I

Ironclad

Digital contract lifecycle management platform

Sales Development Representative

Full-Time
No salary listed
Junior
London, UK
HybridTwo days on-site per week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with additional in-office days for team or company events.
Sales & Account ManagementSales Development Representative

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 1 year of experience as a Sales Development Representative, ideally in business-to-business software-as-a-service and with a strong outbound component.
  • Energy and drive to thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
  • Curiosity and eagerness to master core sales tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Outreach, and Salesforce.
  • Self-sufficiency, a strong internal sense of urgency, and accountability.
  • A thoughtful, detail-oriented approach while keeping the bigger picture in mind.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with persistent and professional follow-through with prospects and customers.
  • A collaborative mindset and willingness to work with other teams and own projects beyond pure prospecting.
  • Flexibility and coachability, with the ability to accept feedback and iterate quickly.
  • Comfort with giving and receiving feedback as part of a high-performing, learning-focused team.
  • A friendly, positive attitude and excitement to participate in a close-knit, social, in-person team environment.
  • Unrestricted right to work in the United Kingdom.
Responsibilities
  • Own and prioritize a strategic target-account list within the assigned territory.
  • Research and build account plans by adding contacts, sending personalized emails, and making strategic outbound calls.
  • Conduct confident, high-level conversations with senior executives at target accounts.
  • Tell compelling stories in meetings by sharing tailored pitches, product insights, and data that help prospects understand the platform's value.
  • Capture and organize sales intelligence in Salesforce so the broader team has clean, actionable data.
  • Partner with Sales, Marketing, and Product to share market feedback and influence platform positioning and improvement in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
  • Consistently meet and exceed monthly quotas for qualified opportunities.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience selling to in-house legal teams or legal stakeholders.
  • Experience in a high-growth technology or software-as-a-service company.
  • Familiarity with the United Kingdom/Europe, Middle East, and Africa market and selling into multiple countries or regions.

About the company

Ironclad is a digital contracting platform that helps legal teams manage the entire contract lifecycle. It enables users to create, automate, and track contracts in one place, reducing bottlenecks and enabling self-service workflows. The product is designed for enterprise-level legal departments and fast-growing companies, with a subscription-based model that offers different tiers, integrations, and support. Ironclad differentiates itself from older contract tools by being user-friendly and modern, focusing on high-volume, high-value contracts and better collaboration within legal teams. Its goal is to speed up contract processes, improve collaboration, and support business growth by continuously updating and optimizing contract workflows for its clients.

Company Size

501-1,000

Company Stage

Series E

Total Funding

$334.2M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2014

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Ironclad crossed $200 million ARR in February 2026 and serves 2,000 customers.
  • Over 65% of customers adopted Ironclad AI by March 2026, signaling product pull.
  • August 13, 2026 procurement launches deepen SAP integration and expand enterprise wallet share.

What critics are saying

  • OpenAI hired Ironclad cofounder Jason Boehmig on June 2, 2026, attacking its core market.
  • Ironclad still depends on a 2022 $3.2 billion valuation and no fresh disclosed funding.
  • If foundation-model vendors bundle CLM into Microsoft Word, Ironclad’s differentiation compresses fast.

What makes Ironclad unique

  • Ironclad’s March 2026 Assistant embeds AI inside contract workflows, not standalone search.
  • Its March 2026 Jurist and August 2026 procurement agents cover drafting through post-signature operations.
  • Deloitte’s June 8, 2026 alliance validates Ironclad as enterprise workflow infrastructure.

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Benefits

Network of mentors - Receive mentorship from our world-class network of mentors, including founders, salespeople, marketers, engineers, and designers.

Health & wellness - Great health care insurance, monthly fitness reimbursement, and seasonal activities like yoga, surfing, and hikes with our dogs are just some of the ways we help take care of employee health and wellness.

Company retreats - Twice yearly, we retreat to local spots like Tahoe or Wine Country for our company off-sites.

Team events - We bond outside of work over games, happy hours, concerts, and more.

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

2%

1 year growth

3%

2 year growth

1%
SalesTech Star
Oct 8th, 2026
Ironclad launches new AI agents grounded in commercial context, helping teams negotiate better and capture more value from every deal.

