 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce. They're telling me it's 170,000 people, which I find hard to believe, but I'm not out there walking around in the traffic or stuck in an Uber. Hopefully you aren't either. We're excited. We're at the Conga Connect West of it. Here at the Thirsty Bear, they're giving out free drink, free entertainment, free food, stop on by just a couple steps over from Moscone South and they'll be here for all three days. So we're excited to be here too. First sales force. We've got some great guests lined up for you. Talk about really the whole life cycle of this cash to quote, or quote to cash, excuse me. See Sharmin Moss first. She is the practice lead at ATG for CLM. Sharmin, great to see you. Oh, it's great to be with you, Jeff. Absolutely. And with her is Bob Graywall. He is the VP of Enterprise Contract Sales for Conga. Bob, great to see you. You as well. Glad that we were here. So what an event. Just before we jump into it, you guys said you did this last year. You had such a great turnout. You had to kind of up the investment. Yeah. So last year, we did a phenomenal amount of events. We wanted to provide our customers an opportunity to come in, have a place where they can meet with us, socialize, meet our technical folks. But at the same time, enjoy themselves and find a place to relax and work. We threw a disco party, our silent disco party last year that was phenomenal and oversubscribe. So this year we ended up having to put a tent in the back and made even a bigger investment. So our people and our partners could come in here and have a great place to work, meet and greet and learn. Great. So we've got Sharmin here. She is a practice lead and out in the field with all the customers. It's true. So we talk a lot. We go to a lot of tech events at theCUBE and we always talk about people, process and tech. And more often than not, the tech is the easiest part. It's true. To really make this stuff work. So give us kind of what you see in the field, kind of the state of the market in contract management. Well, so what we're seeing at ATG, we are a technology and management consulting firm. And what we've seen recently is, you know, we had the whole optimization of CPQ over the last four or five years. And right now we're really seeing the digitization of contract management really take a front place in what companies are trying to automate. And that's why we're so excited to work with the team at Conga because our synergies and the way we work together and our cultures are so similar that we're really able to provide just such a great compliment to our customers. So when you say automating contract management, the first thing that probably goes into most people's head, at least the first buyer, was no way. I mean, there's so much nuance. There's so much legalese and maybe negotiated terms and settlements and a contract. How do you possibly automate that beyond what you stated in the art 10 years ago? Where is it? And what does it do? Right. So what are some of the things that people, you know, what can you do today? What's the future hold? What is the state of the art in contract management? Well, and I think you nailed it on both points, right? So it's not just about the technology and us as the technology provider would probably argue it's not the easiest part of the solution. But I think it's the combination and the reason why the ATG partnership with Conga makes so much sense for us is that to capture the digital transformation or the contract automation value, we've really got to do two things. One, you've got to get the right technology which Conga provides today. And then you've got to have the partner to work with you where we've partnered with ATG to really look at your business processes. And as you do that, this is a great opportunity to review how you're doing it today. Optimize that, because it's not just about going digital with it, it's really about making sure that we have the right approval process. And then you say, what's possible today? Well today, CLM's been around for a long time, right? And we think that it's hit a tipping point where it's not just about creating workflows and approval processes. In fact, in many cases, those are table stakes. We seem to do it better. We've designed it so it's easier to use, easier to manage. But the piece that we're seeing is really a focus on the data side. How do we make that data that lives in those contracts valuable to the organization? So when you're engaging with your customers, now you have a better engagement strategy that's based on real data of what's changes, what's being utilized in your contracts. So for us, a big part of it is is we can do the workflows, we can do the approval processes, but where we're really going to differentiate ourselves is that data and making sure that we can make that work to optimize revenue, to mitigate risk, but most importantly to be able to understand what's happening in the contract world, what you're negotiating, so we can make your engagements in the future easier and faster. So I'm just curious, Sharman, because you negotiate the contract, you go through all the pain, and you finally get a sign. But then generally we just go to a drawer or even worse, it doesn't somebody's hard drive on a laptop unless it's hoped they're working for us any year from now. We didn't give them the laptop. But how does that get baked A into making sure there was an example earlier that the right payment terms get into the ERP system and then also kind of going forward, how does it not just become a stale document that's just sitting in a repository, but how do we extract the value to your point to get more benefits from that tough negotiated piece of paper that we worked so hard on? Right, and I think that's where we're seeing the change now because historically it was our legal teams that wanted to automate things, to make their lives simpler. And now we're seeing we need not just to support the legal teams with this information, we need to support reporting, we need to support renewals, we need to support amendments, and we need those data elements that are associated. So like you said, the payment terms or the length of the term of a specific service, we need to data ties that, put that in a system where people can search for it, discover it. So many cases, even like companies with