and live contracts daily, making centralized CLM essential.”
Contracts Manager, A Clean Energy Finance Company
Why Leah
Despite the complete implementation failure and having full option to switch vendors, a clean energy finance company determined that Leah possessed the required capabilities and functionalities for their needs. Jessica explicitly concluded that the issues stemmed from inadequate training and adoption methodology rather than product limitations—a significant competitive validation.
Salesforce Integration Architecture: Leah hub-and-spoke integration approach aligned perfectly with the company's data architecture vision, with Salesforce as the central hub and the CLM as a critical spoke. The platform enables contract generation and visibility directly within Salesforce where project development teams already work daily, addressing the first implementation's fatal flaw of introducing too much friction.
"This is my dream. The Salesforce contract integration with visibility into stages, automated workflows, and one-click contract generation—this is exactly what we need for our project development team."
— SVP of Product Development, the company
The SVP of Product Development immediately shared the re-implementation demo with his boss and other VPs, indicating strong executive enthusiasm. Stakeholders across the organization expressed "we needed this so poorly" and "I think this is gonna work this time," demonstrating renewed organizational buy-in.
Workflow Flexibility and Configurability: Unlike the rigid linear workflows that doomed the first attempt, Leah flexible workflow design allows users to navigate between stages, skip unnecessary steps, and route appropriately when corrections are needed. The no-code configurability enables Jessica's team to adapt workflows as processes evolve without ongoing vendor dependency.
Relationship Visualization and Tracking: The platform's ability to visualize connections between master agreements and child documents (loan schedules, addendums) directly addresses the company's finance team requirements for managing SPV assignments and complex entity structures with parent-subsidiary relationships.
AI Redlining and Clause Management: Leah capabilities with customizable rules and clear change tracking visibility meet the legal team's requirements for maintaining accuracy while reducing the 2 hours to 2 weeks currently required for initial review of third-party contracts.
Logic-Based Template Automation: The ability to use conditional logic in templates—inserting specific indemnification clauses when Constellation is the counterparty, for example—enables the company to manage partner-specific variations while standardizing core agreement language across the organization.
Vendor Partnership and Support: Leah demonstrated commitment to making the re-implementation successful by waiving re-implementation fees, providing premium training services at no cost, and assigning dedicated solution architect and attorney trainer support. This partnership approach gave the company confidence in achieving different outcomes this time.
"After exhaustive evaluation, we determined Leah has the capabilities we need. We want to properly implement CLM throughout the organization with defined processes, comprehensive training, and full utilization. We are committed to making this partnership successful and leveraging the platform we are investing in."
— Contracts Manager, the company
With Leah Salesforce integration capabilities, flexible workflow architecture, and sophisticated relationship management features aligned to their complex energy finance requirements, the company chose to invest in getting the implementation right rather than starting over with a different vendor. The company's strategic ground-up rebuild emphasizes "keep it simple stupid" principles, proper stakeholder involvement, and a phased "crawl, walk, run" approach—starting with MNDA workflows, then customer-facing contracts and vendor agreements, followed by legacy migration and advanced AI capabilities once foundational workflows prove successful.