Ironclad launches new AI agents grounded in commercial context, helping teams negotiate better and capture more value from every deal. Ironclad Agent gives teams one place to search for contracts and orchestrate specialized agents across every stage of contracting, all grounded in their company's commercial context. Ironclad's new proprietary Contract Knowledge Graph provides the commercial context from precedent, company contracts, workflows, deals, and negotiations to ensure AI agents always reflect how the business actually operates. Ironclad, the AI contracting company that accelerates business with every contract, announced Ironclad Agent, a place for legal, procurement, and sales teams to search, understand, and act on their contracts and workflows using natural language. The company also announced Contract Knowledge Graph (CKG), which powers Ironclad Agent and grounds all interactions in context from each customer's contracts, approved positions, and past decisions to surface relationship patterns and potential risks while protecting sensitive data. Managing contracts is critical for businesses to protect their margins and improve business performance. However, 86% of organizations found that disconnected contract processes delay revenue and purchasing cycles, eroding both trust and margins. Many companies use AI agents to help complete contracts, but most agents operate in silos and lack the shared context needed for reliable answers and recommendations. Without an understanding of how deals were negotiated and what the business has learned from years of making them, agents can't give answers that reflect how the business actually operates. Much of that context exists only with the people who negotiated those deals, and when they leave, so does the knowledge it took years to build. "Every business has years of hard-won knowledge in its contracts, including past negotiations, decisions, and learnings," said Dan Springer, CEO of Ironclad. "That history is a competitive advantage, but only if teams can find and use it when needed. Ironclad Agent helps teams understand the full picture, know where to push, and act with confidence." Ironclad's new capabilities for teams include: * Ironclad Agent: Serves as the front door to the AI platform, giving teams a single conversational interface to access their contracts and workflows, ask questions about their contracts, and orchestrate specialized AI agents. Ironclad Agent understands your company's contracts through context from past deals, negotiation decisions, counterparty positions, and internal benchmarks, not generic AI training data or isolated documents. * Contract Knowledge Graph: Connects information like clauses, relationships, obligations, and past decisions across a company's contracts and workflows and organizes it into commercial context for Ironclad Agent. Agents have the context they need to understand how agreements relate to each other, and to learn an organization's established positions and business practices. This knowledge stays within the company even when the people who have negotiated contracts have moved on. * Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC): Designed to make AI access more secure and easier to scale as your organization grows, since one policy replaces hundreds of one-off permissions. Most companies use traditional role-based access control (RBAC), which gets harder to maintain because every new team, region, or contract type requires separate permission settings. PBAC replaces these one-off configurations with shared policies that apply to people who meet defined criteria. Whenever teams change, or new regions are added, admins only need to update one policy, making the process more precise, auditable, and scalable. For example, regional teams can only see the contracts relevant to them, without admins needing to create separate setups for each team. * Workflow Designer Agent: Building on Ironclad's no-code Workflow Designer, this agent makes it even easier for teams to build and refine contract workflows faster using a guided conversational interface. Teams describe the process they want, such as who should approve a contract, when a request should be escalated, and where work should be routed, and the agent automatically updates the workflows. Teams can make bulk changes to workflows, and the agent ensures that all new workflows match company standards to prevent them from breaking due to inconsistent or incomplete data. Customers Are Already Putting Ironclad's Context-Aware Agents to Work Customers are already running Ironclad's agents in production to review and negotiate contracts, automate routine work, and surface savings, risks, obligations, and important deadlines ahead of time. A recent Ironclad survey found that 88% of customers plan to expand their use of Ironclad Agents. This momentum spans customers across industries including software, business services, medical devices, healthcare, wellness, restaurants, utilities, agriculture, financial services, and education. These interactions add context to how your Ironclad Agent reasons, showing how your organization uses AI to turn contracts into business value. "I used to spend about three hours reviewing an 80-page master services agreement and identifying the risks before I even started redlining," said Sharisse Cumberbatch, VP, Associate General Counsel at ANDMORE. "With Ironclad's Contract Review Agent, I can now complete that analysis and identify the most important risks in about 20 minutes. It gives the business a clearer view of the tradeoffs and allows our legal team to spend more time on higher-value, strategic work."