M&A, do due diligence based on this content. It can't just be a piece of paper in a box anymore. It needs to be out there. And that's what the future of contract management offers. We are at this point in the emergence of this technology where customers are starting to realize the value in that digitization. Yeah, go ahead, I was just going to say the other thing that's happening. Yeah, no it helps, but two is that the nature of business relationships is changing so much with new revenue models, right? Subscription models and kind of prorated and then how do you work in your discount structure? I mean, it's so much more complicated and so much variety in the ways that people are engaging with their customers. And I would imagine most of the time that just kind of happens in that contract is still in that guy's laptop that we don't know where it is and we just kind of execute those things. So how is that getting surfaced and kind of baked back so it's more of a closed loop process? Yeah, so a couple of things and we can talk about the process as Sharman was walking us through kind of, hey, we can automate this, we can do this. There's a couple of things in the technology side that Conga's really done. And when we think about that, one is the true-up. So when we built this on the Salesforce platform, one of the things that we really did was how do we take what's been in that contract? So simple thing like, hey, the terms for payment change from 30 days to 45. Well, today, or traditionally, people would go and have to update that manually. Well, we've created a technology called true-up where you're able to identify all of those key factors, the key data points and automatically have that update within your Salesforce instance. A challenge for one of our customers is renewals, right? Often we have standard policies of we're going to have to notify customers 60 days in advance of their renewal. Well, sometimes we have to negotiate that and sometimes it's 90 days or six months. Well, we've made that really easy. When those terms change, we have the ability to true those up and that actually will be reflected in Salesforce automatically. So without any human intervention outside of approving the term that you've accepted it, it automatically uploads into Salesforce. So, truing up just to repeat what you said to make sure I understand. So it's basically taking the negotiated terms in the contract and making sure it's getting into the systems of record, system of engagement, so it's implemented. It's true and another factor with the integration of Salesforce is you can make some of that negotiation happen upfront. So if you're using a CPQ solution for instance, you may negotiate the quote before it even gets to the contract and that can limit the amount of truing up we even have to do at the end. Yeah, right, right. And that's the other piece that one of the things that we've done is when it comes to just the cash to quote, we've built a product specifically designed for the cash to quote. We call it Kanga Contracts Negotiator Edition. And what that's really designed for is for those customers that have quotes that are going out that are getting quantities negotiated, maybe a price proposed change, maybe different terms that are already listed on that quote, we've provided a technology that basically can support that. So when the customer comes back with those changes, it also can be chewed up with Salesforce without having to go in and go back and rework the quote and redo all those quantities. We've made that sync and that chew up capability available even for the quote thing. So very complimentary to the CPQ practice that ATG has today. Right. Just curious, Charmin, from some of your experience with customers, what's the hardest thing that people think is going to be easy? And then what's the low hanging fruit that people go, oh my goodness, this is phenomenal. That maybe is not that hard, but the value delivery is consistently over the top for people that are kind of in this journey. The thing that I think companies often struggle to implement into their vision here is that when you're buying a piece of technology to solve a problem, that piece of technology on its own is not going to solve your problem. You have to take a look at the processes that you use and figure out how to optimize those along with the tools, just awesome tools that you get with the technology and not pave your cart path. Right, right. So don't keep doing the same things you've been doing for 20 years and just make them automated. Take advantage of this tool that you have. I think what people underestimate how easy it is is all the things that they have available to them with this automation, the approval process that can be automated. I don't have to email four people and get their responses back to say, yeah, those changes are okay. Right, that I can build that approval process, that I can build in the acceptance of changes to clauses. My legal department can say, I'll accept this as governing law or that as governing law and give my sales people the opportunity to do that without involving legal. And people often don't understand how easy that can be. Right, fewer emails, that's got to be an easy clause. Yeah, I wish it was just that simple, but absolutely right. Eliminating everything that lives outside of it and getting control. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Customers sometimes think the technology is going to solve the problem and it's really not just the technology when it comes to CLM, it's about the technology and the process. And I think with the processes we've done, the practices we've developed that's really helping customers get greater adoption, greater, greater, greater ROI, really optimize that so they're getting a higher value and time to value with the processes we use when they're looking at CLM. It's almost a waste of money if you don't go the extra mile for the people in the process to really take advantage of the investment. Bob Sharman, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and Bob specifically congrats on this great event and thanks for having us. Oh, thank you for joining us as well and thank you for the time. All right. He's Bob, she's Sharman. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Conga Connect West at the Thirsty Bear at Dreamforce, San Francisco. Thanks for watching.