Contracts are where corporate enthusiasm goes to acquire page numbers. They arrive after the handshakes, survive long after the launch lunch, and are usually reopened only when somebody wants money or suspects they are owed some. Devinder Jeet Singh chose this unpromising object as the center of a marketing career. More precisely, he chose Sirion, a software company built around the proposition that a contract should do more than sit still.
Singh, known to colleagues as DJ, joined the company in February 2015. Sirion was young, the market was specialized, and the product language was closer to supplier governance than the current fashion for AI agents. He arrived in Gurgaon as a first-time father. The iPhone 6 was an object of interest. He remembers people still listening to music on CDs. Ten years later, his family had grown, his work had crossed an ocean to Canada, and his title had become chief marketing officer.
That is the tidy version. The useful version is found in the plumbing: the website refresh, the webinar program, the customer stories, the CRM system, the marketing technology stack and the introduction of account-based marketing. These are not the glamorous verbs of the C-suite. They are how a company teaches itself whom it serves, what to say, and whether anyone is listening.
A CRM build is bookkeeping with ambitions. It decides which conversations survive, which signals reach sales, and whether a promising account becomes a relationship or a forgotten row. Account-based marketing adds another discipline: instead of shouting toward a market, the team studies a smaller set of companies and coordinates what each one hears. In a field where a sale can involve legal, procurement, finance, IT and operations, that coordination is not decorative. Every department arrives with its own definition of value and its own allergy to wasted time.
Singh's operational remit therefore explains more than the eventual title. Sirion was not selling a quick individual purchase. It was asking enterprises to reconsider how agreements move across functions and what happens after signature. Marketing such a system requires a memory long enough to follow a buying committee and a vocabulary broad enough to avoid speaking only to lawyers. The machinery beneath the campaigns gave his team both.
The apprenticeship was the strategy
Modern executive biographies often resemble airport departure boards: a new company every few rows, each title leaving on schedule. Singh's has a different rhythm. Before Sirion, his public professional record connects him with Aptara, Human Capital Solutions, UnitedLex and ZS. Then the movement slows. He stays with one company while the company, the category and the technology all move around him.
He began in marketing leadership and was publicly identified as SirionLabs' general manager of marketing in 2015. By 2020, he was vice president of marketing. In 2022, the brief became vice president of marketing strategy and operations. In May 2025, after more than a decade inside the business, he announced that he had become CMO.
“A decade at one place might sound static, but this journey has been anything but that.”Devinder Jeet Singh, reflecting on ten years at Sirion
There is a practical advantage to staying. When a product category changes its vocabulary, the person who remembers the old words can tell whether the new ones describe a genuine change or a fresh coat of paint. Singh remembers contract lifecycle management as creation plus basic workflow automation. He now markets software designed to extract contract data, answer conversational questions, assist negotiation and keep track of obligations after signature.
The comparison is qualitative, not a market-size chart. It shows the widening of the promise. In the early pitch, software helped govern suppliers and connect obligations with performance and invoices. In the current pitch, the contract becomes a data layer shared by legal, procurement, finance, sales and operations. The document has not disappeared. It has acquired a job.
The day 1,200 people clicked “register”
A niche is only dull from the outside. Inside it, a missed obligation can cost real money, a loose clause can stall a negotiation, and an invisible renewal date can become a small corporate ambush. Singh's early work translated those consequences through customer examples rather than abstract category claims.
The reduction in manual supplier-management effort Singh cited in an early interview about Sirion's customer results.
In 2017, Sirion ran a webinar with Vodafone and the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management. Singh later recalled more than 1,200 registrations, a company record that still stood when he wrote his ten-year reflection. He followed that program with public recaps involving Vestas and BP. Each story gave the software a setting: telecom, wind power, energy, a named operator with a complicated commercial relationship to manage.
That is good category work because it begins one level below the slogan. “Contract management” can mean almost anything. A global company trying to connect thousands of obligations to supplier performance means something. It has protagonists, deadlines and consequences. Even the fine print benefits from casting.
The same instinct appears in a trade interview from Sirion's earlier phase. Singh explained the product through value leakage, contract length and labor saved. He said strategic services contracts commonly ran five to seven years. He also cited a reduction of roughly 44 percent in manual supplier-management effort for organizations implementing the software. The numbers do what jargon cannot: they make an invisible operational problem occupy space.
From the filing cabinet to the conversation
The central metaphor of contract technology has changed during Singh's tenure. First came the repository: put agreements in one place. Then came workflow: move them through approvals. Then analytics: extract dates, clauses and obligations. Now the favored interface is a conversation, with users asking for what they need in ordinary language while specialized agents perform the steps behind it.
For a marketer, every shift is both an opportunity and a trap. New vocabulary attracts attention. It also tempts companies to detach the language from the work. Singh's public message upon becoming CMO kept the emphasis on a practical ambition: “simplify how enterprises manage their commercial value chain.” The phrase is corporate, but the verb matters. Simplify is a customer promise. “AI-native” is only a description until it does that.
In October 2025, Sirion introduced its next-generation agentic CLM platform and a 360-degree conversational contracting experience. The company presented AskSirion and agentOS as ways to let specialized agents work across contracting tasks. Three months later, Singh welcomed the announcement that Haveli Investments would take a majority stake. He wrote that the partnership gave Sirion a larger stage for agentic AI and a chance to shape the brand's next chapter. The transaction closed in February 2026, with Sirion saying the capital and operational support would go toward product innovation and global expansion.
“We’re only getting started.”Singh on Sirion's next phase, January 2026
A majority investment is a financial event. For a CMO, it is also a test of narrative continuity. The company must sound newly ambitious without pretending it was born yesterday. Singh has the institutional memory to connect the chapters: supplier governance, CLM, analytics, generative AI, agents. His task is to make the sequence feel less like a parade of software fashions and more like one problem becoming progressively solvable.
A career measured in layers
Singh's public anniversary note is unusually good at mixing the domestic and the technical. There is the first website refresh beside first-time fatherhood. There is a CRM build beside the move from Gurgaon to the Toronto area. There are CDs and AI agents in the same paragraph. These details rescue a ten-year corporate milestone from the usual frosting.
They also reveal his preferred form of explanation: compare a complex change with something familiar. Everybody understands that music moved from plastic discs to the cloud. The evolution of contract software needs more help. By putting the two timelines together, he gives the obscure one a sense of speed.
Former colleagues describe a similar temperament from the other side. One public recommendation calls him calm under pressure, thoughtful and able to find clarity in complexity. Another describes him as enthusiastic, knowledgeable and fast. They are not identical qualities. Calm and speed can quarrel. Strategy and operations often do. The interesting operator is the person who can keep them in the same room.
His rise offers no magic formula, unless patience counts as magic. He learned a narrow market deeply. He built the measurement and distribution systems. He used recognizable customers to give the category a human scale. He stayed through the unfashionable nouns and arrived when artificial intelligence made his once-obscure corner of enterprise software newly visible.
The CMO title is the latest line, not the whole story. The better story is cumulative: a marketer becoming the keeper of a company's memory while continuing to revise its language. Contracts themselves would approve. Their power has always come from what compounds after the signature.
Career ledger: 20+ years in B2B marketing · Sirion since 2015 · CMO since 2025 · Based in Waterloo, Ontario