Crypto Briefing
Oct 6th, 2026
OpenAI partners with Ironclad to train GPT-6 Astra on AI contracting

OpenAI partners with Ironclad to train GPT-6 Astra on AI contracting. A research collaboration with the contract software firm produced 11 real-world legal tasks and a faster, more accurate model 2 hours ago OpenAI official logo (public domain, Wikimedia Commons) - CryptoBriefing brand treatment Sponsored: Vera - AI-powered prediction market intelligence, built for serious analysts Explore Vera OpenAI has a new study partner, and it brought homework from the legal department. On October 6, 2026, OpenAI announced a strategic research collaboration with Ironclad, a company recognized as a leader in AI contracting. The goal is to change how AI agents are trained and evaluated on contracting workflows, the unglamorous paperwork that keeps businesses running. The headline result: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model scored an average of 55.0% across 11 contracting tasks. Its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol, averaged 41.6%. The details: 11 tasks, half the time. The two companies jointly defined 11 distinct tasks meant to mirror what contracting teams actually do all day. The list includes configuring agreements, managing approvals, and handling renewals of contractual elements. It also covers negotiation and jurisdictional approvals. Ironclad contributed its domain expertise and had its own employees directly involved in defining what a successful result looks like. Accuracy was only half the story. Speed improved too. With GPT-6 Astra, the average time per task fell from 37.0 minutes to 19.2 minutes. That works out to a 48% improvement in efficiency. GPT-6 Astra itself is fresh off the assembly line. OpenAI introduced it in late September 2026 as its most capable model for professional tasks, so the Ironclad results serve as an early field report on that claim. AI, tech, and the markets they move - in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. Background: a relationship that started with GPT-4. This partnership did not appear out of nowhere. Ironclad has worked with OpenAI products since 2023. That year, Ironclad launched its AI Assist product, which initially ran on GPT-4. The company has also integrated contract data into ChatGPT, bringing its customers' agreements into OpenAI's chatbot environment. In 2026, OpenAI hired Ironclad co-founder Jason Boehmig, who now leads a new legal vertical at the AI company. The research findings frame the effort as bringing customer needs and specialized expertise into the development of frontier models. What this means for legal tech and beyond. By letting a domain specialist define the tasks and the grading criteria, OpenAI is effectively outsourcing the question "what does good look like here?" to people who already know. For Ironclad, the payoff is straightforward. The company gets early influence over how frontier models handle its core use case, which should feed back into products like AI Assist. With a dedicated legal vertical now led by Boehmig, OpenAI appears to be building out legal as a serious line of business rather than a side demo. There are caveats worth watching. A 55.0% average score is a clear improvement over 41.6%, but it is not a level most general counsels would sign off on for unsupervised work. It is also worth noting that these benchmarks were co-designed by one company with one customer base. How well GPT-6 Astra generalizes to contracting teams with different processes, industries, or jurisdictions remains an open question. Two years ago, Ironclad was plugging GPT-4 into a product feature. Now its co-founder runs a legal division at OpenAI, and its employees are helping define what success means for the next generation of models. Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how Cryptobriefing create and review content, see its Editorial Policy.

Legal AI Contracts
Aug 6th, 2026
The ultimate guide to Using an AI Contract Generator in 2026.

