Conga (Composer + Contracts + Orchestrate) = One Comprehensive CLM Solution

by Alexandra Stehman

Managing contracts is central to the operation of any business, from global enterprises to local, independent operations. Despite how critical legal obligations are to understanding everything about the relationship between a company and its customers, it is astounding how manual, error-prone, and archaic many businesses handle their contracts.


Quote-To-Cash requires a contract

Regardless of size, contracting is a hassle for most organizations; in fact, according to PC Magazine, 64% of businesses report that the contracting process frustratingly draws out the timeline between an approved Quote and Cash in hand. Often, the contracting process has dozens of moving parts, both internal and external, and tracking contract progress and understanding which deals are held up by the legal paperwork is often a repetitive, error-prone process.


Expirations and renewals

Even so, once the contracts are signed, managing active contracts and renewals usually requires a full-time person whose sole purpose is to carefully curate a spreadsheet of all active contracts and keep an eagle’s eye on expirations, upcoming renewals, and making sure contracts do not lapse while services are continuing to be rendered.


Managing risk and compliance

At worst, negotiated contracts that incur increased liability and risk for a company are often unknown. Contracts which violate regulatory compliance regularly lurk under the radar, like ticking timebombs. Understanding which customers have negotiated special terms, what those terms are and how they differ from the standard terms requires the intervention of legal staff—who are almost always already overworked and pressured to focus on bringing in new business as opposed to managing what’s already been sold.


How Conga’s CLM suite solves these problems

Salesforce offers a variety of solutions, but CLM requires very specific features and automation that are not out-of-the-box. We at Simplus have partnered with Conga to bring you three powerful tools built to supplement Salesforce to create the most powerful, flexible, hassle-free contract management solution available for Salesforce. 

In this new, three-part blog series, we’ll cover three features of Conga’s CLM Suite: Composer, Contracts, and Orchestrate. First, let’s talk about Composer and how you can be using it better!


Conga Composer—Get rid of the shared drive!

This is the most fundamental product of the three. Conga Composer is a must-have to automate professional, dynamic documents using data from Salesforce. Easily generate highly configurable (and beautiful!) proposals, quotes, NDAs, SOWs, order forms, service contracts, license agreements, employment contracts, or whatever types of documents you are currently managing on your local hard drive or cloud shared drives.

Using Conga Composer for basic documents is straightforward. You can consolidate similar documents, most commonly a Quote and Order Form,  into one template, utilizing simple logic to control the resulting output, so that one template can generate either document. 

Each template may contain a mixture of static text, merge fields, and dynamic tables, which are populated with data from Salesforce. You have the option to output in Word, PDF, or both. You can even configure Composer to generate one merged Word or PDF document from multiple templates, such as combining an order form with T&C’s or an MSA + SOW pair.

After they’re generated, you can download the documents and open them in common formats such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Google Docs. You can also configure Composer to automatically send them for signature as soon as they’re generated!


Overall, Conga Composer is a great tool for creating a wide range of documents. However, for more complex order configurations, language requirements, and approvals, this is where Conga Contracts comes into play—watch out for the next blog where we’ll dive into all the features you need from Contracts.


AlexAlexandra is a CLM Solutions Architect here at Simplus. She has over five years’ experience implementing Salesforce solutions for clients across multiple different verticals. Her recent work includes growing Simplus’ CLM practice, including implementing SpringCM and Conga solutions, providing process and project leadership, overseeing implementations, leading and growing the Conga and SpringCM teams, managing the partner relationship with SpringCM and Conga, and assisting in pre-sales activities for SpringCM and Conga engagements.