Conga: Unlocking the Power of Simplicity in Revenue Growth

Revenue lifecycle management (RLM) stands as a crucial bridge connecting an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This connection is often hampered by siloed operations spread across various departments reliant on a plethora of unconnected tools.

For instance, while sales operations concentrate on facilitating deal closures, legal departments prioritize minimizing business risks. The contract review process, typically managed manually, becomes a bottleneck, resulting in delays in the sales cycle and potential deal slippage.

This juncture in the middle ground is where Conga, an RLM platform, zeroes in to streamline and automate the RLM framework.



The platform seamlessly ties together the various stages of the revenue lifecycle process—from quote creation, proposals and contract management to ordering, billing and invoicing—assembling all the pieces of the puzzle for an efficient workflow. At the core lies Conga’s unified data model, which enables a smooth flow of information between teams, ensuring that the right data is readily available to those who need it when they need it.

Supporting this cohesive RLM operation is Conga’s robust workflow and approval engine, guaranteeing that tasks are completed promptly and that all required approvals are secured. The platform also makes the associated processes, including the creation of documents, sending them out and obtaining signatures, easier.

This comprehensive approach solves clients’ challenges when they hire new salespeople who may lack the experience and data about the right products and pricing to create accurate quotations.

Conga simplifies this by setting up knowledge as rules within the system, allowing it to do the heavy lifting while sales know-how can focus on what they do best—negotiating, reviewing prices and seeking manager approvals. It’s like having a personal assistant that ensures consistency and accuracy in quotations, regardless of any experience level.

The legal team is no longer left out in the cold. With Conga, they are now an integral part of the sales process. The team can efficiently manage sales, customer contracts with suppliers and internal contracts, all in one place. Creating contracts is as easy as clicking a few buttons, thanks to its customizable templates and pre-approved clauses. This way, it mitigates risk by preventing salespeople from using outdated or invalid clauses from old documents, which could land the organization in legal issues. In fact, legal teams have seen a whopping 40 percent decrease in the time it takes to negotiate contracts, all because they have a dedicated system to work with instead of relying on good old MS Word.

Reporting and AI-powered analysis take contract management to the next level. Conga’s AI model swiftly scans hundreds or thousands of contracts and identifies specific clauses that might expose the organization to risk in real time, offering not only efficiency benefits but significant risk mitigation and compliance advantages.

However, contract management is just one part of the revenue lifecycle where Conga leverages AI. The capability of AI within Conga’s platform is virtually unlimited, as it plans to apply it to numerous scenarios and use cases across the revenue process to enable clients to take action based on data-driven evidence.

“Streamlining these processes is not just about improving how things work internally,” says Charles Harb, director of strategy, innovation, and transformation. “There is a massive benefit for organizations in terms of improving the customer experience. Reducing the time it generally takes to complete the transaction can significantly enable them to generate more revenue and create a loyal customer base that will continue to return in the future.”

The proof is in numbers. A financial services company witnessed a dramatic transformation after deploying Conga in their business lending process. The proposal creation and loan approval time was reduced from 79 to 20 days, with the whole process time dropping from three weeks to just 1.5 days—demonstrating a 37 percent increase in speed. This improvement significantly enabled the client to enhance their customer experience and satisfaction by enabling faster decision-making and unlocking new revenue opportunities, ultimately benefiting the company’s bottom line.

The secret behind the success story lies in how Conga is used internally within the company to identify areas for improvement in usability and functionality. This feedback loop ensures that the platform is designed to meet the realworld needs of users. Even Harb’s role stands pivotal as he synthesizes all the inputs and feeds them back into the product team, driving its product strategy. This approach ensures that the platform continues to deliver value to customers and stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving market—this is what the company calls the ‘Conga Way.’