The ultimate guide to Using an AI Contract Generator in 2026. # Why an AI Contract Generator is the Future of Business Legal Work In 2026, the way LegalAIContracts handle legal paperwork has shifted from a manual, time-consuming chore to a streamlined, automated process. Utilizing an AI contract generator is no longer just a trend for tech-forward enterprises; it is a fundamental shift in how freelancers and small businesses protect their interests. With the rise of agentic AI systems that can handle everything from initial drafting to redlining and obligation tracking, the barrier to obtaining professional-grade legal protection has never been lower. The Evolution of AI Legal Tools in 2026 The landscape of legal technology has moved beyond simple templates. Today's AI legals tools are becoming "agentic," meaning they don't just wait for you to type a prompt - they actively manage the lifecycle of an agreement. Recent industry developments show major players like DocuSign and Ironclad launching sophisticated agents for clause review and compliance tasks. For the average business owner, this means that AI legal drafting tools are becoming more conversational and intuitive. Platforms like LegalAIContracts.com allow you to use a template recommendation quiz to find exactly what you need, whether it's a non-disclosure agreement or a complex construction contract, adapting to specific jurisdiction-aware requirements in seconds. What is the best AI contract generator for small business? The best AI contract generator for a small business is one that balances ease of use with robust risk management. While enterprise tools like Ironclad's Jurist Redlining Agent target large legal teams, small businesses need a platform that bundles drafting, review, and signing into one affordable package. A top-tier platform should offer: * Lawyer-Reviewed Templates: Access to categories like Business, Financial, and E-commerce. * Jurisdiction Awareness: Ensuring the document is valid in your specific state or country. * Risk Assessment: Tools that can "read" an incoming contract and flag dangerous clauses. LegalAIContracts.com fills this gap by offering 38+ lawyer-reviewed templates and a unique "Should I Sign This?" contract risk scorer. This allows non-lawyers to get a 0-100 risk score and identify "red flags" instantly, providing the kind of oversight previously only available to companies with in-house counsel. Moving from Drafting to Agentic Contract Management LegalAIContracts is seeing a move toward contract lifecycle management (CLM) that is truly automated. Modern AI contract management software can now handle intake and negotiation without manual intervention. For example, some systems now use "Operator" features for conversational access to contract data, allowing you to ask, "When does my lease expire?" or "What are my obligations under the Smith agreement?" and get an instant answer. At LegalAIContracts.com, LegalAIContracts incorporate this forward-looking tech through its AI Clause Library and Expiration & Renewal Alerts. Instead of manually tracking dates in a spreadsheet, your AI document creation platform sends you an email reminder before a contract expires, ensuring you never miss a renewal deadline. Are AI-generated contracts legally binding? Yes, AI-generated contracts are legally binding, provided they meet the basic requirements of contract law: offer, acceptance, consideration, and a "meeting of the minds." The AI acts as the drafter, but the legal validity comes from the content of the agreement and the intent of the parties involved. To ensure maximum enforceability, it is vital to use an agreement generator that includes: 1. Built-in E-Signatures: Digital signatures with audit trails are essential for modern compliance. 2. Notarization Blocks: For documents like wills or power of attorney, having a built-in notary section is critical for legal standing. 3. Compliance Checks: Using contract review AI to verify that the language adheres to current statutes. How do I automate contract creation from a template? Automating your workflow is simpler than ever. With legal document automation, you no longer need to start from a blank page. The process typically follows three steps: 1. Selection: Choose a template from a library (like its Business or Creator Economy categories). 2. Customization: Use an AI-guided interface to input your specific details (names, dates, payment terms). 3. Execution: Use a client portal to share the document for review and collect e-signatures. This level of automated document generation ensures consistency across all your business dealings, reducing the "human error" factor that often leads to legal disputes. Practical Benefits for Freelancers and Small Teams The push for contract automation software in 2026 is driven by the need for control and auditability. In a market where legal operations are prioritizing 12-month flexible contracts and tighter risk terms, having a tool that provides instant contract intelligence is a competitive advantage. Whether you are an influencer needing a model release or a contractor drafting a subcontractor agreement, AI empowers you to: * Reduce Legal Spend: Stop paying hourly rates for standard document drafting. * Negotiate Better: Use AI suggestions to counter-propose unfair clauses. * Stay Organized: Keep all documents in a secure, searchable dashboard. Conclusion: Take Control with LegalAIContracts The era of fearing "fine print" is over. With the right AI contract generator, any business owner can navigate complex legal waters with confidence. By combining automated drafting with powerful risk-scoring tools and e-signature capabilities, LegalAIContracts.com offers a comprehensive solution for the modern professional. Ready to secure your business? Browse its 38+ templates or try its free contract risk check today to see how AI can transform your legal workflow. Register now and start drafting in minutes. Sources & references. Ready to create your own contract? Generate professional legal documents in minutes with AI-powered templates.

Ironclad
Aug 5th, 2026
A new day for AI contracting in procurement.

A new day for AI contracting in procurement. Procurement's mandate no longer ends at signature. Today, Ironclad is introducing AI agents and capabilities built to make sure the value procurement negotiates is the value the business realizes. Procurement today contends with nearly every force reshaping the enterprise - economic volatility, AI adoption, new supplier risk categories - and success now means more than negotiating a great deal; it must also ensure that negotiated value is fully realized post-signature. Every supplier contract is a detailed record of that value: pricing protections, rebates, service levels, etc. But once it's signed, value is difficult to act on because the commercial context within them stays fragmented across PDFs, amendments, business units, and systems that were never designed to understand it. The fragmentation carries a real cost. Research from Ironclad and World Commerce & Contracting finds that organizations lose an average of 11% of contract value through gaps including unclear ownership, disconnected systems, and terms that are never operationalized or enforced. To be clear, that's not a procurement failure - the value was won at the table. It leaks because the systems holding the contract were never built to help anyone act on it. AI has made that problem solvable. Today, Ironclad is introducing new AI agents and capabilities for procurement: AI Obligation Extraction with portfolio-wide monitoring and notifications, the Contract Family Agent, Redlining from Precedent in Ironclad Jurist, and an enhanced SAP integration. Together, they expand Ironclad's role as the AI contracting platform for procurement. A new phase, not a first step. Earlier this year, Ironclad, Inc. introduced a new era of contract intelligence across the platform: Ironclad Assistant, the Renewal Dashboard, and a growing fleet of agents that turn contract data into answers and action. Today's launch is the next phase of that work, and it starts from procurement's outcomes. Ironclad is expanding beyond managing individual agreements to helping the enterprise understand the commercial relationships those agreements create. The goal isn't just to find information faster. It's also to help procurement move from "what did we agree to?" to "what should happen next?" Here's what's new. AI Obligation Extraction. Once an agreement is executed, its promises have to be translated into action: someone has to know when a rebate becomes available, when evidence of insurance is due, when an SLA has been missed, when a notice must be sent, and when a renewal decision can no longer wait. That responsibility is scattered across procurement, finance, legal, compliance, IT, and business owners, so terms go invisible until the moment to enforce them has passed. AI Obligation Extraction reads signed agreements and converts key commitments into structured obligations that teams can verify based on the review policy admins set and then assign, monitor, and act on. Because it runs on the agreements you already have, teams start seeing tracked obligations immediately instead of spending months on taxonomy workshops and data model designs. Extraction starts with 37 out-of-the-box obligation types, including: * Rebates * SLAs * Breach notices * Reporting requirements * Insurance * Deliverables, and * Milestones From there, a self-service builder lets admins create custom obligation types, decide what information gets captured, set review and ownership rules, and add natural-language instructions that tune extraction to how their organization writes contracts. What this means for you: * Receive notifications for new assignments, due dates, and upcoming overdue commitments * Get portfolio-level visibility into all commitments across the supplier base * Keep obligations connected to their contractual sources and governed by their corresponding permissions and controls * Make time for adoption, governance, and supplier base coverage expansion instead of technical scaffolding Obligation intelligence then becomes part of the contracting process, not a separate program trying to reconstruct insights after the fact. Contract Family Agent. No important supplier relationship stays simple for long. An initial agreement accumulates SOWs, order forms, amendments, renewals, and regional variations. Without a clear structure to organize them, it's hard to know what which terms govern a purchase, where obligations sit,, how much of the enterprise depends on a supplier, or whether separate business units are buying overlapping services on different terms. The Contract Family Agent changes that, using AI to identify related agreements and organize them into contract families, connecting MSAs, SOWs, amendments, entities, and related records without manual linking. What this means for you: * Track obligations across the whole family * Understand the agreement history behind an upcoming renewal * Spot where you have more exposure-or leverage-than any single record reveals A repository tells the enterprise which contracts it has. A contract family shows the commercial relationship those contracts collectively create. AI Redlining from Precedent. Every negotiation takes place inside a longer commercial history, even when the people running it can't see it. A new agreement from an existing supplier often revisits an issue negotiated years earlier, but the relevant knowledge is usually scattered across old contracts and the memories of people who handled them last. Jurist already redlines third-party paper from legal-approved playbooks, applying the organization's clause positions, fallback language, and escalation rules. Redlining from Precedent extends those capabilities, bringing previously approved language and supplier history directly into review. The playbook says what the organization's positions are; precedent shows how those positions have actually played out. What this means for you: * Accelerate contract review cycles * Use legal-approved guardrails to promote consistency on standard agreements * Negotiate with more leverage by bringing prior supplier context into review This helps legal scale its guidance across contract review while supporting faster, more consistent collaboration between procurement and legal. Enhanced SAP integration. None of this creates true value if it stays confined to one system within a broader tech stack. When a contract sits apart from source-to-pay (S2P) or enterprise resource planning software (ERP), negotiated terms have to be manually translated into operational data, otherwise meaning gets lost along the way. Ironclad's enhanced SAP integration connects contract data and obligations with SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA. Contracting workflows can be triggered directly from purchase requisitions, and executed terms surface at the PO level.What this means for you: * Keep negotiated pricing, terms, and obligations visible at the moment of purchase * Carry agreed terms into downstream processes instead of losing them between systems SAP remains the transactional backbone; Ironclad supplies the contracting and governed intelligence that makes executed terms usable within it. A contracting platform that grows more intelligent over time. Each of these capabilities addresses a distinct moment. Their larger value is in how the moments connect to create actionable intelligence across the lifecycle: what you learned in one negotiation strengthens the next, what you committed to after signature shapes supplier management, and what happened across the whole relationship informs the renewal. Underneath it is Ironclad's contract knowledge graph - the connected model of suppliers, entities, agreements, obligations, and terms that makes the compounding possible. And Ironclad Assistant makes it usable: reasoning over anonymized patterns drawn from more than 2,000 customers and over 2 billion contracts processed, it turns that context into grounded answers and next steps. A new day for procurement contract management. Procurement has spent decades becoming more strategic, and contract management now has to rise to meet that ambition. That's the work Ironclad is taking on in this new phase with procurement: combining the contracting foundation enterprises already trust with AI that understands commercial history, operationalizes commitments, connects supplier relationships, and carries trusted context into the broader procurement stack. The future of procurement contract management won't be defined by how efficiently organizations store their agreements. It'll be defined by how intelligently they put those agreements to work. That future starts today. Register for its August 13 webinar with KPMG and The Hackett Group to explore how AI contracting can help procurement teams realize more value from supplier agreements. Request a demo to see the new capabilities in action. Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.

Thought Industries
Jun 22nd, 2026
AI feature adoption: how customer education teams keep pace with product innovation.

AI feature adoption: how customer education teams keep pace with product innovation. Alicia Fontaine June 22, 2026 Thanks to AI, your product team is releasing new features faster than ever. While the pace of innovation is exciting, it brings with it a new challenge: getting customers to use, adopt, and realize value from all these new capabilities. You may have an established customer education strategy and team, but are you ready to keep pace with the firehose of product enhancements? Thought Industries asked customer education leaders at two rapidly growing software companies with AI-driven products how they keep up with product innovation. They shared two approaches to increasing product adoption that are rooted in learning practice, certification and targeted intervention, as well as a way to track AI product adoption separately. How does certification increase Product Adoption? Gong, the leader in Revenue AI with over $500 million in annual recurring revenue, uses a time-honored learning practice to power adoption of their future-forward product: certification. Their customer-facing and partner certifications include proctored exams, integrated badging, and shareable credentials. Tim Halter, Instructional Design Manager at Gong, shared in a recent webinar how certification increases product usage. In particular, Gong's Program Manager certification has driven an uptick of 46% in team-wide activity, which means certification pathways for the admin role boosts usage across the customer account. Chief Customer Officer Simon Frey posted on LinkedIn that Gong customers with certified Program Managers have 21% higher adoption compared to those without. While certification might be the gold-standard for influencing adoption, badges awarded for shorter learning milestones can motivate users to complete more training. Gong uses an integration with Accredible to allow users to share their certification status on LinkedIn, giving customers something to brag about while spotlighting the Gong brand. Gong also awards badges for early milestones to build momentum for further learning deeper product adoption. "We have badges just for getting through the 'Getting Started'" portion of training, Halter explains, "and we use the nurture campaigns in Thought Industries to follow up with an email that says, 'Hey, congratulations, you completed this, you're not done, but here's your badge. Continue your learning, come back soon." When are targeted learning interventions needed? Ironclad, an AI contracting company that recently surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, developed an Adoption Accelerator Program to ensure customers realize value from their software purchase. Bill Keller, Senior Manager, Learning Experience Design & Documentation for Ironclad, shared with Thought Industries how his team delivers targeted learning interventions to encourage use of key features. By closely tracking product adoption milestones across the customer journey, Kelleher's team can identify customer accounts with lagging usage in key areas, and offer a series of training sessions to help them meet those thresholds. "Let's say for example we know that having really clean data is going to make a real difference in a customer's ability to derive value from Ironclad, but there's a good subset of customers who haven't touched their data manager," Keller says. "We go in and identify those customers, and we can offer them a series of three or four sessions, as well as pre-work and homework, and Q&A with Ironclad experts, and really go through it in depth." Ironclad then tracks the attendance in each Accelerator program, and measures that against the product adoption and the annual recurring revenue (ARR) from those customers. "The numbers that we've seen are pretty impressive," says Kelleher. "As a training organization, it's great for us to be able to put that into perspective for our stakeholders, because it's always so hard to really show a correlation between users taking training and what the influence is on the bottom line." From 91 participants in a single accelerator program, Ironclad influenced $1.2M in ARR. Sixty-three percent of participants attended two or more sessions, which led to a 200% increase in customers using the platform. Looking specifically at data managers, Ironclad saw a 58% increase in meaningful feature usage, such as utilizing workflows with presets. Gong also intervenes proactively to boost adoption, although with a different approach. Rather than going directly to end-users, Gong's Education Services team provides data to the customer success managers responsible for securing renewals for the account. Mark Banuelos, Senior Manager, Education Services at Gong, worked with colleagues in Operations to add education consumption to a dashboard shared with Customer Success. "Before even six months, ideally a year before [renewal decision], let's start having the CSMs actively go into a Tableau dashboard, and they can see the education consumption," Banuelos told his Operations colleagues. "I don't care if it's in Academy, I don't care if it's done through live training, but have they consumed anything?" Data on consumption of learning content is then paired with adoption data to identify accounts in need of intervention. "If they have low adoption in the platform, and or they have low education consumption, then we immediately have an automated event happen," Banuelos explains. "It's an alert [directed to the CSM] saying, 'Hey, you need to engage with that customer because, maybe they haven't consumed anything, or they haven't had any training." This early warning system gives the CSM the next six months to prepare for the renewal conversation, during which they can nudge users to engage with the learning that will increase product adoption. When the renewal rolls around, Banuelos says, "You look like a hero as a CSM, because now you can say, 'Hey, we went from a year ago to X number, now you have more adoption, you're seeing your outcomes, you rolled out a new sales methodology and it's working.'" Giving Gong's customer-facing teams visibility into learning data creates a holistic picture of customer health and engagement, allowing them to target interventions for accounts with lagging usage. The key is to deliver the learning interventions proactively, well in advance of the renewal date. "We want to make sure we're operationalizing it and getting ahead of it, and not just cramming training in as a last-ditch, hey, they renew in two months," says Banuelos. Why should AI feature adoption be tracked separately? If new AI capabilities are a strategic focus for your business, then adoption of those features warrants closer tracking. Bill Kelleher's team at Ironclad uses a scorecard to monitor product adoption metrics, and they measure adoption of AI capabilities and new features separately. (In February, Ironclad announced that their AI legal assistant delivered nearly six times year-over-year ARR growth, so clearly that focus is paying off.) Tracking AI adoption separately helps the teams responsible for customer outcomes-product, customer success, and professional services-align on goals and identify areas for improvement. When you break product adoption metrics into smaller milestones, it's easier to assess how effectively learning leads to behavior change. Then you can better align learning strategy to customer outcomes, and communicate more confidently to stakeholders and executive leadership. Influence behavior change at scale. Build the learning strategy that drives real behavior change, and customers will adopt and see value from your new product capabilities. Companies with AI products like Gong and Ironclad use certification, targeted interventions to influence product adoption, and monitor usage of new features separately to ensure customer education meets the needs of the business. As Banuelos says, "You can build this amazing platform, and you can get everybody into it, but if you don't have a very great strategy for education, how are your [customers] going to be using what they just purchased day in and day out?" Download its Product Adoption Scorecard to start tracking customer adoption of new AI capabilities.